How to Combat Falsehoods: It's NOT a matter of opinion or being neutral!

As a skeptic, it is often troubling to see the amount of bogosity available in public, much less the Internet, where anyone with some free time can offer advice, and many people just eat them up, with absolutely zero due diligence about the veracity of the information received. It doesn't help when social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on help (inadvertently) spread the misinformation.

Recently, a post on Slate documented how the subreddit /r/askHistorians struggle to control the deliberate misinformation campaign by Holocaust deniers, and how social media, afraid of lawsuits, basically left them to say ANYTHING they wanted. Fortunately, that subreddit has a crew of volunteer moderators that use the banhammer when it was called for.

And what they found about Holocaust deniers applies to ALL sorts of deniers, such as antivaxxers, pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme proponents, and so on. You should go read the article yourself, as I will only be discussing their findings.  Deniers generally use these tactics:

1) Cite bogus experts who are proven to have ignored facts that did not fit their narrative, or experts who had nothing to do with their field, but merely sympathetic to their field.

Holocaust deniers cite David Irving and Fred Leuchter

Antivaxxers cite Andrew Wakefield, Bob Sears, and Mercola.

Scam proponents cite their own leader(s) or uplines

2) Cite minor mistakes in citings and frame it as "Just Asking Questions"

Otherwise known as "JAQing off", this technique requires a lot of effort to dispell since there are an infinite amount of details they can focus on while sounding earnest, usually by leaving out the context of the question.

Holocaust deniers deny fundamental facts about the Holocaust, such as the number of deaths, whether Nazis have a campaign of extermination, and so on.

Antivaxxers are well known to deny that vaccines work at all, whether vaccines have eradicated most infectious diseases, and even deny that some infectious diseases are deadly.

Scam proponents are well known to deny their scheme is a scam, often even AFTER the scam had been shut down by authorities. They will often deny pyramid scheme by obfuscating-conflating it with "pyramid organization".

Attempting to engage them by doing the research does not appease them, but instead, waste a TON of time. They are NOT interested in the facts. Their questions, seemingly innocent, casts doubt on the facts: "if they didn't get this 100% right, what else did they get wrong?"

DADA Loop: Data / Analysis / Decision / Action and the MLM mind

How do you make decisions?  It's usually a 4 step process:

1. Gather Data

2. Analyze Data

3. Decide on Action

4. Perform the action

This is pretty obvious to most people. Military call it the OODA loop, civilians called it DADA loop (data, analysis, decision, action), but it's the same thing.

So how can this loop go wrong?  EVERY one of the four steps can go wrong.

• One can gather the WRONG data (victim of deception or bad data gathering)
• One can fail to analyze data objectively (by ignoring good data)
• One can fail to decide on any action (stalled loop)
• One can fail to perform the action correctly.

Let's see how MLMer reacts to these steps.

Scam Absurdities: Non-US Scams Posing as American Businesses

It is not uncommon for a scammer to pretend to be what he's not, and the recent make of "The Great Gatsby" is one such tale. In the Scamworld, many such emerging players are from outside the US, and in order to look more legitimate, they will often pretending to be Americans or Europeans, or have fake company executives that have generic American or European names, and/or even hire an American or European "mercenary" COO as a figurehead. They will often appear in the company as themselves, albeit of a lower position than they actually are.

One such player is Tarun Trikha (aka Parun Trika) of TVI Express, arrested in India in April 2013, and have not been heard since. MLM Skeptic was one of the first in the West to identify Tarun Trikha as the *real* head of TVI Express, despite he claiming to be merely a top seller. TVI Express claims to have "admiral", "vice admiral" as top leaders with generic "white guy" names such as "Bill Cooper" or "Eric Taylor". You can find a profile of TVI Express here.

(TVI Express itself spawned many clones, most of which had already been shut down, or are under investigations around the world.)

Scam Psychology: Why Bad Arguers Often Retreat to Conspiracies As Final Defense

Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura
Making a living through selling nothing... like a lot
of scams that call themselves network marketing
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In studying the financial scams and its victims, as well as the common arguments the brainwashed sheeple use to 'defend' the scam they're in, one of the most common "final arguments" is accuse any 'opponents' as a part of the conspiracy against something. While most often found among the "lotion and potion" defenders, they can be found among all sorts of scams, esp. one that had gone viral across the world (and thus must be eradicated).

There seem to be 3 general types of conspiracies when it comes to network marketing, which is grouped by size: personal conspiracy (it's just some hidden reason why the "opponent" is against the scheme), industry conspiracy (some sort of nebulous attack by competitors, though sometimes it's the government), or global conspiracy (often involving some nebulous mention of Bilderbergs, etc.)

All the conspiracy boils down to is "motivation denial of evidence (of scam)". Such conspiracy accusations can take the following forms (but obviously is not limited to such)

• You must have failed at ____ to be so bitter
• You must work for our competitor
• You're just out to get hits for your blog
• You are a part of medical establishment against the "wellness industry"
• You're a part of conspiracy of the rich to keep the rest of us poor

Problem with such conspiracy accusations is conspiracies often rely on circular logic.

Q:Is there any signs of a conspiracy? 
A:No. 
Q:So why is there a conspiracy? 
A:Because conspiracy suppressed the signs! 

Or on a more personal level

Q: Why do you think I work for a competitor? 
A: Because you said we are a scam!
Q: Do you have evidence that I work for a competitor? 
A: No... but it made sense to me!
Q: Here's evidence why ____ is a scam. 
A: You are a liar and those evidence are fake.
Q: Why would I fake such? 
A: Because you work for a competitor.  
Q: But you said you have no evidence that I work for a competitor. 
A: Because you hid it really well! 

Basically, any sort of evidence can be dismissed by "it's part of a conspiracy (against us)".  You have to PRESUME the conspiracy to be true to make sense of the twisted circular logic. It's "self-sealing".

Conspiracy theories are often quite fascinating to study, as it's basically how the mind twists itself into a gordian knot. Psychologists have studied correlations of conspiracy theorists (PDF file), such as is there any correlation between beliefs of conspiracies (i.e. does believing free market make one more like to believe climate denial?)

The results are surprising, and a little troubling. And so was the reaction by the conspiratorial community.