Supplementary Materials 10: Rigorous Conspiracy Hypothesising about the Trump Shooting
A special Supplementary Material where we take a gander at some of the reactions to the recent assassination attempt on Trump and then dig deeper with some responsible model conspiracy hypothesizing with Bret and Heather. Also featuring:Our completely predictable response to the shootingJohn Cusack's Conspiracy TheoryTim Kennedy's Conspiracy Venn DiagramScientific Cosplay with Bret and HeatherLearning about logic with HeatherThe Lab Leak theory revisited with BretThe Fall of Plato's CaveMind Controlled ShootersThe Unity 2024 PlatformThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (57 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusLinks Cave of Mirrors: The 234th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather HeyingTim Kennedy: How Leadership Failures Led to an Assassination Attempt on TrumpJohn Cusack's conspiracy tweet
And welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplementary material number 10, Matt.
We've made it to the number 10. And that is when...
Oh, also, that's Matt.
He's Matthew Brown.
He's a psychologist of some description, a statistician.
What is he?
He lives in Australia.
He does all sorts of things.
He's had a varied career.
And I am Chris Kavanaugh, an anthropologist, psychologist, something.
We're academics.
We're in the field.
But we are here.
To talk about gurus and discourse nonsense and all that.
But it's 10, Matt.
The reason I was mentioning that is back when we started the podcast, there was a piece of advice given by Mickey Inslicht, which is just general podcast advice.
If you get past 10 episodes, you're probably going to continue on.
Yeah.
So we're back at the start.
We did continue on with the original series, and we'll continue on with this.
We will.
We can't not do it because we don't want to contaminate our series decoding episodes with random bits of trivia, news items, and things that upset us.
And it's a safe space for you and me to, yeah, chew the fat.
That's right.
That's right.
So for anybody who might be tempted to complain about the format, just remember, you still get the decoding episodes and they're now purer than they previously were.
It's like they've been cut with less alternate material there.
So they're now purer and instead you have this section which is less pure but...
You know, it gives you a chance to deal with issues that are less substantial or require less investment of clipping in certain respects.
I like that analogy.
It means that these episodes are 100% talcumpata.
That's the metaphor.
Is that the way?
Well, that's possibly true.
Let's see, Matt.
The thing is, as is often the case, I'm not supposed to have that many clips for these, but I do.
I've got quite a lot.
The assassination attempt, that will be a significant thing that has happened.
And I feel that our stance on that won't be shocking to anyone.
Like, I'm assuming, Matt, that you're not for political assassinations, including of people that you don't like politically and think that that's a bad thing for that to become a normal part of the political process.
Would that be fair?
In principle, I'm against.
Assassination?
Yes.
The main thing that's disappointing about this one, of course, is that it provided Trump with an amazing photo opportunity.
And I feel may well have sealed the deal in terms of the election.
Not that I'm making any predictions.
Yeah, I suspect that's true as well.
But in general, I would say...
It's not good whenever there's an assassination attempt of even a demagogue.
I really dislike Nigel Farage, but I don't want people to take him out.
But inevitably, after that event happened, the discourse was going to go crazy.
It could have went much worse if the assassination had been successful.
I have no idea what would have happened in the U.S. in that, but I would imagine.
It would have been, you know, a much stronger reaction.
In any case, like Matt mentioned, there was images that came out.
Trump was very defiant after it, stood up, pumped his fist, said, fight, fight, fight.
And there was an almost too perfect image of him kind of standing up with the American flag, wafting behind him with a blood splattered face, which has now gone around everyone and will become an iconic photograph.
It already...
So yes, this has been, especially in the current electoral process where you have Biden coming across as not robust and relatively feeble, not presenting themselves well,
and a lot of things being about cognitive decline.
Then you have this example of somebody getting shot and like springing back up and yelling fight.
There's a quite strong contrast visually and narratively.
There.
So I think this is trouble.
I think it's trouble in terms of if you wanted to see Biden elected, which I think most liberal people do.
But in the US, you essentially have a 50-50 split, and it is usually down to a handful of states in the US.
So it's probably going to be the same thing, but it does look like boring.
Other things happening that Trump is likely to win, and I think most of the polls are leaning in that direction now.
So that's going to be fun for the world.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not going to be great for many of the rest of us from the world, probably.
I don't know.
We'll see.
But the thing about these kind of events is, and it doesn't have to be Donald Trump, it could be literally anyone, but I think he is a salient figure.
Whenever there's an event like this, particularly an assassination attempt, successful or unsuccessful, it immediately attracts conspiracy theorists of every stripe, from left and right.
