Conspiracy theorist
I've always been someone pretty prone to conspiratorial thinking. I can't really say where it came from. I grew up in a normal secular family, no conspiracy theories around me, but also no philosophizing, no real skepticism either.
Then I found Popper and Traditional Rationality, and that satisfied me for a while, until the skepticism broke through and I found LessWrong: Bayes, statistics, heuristics, Kolmogorov, Solomonoff. All of it replaced that vague, fuzzy picture of "science" I'd had before, the ordinary pop-science version. I held steady for almost two years, until recently I put myself through something like the crisis of faith Yudkowsky talks about. And all the conspiratorial thinking came right back.
That's when it started. Every method I knew for raising the prior on "the mundane explanation," cognitive biases, regression to the mean, all of it, suddenly turned into just one weight on a scale. And I wasn't sure anymore that institutional science actually outweighed me on that scale.
For years I trusted research. I read a lot about biology, psychology, that kind of thing. Absence of evidence of direct falsification was evidence of absence, but okay, that's already a shift. What about the prior itself, though? The prior that an average study is probably legit, where did that come from? It was formed by the exact same kind of studies and surveys, the ones showing that outright falsification is rare. Fine. But then what about those studies? They haven't even been replicated...
I’d appreciate it if someone could explain how to get past this, as it’s not the first crisis of this kind I’ve faced. Sorry for the slightly odd AI-generated translation; English isn't my native language.
Added
I see I didn't express myself clearly: my search for grounds to doubt consensus and institutional trust has led me specifically to Grey Agnosticism, not to belief in any particular conspiracy theory. This is a question of method, and of priors about trusting institutions, not about which facts are true.
I didn't use to be like this, but all those confirmation bias write-ups have apparently produced exactly that effect on me. I get that it's hard to seriously entertain the idea that PRIOR of a journal publication is a complete fabrication from start to finish, but how would I actually know otherwise? And there's the grayness again.
Added 2
Maybe I should have titled this post "The Agnostic and Sophist of Gray Priors"