The trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. If manipulators really had the powers claimed, they could win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science.
Interpretation
Conspiracies, though potentially beneficial, can be misused, and claims of manipulation often lack credible evidence.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins highlights the flawed logic behind conspiracy theories. He argues that if conspirators truly possessed the extraordinary powers they claim, they could achieve remarkable feats such as winning lotteries or discovering groundbreaking scientific principles, pointing out the absurdity of such claims and emphasizing the need for critical thinking over blind belief in conspiracies.
In practice
In a debate on social media about misinformation, you could use this quote to argue against the credibility of conspiracy theories.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
Today the two hundred million men in our country are entering into a civilized new world...but we, the two hundred million women, are still kept down in the dungeon.
The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.
Evolution does not isolate us from the rest of the Kosmos, it unites us with the rest of the Kosmos: the same currents that produced birds from dust and poetry from rocks produce egos from ids and sages from egos.
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
Done to death by slanderous tongue
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