This domain is a personal obsession of mine, and I have found Keith Stanovich's work extremely useful in unpacking the different kinds of cognitive errors driving what he calls dysrationality, which includes improper weighing of evidence. He distinguishes cognitive "miserliness" (a tendency to rely on familiar heuristics, intuition, etc. and generally avoid serious cognition), from "contaminated mindware" (e.g. ideologies and biases that skew or subvert cognition), from "mindware gaps" (e.g. lack of competencies required to evaluate the question at hand). These are not mutually exclusive of course, and a given person might 'present' errors in one domain but not others. That is Stanovich's main focus - understanding why a generally smart/clever/rational person can nonetheless hold a particular false belief (e.g. conspiracy theory) or take some exceptionally irrational action.
I feel compelled to add that a ‘conspiratorial mindset,’ which you identify as the problem, is actually a symptom that can have different problems underlying it. It’s also unhelpfully vague. It’s more useful to examine observable behaviors, such as the tendency to “sort relevant actors into morally opposed camps,” which is also a symptom.
This is where I find Stanovich’s model really helpful. The tendency to frame actors in simple moral terms could be a function of someone’s ideology (motivated reasoning, motivated closed-mindedness), which Stanovich would characterize as contaminated mindware. Or it could be a simple reflection of superficial thinking (cognitive miserliness). Or a person could ill-equipped to perform required analysis (e.g. some people literally don’t understand concepts like per-capita or base rates), which would be a mindware gap.
Or it might stem from a more general tendency to put things into false binaries (if she’s innocent, then he must be guilty), which a lot of people maddeningly exhibit across seemingly every domain (You hate Trump? You must love Biden).
This could reflect a mindware gap (meaning it’s correctable through teaching), or it could reflect a kind of cognitive bias (contaminated mindware) that’s more deeply wired.
Great article. Couple of thoughts on this: "Individuals who view reality as a political construct are significantly more likely to embrace falsehoods, whereas those who believe that their conclusions must hew to available evidence tend to hold more accurate beliefs."
I think that there is a genuine ambiguity about causation in political discussions, and we generally need to use "causal models" as an intermediary between evidence and belief. The causal models used though - within indirect relationships between observations and outcomes in the presence of many other seen and unseen dynamics - are often the contested bit, and nearly always impossible to "prove". (Many authors have addressed complexity and the limits of understanding and prediction, such as Paul Oremord, in his book "Why Most Things Fail")
If I hold to a conspiracy theory that "our government are trying to kill the old people", then how strong a case is there if the government, say, remove winter fuel payments, tax pensions, reduce healthcare and social care, and introduce a euthanasia bill: I could point to studies to say that in 70%-90% of the times that these policies were implemented, they led to higher death rates amongst the old at a disproportionate rate compared to the rest of the population.
The government could claim, in response, it is trying to reduce public costs, stimulate enterprise and increase tax revenues, which will make everyone live longer - and label their critics as conspiracy theorists. They point to studies that GDP/capital (say) correlated with age, and they are trying to lift GDP/capita.
I am pretty sure that my wife and dog engage in illicit biscuit eating sessions. They leave the kitchen and the number of biscuits are less than when they entered. However, in more complex situations than this, then "evidence" is not so much an object (weapon/photo/document/event), but of a more ethereal causality i.e. the forces between objects, usually in the presence of other concurrent forces. It can make it tricky NOT to be a conspiracy theorist. We sometimes have to proceed with the "best imperfect evidence", hold our views lightly, and wait until we are proven wrong. Otherwise, we can come to believe nothing at all when things get complicated.
This is actually the way that the best forecasters* on the planet proceed. They still get it wrong. They piece together disparate evidence, assign probabilities, and update judgements.
(* To be a strong forecaster, you need to understand why things happen i.e. minimise bias in interpreting events and relationships).
It does highlight the Bayesian approach nicely, tony: updating probabilities (that your narrative is correct) based on new data, and updating narratives as a result.
Forever.
Or at least until one is satisfied that the evidence & remaining uncertainties point in one direction or another (and then being willing to reopen the closed case if extraordinary data arises).
Sounds like you’ve got pretty solid evidence from which to infer a likely set of possible outcomes.
