Deciding what to believe: 9/11: the Moon landing, MKUltra, conspiracy theories - what a conversation revealed about things dismissed as conspiracy theories that turned out to be real.
Some things that were once dismissed as conspiracy theories turned out to be real. Others didn't.
That creates a problem.
If governments, corporations, experts, journalists, or institutions have at times misled us, then “trust the official explanation” isn't a sufficient method for determining what is true and what is not. Neither is its opposite valid. Distrusting the official explanation doesn't make an alternative explanation true.
That the problem discussed during my conversation with John Abrons. John and I talked about 9/11, the Moon landing, MKUltra, technocracy, COVID, government, propaganda, secret societies - ideas many put squarely in the category of conspiracy theory.
Near the end of our conversation, he said something that I think is more important than whether he is right about any particular one of them: “I don't believe anybody should listen and take my word at face value any more than they should listen to anybody else's word at face value.”
His answer was to look at the evidence yourself.
That sounds simple. Is it? Once you decide not to outsource your thinking, you inherit a harder responsibility:
How do you determine what's real?
Questioning Something Isn't the Same as Proving It isn't Real
Our conversation began with 9/11. John believes the accepted explanation of what happened is wrong, and raised questions about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the fires, the removal of structural steel, the aircraft and the investigation.
I found myself wondering, if the official explanation is true, how do we know a particular claim is true? When John described a firefighter who reportedly reached an upper floor of one of the towers and radioed that the fires could be controlled, shortly before the building collapsed, I asked:
Do we have that on tape? How do we know that?
John said a recording exists. He didn't have the source in front of him. That illustrates something important. There are two investigations happening simultaneously. One is an investigation of the official explanation. The other is an investigation of the alternative explanation.
We often perform only one. Someone who trusts the government may scrutinize every conspiracy claim, while accepting the official account with little examination.
Someone who distrusts the government may do the reverse. Skepticism isn't choosing which side deserves scrutiny. Skepticism means both sides have to answer the same question: How do you know?
An Unanswered Question Is Not an Answer
The Moon landing is an example.
John raised several things that he finds difficult to reconcile with the accepted account, including the apparent movement of the flag, and the communications between President Nixon and the astronauts.
I challenged part of the argument. If the issue were communication delay, don't radio waves travel at approximately the speed of light? That doesn't establish that the Moon landing happened, nor does an anomaly establish that it didn't. It identifies something that needs to be investigated, a better question to ask.
Suppose I observe something that I cannot explain. There are at least three separate statements I could make:
Observation: I see something unusual.
Question: I don't understand how that could have happened under the explanation I've been given.
Conclusion: Therefore, the explanation I've been given is false.
Only the first two follow automatically. The third requires additional evidence and consideration.
This is an easy reasoning mistakes to make. The unexplained observation can feel like evidence for whatever alternative explanation we find possible.
Sometimes the Incredible Thing Really Did Happen
One of the things we discussed was MKUlta. John explained MKUltra as a government mind-control experiment involving drugs and attempts to understand and influence human behavior.
The existence of MKUltra is a historical fact.
The CIA was secretly experimenting with drugs, hypnosis, behavioral modification, and methods of influencing people. Some being experimented on didn't even know they were subjects.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory.
And it happened.
The fact that something sounds unlikely doesn't tell us whether it happened. We can't use “that sounds crazy” as our test for truth. Extraordinary events happen. Governments can deceive people. Experts can be wrong. Institutions can have conflicts of interest. People can conspire.
None of those facts relieve us of the need to examine the evidence for the specific claim in front of us.
What MKUltra was
MKUltra was the name of a CIA umbrella project begun in the 1950s. It included research related to behavioral modification. When CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified before the Senate in 1977, he described 149 MKUltra subprojects revealed by surviving records. They included research into behavioral drugs and alcohol, hypnosis, human behavior, sleep, psychotherapy and behavioral change. Eight subprojects involved hypnosis, including two combining hypnosis with drugs. Some projects involved human volunteers. Six were identified as involving tests on unwitting human beings. The Senate hearing was titled “Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification.”
Other CIA behavioral-control research, including the earlier ARTICHOKE program, explored hypnosis, post-hypnotic suggestion and amnesia. Researchers investigated whether information or instructions could be given under hypnosis and subsequently become unavailable to the subject's conscious memory.
The historical record establishes that the government was interested in whether aspects of human behavior and memory could be deliberately manipulated.
