Math Says Conspiracies Are Prone To Unravel (bbc.com) 303
An anonymous reader writes: Who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory? Well, I don't — they're usually annoying daydreams from annoying people. Fortunately, an Oxford mathematician seems to feel the same way. Dr. David Grimes just published research in PLOS One establishing a formula for determining the likelihood of a failed conspiracy — in other words, how likely some of its participants are to spill the beans. There are three main factors: number of conspirators, the amount of time passed since it started, and how often we can expect conspiracies to intrinsically fail (a value he derived by studying actual conspiracies that were exposed). From the article: "He then applied his equation to four famous conspiracy theories: The belief that the Moon landing was faked, the belief that climate change is a fraud, the belief that vaccines cause autism, and the belief that pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer. Dr. Grimes's analysis suggests that if these four conspiracies were real, most are very likely to have been revealed as such by now. Specifically, the Moon landing 'hoax' would have been revealed in 3.7 years, the climate change 'fraud' in 3.7 to 26.8 years, the vaccine-autism 'conspiracy' in 3.2 to 34.8 years, and the cancer 'conspiracy' in 3.2 years."
pick your poison (Score:2)
Paper doesn't account for successful theories (Score:5, Insightful)
One problem with this analysis is that it doesn't take into account *successful* conspiracies.
Suppose there are conspiracies which succeeded completely - in that the public was defrauded, suspected nothing, and life went on as normal.
If we are using past performance to predict future trends, shouldn't those conspiracies be counted? There's no realistic way to account for or even detect them.
Take for example the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon.
During that campaign, [incumbent president] Johnson was negotiating with Vietnam [politico.com] to bring an end to the Vietnam war.
Nixon though that this action would ruin his chances of being elected, so he contacted the Vietnamese government and said that if they obstructed talks, they'd get a better deal when he was elected.
(An example of an American interfering with the political process, prolonging a war for 7 more years, with enforced conscription, and causing the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.)
This action was known to Nixon's campaign manager (Mitchell) and several aides. Johnson knew about it (a tape in the Johnson presidential library has Johnson denouncing Nixon for “treason”)
Neither side wanted to push the issue, so it was dropped.
This was a conspiracy, involved several dozen people (including FBI agents), and was monstrously important at the time. It took 50 years for the documents to be released describing the situation. Johnson's tape was released in 2008, and some other files are still hidden.
I don't have a lot of faith in this paper - it doesn't take into account conspiracies that actually succeed.
Re:Paper doesn't account for successful theories (Score:5, Insightful)
It *does* account for those. The probability is based on how many people would have to be in on it. The moonlanding hoax and the "climate change is a hoax" conspiracy theories require incredibly large numbers of people to be involved and thus would have been quickly discovered, but since theres no evidence either of them are a hoax and the time scale involved, we can thus conclude theres no conspiracy. The nixon vietnam talks conspiracy however involved a small number of conspirators, and this greatly increases the likelihood of a conspiracy succeeding.
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Re:Paper doesn't account for successful theories (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paper doesn't account for successful theories (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just a guess here, but it sounds like the study didn't really examine whether or not a conspiracy "worked" or not, but whether a conspiracy unraveled. And by unraveled, I assume he means that people found out about it. So even Nixon's conspiracy to keep the War in Vietnam going until he could be elected president eventually unraveled because we've found out about it and we know it happened.
So, if we start from an adjusted definition of conspiracy that means "conspiracies that managed to be kept hidden", the study makes a lot more sense. The more people you get involved, the more likely it is to unravel because human beings are notoriously bad at keeping secrets in groups. Eventually, somebody tells a wife or friend or spills the beans at the bar.
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So, if we start from an adjusted definition of conspiracy that means "conspiracies that managed to be kept hidden", the study makes a lot more sense.
My whole point is these are NOT conspiracies that they managed to keep hidden, they were eventually revealed, even if 25 years or more later. He has no data or knowledge of how many remained secret indefinitely nor is there any way to obtain that information. So at best he is working from a flawed data set that has to make a load of assumptions and guesses.