(i.e., It is still *possible* that Helen comes over each night & strews crumbs about, while Cookie Gnomes abscond with the goods in support of some amorphous business plan. But not very *likely* — with or without gnomes 🤷♂️)
In your example you have two arguments you need to support:
1. Various policies will result in premature deaths among the old.
2. The intent of these policies is 'to kill old people'.
Suppose the gov't cuts winter fuel payments but there is no increase in deaths among the elderly. Maybe the elderly signed up for insulation programs so they didn't need as much fuel after all, maybe global warming made the winter more mild. If the intent was to ease the budget, then the policy makers will be quite happy. If the intent was to kill off the elderly but have plausible deniability, then they won't be happy.
There's also a hidden argument here, you've asserted 'the gov't' can be usefully anthropomorphized into something like a person with long run plans and interests. Is that the case? The Prime Minister today isn't going to be the PM in a decade, or two decades. Most likely won't even be in office. Why would he or she care if the budget of 2035 is slightly more balanced because olds were offed at a slightly higher rate in 2026?
Of course this is logic and the other side of the coin is rhetoric. "Don't let them kill grannies, save the fuel subsidy" is a potent rallying cry but as Aristotle noted you can't just use logic in argument. If your response is a tight logic demonstration that policy makers have little long term incentives and no evidence of a long game conspiracy, you'll sound like a nerd and be ignored. The better counter would be a rhetorical one instead.
Good stuff. I particularly like ..."Our most successful systems of knowledge production are designed precisely to mitigate these tendencies: by demanding evidence, exposing claims to criticism and treating willingness to discover that one is wrong as an intellectual virtue. "
This step is where too many people fail: “Better … is exercising an evidence-based epistemology and sound reasoning.” They instead employ shortcuts like the Bible or church says (as they interpret what they were told the Bible says), or as my loyal friend and ally says, or as my favorite partisan advocacy group says, or as this other partisan advocacy groups says that we are allying ourselves with because we benefit from a - they support our cause and we support their cause - reciprocal exchange, or as my understanding of favoring my self-interest wants to be the case says, or as by saying over and over again we alter reality to match what we say, or…
My view of adding to this complex conversation may not help but here it is. Old Wisdom can often help in getting a common sense perspective in problem solving. Remembering “when first you learn to deceive what a complicated web you weave” which in turn yields “by their fruits you will know them”. “Actions speak louder than words “I believe these quotes come from a variety of cultures, philosophies and religions and yet they speak of human nature
Rationality requires taking all plausible alternatives into account before judgement. Treating "reality as a political construct" will imply ideological blindness in which some explanations are ruled out a priori. Example; there are no causes of group differences other than racism.
I fear that the energy savings that relate to shortcut & biased-ridden thinking are too substantial to expect a plurality of humanity to be positioned to take the time to live the life scientific: biological and socioeconomic factors will limit the ability & extent to which any individual is able to apply the scientific method throughout their lives personal, professional, spiritual, and otherwise.
In such scarcity-driven circumstances, behaviour tends toward the less energy intensive, and “narrative maintenance”costs can broadly be separated into 4 classes:
Nihilistic
Revelatory
Scientific
Conspiratorial
Nihilism requires no narrative maintenance, and involves the assimilation of zero additional information.
Revelation requires minimal narrative effort, and involves accepting one source of information (as “gospel” if I may 😉) & squaring new info with that source.
Conspiracy requires minimal narrative as well, as new information generates new “epicycles” that can be interpreted in any way one likes. Fourier transformation means that even if rigour is applied, one can always find a solution that fits — with enough epicycles.
All 3 of these explain everything, and nothing, with relatively low narrative cost.
But science & the scientific method require the balancing of parsimony with utility, intuition with evidence, learning from past errors, openness to future error, and far more. The facts actually matter, and that means that it’s “expensive”, in a manner analogous to the reality that quality, transparent, democratic government is more costly than a dictator — if $$ are all one cares about 🤮
Game theory predicts that as long as there is a sufficient supply of individuals able & predisposed to take on this additional mental burden, and sufficient benefit to (sometimes at least) the group following their counsel/methods, the level of such ability & predisposition will reach an equilibrium — one that right now doesn’t inspire much confidence in this liberal physicalist.
And yet, my absence of free will means I believe it can & will improve as I & likeminded others engage the world methodically 🙀
Great essay, Helen. As ever, you're a voice of reason. Have restacked, with copious pull-quotes.
I can't help but be reminded of a once-brilliant academic with whom I used to work. He was a colleague, a mentor, a friend. He has since gone off the deep end. He writes here on Substack, but I won't mention his name or point to his writing because he also has a tendency to initiate frivolous lawsuits against former friends that require time, soul, and money to defend. I'll say only that he used to work for a prestigious university where I live and left many years ago to work for another elsewhere (where he's been busy suing colleagues and where they can't get rid of him because he has tenure).