It does not establish that everything researchers hoped to accomplish worked, that every proposed experiment was performed, or that these techniques were successfully used operationally in the ways later attributed to them.
Knowing that something was investigated is different from knowing that it worked.
Knowing that something worked experimentally is different from knowing that it was used in a particular historical event.
There is something we don't know
Much of the original MKUltra documentation was deliberately destroyed.
The Senate investigation concluded that the destruction made it impossible to determine the range and extent of the program and the full extent to which materials developed through MKUltra were actually used operationally. A 1963 CIA Inspector General report described the files as incomplete and poorly organized.In 1977, additional records were discovered as they had been stored separately as financial records and escaped the earlier destruction.
Those records revealed what is known about the 149 subprojects. Turner told the Senate that they consisted largely of approvals for funds, vouchers and accounting records and generally didn't include overall status reports or documents describing operational progress.
We know two things:
MKUltra happened.
And:
We don't have a complete record of everything that happened under MKUltra or everything that may have been done with what it learned.
“Manchurian candidate”
John raised the possibility that Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of assassinating presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, may have been a “Manchurian candidate.” The expression comes from Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate. In the story, a person is psychologically conditioned so that his behavior can be triggered and controlled without his conscious awareness.
The expression became shorthand for the idea that a person might be conditioned or programmed to perform an act, without fully understanding why he is doing it, and potentially without later remembering it.
That sounds similar to some of the questions researchers really were investigating.
Hypnosis comes up in the Sirhan case
This part isn't omething later conspiracy theorists added to the story after learning about MKUltra. There was evidence presented during Sirhan's case that he had studied and experimented with self-hypnosis before the assassination. After his arrest, psychiatrist Bernard Diamond examined Sirhan for the defense and hypnotized him. Sirhan proved susceptible to hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion.
The defense had a reason for investigating his mental state. Sirhan's lawyers were trying to determine his psychological condition and whether he had been capable of the deliberate, premeditated mental state required for first-degree murder. Diamond eventually developed an explanation of his own. It wasn't that the CIA had programmed Sirhan. His theory was essentially that Sirhan may have programmed himself.
According to Diamond's interpretation, Sirhan's previous experimentation with self-hypnosis, obsessive thinking and psychological factors could have contributed to a self-induced hypnotic or dissociative state surrounding the assassination.
That gives an alternative explanation for some of the same observations used to support an external-programming theory. Sirhan's hypnotizability doesn't uniquely point toward MKUltra. Neither does his practice of self-hypnosis or a claimed memory gap. Those observations might be compatible with external programming. They might also be compatible with Diamond's self-programming explanation or explanations that don't depend upon hypnosis being responsible for the assassination.
MKUltra enters the picture
Now put the two histories beside each other. On one side:
The CIA really investigated behavioral modification. It investigated hypnosis, drugs, post-hypnotic behavior and amnesia. Some people were experimented on without knowing they were subjects.
On the other side:
Sirhan had experimented with self-hypnosis. He was demonstrably susceptible to hypnosis. Post-hypnotic suggestion worked on him during psychiatric examination. He claimed not to remember the assassination. A psychiatrist examining him thought a hypnotic or dissociative process was relevant enough to develop a self-programming explanation.
Other people wondered whether the conditioning might instead have come from someone else.
What do the facts tell us?
Perhaps less—and more—than either side of the argument might want them to.
The similarity doesn't identify the cause
magine we established that hypnosis or conditioning did play an important role in Sirhan's behavior that night.
Would that establish that MKUltra was responsible?
No.
Sirhan might have conditioned himself, broadly as Diamond proposed. Another person with knowledge of hypnosis might have conditioned him. Someone might have recognized that Sirhan was already psychologically or hypnotically conditioned and exploited that condition. Someone familiar with techniques investigated by intelligence agencies could conceivably have used them independently. Someone associated with intelligence research could theoretically have acted without authorization from the people running MKUltra. An intelligence organization itself could be another hypothesis. Or our original premise could be wrong, and hypnosis might not have been an important factor in the assassination.
The existence of a possibility isn't evidence that it happened.
Demonstrating an overlap between Sirhan's behavior and something studied under MKUltra wouldn't necessarily answer the question of responsibility. There are several different questions. It's easy to compress this into:
Was Sirhan an MKUltra Manchurian candidate?
That question contains separate questions:
Did the phenomenon exist?