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well, if 50%+ are in a conspiracy, it's no longer a conspiracy now is it..
as with moon landing, there's plenty of people who claim that they're spilling the beans on it. as is with area 51 having ufos and all that.
as to your example, well, it took 50 years and involved a lot less people - and on the other hand, might have had very little effect on the whole war itself anyways.
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That depends on what you consider "revealed to be real".
Area 51 and Groom Lake were pretty much known to be an aircraft test site for years. Yes, the government didn't admit it, but all the restricted airspace and patrols meant that there was *something* there.
Now what would have been a real reveal is if they'd actually found aliens or their equipment and had it in Area 51. Of course, that's could be a completely successful conspiracy, but more likely it's complete bunk, and either way, no one has any pro
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Now what would have been a real reveal is if they'd actually found aliens or their equipment and had it in Area 51.
A different theory is that they've been using Area 51 for years as a false flag operation to keep people from finding the real site the extra-terrestrials and such are being kept at.
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I guess... but anyone who works in espionage will be watching people, not just observing places. And as this article mentions, its all down to who gives it away.
Certainly, a false flag could distract espionage resources for a certain amount of time, just like the fake invasion army in Britain did in WWII, but eventually the other side will find out the false site is a sham by penetrating the site's staff or the supporting agencies, or someone who is part of the *real* operation will give up the information
Re: Paper doesn't account for successful theories (Score:5, Informative)
Fortitude is an interesting topic and I would recommend that you read up on it. The operation as a whole encompassed far more deception than was required, which was an unknown fact at the time, but it was two primary factors that contributed to its success. The first was the double cross system. The Brits didn't know that they had acquired every German agent in the country and closely linked to this was the intelligence sent back to the Germans via Garbo, Brutus, and Tricycle (predominantly) was given a very high level of trust especially so in the case of Garbo since they had created a fictitious network of agents working underneath him in order to give reason for the information Garbo was providing. This aided the double cross system as it discouraged the Germans from attempting to infiltrate more agents due to the Garbo network being so good. His network did include informants and sources that were situated in headquarters. The second major factor was that German reconnaissance was poor. The British had expected that the Germans would perform far more aerial reconnaissance than they did in order to verify the radio traffic they were performing as well as the intelligence received via double cross agents. Their visual reconnaissance was almost entirely limited to places where they could observe the British coast from across the channel. The Germans trusted their sources but rarely ever verified them.
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Absolutely. In the TV series "The World at War", the producer's aunt, who he was close to and conversed regularly, had worked at Bletchley Park and she never even hinted at its work. The series, filmed in the early seventies, made a programme on the Battle of the Atlantic and put the British success down to radar and better training.
I have a simpler method ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have a simpler method ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a fake conspiracy theory when my nephew believes it. 100% accuracy within 5 seconds.
Hm. "5, Insightful". Seems like quite a few slashdotters know your nephew.
;-)
However, a "5, Interesting" would mean a bunch of slashdotters would like to know your nephew.
Don't know which scares me more
Re:I have a simpler method ... (Score:5, Funny)
Her nephew is Alex Jones.
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That was pretty slick how you managed to imply that Rahm Emanuel was behind 9/11.
Re: I have a simpler method ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Israel *isn't* in control of US policy. There are simply a lot of people in the US government who are sympathetic to Israel and take its side. There is a difference, mostly because when push comes to shove, Israel isn't going to get its way if the US government gets a higher priority.
The fact is, Israel is more or less a modern democracy that plays by Western rules and has been continuously under attack by groups that were very easily labelled as terrorists. That plays pretty well to the US population.
Certainly, Israel has employs some very questionable tactics to maintain a Jewish state, but is generally admired for not allowing themselves to be pushed around by their neighbors. And their neighbors have certainly tried to push them around. You don't need to be a "captive" of the Israeli government to see their side of it.
Obviously, both sides need to move away from the posturing and violence to make real progress.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of political profit for those in the region for keeping this battle going... on both sides. Once the Palestinians and Israelis can make real progress, certain segments of the Israeli population will find themselves without the state of siege that they have been using to justify their program of maintaining settlements. There are also some demographic issues were maintaining a Jewish majority state will be more difficult.