You know, there are various details that will emerge in the coming weeks and months about the shooter and how the security field and all this kind of thing.
So that will all remain to be found out.
But the fact that they existed at the minute was that there was a lone shooter on the rooftop who managed to get up, you know, via some slip-up in the security perimeter and shot at Trump and then was shot by snipers and killed.
And that's it.
But the issue is that the place that he was shooting from looks to be a very obvious potential site for somebody to position them as a sniper, especially in hindsight.
So the immediate reaction of people is, how could that be possible?
The Secret Service, you know, they're well-trained and professional, so that kind of thing shouldn't be possible unless there's something else.
Afoot, right?
And so you have, for example, just to show the distribution, you have John Cusack, you know, the actor, the wing liberal guy saying, I hate conspiracy theories because they avoid the open conspiracies we see with our eyes for rabbit hole nonsense.
That said, it's unthinkable that the Secret Service doesn't cover the one roof staring at the stage.
Zero chance.
Also, No Secret Service action in history lets the candidates stop for a photo op.
They cover the body and move it off-site about as fast and completely as possible to imagine.
See Reagan assassination attempt.
Makes zero sense.
So from this angle, this is him saying it was a staged event in order to increase support for Trump?
Yeah, yeah.
You think that, like, I don't...
I don't know how unlikely it is that the Secret Service wouldn't have people stationed on that roof, and I don't know how unlikely it is they would let Trump stand up and raise his fist or whatever.
I don't know about any of that.
But the problem with that story is that that was a real bullet, right, that was fired, that clipped his ear.
Well, there was somebody else killed.
Killed, yeah.
And there is no way that if your intention was to big Trump up, that your strategy would be To fire a bullet that would take off his ear.
Nobody is that good a shot.
So, yeah, there's some problems with that one.
Yeah, so the story there does not make sense.
And Brett Weinstein wanted to make clear that that is the conspiracy theory that he would not endorse.
So he responded to these events saying, if you wish that the assassin had killed President Trump, your values are indefensible.
If you think that Trump's team might have orchestrated this, your ability to reason has failed you.
Then he followed this up, just to clarify, because he got responses from his audience.
I don't know why this tweet confused people.
I'm not discounting the possibility that there was more to the attempt on President Trump's life than meets the eye.
I think that is highly likely.
But I find the idea that Trump's team staged this impossible to imagine.
Yeah, he's down with conspiratorial thinking, make no mistake.
There's got to be something more going on.
But not one that makes the Republicans out to be the bad guys, right?
He's not into that one, yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
And Chris Williamson had on the retired MMA fighter and ex-military, might even be back in the military guy, Tim Kennedy.
This is a guy who hosted a series to find Hitler, the living Hitler, because of course he's not actually...
Dead, right?
Let me guess, he's wearing a Panama hat in Venezuela.
Quite possibly.
So Tim Kennedy is a bit of a conspiratorial fool, but somebody with military credentials.
And in his take, he had a little Venn diagram, and all of them, John Cusack, Brett Weinstein, and Tim Kennedy, all of them start out by saying, look, I'm not like these stupid conspiracy theorists who just immediately come out with the most harebrained theories.
No, it wasn't a conspiracy theory.
But then as they go on, they essentially outline that they are conspiracy theorists and they have a conspiracy.
It's just that they want the freezer in more complex terms.
So in his case, he drew three band diagrams, one saying lone shooter, the other saying enemy of Trump, and the other saying an inside job, right?
These are all possibilities.
It could be like a lone shooter who is just taking action on his own.
Could be...
Enemies of Trump within the government to give him a crap security detail in the hope that somebody could penetrate it.
Or it could be an inside job where it was actually people in his own network that wanted to take him out.
And he drew the three Venn diagrams and then basically said, in his reading, it's in the middle of all of these.
It's the intersection of all of them.
It's all three.
It's all three.
And he linked it to the DEI agenda.
DEI agenda as well.
But how does that make sense logically?
So how can it be a lone government and someone who's been...
So I'm glad you asked, Mike.
So it's the government has been taken over.
The deep state is in effect.
There's the corrupt DEI initiatives and all this.
So they...
Have instilled these values that are producing like limp-wristed secret service people, women in high positions who aren't big enough to protect Trump.
So that's the ideology.
Then they won't extend the best protection to Trump.
The Biden administration is sending not their best.
They're refusing to give protection to RFK Jr. that he deserves in the hope that Something might take place.
And then because of the rhetoric around Trump being Hitler, they're motivating lone shooters to take action.