Could hypnosis, post-hypnotic suggestion, amnesia or behavioral conditioning actually produce the kinds of effects being discussed?
Did something like that happen to Sirhan?
If it happened, did Sirhan produce it himself or did someone else produce or exploit it?
That's another question.
If another person was involved, who was that person?
Was that person associated with MKUltra, ARTICHOKE, the CIA or some other intelligence activity?
If that person had such an association, was he acting as part of an authorized government operation?
That's another claim.
Knowing that something can be done is different from knowing that it was done. Knowing that it was done is different from knowing who did it. Knowing who did it, is different from knowing who authorized it.
What would make the MKUltra connection stronger?
If a surviving document identified Sirhan as an MKUltra or related behavioral-research subject, that would obviously matter.
Evidence establishing contact between Sirhan and a particular researcher or operative connected to such a program would matter.
A contemporaneous record describing an intervention performed on Sirhan would matter.
It might matter if something observed in Sirhan were shown to be the result of a highly distinctive technique developed within one of these programs and difficult to explain through ordinary hypnosis, self-hypnosis or another mechanism.
We have to establish that uniqueness.
If post-hypnotic suggestion and amnesia were phenomena known to hypnotists outside MKUltra, then discovering those characteristics in Sirhan wouldn't uniquely identify MKUltra as their source.
Thequestion is:
What evidence distinguishes one explanation from the alternatives?
That's a stronger test than asking whether the evidence is compatible with the explanation we favor.
What if evidence no longer exists?
This is where the destroyed MKUltra records become relevant in a specific way. The destruction of records doesn't establish a connection to Sirhan. We can't say: The records are missing, therefore the proof was in the missing records. Neither can we assume the surviving files constitute a complete record, and that anything absent from them never happened. The Senate investigation said the destruction prevented investigators from reconstructing the program's full extent and its operational uses.
Missing records have a narrower implication:
They limit what we may ever be able to know from those records.
What should we believe?
That's the wrong question.
I don't need to conclude from this that John is right that Sirhan was externally programmed. I don't need to conclude that he wasn't. I can believe MKUltra existed, as the evidence establishing its existence is overwhelming.
I can accept that the CIA investigated hypnosis, drugs, behavioral modification and unwitting human experimentation, as those activities are also documented.
I might accept the evidence that Sirhan practiced self-hypnosis, and was susceptible to hypnosis, without deciding what role, if any, hypnosis played in the assassination.
I can consider Diamond's self-programming explanation, and I can remain open to the possibility of external conditioning. I can ask whether there is evidence connecting any such conditioning specifically to MKUltra, another intelligence program, an individual—or no outside actor at all. Those positions aren't contradictory. They're different levels of confidence attached to different claims.
Even if evidence persuaded me that some form of external conditioning contributed to Sirhan's actions, that wouldn't establish that the MKUltra program, the CIA, or the U.S. government was responsible for Robert Kennedy's assassination. That attribution requires evidence of its own. This is why uncertainty shouldn't automatically push us toward either belief or disbelief.
Sometimes the evidence gives us a clear answer.
Sometimes it makes one explanation more likely than another.
Sometimes it establishes that something could have happened, without establishing it did happen.
Sometimes missing or destroyed evidence prevents us from knowing with complete certainty.
The objective isn't to eliminate uncertainty by choosing a side. It's to know where the uncertainty begins.
What do I know? How do I know it? What does the evidence allow me to infer? What other explanations fit the same evidence? And what additional evidence would allow me to distinguish among them?
That's how I get closer to knowing what to believe.
The symmetrical reasoning error
There's a bigger lesson here than what we believe about the assassination being related to the MKultra program.
There are really two issues: premature dismissal can be just as evidence-poor as premature belief, and the label conspiracy theory itself can bias an evaluation before it begins.
Imagine two people considering the proposition that behavioral conditioning of the sort investigated by CIA programs might have played a role in Sirhan's assassination of Robert Kennedy.
One says: “MKUltra existed, therefore Sirhan must have been programmed by the CIA.”We can identify the problem with that statement: MKUltra's existence doesn't establish the Sirhan connection.
Suppose another says: “That's a conspiracy theory. The government wasn't running secret mind-control experiments on people.” While we might understand the person's reasoning, the premise is in fact, factually wrong.