And the Arab and other Muslim governments are going to lose their unifying scapegoat which keeps their populations from fully realizing what kind of crappy governments that they've been tolerating.
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Once the Palestinians and Israelis can make real progress,
Oh so much more than that has to happen. Basically the problem is everyone hates the Palestinians and they're utterly fucked. I'm not talking about just Israel here. Go read about the treatment the get in their refugee camps in the surrounding countries like Lebanon and Jordan too.
Everyone loves to beat on the Palestinians and the problem is much bigger than just Israel now. Does that mean they've not done some incredibly stupid and incredibly bad th
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I pause before saying causation (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right, a big fat zero. You know who keeps a secret? Of course not, that person has never told you anything.
A conspiracy's success is diminished inversely proportionate to the number of its' participants and the time of execution.
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Frank shit in the bed.
Re:I pause before saying causation (Score:4, Informative)
And yet, the global-scale sock heist conspiracy remains at large.
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Prone to unravel? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, that's what THEY want you to believe!
You guys ain't foolin' anyone, I know the truth!
Hmmm... seems to be intrinsically faulty (Score:5, Insightful)
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missing factors? (Score:2)
Mass surveillance (Score:2)
What about the one where various three letter agencies are snooping on all of your communications. Who would believe that?
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And this was exactly one of the existing exposed conspiracies that was used to develop the model. Specifically the PRISM program by the NSA.
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And this was exactly one of the existing exposed conspiracies that was used to develop the model. Specifically the PRISM program by the NSA.
People *used* to say it was all about people wearing tin foil hats. It turned out that if you actually know the truth and the truth hurts people, then they would prefer to stay ignorant and happy.
Cure for Cancer (Score:2)
Proof of concept for the cure of cancer has been patented more than 30 years ago, in 1983.
While many of the readers here are techies, I am bringing your attention to the Cabilly patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] that are key to some of the existing effective FDA approved cancer medications (with the combo treatment cost of $250K or so). If you do not believe, please spend some time researching or ask your friend patent lawyer of biochemistry scientist to comment on Cabilly patents.
Bottom line is tha
Moon landing (Score:2)
I do not think that any sane person questions landing itself. The world, including arch-competitors Soviets, were monitoring and spying the process. Moreover, the landing vehicle at the first landing location has been photographed. You can't fake the fact of that kind of magnitude.
However there is a reasonable suspicion that the footage of the landing is .... well... a bit of a stretch, and those pesky conspiracy theorists brought dozens of details that did not make sense. Lastly, there is this Stanley Kub
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Sure... why not? [youtube.com].
and yet (Score:2)
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These aren't exactly secret conspiracies. They're widely known by the public and those who perpetuate them will often brag about it.
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Ben Franklin said it best (Score:5, Funny)
He's in on it! (Score:2)
Clearly he's in on it. He's just telling us what they want us to believe.
I wish I liked them (Score:2)
Conspiracy theories are so simple.... it would be so much easier. I think I could feel more hopeful as a conspiracy theorist. Because then its just a few bad apples. Sure, a few bad apples do spoil the whole bunch..... but you can toss out a whole bunch, you can scrap a whole years apple harvest.... if you just buck up, check those apples, and don't keep the bad ones.
But, I don't see that. Conspiracies are hard. They do tend to unravel. They only work when of very short duration and scope, when the people i
Half Conspiracies (Score:4, Insightful)
The moon landing and cancer-cure suppression would be actual conspiracies, but climate change and vaccine-caused autism are less thought to be malicious conspiracies and more incorrect group-think*. There is no spilling the beans to be done.
* Yes there are those who claim genuine conspiracies, but by far the vast majority of people who, say, believe climate change is not man-made nor catastrophic think it is incorrect science.
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If a pharmaceutical company finds a cure for cancer, and decides it would hurt their bottom line to release it, what do you call that?
Time to file their business folk, because a cure for cancer is so insanely valuable that they'd be idiots not to pursue it.