So they've made this perfect cocktail of an incompetent security apparatus, plus the motivation to kill Trump.
So it's kind of like all of them are coming together in the perfect storm to a new world.
But that's not a conspiracy theory.
That is just...
And acknowledging the facts.
Yeah, I guess the common denominator with these conspiracy theories is how much weight is placed on those prior assumptions that are built into them.
There's an agenda to create weak and ineffectual security agents.
He would place a huge amount of weight on that.
And you add all those things up and people build themselves into a situation where to them their conspiracy theory is kind of the only logical or at least the most probable explanation for events.
So they never believe they're doing a conspiracy theory because they just weight everything wrong, don't they?
Yeah, I'm going to give a bit more illustration of this because Brett and Heller released an episode of The Dark Horse.
They're 234th episode, Matt.
We've got a lot of episodes.
And Cave of Mirrors was the name of it.
And it's talking about the assassination attempt and their ideas around it.
And it's very classic Brett and Heller, but it also speaks to all this confluence of conspiratorial reasoning that we just talked about.
And I've got a couple of clips.
The first one is just to remind you how good Brett and Heller are at doing the kind of scientific Rigorous cosplay as they advance their conspiracy hypothesis.
So listen to this.
The argument is if we look at the history of assassinations, especially assassinations of American presidents and presidential candidates, that there is a pattern that is evident, which is most assassinations are the work of lone gun nuts.
And therefore, we should be very reluctant to look beyond that unless there's reason to, unless there's evidence to.
And on the one hand, logically speaking, that makes sense, but it runs afoul of a higher logic, which I want to make evident.
So the higher logic is this.
And forgive the...
The academic detour.
But there are two kinds of error that we discuss in science.
One is called random error.
That's just noise.
And the other is called systematic error.
And while it sounds like in some ways systematic error would be better because it's organized, in fact, it is way worse.
Random error is error that goes in an arbitrary direction.
So sometimes a data point will push you towards a hypothesis you're trying to test when your hypothesis isn't even true.
Okay, so this all sounds like a preamble, Chris, for this little detour to explain about random error and bias, or systematic error.
Like, essentially they're responding to an article from Michael Schirmer which was pointing out that most assassinations are done by lone...
It actually isn't conspiracies, even though they're constantly alleged.
And they're arguing that this is wrong because they're conspiracy theorists, right?
So they want to say that that is assuming that the official account is actually correct and that there's a systematic error because people are believing the official...
Accounts.
But it's that thing about, okay, let me talk about these academic terms that we have called systematic and random error.
And these are important concepts.
And it just gives the impression that they're approaching this like careful scientists.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I know what he's saying, right?
He's saying that the data that you think you have about most shootings being the work of crazy lone government, that data is wrong.
So you're operating from the wrong assumption.
Actually, that data is perturbed towards that, whereas actually they weren't, mostly lone gunmen.
So it's a very loose analogy to map systematic error and random error statistical concepts to what he's saying, which is basically that you can't trust anything that the official story is telling you.
And that's just a straight-up conspiratorial claim.
That's all he's saying, right?
So he's saying that.
Yeah.
He's saying that, which is bog-standard conspiratorial claim without any evidence.
The little preamble, the little sidetrack into statistical terminology there, it's just window dressing, isn't it?
Yeah, but it gives a certain impression.
And, like, one other thing is that...
They're so long-winded.
I mean, I know the people in glass houses shoot at Throbstones, but it takes them literal hours to get to the main conspiracy in this.
And they cover lots of mini conspiracies before they get there, but it's actually like two hours in before they get to their final conspiracy.
And there's so many sidetracks about various things, including that they knew Jack Black at school and what he was like.
Yeah.
And also, you know, various scientific sidetracks and whatnot.
It just takes them such a long time.
But Chris, this is a recurring theme, right?
Remember we noticed this with Jordan Peterson early on, for instance, where you get asked a direct question and then we'll embark on this monologue and visit all of these different places.
It's all very obscure.
It's all very dense.
The connections between points are really long.
And if you're trying to follow along, you cannot help.
But lose the thread at multiple points between the time that he starts his answer and the time that he finishes his answer.
And I think we agreed that that kind of style is a feature, not a bug, as far as these people are concerned, because it's actually quite helpful, right?
After that two-hour-long preamble before they claim the silly thing, it serves to give the impression that they've built up some form of...
Argument.
Some mountain of evidence.
Yes, I know.
I know it does.
And it's also like the famous clip that we always play is Brett talking about how he isn't a conspiracy theorist.
He advances conspiracy hypotheses, right?
And he loves to use this to argue that actually it's being a good scientist to entertain various hypotheses.
