The Purpose of Conspiracy Theory Is What It Does

In his latest article, David Robert Grimes traces the history of the anti-vaccine movement. Ever since Edward Jennner's early experiments, using a relatively mild disease (cowpox) to protect against a much more serious one (smallpox), people have expressed scepticism, fear, scorn and outright opposition to all forms of vaccination.

Vaccine hesitancy has increased significantly in the last few years, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and Jim Reed's article also notes that the sheer quantity of vaccinations that are being pushed onto people has resulted in a degree of vaccine fatigue, even among NHS workers.

Those who believe in the efficacy of vaccines, and in the important contribution that vaccine makes to public health, tend to see the anti-vaccine movement as fueled by conspiracy theories, immune to scientific argument because the adversary in this game plays according to rules that are not generally those of science WHO 2007.

In relation to another area that has promoted strong opposition in some quarters, the idea of eating insects as a source of protein, Riley Farrell's article quotes Stephan Lewandowsky, who suggests arguments based not on the content of the beliefs but on their purpose. You're not going to be successful if you say, Uncle Bruce, you're crazy… don't believe this utter nonsense. But instead, you can ask: What function do your beliefs serve? Why are you believing this?

Many politicians and internet celebrities take strong positions on vaccines, bug eating and other topics, and some of these may be cynically driven by the desire to build support and revenue rather than their own private beliefs - for example vaccinating their own families while attacking vaccines for everyone else. For such people, the purpose of these positions may be clear, although they probably won't acknowledge it. But as for Uncle Bruce, it's not at all clear what kind of answer Professor Lewandowsky would expect or accept, or what arguments this would lead to.

Underpinning all of these movements is a distrust of authority, especially governments, big business and scientists. And yet a willingness to trust the biggest businesses on the planet - the tech platforms and their Generative AI tools that add fuel to these theories, and generate income for themselves. Obviously.

 

 

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Riley Farrell, How eating insects became a conspiracy theory (BBC 4 September 2025)

David Robert Grimes, The strange history of the anti-vaccine movement (BBC 5 September 2025)

Jim Reed, Rise of vaccine distrust - why more of us are questioning jabs (BBC 16 January 2025)

WHO Bulletin 27 November 2007 86(2):140–146. doi: 10.2471/BLT.07.040089

The Nature of Lists

As previously noted on this blog, lists may be constructed for various purposes, but the list then becomes a thing in its own right.

One of the open questions of our time appears to be the existence or non-existence of a list, supposedly maintained by Jeffrey Epstein, possibly with the assistance of Ghislaine Maxwell. And the presence or absence of certain names on this list, if it exists. Interviewed in prison recently, Maxwell has denied the existence of such a list.  

But surely the more important question is about the relationships that Epstein maintained with a number of wealthy and well-connected people, and the extent to which he had any kompromat over them. Not whether he kept all their names in a grubby little notebook, like he was a villain in a B-movie.

If the list only ever existed in Epstein's head, does that count?

 

Wikipedia: Jeffrey Epstein client list, 

Luc Cohen, Andrew Goudsward and Jack Queen, Ghislaine Maxwell told DOJ she is unaware of any Epstein 'client list' (Reuters, 23 August 2025)

The Ethics of the Possible - Chatbotic Sermons

Interesting piece by Deena Prichep, in which clergy agonize as to the ethics of using a chatbot to construct a sermon.

The first point is that it is easy - perhaps too easy. ChatGPT currently advertises its sermon-writing services as follows: 

Your preaching companion. Transform Your Message into Impactful Sermons. Just provide your topic, choose from three tailor-made outlines, and let's co-create a captivating sermon. Fully adaptable to your congregation's needs - denomination, duration, tone, and language.

And for busy clergy the results seem almost touched by the Holy Spirit (aka Ghost in the Machine). Prichep quotes a Lutheran pastor whose first reaction was Oh my God, this is really good. (I may be doing my own research here, but I think there may be something in the Bible about taking the name of the Lord in vain.)

But just because you can doesn't mean you should. One of the arguments in favour of letting a large language model write your sermons for you is that it frees up your time to do more important things, like pastoral care. But are these things really more important? Brad East argues (following Calvin) that the primary task of ministry is the service of Word and sacrament, and that use of Artificial Intelligence shortchanges something essential.

So the underlying principle here seems to be that it might be okay to use AI tools for less important tasks but not for your most important task.

However, there are some other issues with the use of AI tools, including the environmental cost. And East notes the possiblity that large language models might fabricate material as well as pushing a particular agenda, although one might think preachers have always been able to do this without the aid of technology.