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Yes there are those who claim genuine conspiracies, but by far the vast majority of people who, say, believe climate change is not man-made nor catastrophic think it is incorrect science.
Science is generally pretty self correcting, if you make a mistake someone will eventually find out. Climate Change was discovered over 150 years ago: it's kinda hard to believe that nobody has checked that work in all that time. If you were a climate contrarian, wouldn't the first thing you do be to check experimentally to see if CO2 is a greenhouse gas?
If the accepted science is actually wrong, then the only way that could be not generally known would be if there was a massive, enduring conspiracy suppre
Model omits authoritativeness, reach of source (Score:3)
His model is way too weak.
So any single person acting alone, of any stature in society, can bust open a conspiracy and get it on CNN?
The problems with this model are many:
1. It ignores authority and credibility of the leaker
2. It ignores the reach of the leaker
3. It does not define when a conspiracy theory has been proven (e.g. a reasonable definition is whether a specified percentage of the population understand the conspiracy to be true)
For example, to use one of the examples of a true conspiracy the author used, the NSA:
That's just factually wrong. It was substantially exposed on PBS [pbs.org] in 2007. Why am I quoting PBS? Because I know it is perceived as an authoritative source. Why do most people not know about this? Because PBS lacks the reach.
Both authoratativeness and reach are required to expose a conspiracy. And once these two elements are added into the model, then one is forced to accept a non-trivial definition of conspiracy-proven-true by setting a threshold of population who believes (and not simply saying one leaker implies the whole world instantaneously and fully believes).
What about the Manhattan conspiracy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like severe selection bias - not one of the examples has yet to reveal a conspiracy.
How well does the theory predict conspiracies that have already been revealed?
For example, the Manhattan project involved hundreds of people, yet remained secret for years, is that what this theory suggests would have happened?
Re:What about the Manhattan conspiracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, the Manhattan project involved hundreds of people, yet remained secret for years, is that what this theory suggests would have happened?
I can't speak to the validity of the mathematical model here, but it seems the Manhattan Project might be distinguished in a number of ways.
(1) The "conspiracies" in TFA are mostly things that many people would view as against "public interest." Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project was doing something that was actually trying to win a war, which average Americans knew was already killing millions of them. Thus, I think it would be easier to appeal to people's patriotism to keep the Manhattan Project secret even if more people did find out or someone was thinking of "talking." The very word "conspiracy" implies something negative and nefarious going on; while some people nowadays consider the Manhattan Project to have unleashed "evil" I suppose, the general negative impact at the time was on enemies who were intent on killing Americans -- so I don't know that most people would have considered it a net benefit to release that information to the public, where it could more easily get in the hands of enemies and put Americans at a disadvantage in the war if the enemy developed weapons faster.
(2) It was a different time. Not just because of the war. This was the era when journalists voluntarily kept the secret that FDR was basically confined to a wheelchair. Could you imagine something like that being kept secret today? The amount of technology, surveillance, electronic communications, etc. that EVERYONE has access to (and anything anyone was trying to keep secret would be subject to a barrage of), not to mention the lack of the kind of ethical choices that journalists of that time made... well, it's just a different world today.
(3) Probably only a few dozen people knew of the full scope of the Manhattan project, and probably only a few hundred had any real clue that it even had to do with atoms. Hundreds of thousands of people were employed doing construction, etc., but they had no clue what was going on, and they couldn't figure it out from the little pieces they knew and observed personally. And even if they started to figure something out, see (1) and (2) above.
(4) The Manhattan Project hit a "big reveal" when the bombs were dropped on Japan. Probably a few hundred more people who didn't really "get" what was going on figured something out when they heard that news. And more people likely started putting the pieces together then. And it was in that same year that the government started revealing stuff about the project. Compare that to something like the Moon Landings. You could imaging thousands of construction workers and whatever involved in setting those up to create a hoax, and maybe they could segregate people similarly to avoid any one person having "all the pieces." But then the day comes in 1969 when it's broadcast around the globe, and I bet lots of people start putting the pieces together. Same thing for the other conspiracies in TFA -- these are all publicly disclosed matters where the "official" story is different from the supposed "conspiracy" story. With the Manhattan Project, there often was really no major "official" story -- in fact, you have stories about managers from then who were tasked with keeping workers happy when no one knew anything (including the managers). If anything, the danger of the Manhattan Project was that too many people thought it was worthless or nonsense -- since they had no clue what the work was for. There's not the same tension in explanations or the feeling of "deception" that would tend to lead to "leaks."