So here's...
A bit more about this.
And also, you'll hear some of the dynamics about flattering the audience.
But the question of how we're going to deal with what appears to have happened, what it might mean beyond the obvious, is not straightforward.
And what I think our audience expects from us, and what we can do, is we can model The very difficult question of how you responsibly engage in evaluating circumstances like this where very few of us were present.
The information that we have is filtered both intentionally and accidentally by algorithms and things like that.
How are we to reason through what are the bounds of what we are allowed to consider here?
The appropriate toolkit to bring to bear.
Does that sound fair enough?
What are you asking me?
Does that seem like a reasonable way to approach this?
Sure.
Okay.
So, first question I wanted to address.
I saw a lot of unavoidable...
Theorizing, that is the advancing of hypotheses, is theorizing.
You don't advance theories, you advance hypotheses.
So an awful lot of theorizing about possible conspiracies that might go beyond the obvious in the case of the attempt on President Trump's life.
I was surprised by the sloppiness of some of it.
This is just so much waffle and window dressing, right?
You know, we advance hypotheses.
We don't advance theories.
This is an important thing.
I say this to my students all the time.
These are important scientific principles.
No, he's just saying that.
Yeah, he's just conspiracy theorizing.
But he wants to say that there are stupid conspiracy theories, right?
And then there is what he's about to do.
But all that preamble as well, I think our audience has come to expect that we will carefully evaluate this and talk about algorithms and intentional and accidental filtering of information.
That's right.
We have to think carefully about what's the most responsible way to engage in speculation and hypothesizing, given that we're working with incomplete information.
All is not apparent.
But let's proceed.
Let's proceed responsibly.
Yeah, let's proceed.
I did like as well that Heller's response in the middle of it was when he set her up to agree.
She was like, what?
And then, oh yeah, sure.
I really like the idea that she's just kind of tuning out while he does these things.
You know what I mean?
Just having a bit of a mental break, which I would do if I was sitting there next to her.
But lest you think that Heller is epistemically better and more well-grounded, let's hear her talk a little bit about the kind of logic that she brings to bear.
Some of, you know, the epistemic tools she has.
Michael Shermer, in his piece that you showed briefly, arguing that lone gun nuts are the expected, all lead to this supposition that most What moderns are walking around with,
which is that the null hypothesis is it was one guy.
The null is that it was one guy.
Imagining anything else, that takes special evidence, and you're going to have to prove it.
If the null hypothesis, if the default hypothesis is it was one guy because of Hanlon's razor, because of Occam's razor, because of parsimony, because of all of these things, Then in order to credibly propose that it was anything more than one guy,
the burden is on you.
And I think part of where we have gotten in thinking about this is actually under conditions as complex as this, there is no no.
That you cannot.
And so it will sound, if you start down this road, it's like, nope, I don't think the null should be lone gun nut.
Oh, you're a freaking conspiracy theorist, conspiracy hypothesis.
And so you think the null should be conspiracy?
No.
I think there shouldn't be a null here.
I think that what we need to go in with is we don't know.
We are open.
And there are so many observations here of maybe incompetence across every domain, across every possibility, and maybe not.
But the null is not one, therefore I have to work harder to prove conspiracy.
The null is we don't know.
That was fun reasoning.
Thank you for playing that, Chris.
I enjoyed that.
Again, with the scientific language, right?
No hypotheses and alternative hypotheses.
I think what she's saying is don't assume that it's one explanation or the other as a default and rather have an open mind.
Everything is equally plausible, which is a stupid heuristic.
It's not true.
I mean, like, let's take a different example, right?
The police turn up at someone's house and there's a...
A woman lying unconscious on the floor or has been murdered or something like that.
Or a man, whatever.
They are going to do things, like interview family members.
They're going to do other things as well.
That's something that they assume that it's going to be someone else who's living in the house, but it often is.
And it's not that they're discounting any other options.
It's just normal investigation where you gather evidence.
I don't think that anyone investigating...
You know, the secret services and so on, the security services would be investigating everything about the background of this guy, every little detail, everything, right?
They're not starting off with a firm, like, null hypothesis that they have to get shifted from.
This is, again, like, it's partly just window dressing to sort of use all these scientific terms, like null hypothesis and so on.
It's mostly that.
But it's also, like, it injects a version of reality, which isn't true, right?
They actually don't operate like that at all when they're investigating.
No, but they are correct in the sense that the default approach to this is that there was a guy on a rooftop that there's video of who shot at Trump and appears to be like a 20-year-old guy,
right?
