Evidence, desire, support

I keep worrying, as with a loose tooth, about news media elites who are going for the UFOs-as-space-aliens theory. This one falls halfway between election denial (too upsetting for me to want to think about too often) and belief in ghosts (too weird to take seriously).

I was also thinking about the movie JFK, which I saw when it came out in 1991. As a reader of the newspapers, I knew that the narrative pushed in the movie was iffy, to say the least; still, I watched the movie intently—I wanted to believe. In the same way that in the 1970s I wanted to believe those claims that dolphins are smarter than people, or that millions of people wanted to believe in the Bermuda Triangle or ancient astronauts or Noah’s Ark or other fringe ideas that were big in that decade. None of those particular ideas appealed to me.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about what it takes for someone to believe in something. My current thinking is that belief requires some mixture of the following three things: 1. Evidence 2. Desire 3. Support

To go through these briefly:

1. I’m using the term “evidence” in a general sense to include things you directly observe and also convincing arguments of some sort or another. Evidence can be ambiguous and, much to people’s confusion, it doesn’t always point in the same direction. The unusual trajectory of Oswald’s bullet is a form of evidence, even though not as strong as has been claimed by conspiracy theories. The notorious psychology paper from 2011 is evidence for ESP. It’s weak evidence, really no evidence at all for anything beyond the low standards of academic psychology at the time, but it played the role of evidence for people who were interested in or open to believing.

2. By “desire,” I mean a desire to believe in the proposition at hand. There can be complicated reasons for this desire. Why did I have some desire in 1991 to believe the fake JFK story, even thought I knew ahead of time it was suspect? Maybe because it helped make sense of the world? Maybe because, if I could believe the story, I could go with the flow of the movie and feel some righteous anger? I don’t really know. Why do some media insiders seen to have the desire to believe that UFOs are space aliens? Maybe because space aliens are cool, maybe because, if the theory is true, then these writers are in on the ground floor of something big, maybe because the theory is a poke in the eye at official experts, maybe all sorts of things.

3. “Support” refers to whatever social environment you’re in. 30% of Americans believe in ghosts, and belief in ghosts seems to be generally socially acceptable—I’ve heard people from all walks of life express the belief—but there are some places where it’s not taken seriously, such as in the physics department. The position of ghost-belief within the news media is complicated, typically walking a fine line to avoid expressing belief or disbelief. For example, a quick search of *ghosts npr* led to this from the radio reporter:

I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in ghosts. Now, I say pretty sure because I want to leave the possibility open. There have definitely been times when I felt the presence of my parents who’ve both died, like when one of their favorite songs comes on when I’m walking the aisles of the grocery store, or when the wind chime that my mom gave me sings a song even though there’s no breeze. But straight-up ghosts, like seeing spirits, is that real? Can that happen?

This is kind of typical. It’s a news story that’s pro-ghosts, reports a purported ghost citing with no pushback, but there’s that kinda disclaimer too. It’s similar to reporting on religion. Different religions contradict each other, and so if you want to report in a way that’s respectful of religion, you have to place yourself in a no-belief-yet-no-criticism mode: if you have a story about religion X, you can’t push back (“Did you really see the Lord smite that goat in your backyard that day?”) because that could offend adherents of that religion, but you can’t fully go with it, as that could offend adherents of every other religion.

I won’t say that all three of evidence, desire, and support are required for belief, just that they can all contribute. We can see this with some edge cases. That psychologist who published the terrible paper on ESP: he had a strong desire to believe, a strong enough desire to motivate an entire research program on his part. There was also a little bit of institutional support for the belief. Not a lot—ESP is a fringe take that would be, at best, mocked by most academic psychologists, it’s a belief that has much lower standing now than it did fifty years ago—but some. Anyway, the strong desire was enough, along with the terrible-but-nonzero evidence and the small-but-nonzero support. Another example would be Arthur Conan Doyle believing those ridiculous faked fairy photos: spiritualism was big in society at the time, so he had strong social support as well as strong desire to believe. In other cases, evidence is king, but without the institutional support it can be difficult for people to be convinced. Think of all those “they all laughed, but . . .” stories of scientific successes under adversity: continental drift and all the rest.

As we discussed in an earlier post, the “support” thing seems like a big change regarding the elite media and UFOs-as-space-aliens. The evidence for space aliens, such as it is—blurry photographs, eyewitness testimony, suspiciously missing government records, and all the rest—has been with us for half a century. The desire to believe has been out there too for a long time. What’s new is the support: some true believers managed to insert the space aliens thing into the major news media in a way that gives permission to wanna-believers to lean into the story.

I don’t have anything more to say on this right now, just trying to make sense of it all. This all has obvious relevance to political conspiracy theories, where authority figures can validate an idea, which then gives permission for other wanna-believers to push it.