When I knew him, he used to walk right up to, but not over, the line of conspiratorial thinking. Now he's crossed well and truly over it. In other words, he always had that tendency, which we used to notice and comment on but quickly brushed aside because, well, he was our friend and he otherwise did so much excellent work, and as I said, he never quite crossed the line.
Anyway, it's sad to see what he's become and how he has abandoned empirical evidence in favor of some really looney-tunes thinking.
*Edited for typo: I had written "tenture" for "tenure".
I wonder if you are familiar with the works of Robert Anton Wilson?
He wrote and said a lot of smart things about conspiracy theories already in the 70s and 80s, and gave some really good advice on how to engage with them - basically always start from the point that they might be true, or partially true, or not true at all, and consider each of these possibilities for a while before you make an assessment. Which seems similar to your stance.
Plus, his "Illuminatus!" and "The historical Illuminatus chronicles" trilogies are easily the funniest novels ever written about conspiracies (and the latter most likely served as inspiration for the more successful, but much more boring Dan Brown books).
I think there is a bit of confusion here due to the term 'conspiracy theory'. Quite often people use language in a way that is not directly connected a strict dictionary definition and more connected to the vibe they are trying to give.
What I think a more accurate description is of what is going on here is a purposeful decision to relax or ignore Occam's Razor. Absent the razor, there is no inhibition on "plurality without good reason". Consider how flat earthers construct their 'theory'. They add pluralities to address the evidence to the contrary. Hence they will add a giant wall of ice to explain what happens when someone tries to sail to the end of the earth if it is flat. Conspiracies are added but are not such much for the conspiracy in itself but the need to find pluralities that address some problems like why do airlines fly in one direction and end up back where they started (GPS, NASA, air traffic control are secretly distorting what the passenger thinks is a simple straight line of travel).
The thing to note is that some are doing this because they want rhetorical credibility for a position they hold for other reasons but feel those reasons do not present a sufficient argument to be convincing to the rest of society so they use 'conspiracy reasoning' to sell a slightly different argument. (Before bemoaning this, remember it has a long rhetorical history. Look at Plato in his Republic). Others do it simply because it is a fun intellectual game.
A reality is, however, there has never been a case (at least none I can think of, please suggest examples if you can) where relaxing Occam's Razor produced a hypothesis that ended up being true. Yes if someone challenged Newton's work in 1688 with a book that used Einstein's laws of gravity and motion, he would have been rejected for violating Occam's Razor while Newton's 'simple' math produced correct answers to what they tested it on back then. So would Einstein's but he would have 'extra pluralities".
This tells us the TRUTH can be approached by starting with Occam's Razor but then allowing pluralities to be added on, even if they were initially shaved off. But those who opt to start by not abiding by the Razor have literally never gotten it right. Bad opening move.
"Below is a diagram of an antisemitic conspiracy theory in which I feature. I have encountered it a number of times while being accused of complicity in a Jewish-led plot to eradicate the white race, undermine Christianity and trans everybody’s children. In this case, the ‘good’ people are white conservative Christians and the ‘bad’ people are Jews. The underlying claim is that Jews control much of intellectual life and the media and use this power to harm the good people. There is seemingly nothing that can disconfirm this hypothesis."
But then what is the hypothesis here? It is just a few people with some profile in the public discourse and lines to institutions. Oddly no line between you and James Lindsey despite having been coauthors with him? So what does the line mean? That you take orders directly from an institution? That you work or worked for one at some point? That you gave a donation to one?
Six Degrees of Separation established that you can get from one person to almost any other person on earth with six or less leaps. Maybe there's a handful of exceptions, such as those in North Sentinel Island but you could instruct an app to take any random set of people and institutions and draw the same diagram.
So I would say here it's a bit of a rhetorical trap to try to 'disconfirm the hypothesis'. The hypothesis is true in terms of the diagram but irrelevant and trivial.
This domain is a personal obsession of mine, and I have found Keith Stanovich's work extremely useful in unpacking the different kinds of cognitive errors driving what he calls dysrationality, which includes improper weighing of evidence. He distinguishes cognitive "miserliness" (a tendency to rely on familiar heuristics, intuition, etc. and generally avoid serious cognition), from "contaminated mindware" (e.g. ideologies and biases that skew or subvert cognition), from "mindware gaps" (e.g. lack of competencies required to evaluate the question at hand). These are not mutually exclusive of course, and a given person might 'present' errors in one domain but not others. That is Stanovich's main focus - understanding why a generally smart/clever/rational person can nonetheless hold a particular false belief (e.g. conspiracy theory) or take some exceptionally irrational action.