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Brad East, AI Has No Place in the Pulpit (Christianity Today, 27 September 2023)

Deena Prichep, We asked clergy if they use AI to help write sermons. Here's what they said (NPR 17 July 2025) HT Carissa Véliz

Deena Prichep, Encore: Religion and AI, what does it mean when the word of God comes from a chatbot? (NPR 19 July 2025)

John Rector, The Ghost in the Machine (19 June 2024) 

Brad Turner, Beatitudes or Platitudes (Milton Church of Christ, 19 December 2021) 

The Social Value of Reality TV

As well as being a pioneer of heavy metal, Ossy Osborne was one of the early stars of reality TV. The MTV show The Osbornes, running from 2002 to 2005 and featuring Ossy, Sharon and two of their teenage children, was described as a reality sitcom. Previous fly-on-the-wall programmes had been presented as documentaries, albeit with some dramatic elements, but this one was edited for drama.

Reality TV receives a lot of criticism and disparagement. Some people have commented on the relationship between Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian engineer who build a system of sewers to pump effluent out of Londoners' homes, and Sir Peter Bazalgette, the creative director of Endemol responsible for Big Brother.

The BBC reports some sociologists as arguing that reality TV can have some social value.

Reality TV ... can be a tool for greater social understanding. Danielle Lindemann

It can potentially offer benefits to viewers and society because it can lead to wider conversations about the world we want to live in. Jacob Johanssen

However, Dr Johanssen has previously expressed criticism of the way participants in reality shows are exploited and shamed, both by the programme makers and by the audience (via social media). He frames reality TV as a neoliberal update on Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle.

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Nathan Briant, The sisters from UK's first fly-on-the-wall series (BBC News, 21 June 2024)

Jacob Johanssen, Immaterial Labour and Reality TV: The Affective Surplus of Excess. (In: Briziarelli, M. and Armano, E. (eds.). The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism. pp. 197–208. London: University of Westminster Press 2017). https://doi.org/10.16997/book11.l 

Alex Taylor, How reality TV changed the way we think - for the better (BBC News, 26 July 2025)

Caitlin Wilson, Ozzy Osbourne: From Prince of Darkness to reality TV's favourite dad (BBC News, 26 July 2025)

The Urge to Persecute

People have always sought to project evil onto their neighbours, and that desire now extends to random strangers on the Internet. Malcolm Gaskill shows how the science of witch-hunting took a leap forward in the Enlightenment period, thanks to the meticulous assembly and analysis of data to confirm or confound hypotheses, and describes how one seventeenth century German woman was found innocent of witchcraft only after the intervention of her son, who was able to use these same tools in her defence. Of course it helped that her son happened to be one of the greatest intellectuals of the period, Johannes Kepler.

Empiricism made witchcraft possible as an actionable crime before it made it an impossible one. Kepler saved his mother through formidable concentration, sticking to a firm line of reasoning and dissecting his opponents’ arguments, point by point.

In this week's news, two tech executives were spotted cuddling one another at a Coldplay concert, drawing attention to themselves by ducking in a guilty fashion when they realized they were being shown on the big screen. Internet sleuths were able to discover their identity, public shaming ensued, and jobs and marriages were lost - an example of what Cathy O'Neil calls Networked Shame. In his commentary on the incident, Brandon Vigliarolo noted our willingness to persecute someone for a perceived wrong despite not knowing the full story. 

Vigliarolo then went on to remind us of the eagerness with which other tech executives are pushing mass surveillance, which will apparently keep everyone on their best behavior through the use of constant real-time machine-learning-powered monitoring. 

Because we can trust machine learning to know the full story before jumping to conclusions, can't we?

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See also: Witnessing Machines Built in Secret (November 2017), Metrication and Demetrication (August 2021), The Purpose of Shame (April 2022)

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Malcolm Gaskill, Money, Sex, Lies, Magic (London Review of Books, 38/13, 30 June 2016) 

Malcolm Gaskill, Social media witch-hunts are no different to the old kind – just bigger (Guardian, 13 October 2016)

Cathy O'Neil, The Shame Machine (New York: Crown, 2022) 

Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Picador 2015)

Geoff Shullenberger, The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)  

Brandon Vigliarolo, Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line (The Register, 16 September 2024)

Brandon Vigliarolo, Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state (The Register, 18 Jul 2025)

Just About Managing

In the UK from 2013 to 2016 there were old Etonians in three important posts: Prime Minister, Mayor of London, and Archibishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby had spent much of his life in the oil industry, and had only been a bishop for just over a year when appointed to the top job in the Church of England. Initially praised for his crisp business-like approach, and expected to drive improvements across the Anglican congregation, some critics thought he ended up achieving very little, reduced to bland words and sleight of hand.