The CIA did operate MKUltra and related behavioral-control programs. It did investigate drugs, hypnosis and behavioral modification. Unwitting human subjects were used. Records were destroyed. So someone who dismisses the Sirhan question because “MKUltra is just a conspiracy theory” hasn't reached a more evidence-based position than the person they're criticizing. In one respect, they've reached a less factual starting position, as they are denying something the historical record establishes as facts.
That doesn't make the Sirhan hypothesis true.
It means their reason for dismissing it is invalid.
That's an important distinction:
You can reach the correct conclusion for the wrong reason.
And you can reject an incorrect conclusion, using an argument that is false.
If Sirhan wasn't externally conditioned, someone who dismissed the idea entirely, just because “MKUltra never existed” would happen to arrive at the right answer about Sirhan through incorrect reasoning.
That's what this article, How Do You Know What's Real? is about.
Why the term “conspiracy theory” causes trouble
Strictly speaking, conspiracy describes two or more people secretly cooperating to accomplish something, typically unlawful or harmful. History contains countless documented conspiracies.
The term conspiracy theory has acquired another meaning in ordinary conversation. It often doesn't only describe the structure of a hypothesis. It also communicates judgment: This is an implausible belief held without adequate evidence. Once we call something a conspiracy theory, we've attached a conclusion into the label.
Consider:
“The conspiracy theory that the CIA experimented on unwitting Americans with drugs and behavioral modification…”
versus:
“The claim that the CIA experimented on unwitting Americans with drugs and behavioral modification…”
Before MKUltra became publicly documented, the first sentence could have been used dismissively. After the documentation became public, we'd describe the same proposition as historical fact. The proposition didn't change. Our evidence did.
“Official” versus “Non-official” Doesn't Solves It
As a solution to this problem, I had the idea of using the terms official explanation and non-official explanation. The problem is while they're useful descriptively, they introduce another hierarchy.
“Official” tells us who supplied the explanation, not whether it's better supported. "Non-official” lumps together everything else—from a rigorous investigation based on primary documents to something someone invented yesterday. There's no reason an official explanation must be the default hypothesis against which everything else has to compete.Likewise, the term alternative explanation isn't ideal, as “alternative” subtly establishes another explanation as primary.
The best neutral terms to use, depending on what's being discussed, may be:
Claim — a proposition someone says is true.
Observation — reportedly seen, measured, recorded or documented.
Explanation — an account of why or how observations occurred.
Hypothesis — an explanation proposed for further investigation.
Official account — an explanation offered by the institution or authority responsible for a formal investigation.
Competing explanation — another explanation for the same observations.
That last one is particularly useful.Instead of, “The official explanation and the conspiracy theory,…” we can write: “Two competing explanations of the same event…”. Neither gets epistemological priority from its name. “The official account concludes X. A competing explanation proposes Y.” Now official identifies the source, not the truth status.
Why people dismiss the category
There are reasonable reasons for skepticism.
People encounter poorly supported claims. Some explanations require increasingly elaborate assumptions. Some proponents selectively collect confirming evidence. Some claims become effectively unfalsifiable: every piece of contradictory evidence becomes further evidence of the cover-up.
After encountering enough of that, people can develop a useful shortcut:
Claims like this are usually unreliable.
The shortcut can save time. Then something subtle happens: it becomes a conclusion. Instead of saying, “Claims of this type have often been poorly supported, so I'm going to require good evidence,” it becomes, “This is a conspiracy theory, therefore it's false.” Now we're no longer evaluating the particular claim.
MKUltra demonstrates the problem spectacularly.
Historical Precedent Changes What We Should Consider
John brought up Operation Northwoods when discussing 9/11. If you're unfamiliar with Northwoods, the name can make it sound like another conspiracy theory. It isn't. In March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a top-secret memorandum titled “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba.”
The purpose was to develop pretexts that could provide justification for U.S. military intervention against Cuba. The document proposed creating a series of apparently Cuban provocations so that the United States would appear to be responding to aggression rather than initiating it.
The document suggested staging incidents around the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay using friendly Cubans dressed as hostile forces. It proposed blowing up ammunition, starting fires, sabotaging aircraft, firing mortar shells into the base and sinking a ship near the harbor entrance.
One proposal contemplated blowing up a U.S. ship and blaming Cuba. Another suggested using an unmanned vessel and conducting a rescue operation for a nonexistent crew, followed by casualty lists that would generate public outrage.
Another proposed creating what appeared to be a Cuban terrorist campaign in Miami, elsewhere in Florida and even Washington. The document contemplated bombings and attacks involving Cuban refugees that could then be attributed to the Cuban government.
