Does this apply to you and any of your theories?
"The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, so to speak, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed in the two or three commonest types of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says he is the rightful king of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were the king of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do."
[snip]
Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this; that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle….in the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but is not so large.”
-GK Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
TLDR – Stupid conspiracy theories can have perfect internal logic, but fall apart when presented with outside facts.
The test of theory is always repeatable, observable, testable empirical facts.
That's any theory, whether scientific or conspiratorial or other.
The problem is weeding the wheat from the chaff when it comes to facts.
It's a probabilistic bayesian chain of dependencies with sometimes way too wide uncertainty brackets.
That's what makes it hard.
Yet, one single fact that is known should always be enough to disprove at least a part of a theory.
Therefor, the heuristic is always:
The trouble is, we humans suck badly at actually applying these maxims in real ife.
So don't try to be right, try to be consistently, progressive, less wrong.
Well said.