When you spoke to him, you sensed he was a CEO who had mentally allocated you five minutes before passing on to the next matter to be dealt with. That is agenda-driven episcopacy, rather than a listening episcopacy. You can’t run a church with a handbook full of business buzzwords. Pepinster

Mr Welby has undoubtedly seen it as a big part of his job to hold together very different factions within the Church of England and, even more difficult, in the wider global Church, the Anglican Communion of 85 million people. ... He has expended a huge amount of energy in this endeavour of finding common ground through 12 years during which there has been other momentous social change, and at times has shown himself to be an astute political operator. Maqbook

But his failure to tackle the safeguarding issue properly has damaged the Church and brought an end to his tenure. Martyn Percy argues that the safeguarding measures that Welby oversaw are ill-thought-out and arbitrarily enforced, and deter the sort of volunteers on whom the church has traditionally relied for local good works 

And Ian Paul thought Welby was a poor leader overall. Justin managed to make enemies of every single group. He made enemies of liberals by talking about evangelism. He made enemies of evangelicals by talking about sexuality. He made enemies of conservatives by talking about new forms of church.

So much for his management skills then.

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Andrew Anthony, The Church of England is beset by shame and division. Can it survive? (Observer 17 November 2024)

Stephen Bates, Just About Managing (The Tablet, 16 March 2017) (Note: link is to the archived page because of trojan warning on live page)

Stephen Bates, Justin Welby: why archbishop chosen for his managerial skills had to go (Guardian 12 November 2024)

Aleem Maqbool, Church at precarious moment after Welby resignation (BBC News, 13 November 2024)

Catherine Pepinster, Why did Justin Welby fall so tragically short? Because he was preoccupied with efficiency, not listening (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Harriet Sherwood, The C of E’s CEO: how will history judge Justin Welby’s tenure as archbishop of Canterbury? (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Wikipedia: Old Etonians

The Purpose of Surveillance

While surveillance has been a recurring topic on this blog, the technological environment has developed significantly over the past twenty years.

Once upon a time, the only form of real-time surveillance involved so-called closed circuit systems (CCTV), providing a dedicated watcher with a view of what was going on at that moment, although these systems now generally include a recording function, often operate retrospectively, and feed into an open-ended ecosystem of discipline-and-punish. As I noted in May 2008, the purpose of CCTV had extended from monitoring to include deterrence and penalty, and in the process it had ceased to be closed circuit in the original sense.

Fiction has provided some alternative models of surveillance and control. As well as Fritz Lang's 1960 film The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, there are the Palantíri in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, which are indestructable stones or crystal balls enabling events to be seen from afar.

The data company Palantir. whose founders included Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, was originally established to provide big data analytics to the intelligence community. Geoff Shullenberger suggests that Palantir might be understood as an application of the ideas of Leo Strauss (who inspired Thiel): an enterprise that acknowledges the deep, dangerous undercurrent of human violence and harnesses the reams of data generated by the internet to monitor and control it. Meanwhile Moira Weigel notes the contribution of Adorno (who inspired Karp): Adorno’s jargon anticipates the software tools Palantir would develop. By tracing the rhetorical patterns that constitute jargon in literary language, Karp argues that he can reveal otherwise hidden identities and affinities—and the drive to commit violence that lies latent in them.

 

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Geoff Shullenberger, The Intellectual Origins of Surveillance Tech (Outsider Theory, 17 July 2020)

Moira Weigel, Palantir goes to the Frankfurt School (Boundary2, 10 July 2020)

Related posts: Surveillance and its Effects (May 2005), What's in a Name - CCTV (May 2008), As Shepherds Watched (April 2024)

Surveillance@DemandingChange, Surveillance@POSIWID

Data and the Genome

The word data comes from the Latin meaning that which is given. So one might think it is entirely appropriate to use the word for our DNA, given to us by our parents, thanks to millions of years of evolution. DNA is often described as a genetic code; the word code either refers to the way biological information is represented in the molecular structure of chromosomes, or to the way these chromosomes can be understood as a set of instructions for building a biological entity. Watson and Crick used the word code in their 1953 Nature article.

However, when people talk about the human genome, they are often referring to a non-biological representation in some artificial datastore. In other words, given by biology to data science.

Shannon E French objects to talking about data stored on DNA like it’s some kind of memory stick, and Abeba Birhane sees this as part of the current trend that is so determined to present AI as human-like at all costs, describing humans in machinic terms has become normalised.

Elsewhere, Abeba Birhane is known for her strong critique of AI. As well as important ethical issues (algorithmic bias, digital colonialism, accountability, exploitation/expropriation), she has also raised concerns about the false promise of AI hype.

we have arrived at peak AI hype accompanied by minimal critical thinking

— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) June 12, 2022

But describing humans (or other biological entities) in machinic terms, or treating them as instruments. is far older than AI. When we replace animals with technical devices (canaries. carrier pigeons, horses), the substitution implies that the animals had been treated as devices, the replacement often justified by the argument that technical devices are cheaper, more efficient, or more reliable, or don't require regular breaks - or are simply more modern. Conversely, when scientists try to repurpose DNA as a data storage mechanism, this also seems to mean treating biology in instrumental terms.