A striking proposal involved a civilian aircraft. A real passenger aircraft would be replaced by an identical unmanned aircraft. The passengers would secretly be removed. The drone would continue along the scheduled route near Cuba, transmit a distress message claiming it was under attack by Cuban MiGs, and then be destroyed remotely.
Anyone listening would apparently have witnessed Cuba shooting down an aircraft filled with civilians. The passengers would actually be alive.
The objective wasn't hidden in the document. The planners wanted the United States to appear to be suffering legitimate grievances caused by an irresponsible Cuban government, thereby creating international and domestic support for military intervention.
Was Northwoods actually carried out?
We have evidence that these actions were proposed. We do not have evidence that Operation Northwoods was carried out. The Joint Chiefs recommended the proposals as a preliminary basis for planning. Three days later, a memorandum describing a meeting with President Kennedy records that Kennedy was informed that the military had plans for creating plausible pretexts for the use of force. Kennedy responded that they were not discussing the use of U.S. military force.
Northwoods establishes something important and narrower than:
The U.S. government conducts false-flag attacks against Americans.
It establishes that senior U.S. military officials developed and recommended plans that included secretly manufacturing incidents and attributing them to another country in order to create justification for military intervention.
Why does John connect this to 9/11?
If someone proposes that elements within the U.S. government could have participated in, facilitated, allowed, or misrepresented an attack in order to generate public support for subsequent military action, one objection might be:
The U.S. government would never even contemplate something like that.
Northwoods is relevant to that argument. We know that senior military officials once contemplated manufacturing apparent attacks and attributing them to a foreign adversary partly to create justification for military intervention.
Therefore:
“No one in the U.S. government would ever contemplate such a thing”
isn't a historical argument. We have documentary evidence that some people in government did contemplate something within that category. That tells us something about possibility and historical precedent.
What does it tell us about 9/11? By itself, perhaps little.
Don't confuse precedent with evidence of occurrence
Suppose someone committed fraud twenty years ago. When another suspicious financial event occurs, the previous fraud might reasonably change how seriously I consider fraud as a possible explanation. It might justify investigating something I otherwise would have dismissed as implausible. It doesn't establish that the person committed the second fraud.
Northwoods presents the same reasoning problem. Northwoods can defeat an argument from impossibility. It cannot establish an argument from occurrence. The fact that U.S. military officials proposed manufactured provocations against Cuba in 1962 doesn't establish that anyone in the U.S. government participated in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Neither should we reverse the reasoning and say: Northwoods wasn't carried out, therefore it has no relevance.It has relevance to a narrower question:
Is the idea that people within the U.S. government could contemplate manufacturing or manipulating an apparent attack to justify military action historically unprecedented?
The answer to that question is, no.
Then we have to move on to a completely different question:
What evidence is there that anything resembling that actually occurred on 9/11?
Northwoods cannot answer it.
"The government” is too broad
The Northwoods documents don't establish that “the U.S. government wanted to attack Americans and blame Cuba.” Specific people within particular institutions developed and recommended these proposals. Other people had the authority to approve or reject them. Kennedy did not authorize Northwoods as proposed.
That's relevant when evaluating claims about 9/11. “The government did it” can hide several completely different propositions:
Someone within government knew something.
Someone within government allowed something to happen.
Someone within government helped make something happen.
An intelligence agency participated.
Senior officials authorized it.
The President authorized it.
The U.S. government as an institution carried it out.
Those aren't interchangeable claims. Evidence establishing one wouldn't automatically establish the others.
What does Northwoods change?
It changes what I'm willing to investigate, not what I'm willing to conclude. Before knowing about Northwoods, someone might say:
There's no reason even to consider that hypothesis. People at the highest levels of the U.S. military would never contemplate manufacturing an apparent attack and blaming another country to justify military intervention.
After reading the Northwoods document, I can't use that argument.
I can't say:
They contemplated Northwoods in 1962, therefore something similar happened on 9/11.
That's a mistake in the opposite direction. Historical precedent can change the range of explanations I consider plausible enough to investigate. It doesn't substitute for evidence about the event I'm investigating.
That leaves us with the same third position that keeps appearing throughout this conversation.
We don't have to immediately: Believe it.
We don't have to immediately: Debunk it.
We can say: That's interesting. What evidence would tell us whether it happened here?
