Talking about these things like you’re in a position to know anything is foolish.
You don’t know, just like the people speculating about conspiracies don’t know. But at least they usually cite some suspicious coincidence, all you’ve done is make a confident statement about something you have no right to be confident about.
Suspicious coincidences and innuendo can be easily constructed for anyone, anything, and at any time. Which is why, generally speaking, these kind of appeals are considered fallacious reasoning in rational and scientific discourse. So I don't know what to tell you. But I guess I would tell you that you're insisting on using things as evidence that centuries worth of philosophy pretty much tells us we shouldn't use as evidence to inform options.
If you had read carefully I was not defending using coincidences, I was merely saying that even this low level of “reasoning” is above your strategy of “just making a totally unwarranted confident statement”.
What is my unwarranted confident statement, exactly?
“It is not a global conspiracy.”
How could you possibly know this? Isn’t the whole point of conspiring to keep something secret?
Well, for one, it's almost impossible to prove of a negative. But on the argument to the affirmative, outside of innuendo, I see no evidence that it is.
I can't possibly prove that there isn't a red teapot in orbit of Pluto, either. But I'd be happy pronouncing there isn't, in the absence of evidence that there is.
No one is asking you to prove anything. No one is claiming there are red teapots in the orbit of pluto.
Epistemic humility is the only thing I would urge you to consider. Why proclaim something you cannot possibly verify or invalidate?
Because I see people saying things, as if they're true, that I believe are exceedingly unlikely to be true, so I said as much. Humility does not negate having opinions. I have sufficient humility that if someone proves the existence of a conspiracy, I will eagerly evaluate the evidence.