Yeah, that's like evidence that is known, right?
But before you commence your investigation, you've got the immediate reports to the ground.
You might start off with some...
Facts that are known, right?
You might know the guy because you've got his body.
You might have identified them.
You might have the gun, etc.
And you proceed from there.
Yeah, now you're going to check what was he doing?
Who was he in contact with?
Did he write down about this plan?
All that kind of thing will be investigated.
It's not going to be ruled out that there was a larger conspiracy, that the person had help or that there was nobody else involved.
But it is also more likely given the history.
Of various presidential assassins and whatnot, that it will be an unhinged person.
So their notion is that, one, you're right, that they're kind of suggesting there won't be a consideration of alternatives, which there will be.
But they're also, when they say that it's silly to apply any weighting of plausibilities to possible explanations.
Yeah, it's just not how it works.
Let's say hypothetically, they looked into all of the background of this person, everyone they'd met with, phone call records, you know, I'm sure there's like a dozen of different ways they can check every single thing.
And let's say they find no contacts with suspicious things, no record of meeting dodgy people, no involvement with any political organizations, yada, yada, yada.
Then they would probably default to this person's...
A bit nuts and crazy.
Whereas I think, like, Heather is implying that what they should be doing is saying if they didn't find any evidence of that, well, they didn't find any evidence that he, like, wasn't.
Like, it's the dog that didn't bark at the nighttime or something.
Then you just have to keep all those options as equally likely.
Yeah, like, there's no actual clear evidence that it wasn't aliens.
Involved in that.
That has not been disproven yet.
And so it would be wrong to discount that out of hand because, yes, it's unlikely, right?
But aliens presumably would be good at hiding what they're involved in.
And, like, it's the same logic.
It's as good as that logic.
The other thing too, Chris, is that, of course, this hypothetical scenario where there's no evidence of anything either way.
Absolutely none.
That never happens.
When they look at these people, they find deranged Facebook posts and they find weird things.
Or they have reports from family or friends that was a bit of a loner and seemed out of sorts.
You know what I mean?
Or, I mean, there's this issue where when somebody engages in something like this, there's an assumption that they are unusual in some respect because most of us don't go around and try to assassinate people.
But it can be.
That somebody has an entirely coherent thought process and did a kind of cost-benefit analysis and decided this is the appropriate cause of action.
And that can happen.
People that are white supremacist shooters targeting mosques or whatever, they're not mentally ill in the sense that they've got no idea about the consequences or whatever.
They simply have decided their ideology means this is the correct course of action.
So that could be the case as well, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I agree with you.
But to return to Heather and Brett, I mean, I think it was good you played that because it parallels what Brett did before about his epistemic approach and that it's just like he was bringing in these stats concepts to spruce up a bog standard rationale for being a conspiracist.
Heather here is bringing in this stuff about null hypotheses and so on to really just, she's trying to say, We should keep an open mind about what...
Conspiracies.
Yeah, or even to be charitable, keep an open mind when you're investigating these things about the cause or the motivation behind the person doing the thing.
That's fine.
You know what I mean?
That's a trivial thing.
Yeah, but they don't mean that.
Because as Brett said in his tweet, he wants to rule out any possibility for...
As you pointed out, there's problems with the logic there.
But if they were consistent, they would be saying...
You know, that you shouldn't be ruling out the possibility of this being a staged event for Trump.
But there is lots of reasons that you should rule that out.
And they ruled that out as well.
What they just don't want to rule out is a plot by the deep state against Trump, like, you know.
Yeah, combined with DEI, etc., etc.
Yeah, they don't want to rule that out.
Well, it's just annoying to me that the argument is based on these faulty premises.
That the people investigating assassinations, not just this one, but all of them, have this inherent reluctance to accept any explanation that isn't a lone gunman explanation.
I just don't think that's true.
I've had family members who have worked in ASIO, Australia's thing, and I know that's...
No, they're going to check as well the security breaches that allowed this to happen.
Is there any evidence of foul play or intentional or is it incompetence?
Like, that will absolutely be looked into in some detail.
For very legitimate reasons, right?
Like, they're not expecting that they're going to find some conspiracy by insiders to murder Trump.
But what they are expecting is some flaw in their procedures and somebody maybe not doing their job 100% well.
They're all about finding those things and fixing them.
Yeah.
In any case, if you want to hear this logic applied to another topic, which sound familiar, listen to this.
It is perfectly natural at a logical level to not treat anything as the default hypothesis.
I would point out we've been here before, right?
The idea that natural origins for COVID was the obvious explanation and that, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology required some incredible level of evidence.
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