I thought my comment above would have played better to the crowd here, who always seemed to be strongly anti-conspiracy theory since they always wanted to mis-apply things like Occam's Razor and other such heuristics, in a debate. Maybe the tide has finally turned. I just like Microsoft and don't get all the hate for them, so I tried branding someone as a conspiracy theorist to see what would happen. Interesting results...
I actually fall into the group of people who can see the possibility of conspiracy everywhere. While I don't believe in lizard people, I do believe in the strong possibility that the US gov't was at least partly behind 9/11. Matter of fact - I believe the lizard people story was put out there to make conspiracy theorists look ridiculous. I also believe, for instance, that the CIA runs the illicit drug trade...and I believe that Mao Zedong was a controlled assets of the western elite, just like China is today and that this will all culminate into a really scary new world order with China as the only superpower. My favorite thing about being a conspiracy theorist is that it has actually freed my mind up a bit because I don't sweat the small stuff so much anymore and I have fully accepted the fact that I am going to die one day since I have spent so much time thinking about all the ways I'm going to get killed by the Illuminati :)
I think you got downvoted not so much because HN believes in conspiracy theories, but because the lizard people remark was a bit of a rude put-down.
I very much like Microsoft too, but I also get the hate. Even this move of nagging you to update to Win10 seems to come out of the brain of marketeers, not engineers. When companies get big enough, they often lose some of their engineering/academic spirit to commercial thinking. Understandable, but annoying, as it becomes less about building a great product, but more about building great profits.
I do not think the US gov had anything to do with 9/11. I think they just didn't share information correctly and it could have been avoided (dropped the ball). I am always a bit mystified when Americans say that 9/11 was an inside job. If true, their government would be directly responsible for the deaths of 1000s. That should cause riots, not conspiracy theory forums. I think 9/11 conspiracy theories are interesting, because I have a conspiracy theory that most of these theories are propagated by the Middle East (shift the blame) and Russia (destabilize US politics, comparable to Operation INFEKTION, where they tried to paint the US as creating AIDS).
I think the lizard people are the product of a troubled mind and plain old antisemitism. In an allegorical sense it may hold some truths though. The crack cocaine flights of the CIA are no theory anymore, these have been pretty much confirmed, culminating in the "suicide" of Gary Webb by two(!) bullets to the head.
I like Robert Anton Wilson when he says that belief in the Illuminati is driven by our current information overload: The brain wants to make sense of it all, and that is easier when you picture an evil force behind the curtains pulling the strings. But also that there simply are a lot of people conspiring to do evil things (for instance the P2 lodge). So it is a balance between reality and psychology.
My favorite thing about conspiracy theories is that it allows you to draw all sorts of connections. It's a form of data analysis to occupy the mind with, only bounded by your imagination.
I think the China-themed conspiracy theories are very US-centric. Europe seems less afraid of China as a competitor, decreasing the popularity and adoption of such theories.
I actually fall into the group of people who can see the possibility of conspiracy everywhere. While I don't believe in lizard people, I do believe in the strong possibility that the US gov't was at least partly behind 9/11. Matter of fact - I believe the lizard people story was put out there to make conspiracy theorists look ridiculous. I also believe, for instance, that the CIA runs the illicit drug trade...and I believe that Mao Zedong was a controlled assets of the western elite, just like China is today and that this will all culminate into a really scary new world order with China as the only superpower. My favorite thing about being a conspiracy theorist is that it has actually freed my mind up a bit because I don't sweat the small stuff so much anymore and I have fully accepted the fact that I am going to die one day since I have spent so much time thinking about all the ways I'm going to get killed by the Illuminati :)