Mistrust Creates Vulnerability
John made an observation that deserves attention. Conspiracy theories often grow where trust has collapsed. If people discover that an institution withheld information, changed its story or misled them, they become less willing to accept the next explanation that institution provides.
Mistrust creates danger. Once I decide a source cannot be trusted, I may begin giving much less scrutiny to anyone who tells me that source is lying. The reasoning becomes:
The government lies.
This person says the government is lying.
Therefore this person is telling the truth.
The second doesn't follow from the first.
A discredited authority doesn't automatically make its critics reliable authorities.
This is why restoring trust isn't as simple as telling people to trust experts again. John and I arrived at something closer to the opposite.
Don't begin with trust.
Begin with evidence.
Near the end of the conversation, John explicitly said he didn't want listeners taking his word. He wants people to examine the sources behind his claims.
Fear Should Make Us Ask More Questions, Not Fewer
Fear can be used to influence public behavior. In discussing propaganda, John argued that frightening people makes them easier to direct.
A useful question:
What happens to our reasoning when we're afraid?
An emergency creates pressure to decide quickly. Something terrible has happened. People want an explanation. Authorities need to respond. News organizations need information. The public wants certainty. That is when an early explanation is powerful.
I remembered watching the towers burn on September 11 and hearing Osama bin Laden discussed almost immediately. My reaction was essentially: How could anyone know that so quickly?
That question doesn't establish that the conclusion was wrong. It asks whether the confidence expressed at that moment was justified by the evidence available at that moment. What was known, what was inferred and what was subsequently concluded. That is a question we should be willing to ask regardless of the subject.
How much of what I'm hearing is observation, and how much is explanation?
We Need to Know the Playbook
Our discussion of MKUltra led somewhere I found more useful than debating individual conspiracies. If people have learned how fear, authority, conformity and repetition influence human behavior, could understanding those mechanisms make us less vulnerable to them? I compared it to knowing another team's playbook. If you understand the plays that might be run against you, you're in a much better position to recognize them.
John focused on conformity, and brought up psychological experiments in which people's willingness to go along with a group or authority could change when they saw another refuse to comply. Seeing someone else question authority can make questioning it psychologically easier.
There is a broader idea that doesn't require deciding whether some hidden group is manipulating us. We can learn to recognize the conditions under which anyone can manipulate our judgment.
Fear.
Repetition.
Social conformity.
Authority.
Group identity.
Urgency.
Selective evidence.
A claim that everyone intelligent already agrees.
A suggestion that asking a question puts you on the wrong side.
A community that rewards you for rejecting every mainstream explanation. Both can become environments in which belonging matters more than evidence.
Don't Let Your Side Do Your Thinking
People frequently change their reaction to essentially the same, depending on which political figure or party is associated with it. That gives us a useful test:
Would I evaluate this evidence differently if party names were reversed?
Would I demand more evidence if the claim came from the political party I oppose?
Would I dismiss a claim quicker if it came from someone labeled a conspiracy theorist?
Would I accept the same argument if it supported something I already believe?
If I begin thinking of myself as someone who doesn't believe the official story, I've biased my investigation. If I begin thinking of myself as someone who believes experts and rejects misinformation, I can create the same problem. In both, my identity begins telling me what conclusion I'm supposed to reach. I'd rather start with.
What is the claim?
What was actually observed?
What evidence supports the explanation?
Where did that evidence come from?
What assumptions connect the evidence to the conclusion?
Could the same evidence support another explanation?
What evidence would make me change my mind?
Do I know this—or does it simply make sense to me?
John and I didn't agree with each other on everything. That's good. The value of a conversation s isn't that John tells me or you what's real . Unusual claims give an opportunity to examine how we decide what's real.
“The government said so” isn't evidence. “The conspiracy theorist said so” isn't evidence. Something isn't true just because everyone believes it. Be willing to ask questions without deciding in advance what the answer is supposed to be.
How do you know?
Editor's Note
This article grew out of a conversation with John Abrons on The Daniel Stih Podcast. The ideas discussed here originated in that conversation, while the structure, emphasis, and commentary are my own. Any errors or interpretations are mine, not John Abrons'
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About the Author
Daniel Stih (danielstih.com) is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. For more than 30 years, he has investigated complex problems spanning engineering, technology, the built environment, and human decision-making. His work explores how evidence, assumptions, and systems shape the conclusions we draw—and whether we're solving the right problem. Learn more about his approach in Why I Think This Way.