I feel compelled to add that a ‘conspiratorial mindset,’ which you identify as the problem, is actually a symptom that can have different problems underlying it. It’s also unhelpfully vague. It’s more useful to examine observable behaviors, such as the tendency to “sort relevant actors into morally opposed camps,” which is also a symptom.
This is where I find Stanovich’s model really helpful. The tendency to frame actors in simple moral terms could be a function of someone’s ideology (motivated reasoning, motivated closed-mindedness), which Stanovich would characterize as contaminated mindware. Or it could be a simple reflection of superficial thinking (cognitive miserliness). Or a person could ill-equipped to perform required analysis (e.g. some people literally don’t understand concepts like per-capita or base rates), which would be a mindware gap.
Or it might stem from a more general tendency to put things into false binaries (if she’s innocent, then he must be guilty), which a lot of people maddeningly exhibit across seemingly every domain (You hate Trump? You must love Biden).
This could reflect a mindware gap (meaning it’s correctable through teaching), or it could reflect a kind of cognitive bias (contaminated mindware) that’s more deeply wired.
Great article. Couple of thoughts on this: "Individuals who view reality as a political construct are significantly more likely to embrace falsehoods, whereas those who believe that their conclusions must hew to available evidence tend to hold more accurate beliefs."
I think that there is a genuine ambiguity about causation in political discussions, and we generally need to use "causal models" as an intermediary between evidence and belief. The causal models used though - within indirect relationships between observations and outcomes in the presence of many other seen and unseen dynamics - are often the contested bit, and nearly always impossible to "prove". (Many authors have addressed complexity and the limits of understanding and prediction, such as Paul Oremord, in his book "Why Most Things Fail")
If I hold to a conspiracy theory that "our government are trying to kill the old people", then how strong a case is there if the government, say, remove winter fuel payments, tax pensions, reduce healthcare and social care, and introduce a euthanasia bill: I could point to studies to say that in 70%-90% of the times that these policies were implemented, they led to higher death rates amongst the old at a disproportionate rate compared to the rest of the population.
The government could claim, in response, it is trying to reduce public costs, stimulate enterprise and increase tax revenues, which will make everyone live longer - and label their critics as conspiracy theorists. They point to studies that GDP/capital (say) correlated with age, and they are trying to lift GDP/capita.
I am pretty sure that my wife and dog engage in illicit biscuit eating sessions. They leave the kitchen and the number of biscuits are less than when they entered. However, in more complex situations than this, then "evidence" is not so much an object (weapon/photo/document/event), but of a more ethereal causality i.e. the forces between objects, usually in the presence of other concurrent forces. It can make it tricky NOT to be a conspiracy theorist. We sometimes have to proceed with the "best imperfect evidence", hold our views lightly, and wait until we are proven wrong. Otherwise, we can come to believe nothing at all when things get complicated.
This is actually the way that the best forecasters* on the planet proceed. They still get it wrong. They piece together disparate evidence, assign probabilities, and update judgements.
(* To be a strong forecaster, you need to understand why things happen i.e. minimise bias in interpreting events and relationships).
Yes, I don’t think that could be considered a conspiracy theory as there is actually evidence of them doing what you say they are.
Probably a bad example - too crude. There were probably better, more subtle examples. Thanks for the response.
It does highlight the Bayesian approach nicely, tony: updating probabilities (that your narrative is correct) based on new data, and updating narratives as a result.
Forever.
Or at least until one is satisfied that the evidence & remaining uncertainties point in one direction or another (and then being willing to reopen the closed case if extraordinary data arises).
Sounds like you’ve got pretty solid evidence from which to infer a likely set of possible outcomes.
(i.e., It is still *possible* that Helen comes over each night & strews crumbs about, while Cookie Gnomes abscond with the goods in support of some amorphous business plan. But not very *likely* — with or without gnomes 🤷♂️)
In your example you have two arguments you need to support:
1. Various policies will result in premature deaths among the old.
2. The intent of these policies is 'to kill old people'.
Suppose the gov't cuts winter fuel payments but there is no increase in deaths among the elderly. Maybe the elderly signed up for insulation programs so they didn't need as much fuel after all, maybe global warming made the winter more mild. If the intent was to ease the budget, then the policy makers will be quite happy. If the intent was to kill off the elderly but have plausible deniability, then they won't be happy.
