Still, this is not the problem:
[A] grim testament to our deeply poisoned information ecosystem — one that’s built for speed and designed to reward the most incendiary impulses of its worst actors. It has ushered in a parallel reality unrooted in fact and helped to push conspiratorial thinking into the cultural mainstream. And with each news cycle, the system grows more efficient, entrenching its opposing camps....The problem is that waiting for better information has not made conspiracy theories seem less plausible. It remains possible that Epstein killed himself, just as we are being told: that he was broken-hearted over the loss of a life of wealth and freedom, and the certain prospect of spending the rest of his days in misery. It's possible that every single system that would have monitored him failed, and that they did so all at the same time, and he spotted his moment and used it.
At the heart of Saturday’s fiasco is Twitter, which has come to largely program the political conversation and much of the press. Twitter is magnetic during massive breaking stories; news junkies flock to it for up-to-the-second information. But early on, there’s often a vast discrepancy between the attention that is directed at the platform and the available information about the developing story. That gap is filled by speculation and, via its worst users, rumor-mongering and conspiracy theories.
However, this time, Occam's razor points toward a conspiracy to commit murder. Corruption happens to be the simplest explanation for the cascade failure of obvious protections against the death of the most valuable prisoner in the entire system. It is much easier to believe that one of the many extremely rich and powerful people to whom he posed a threat called in a favor from the mafia, and that the mafia called in a series of favors (or extended offers of new ones) to its extensive set of contacts within the prison system in New York. If all the payoffs were favors, there will be no money trail, and we'll likely never find out which billionaire or millionaire made the request.
That may not be true, but its plausibility doesn't hang on people being participants in a poisoned information stream. It's more plausible even today than it was two days ago: new details have emerged that he was just recently taken off suicide watch; that his cellmate was just removed, unusually leaving him completely alone; that he happened to have been moved from cells that were constantly monitored by CCTV to cells without any such monitoring; that guards left him alone and unsupervised for hours at a stretch, in spite of procedures calling for 30 minute checks....
This is a problem that is akin to the one that happened when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot down by Jack Ruby, in full view of everyone and while under the direct protection of US officers. We've waited a long time now for better information, but ultimately no better explanation has emerged. It's possible he was really not part of any sort of conspiracy, and there was just a cascade failure of systems in which we had unreasonable confidence. If people choose to believe the simpler explanation, though, it's not irrational to do so. It's an application of a usually-reliable heuristic.
It's just that there are huge consequences to adopting the mental model that follows from the conclusion. Perhaps the best thing is to remain open to both possibilities, as both remain possible. Then you don't have to come to any uncomfortable conclusions with dangerous consequences. You just have to accept an obvious truth, which is that we all live in much greater ignorance than we'd like to think. Ultimately the truth of much of the world is outside our grasp, now and forever.
