I agree with you when you say

> One of the central criteria for free will is “Could I have done otherwise?” But because of a temporal asymmetry in human choice, the question makes no sense.

I think that free will is a useful concept that feels true and useful, more true and useful than the alternative of “already written”.

I’ll give the example of watching a recording of a basketball game where I already know the final score. I am watching the deterministic process of things unfold, shots being missed, fouls being called, players getting tired. But at the end of the day, I know that the score will be met, even if that means one team hits 15 three pointers in a row and the other team misses layup after layup. It will happen.

And yet, a coach can say useful things about the deterministic side of things, things like “you’re not turning your hips enough” and “see how the defender turns his head here and there is the possibility for an entry pass?”

But nobody really has anything useful to say about the extra knowledge version where the interplay of actions and decisions is taken off the table. You’re left with inanities like “I guess the home team is going to get hot in the second half” and things like that.

Choosing between which version is more interesting and useful, it’s the deterministic, free will one. (I know that determinism and free will are often put on opposite sides of the debate, so I think it’s interesting that in this thought experiment they are on the same side, against a sort of omniscient pre determination.) Believing in free will let’s us talk about habit formation and deciding who you want to be as a person and all that stuff. It’s William James’s Right to Believe. In a debatable situation, we’re allowed to throw our beliefs behind the worldview that gives us more of a chance of success.

So many municipalities are afraid to try anything new but happy to be copycats. This could be the start of something big!

One of the things philosophy is often searching for is a principle that works over a broad range of circumstances. You need to try a lot of situations, including edge cases, to see if it holds up as one might intend. This is going to require hypotheticals to fill in gaps in the real world data.

I thought the ideas on anarchy were kind of sloppy and poorly developed. However, I did like the idea of listing the things that tend to “dominate” us (and certainly anarchy is about trying to minimize these things). I wish that it had not just listed a potpourri of modern contenders to being in charge, but focused on more fundamental components that things are composed of.

For instance, socialist-democratic seems like it actually appeals to the mass/majority (as shown through votes and public discussion), the institution (an appeal to a long-functioning institutions that has shown stability) and the technocratic system (tax codes, legal codes, the educational system standing in for the arbitrary judgements of individuals).

I think it’s extremely odd the author doesn’t even mention the threat of physical coercion, kind of the big daddy of all coercion with tons of thinking around the state holding a monopoly on violence and all that.

> We Westerners are not recognizing the great achievements and there is an excessive distrust in the system that connects with the nostalgia for a strong leader.

He talks a lot about happiness in the abstract and how we’re not appreciating the great accomplishments of our current system, but at least from an American’s perspective the big thing he’s not mentioning is capitalism and how these days people just seem to feel squeezed. If you need to work more and more hours at a crappy job with an aggressive boss in order to afford the same amount of food and a crappier place to rent and you can’t afford a family or leisure time and you have all this anxiety around your future being worse than your present, it’s a big deal. And add to that a sense of unfairness at wealth inequality, and a ruling class rigging thing for themselves and critical under-addressed issues like climate change and all the headlines about violence, and corporations spying on you and trying harder and harder to milk you for profit … I mean at some point life just stops being fun. And when that happens it casts a shadow over our philosophical meaning-making and our sense that using our rational mind to play the game that society sets out before us is the winning strategy

His only mention of suffering is a random line in passing “This is why wars always work the same way: I want to destroy you, I suffer and I want revenge.” He doesn’t seem to perceive rational people existing in the current world as sufferin; he just thinks of them as ungrateful.

They may not be science’s true powerhouse but statistics and modeling have come a long way. Just 30 years ago the weather forecast was a joke where it couldn’t reliably tell you whether to take her umbrella or not. Now I can plan whether to take in my plants or not five days in advance based on predicted nighttime temperatures. A lot of the models for climate change are quite accurate but what does it matter if they get it right? Nobody is paying attention to them anyway

The author (not surprisingly) gives a more balanced assessment than the title implies, recognizing that many conspiracy theories are harmful to society. I wish he had spoken more of the costs of entertaining poorly founded theories that rile us up, because they gum up the public debate.

He says “Yet even these should not be automatically dismissed; someone should be evaluating them on their evidential merits.” If this is the center of his argument, of course I agree. Somebody should look it over seriously, somewhat in the way that Snopes does. The problem is, how do you know that Snopes did a thorough job and didn’t have a bias? It’s an important problem, almost the problem of our age. But having a million Facebook investigators watching the same 20 poorly researched videos is absolutely not helping.

> The people who believed that the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s were an elaborate sham orchestrated to justify a purge of Stalin’s enemies where called “conspiracy theorists”.

This is his other best point, that cases like this are not rare in history. Legitimacy is the glue that keeps society together, and what we might call “manufactured legitimacy” (to adapt the phrase by Chompsky) tends to be constantly created by those in power. And, to be fair, antivaxers think they are in that same type of a situation now (or at least a few do, I suspect most just see it as a way to shake a political structure they already have decided they oppose in hopes it will come crashing down).

Lastly, science tends to be entertaining innumerable hypotheses at once, and which ones are worth working on has a sort of ranking system with something like a serious challenge to relativity at the top and the idea that a confederate ghost shot JFK near the bottom. The author dislikes the term “conspiracy theory” because it is used to discount theories, but these days I feel it is almost a term that means we have to handle the dubious theory in question with kit gloves, since the goal is often not to establish our own assessment of its merits but to influence others who have already tied their identity up with this theory. This means we have to be much more circumspect and politically sensitive (as well as go on asides as we remedially explain 7th grade concepts) than we would if we were debating a real fringe hypothesis with a qualified advocate for it.

In summary I would argue that “conspiracy theories” should be investigated thoroughly by a few small groups of competent individuals and their findings and judgements not suppressed. At the same time, politically charged public posturing by people who have not put in the time to understand the arguments and evidence is swallowing society right now and swamping substantive political debate. The term “conspiracy theory” has come to be double sided; on the one side it is to scientific theories what a junk bond is to investing. On the other, while at times in the past it may have been used as a pejorative term by those in authority in order to suppress debate, now it is practically a badge of honor with political cache, such that it may well be elevated to serious debate whether it has a hint of merit or not. I think “conspiracy theory” has become a term that stands for too many contradictory ideas and while it’s fine to debate it, as here, when addressed seriously, for the most part we don’t have a lot of choice but to recognize that most online debate around conspiracy theories are disingenuous and are really trolling and political agenda pushing, and that they don’t deserve time-consuming, well reasoned responses.