But arguably what is stored or encoded in the DNA - whether in its original biological manifestation or more recent exercises in bioengineering - is still data, regardless of how or for whom it is used.

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Abeba Birhane, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, David Leslie and Sandra Wachter, Science in the age of large language models (Nature Reviews Physics, Volume 5, May 2023, 277–280)

Abeba Birhane and Deborah Raji, ChatGPT, Galactica and the Progress Trap (Wired, 9 December 2022)

Grace Browne, AI is steeped in Big Tech's 'Digital Colonialism' (Wired, 25 May 2023)

J.D. Watson and F.H.C. Crick, Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (Nature, 30 May 1953)

Related posts: Naive Epistemology (July 2020), Limitations of Machine Learning (July 2020), Mapping out the entire world of objects (July 2020), Lie Detectors at Airports (April 2022), Algorithmic Intuition (November 2023)

Algorithmic Intuition - Gaydar

When my friend A was still going out with women, other friends would sometimes ask if he was gay. An intuitive ability to guess the sexuality of other people is known as gaydar. There have been studies that appear to provide evidence that both humans and computers possess such an ability, although the reliability of this evidence has been challenged. For example, some of these studies have relied on images posted on dating sites, but images that have been crafted and selected for dating purposes may already reflect how a person of a given sexuality wishes to present thenselves in that specific context, and may not reflect how the person looks in other contexts.

The latest study claims to assess sexuality from brain waves. This has been criticized as gross and irresponsible (Rae Walker) and as unscientific (Ababa Birhane). Continuing a debate that had started with other methods of algorithmic gaydar.

More generally, there is considerable disquiet about computers attempting to segment people in this way. For a start, there are many parts of the world where homosexuality doesn't only lead to social disapproval and harassment, but also criminal penalties and sanctions. Even though the algorithms may be inaccurate, they might be used to discriminate against people, or trigger homophobic actions. Whether someone actually is gay or is a false positive is almost beside the point here, either way the algorithmic gaydar may result in individual suffering.

Furthermore, these algorithm appears to want to colonize aspects of subjectivity, of the subject's identity.

• WyssBernard: I’m not going accept a machine determination as to what I identify as. ?¿
• Abeba Birhane: just let people be or let people identify their own sexuality

In an interview with the editor of Wired, Yuval Noah Harari wonders whether an algorithm might have guessed he was gay before he realised it himself. And if an algorithm had been the source of this wisdom about himself, would this not have been incredibly deflating for the ego?

And Lawrence Scott describes how his Facebook timeline started to be invaded by images of attractive men, suggesting that the algorithm had somehow profiled him as being particularly susceptible to these images.

to be continued

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Isobel Cockerell, Facial recognition systems decide your gender for you. Activists say it needs to stop (Codastory, 12 April 2021)

Isobel Cockerell, Researchers say their AI can detect sexuality. Critics say it’s dangerous (Codastory, 13 July 2023)

Lawrence Scott, Hell is Ourselves (The New Atlantis #68, Spring 2022, pp. 65-72)

Nicholas Thompson, When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself (Wired, 4 October 2018)

Wikipedia: Gaydar

ChatGPT and the Defecating Duck

For dog owners, the intelligence of dogs shows itself (among other things) in their ability to learn tricks. For cat owners, the intelligence of cats shows itself (among other things) in their disdain for learning tricks. 

When Alan Turing conceived of a way to tell computers and humans apart, now known as the Turing Test, he called it the Imitation Game. His first example was to ask a computer to write poetry - specifically a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. And his idea of a plausible answer for the computer was to say: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry.

No doubt many people have tested ChatGPT with exactly the same question. When Jessica Riskin tried it, she was not impressed by its efforts. She found Turing’s imaginary machine’s answer (Turing imitating a machine imitating a human) infinitely more persuasive (as indicator of intelligence) than ChatGPT’s. Turing’s imagined intelligent machine gives off an unmistakable aura of individual personhood, even of charm.

An earlier article by Professor Riskin described a mechanical automaton that attracted large admiring crowds in 18th century Paris. This was a generative pretrained transformer in the shape of a duck, which appeared to convert pellets of food into pellets of excrement. The inventor is careful to say that he wants to show, not just a machine, but a process. But he is equally careful to say that this process is only a partial imitation.

Whereas ChatGPT's bad imitation of poetry is real shit.

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Jessica Riskin, The Defecating Duck, or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artifical Life (Critical Enquiry, 2003)

Jessica Riskin, A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head (New York Review of Books, 25 June 2023)

Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind 1950)