This was before AI and certainly must have been quite an effort to pull off plausibly. Imagine what is possible now.
Invent an alternative history in an afternoon or two and gaslight the gullible into your version of reality. I wait for the day where a company is ordered to hand out their communication to a court and instead of doing so hands out an AI invented but plausible one.
Conspiracy theorists, unlike normal people, find it easy to believe that people will expend enormous effort to create an illusion. I'd like to take this opportunity to say we told you so.
The question isn't "does it happen", the question is "how common is it?". If a normal person is dealing someone who seems to have an "everything is always a conspiracy" worldview - then "that stuff doesn't happen" can be both an assertion that the non-normal is nuts, and that the very frustrated normal just wants them to shut up and go away.
As a prior, I'd assume that the conspiracist is probably more willing to "make that stuff happen". Sometimes, the accusation is the confession.
I'd argue that it's the anti-conspiracy theories, that are just as common and almost as insidious. For example, the idea that the intelligence agencies aren't aware of what their government representatives are doing in the background, and can't/don't influence it. There are literally thousands of individuals who work in the same town with the same people with, their very jobs are to discover and keep secrets, and they are almost all presumably capable. Means, motive, and opportunity. And yet, supposedly of the many thousands, none of them has ever done it without express permission from a judge. It would take a massive conspiracy of group think for it not to happen.
Yup. Among other reasons, in this case due to the very much nonfictional consequences you’d expect in a “real world” story like this:
Had Graw been convicted and stripped of his titles, basically anyone found guilty using evidence from one of his investigations/autopsies, even decades later, could attempt to appeal their case and very likely, this would have completely flooded the courts.
For this reason, this was a huge case here in Munich, and the prosecutors’ office, from what the public could read in newspapers, was very anxious about the outcome all throughout like 2024 to 2026, IIRC.
Invent an alternative history in an afternoon or two and gaslight the gullible into your version of reality. I wait for the day where a company is ordered to hand out their communication to a court and instead of doing so hands out an AI invented but plausible one.
https://www.cityam.com/lawyer-struck-off-for-using-fake-ai-e...
I'd argue that it's the anti-conspiracy theories, that are just as common and almost as insidious. For example, the idea that the intelligence agencies aren't aware of what their government representatives are doing in the background, and can't/don't influence it. There are literally thousands of individuals who work in the same town with the same people with, their very jobs are to discover and keep secrets, and they are almost all presumably capable. Means, motive, and opportunity. And yet, supposedly of the many thousands, none of them has ever done it without express permission from a judge. It would take a massive conspiracy of group think for it not to happen.
Yup. Among other reasons, in this case due to the very much nonfictional consequences you’d expect in a “real world” story like this: Had Graw been convicted and stripped of his titles, basically anyone found guilty using evidence from one of his investigations/autopsies, even decades later, could attempt to appeal their case and very likely, this would have completely flooded the courts.
For this reason, this was a huge case here in Munich, and the prosecutors’ office, from what the public could read in newspapers, was very anxious about the outcome all throughout like 2024 to 2026, IIRC.