Oh, and besides all of this, TFS says these conspiracies would unravel in a MINIMUM of 3-4 years (and perhaps as long as decades). While the Manhattan Project got started in 1939, it didn't really get going in force until around 1942, and it was revealed in 1945. So, it's not like the "secret" phase of the project lasted even much longer than the MINIMUM predicted by this model.
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(2) above isn't that different today. The media cooperates with the White House to almost never say anything about our President smoking. It's not really a secret, but it's also something that is hardly ever mentioned.
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What you say is true, but...
On the other hand the secrets produced by the secret program themselves remained secret (at least to th
Good example of applied mathematics (Score:2)
A good conspiracy theory is a belief, not a hypothesis.
See e.g. the "Flat earth" believers ("The earth is flat, you see, but "da gubbamint" hushes it up (with truly amazing efficiency, across several decades)).
And the "rational Pi" crowd ("The number Pi can is a rational number, not an irrational one, but established mathematicians simply refuse to take any proofs to the contrary seriously and conspire against anyone who tries to put such theories
I secretly root for conspiracy theorists (Score:5, Interesting)
What ticks me off more than crazy theories are instances of skeptics invoking many of the same kinds of errors in judgments into debunking conspiracies as was originally required to invent them in the first place.
All I ask if you feel the need to waste your time debunking a conspiracy theory at least do so with evidence and sound reasoning.
In this case making judgments based on statistical inferences of who would "spill the beans" is pretty lame. First off this kind of analysis does nothing to directly address the underlying assertions made by conspiracy theorist. Who is likely to "talk" is a variable based on conspiracy specific human factors I very much doubt can be captured in a formula. Most importantly believers are not going to be swayed by models from "establishment" mathematicians they neither understand or are likely to be willing to take the time to understand.
If someone makes a non-falsifiable claim going further than demonstrating the claim cannot be falsified is unnecessary and counterproductive. In my view the best way to rescue people from conspiracies is to trick them into discovering for themselves the errors in their positions.
This is a bullshit simplification (Score:5, Interesting)
How about UFO's? The CIA spread disinformation about UFO's in the 1950's and 1960's to hide their experimental aircraft program. Another example of a conspiracy that took hold with the general public and survived to this day.
It's not amount of time since the event occurred, or the number of people involved, it's the cover story that makes the conspiracy succeed or fail.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08... [nytimes.com]
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... [smithsonianmag.com]
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I'm saying it's a conspiracy to get the public to believe something that is untrue that many people have known about and has been successful for the better part of a century, which refutes the article's presupposition that this formula can predict whether a conspiracy is probable or not.
I didn't say it was good or bad.
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Or that time the America and Canada performed dangerous and torturous medical experimentation on non-consenting citizens. A practice the utilised hundreds of doctors and nurses spanning dozens and dozens of institutions, not to mention the thousands of unwitting participants. And we did not find out until the government declassified the documents detailing the practice decades latter. All you need to do is read some declassified federal documents to know that large, complicated, crazy, conspiracies are carr
Only one of these is a conspiracy (Score:2)
A good conspiracy theory, like "911 inside job", can be pulled off with just a few guys. But maybe then it's no longer a conspiracy?
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actually the 911 inside job as shown on some crappy "documentaries" would involve tens of thousands of engineers who say those documentaries are full of bullshit.. but those engineers are saying that the inside job theory uses bullshit for proof.