There's also a hidden argument here, you've asserted 'the gov't' can be usefully anthropomorphized into something like a person with long run plans and interests. Is that the case? The Prime Minister today isn't going to be the PM in a decade, or two decades. Most likely won't even be in office. Why would he or she care if the budget of 2035 is slightly more balanced because olds were offed at a slightly higher rate in 2026?
Of course this is logic and the other side of the coin is rhetoric. "Don't let them kill grannies, save the fuel subsidy" is a potent rallying cry but as Aristotle noted you can't just use logic in argument. If your response is a tight logic demonstration that policy makers have little long term incentives and no evidence of a long game conspiracy, you'll sound like a nerd and be ignored. The better counter would be a rhetorical one instead.
Good stuff. I particularly like ..."Our most successful systems of knowledge production are designed precisely to mitigate these tendencies: by demanding evidence, exposing claims to criticism and treating willingness to discover that one is wrong as an intellectual virtue. "
This step is where too many people fail: “Better … is exercising an evidence-based epistemology and sound reasoning.” They instead employ shortcuts like the Bible or church says (as they interpret what they were told the Bible says), or as my loyal friend and ally says, or as my favorite partisan advocacy group says, or as this other partisan advocacy groups says that we are allying ourselves with because we benefit from a - they support our cause and we support their cause - reciprocal exchange, or as my understanding of favoring my self-interest wants to be the case says, or as by saying over and over again we alter reality to match what we say, or…
My view of adding to this complex conversation may not help but here it is. Old Wisdom can often help in getting a common sense perspective in problem solving. Remembering “when first you learn to deceive what a complicated web you weave” which in turn yields “by their fruits you will know them”. “Actions speak louder than words “I believe these quotes come from a variety of cultures, philosophies and religions and yet they speak of human nature
Rationality requires taking all plausible alternatives into account before judgement. Treating "reality as a political construct" will imply ideological blindness in which some explanations are ruled out a priori. Example; there are no causes of group differences other than racism.
I fear that the energy savings that relate to shortcut & biased-ridden thinking are too substantial to expect a plurality of humanity to be positioned to take the time to live the life scientific: biological and socioeconomic factors will limit the ability & extent to which any individual is able to apply the scientific method throughout their lives personal, professional, spiritual, and otherwise.
In such scarcity-driven circumstances, behaviour tends toward the less energy intensive, and “narrative maintenance”costs can broadly be separated into 4 classes:
Nihilistic
Revelatory
Scientific
Conspiratorial
Nihilism requires no narrative maintenance, and involves the assimilation of zero additional information.
Revelation requires minimal narrative effort, and involves accepting one source of information (as “gospel” if I may 😉) & squaring new info with that source.
Conspiracy requires minimal narrative as well, as new information generates new “epicycles” that can be interpreted in any way one likes. Fourier transformation means that even if rigour is applied, one can always find a solution that fits — with enough epicycles.
All 3 of these explain everything, and nothing, with relatively low narrative cost.
But science & the scientific method require the balancing of parsimony with utility, intuition with evidence, learning from past errors, openness to future error, and far more. The facts actually matter, and that means that it’s “expensive”, in a manner analogous to the reality that quality, transparent, democratic government is more costly than a dictator — if $$ are all one cares about 🤮
Game theory predicts that as long as there is a sufficient supply of individuals able & predisposed to take on this additional mental burden, and sufficient benefit to (sometimes at least) the group following their counsel/methods, the level of such ability & predisposition will reach an equilibrium — one that right now doesn’t inspire much confidence in this liberal physicalist.
And yet, my absence of free will means I believe it can & will improve as I & likeminded others engage the world methodically 🙀
Conspiracies do indeed happen. That's why we all should make sure we know facts and how to establish them.
But Helen, as much as I enjoyed all of your nuanced discussion, your brain did overflow this time around. Bring a mop next time.
(I feel I can say that because I have finally learned to bring a mop whenever I sit down at the keyboard.)
Yikes. Reforming epistemology from the bottom up.
I say, let's kill all the postmodernists. It's easier.
Sorry. It's been that kind of day.... :-(
Great essay, Helen. As ever, you're a voice of reason. Have restacked, with copious pull-quotes.
