There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoeverโs in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800โs it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsenseโฆ Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just โNo medicine at allโ, thatโs exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if thereโs a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said โWow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.โ
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest โYa know I had to do it 'emโ face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said โNoโ that was replaced by better evidence that said โDisregard that, the answer is actually Yesโ
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
Iโm fairly certain variations on the dead internet theory have been floating around well before 2021. Hereโs a variation of it on Reddit from 9 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/348vlx/what_bot_accounts_on_reddit_should_people_know/
Apparently the idea stems from the IRC days where the first user to join a channel would receive admin rights. So people wrote bots to stay in channels and only grant admin rights to specific users joining. Then came more novelty bots that would stick around in channels, even bots that โchattedโ with one another. When youโd join a channel and ask if there were any humans around theyโd answer โjust botsโ, which eventually became a meme and then regular humans started saying that too as a joke.
That idea morphed into the โEveryone on Reddit is a bot except youโ meme, which coupled with obvious bot activity on Twitter turned into the โDead Internet Theoryโ, which basically takes the meme seriously. One of the original versions of that theory is this one: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/
Some excerpts:
Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.
Yes, the Internet may seem gigantic, but itโs like a hot air balloon with nothing inside. Some of this is absolutely the fault of corporations and government entities.
I think itโs entirely obvious what Iโm subtly suggesting here given this setup, but allow me to try to succinctly state my thesis here: the U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.
In this way, the internet and social media, which was supposed to democratise media by allowing users to create whatever content they wanted, has instead been hijacked by a powerful few.
Quite clearly appears to be blaming a secretive cabal/corporarions/US government for the whole thing, so itโs definitely blaming โthe elitesโ.
So forget that the original author blamed a Jewish cabal, and look at where we are. The causes may have been wrong (deeply wrong) but the effects are looking remarkably similar and we need to be able to talk about the real reasons without getting getting caught up in this โitโs all anti-semetic liesโ trap.
Dead internet theory goes quite a bit further than what people mean when they talk about seeing more bots. Ardent believers of DIT think 90%+ of online interactions are not real for example, and that the US government has more advanced AI tech to fake these interactions than what is publicly known.
Iโm not sure Iโd mark every โthe government is behind X/Yโ conspiracy theory as anti-semitic either. The issue is more that those theories act as gateways towards more extreme conspiracy theories (which are more likely to be actually anti-semitic).
Fair enough. Iโm just getting fed up with discussion about real issues being derailed with โthatโs a conspiracy theoryโ because some crazy made up a load of bullshit to โexplain itโ at some point.
Itโs almost like there an Illuminati coming up with conspiracy theories in order to stop rational discussion. /s
