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.