I can't help but be reminded of a once-brilliant academic with whom I used to work. He was a colleague, a mentor, a friend. He has since gone off the deep end. He writes here on Substack, but I won't mention his name or point to his writing because he also has a tendency to initiate frivolous lawsuits against former friends that require time, soul, and money to defend. I'll say only that he used to work for a prestigious university where I live and left many years ago to work for another elsewhere (where he's been busy suing colleagues and where they can't get rid of him because he has tenure).
When I knew him, he used to walk right up to, but not over, the line of conspiratorial thinking. Now he's crossed well and truly over it. In other words, he always had that tendency, which we used to notice and comment on but quickly brushed aside because, well, he was our friend and he otherwise did so much excellent work, and as I said, he never quite crossed the line.
Anyway, it's sad to see what he's become and how he has abandoned empirical evidence in favor of some really looney-tunes thinking.
*Edited for typo: I had written "tenture" for "tenure".
Excellent article!
I wonder if you are familiar with the works of Robert Anton Wilson?
He wrote and said a lot of smart things about conspiracy theories already in the 70s and 80s, and gave some really good advice on how to engage with them - basically always start from the point that they might be true, or partially true, or not true at all, and consider each of these possibilities for a while before you make an assessment. Which seems similar to your stance.
Plus, his "Illuminatus!" and "The historical Illuminatus chronicles" trilogies are easily the funniest novels ever written about conspiracies (and the latter most likely served as inspiration for the more successful, but much more boring Dan Brown books).
I think there is a bit of confusion here due to the term 'conspiracy theory'. Quite often people use language in a way that is not directly connected a strict dictionary definition and more connected to the vibe they are trying to give.
The 'vibe' that is most often meant by the term is not strictly conspiracy but someone who is either paranoid, obsessed or a bit unhinged. (See this famous meme from Always Sunny in Philadelphia https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1290725/mediaviewer/rm3459106561/?ref_=tt_ov_i)
What I think a more accurate description is of what is going on here is a purposeful decision to relax or ignore Occam's Razor. Absent the razor, there is no inhibition on "plurality without good reason". Consider how flat earthers construct their 'theory'. They add pluralities to address the evidence to the contrary. Hence they will add a giant wall of ice to explain what happens when someone tries to sail to the end of the earth if it is flat. Conspiracies are added but are not such much for the conspiracy in itself but the need to find pluralities that address some problems like why do airlines fly in one direction and end up back where they started (GPS, NASA, air traffic control are secretly distorting what the passenger thinks is a simple straight line of travel).
The thing to note is that some are doing this because they want rhetorical credibility for a position they hold for other reasons but feel those reasons do not present a sufficient argument to be convincing to the rest of society so they use 'conspiracy reasoning' to sell a slightly different argument. (Before bemoaning this, remember it has a long rhetorical history. Look at Plato in his Republic). Others do it simply because it is a fun intellectual game.
A reality is, however, there has never been a case (at least none I can think of, please suggest examples if you can) where relaxing Occam's Razor produced a hypothesis that ended up being true. Yes if someone challenged Newton's work in 1688 with a book that used Einstein's laws of gravity and motion, he would have been rejected for violating Occam's Razor while Newton's 'simple' math produced correct answers to what they tested it on back then. So would Einstein's but he would have 'extra pluralities".
This tells us the TRUTH can be approached by starting with Occam's Razor but then allowing pluralities to be added on, even if they were initially shaved off. But those who opt to start by not abiding by the Razor have literally never gotten it right. Bad opening move.
"Below is a diagram of an antisemitic conspiracy theory in which I feature. I have encountered it a number of times while being accused of complicity in a Jewish-led plot to eradicate the white race, undermine Christianity and trans everybody’s children. In this case, the ‘good’ people are white conservative Christians and the ‘bad’ people are Jews. The underlying claim is that Jews control much of intellectual life and the media and use this power to harm the good people. There is seemingly nothing that can disconfirm this hypothesis."
But then what is the hypothesis here? It is just a few people with some profile in the public discourse and lines to institutions. Oddly no line between you and James Lindsey despite having been coauthors with him? So what does the line mean? That you take orders directly from an institution? That you work or worked for one at some point? That you gave a donation to one?
Six Degrees of Separation established that you can get from one person to almost any other person on earth with six or less leaps. Maybe there's a handful of exceptions, such as those in North Sentinel Island but you could instruct an app to take any random set of people and institutions and draw the same diagram.
So I would say here it's a bit of a rhetorical trap to try to 'disconfirm the hypothesis'. The hypothesis is true in terms of the diagram but irrelevant and trivial.