Note: This is the second blog post in a four part series.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, Ross Douthat’s recent NY Times column on conspiracy thinking, “A Better Way to Think about Conspiracies,” formulates a four-part test for deciding which alleged conspiracies to keep an open mind about, or in Douthat’s own words, “a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas.” Among other things, Douthat recommends: “Prefer simple theories to baroque ones.” This first criterion can thus be restated in Occam’s Razor terms as follows: prefer simpler conspiracy theories to more complex ones. Let’s call this principle “Ross’s Razor.”

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In brief, Ross’s Razor tells us that when we are presented with competing explanations of the same event (e.g., Germany’s defeat in World War I; Trump’s loss in 2020 despite winning in Florida and Ohio), we should select the simplest explanation, the explanation with the fewest assumptions. As an aside, this preference for simplicity, though attributed to William of Ockham (1287?–1347), a Franciscan theologian and scholastic philosopher (see image below), may, in fact, go as far back as Aristotle’s treatise Physics, which states, “Nature operates in the shortest way possible.” As a further aside, whether we define simplicity in terms of the number of background assumptions or in terms of how nature or the world operates, I personally prefer to frame the simplicity/parsimony criterion in probabilistic terms, since one of the rationales for this preference for parsimony is a probabilistic one: the idea that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.

Either way, however, what does “simpler” mean in the domain of alternate realities or conspiracy theories? Does simplicity refer to the number of conspirators? The goal of the conspiracy? The number of steps necessary for the conspiracy to succeed? Worse yet, however we answer the foregoing questions, one of the supreme ironies of many conspiracy theories is that they pass Douthat’s parsimony test with flying colors, especially when it is the truth that is often ambiguous and messy! By way of illustration, consider the German “Stab-in-the-Back” Myth that I mentioned in my previous post. In many ways, this particular conspiracy theory provides a far simpler and parsimonious explanation of Germany’s defeat in World War I than the truth does.

Yes, the German Army was low on reserves, and yes the United States changed the course of the war after the Battle of Cantigny (28 May 1918), but how could the German public know these things at the time? Also, even if the number of German reserves and the number of U.S. Puma modems driver. troops were publicly-available information, what could be more simpler than to believe that Germany was stabbed-in-the-back by a visible group of traitors, the “November Criminals” who signed the armistice in November of 1918? Simply put (pun intended), it is this tempting yet misleading simplicity that is one of the main attractions of so many fringe conspiracy theories! That said, I will consider the remaining three factors in Douthat’s four-part test in my next few blog posts.

Ross Gregory Douthat (/ˈdaʊθət/^[1]) (born 1979) is an American conservative political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of conservative topics, including the state of Christianity in America and 'sustainable decadence' in contemporary society.

Personal life[edit]

Douthat was born on November 28, 1979, in San Francisco, California, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.^[2] As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,^[3] to Catholicism.^[4]

His mother, Patricia Snow, is a writer.^[5] His great-grandfather was Governor Charles Wilbert Snow of Connecticut.^[6] His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm^[7][8] and poet. In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and a writer for Smithsonian.^[7] He and his family live in New Haven, Connecticut.^[9]

Education[edit]

Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient.^[10]

Career[edit]

Douthat is a regular columnist for The New York Times.^[11] In April 2009, he became the youngest regular op-ed writer in The New York Times after replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice on the Times editorial page.^[12][13]

Before joining The New York Times, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic.^[14] He has published books on the decline of religion in American society, the role of Harvard University in creating an American ruling class and other topics related to religion, politics and society. His book Grand New Party (2008), which he co-wrote with Reihan Salam, was described by journalist David Brooks as the 'best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is likely to head.'^[15] Douthat's most recent book is The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020), which has received positive reviews in The New York Times^[16] and National Review.^[17] Douthat frequently appeared on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv until 2012.

Published works[edit]

• Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. New York: Hyperion. 2005. ISBN978-1-4013-0112-5.
• Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. With Salam, Reihan. New York: Doubleday. 2008. ISBN978-0-385-51943-4.
• Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. New York: Free Press. 2012. ISBN978-1-4391-7830-0.2013 pbk reprint
• To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2018. ISBN978-1-5011-4694-7.2019 pbk reprint
• The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020. ISBN978-1476785240

References[edit]

1. ^Douthat, Ross. 'Rush Versus Me'. The Atlantic. Archived from the original on March 28, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
2. ^Lamb, Brian (May 6, 2009). 'Q&A with Ross Douthat'. Q&A. Q & A. (c-spanarchives.org). Archived from the original on April 14, 2013. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
3. ^Sheelah Kolhatkar (March 6, 2005). 'A Pisher's Privilege'. The New York Observer. Archived from the original on April 9, 2015. Retrieved March 30, 2009.
4. ^George Packer (May 26, 2008). 'The Fall of Conservatism'. The New Yorker. Archived from the original on December 19, 2008. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
5. ^Ross Douthat. 'Anne Rice's Christ'. Archived from the original on February 7, 2009. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
6. ^Hoffman, Chris. 'Q&A with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat'. Retrieved May 17, 2020.
7. ^ ^ab'Abigail Tucker, Ross Douthat'. The New York Times. September 30, 2007. Archived from the original on May 7, 2011. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
8. ^'John Carmichael (1740–1806) and his wife Esther Canfield (1748–1816) of Sand .. - Google Books'. 1996.
9. ^'Opinion | Your Questions, Answered - The New York Times'. Archived from the original on January 22, 2019. Retrieved January 21, 2019.
10. ^Shah, Huma N. (March 13, 2009). 'Crimson Alum Replaces Kristol'. The Harvard Crimson. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved November 11, 2018.
11. ^Patricia Cohen (July 20, 2008). 'Conservative Thinkers Think Again'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 16, 2011. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
12. ^Calderone, Michael (March 31, 2009). 'Douthat enters new Times zone'. The Politico. politico.com. Archived from the original on January 4, 2010. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
13. ^Richard Pérez-Peña (March 11, 2009). 'Times Hires New Conservative Columnist'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 17, 2013. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
14. ^Ross Douthat (April 17, 2009). 'A Goodbye'. The Atlantic. Archived from the original on April 17, 2009. Retrieved April 18, 2009.
15. ^David Brooks (June 27, 2008). 'The Sam's Club Agenda'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 24, 2009. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
16. ^Lilla, Mark (February 25, 2020). 'Ross Douthat Has a Vision of America. It's Grim'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 1, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2020.
17. ^Sibarium, Aaron (March 5, 2020). 'Our Comfortable Decadence'. National Review. Archived from the original on September 22, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2020.

Ross Douthat Twitter

External links[edit]

• Douthat's columns, The New York Times
• Douthat's former blog, The Atlantic
• Archive of Douthat's columns, The Harvard Crimson
• Video discussions and debates featuring Douthat, Bloggingheads.tv
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• 'They're Young, They're Bright, They Tilt to the Right' A conversation with Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam from n+1

Ross Douthat New York Times