He's using bad assumptions (Score:3)
He's totally wrong in assuming you need secrecy to maintain a conspiracy. Everyone knows that global warming is a hoax and that vaccines are harmful. They've both been revealed many times. You can find information about them all over the internet. But everyone keeps believing the conspirators lies anyway. You don't need secrecy, you just need most people to be really gullible and believe whatever they read, instead of questioning it and checking the facts. You know, the way any smart conspiracy theorist would do.
(In case you can't tell, yes I'm being sarcastic here. But I'm also being serious: you can't cite the difficulty of keeping a secret as an argument against a belief that, according to its adherents, isn't secret anymore.)
What made it out (Score:2)
Note the backgrounds to Daniel Ellsberg, Sibel Edmonds, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Edward Snowden.
As to the ".. rendering such Byzantine cover-ups far more likely to fail."
What has failed for the CIA?
United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States [wikipedia.org] in the mid 1970's went fine even after the MKUltra news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Doctors and medics get to stay in th
Flawed? (Score:2)
I don't see how this analysis could possibly be conservative as conservative as the author believes. He estimates a lower bound on a failure parameter based on exposed conspiracies, except this can't possibly be convincing if one believes there exist long-term conspiracies that h
Tweaked algorithm (Score:2)
Conveniently, the algorithm has been tweaked so that none of these predicted time periods are in the past. Now all we have to do is wait 4 years to see if any of the theories are true!
It's a Conspiracy! (Score:2)
He is just trying to placate us.
He might as well have said; "There are no conspiracies, because, MATH! Bam!!!"
protip: math can prove anything (Score:2)
Have some empathy! (Score:2)
Even annoying people deserve daydreams!
Well duh (Score:2)
darth jar jar (Score:2)
nobody yet has mentioned the darth jar jar conspiracy. when will this one be revealed to be confirmed? what does the math say on that?
This paper is a conspiracy (Score:2)
I think this paper is a conspiracy to make you think conspiracies don't exist or are prone to unravel.
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Then they're not conspirators, they're unwitting dupes.
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And if your so called "unwitting dupes" are both the beneficiaries of and responsible agents for the acts of conspiracy? Humans make most decisions without explicit deliberation, let alone explicit communication, of their aims and means.
Got a live one, we does! Let me guess - you haunt the kookier sections of Youtube.
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Jet fuel can't melt logic.
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Because there would be hundreds of thousands of people in the know on this. Any one of them can leak it. Are all of them bound by a pact of evil to never reveal what they know?
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Let's say we have a true conspiracy that involves hundreds of thousands of people. Should such a conspiracy be revealed, even by a few hundred of the conspirators, why would anyone believe them? After all, such a conspiracy would involve hundreds of thousands of people. They're just a bunch of attention seekers and conspiracy nuts. If it were true, it would have been revealed by now ...
All of the conspiracies listed in the summary, conspiracy theorists would say have been revealed, after all. Like JFK,
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That's now how the math was done. It required one person to reveal, even inadvertently, that there was a conspiracy. It doesn't assume that it was all blown wide open with the public convinced of the conspiracy either. It took just Edward Snowden to open the doors on a conspiracy involved tens of thousands of people (the conspiracy kept in place by laws forbidding disclosure of classified materials). Much of the general population already believed that there was a conspiracy involved with the NSA, there
Re:This model excludes tacit conspiracies (Score:5, Interesting)
No one creates a cure for cancer on their own. Lots of people have to be involved, there would be years of lab work, the data has to be gathered from studies to prove effectiveness, and so forth. The CEO could try to keep it hush hush but there would be too many people around who would have to know there was such cure either present or at the stage of trials. The CEO could demand that all records be retrieved and hidden, but the people doing the retrieving and hiding are now in the know also. You can hide studies but you can't make people forget that they worked on those studies.
The model used in this math does actually assume that all conspirators are intent on keeping the secret in the first place, rather than there being some internal good guy who wants to blow the whistle. Whereas in this case most of those conspirators would have an interest in getting that secret out. Sure you can pay them off, but even that is hard to keep secret because now you've got stockholders wondering where all that money went and such payments do not provide guarantees of silence.
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That really depends on the details, doesn't it? How exactly would hundreds and thousands or people know about this? People know only what they are told, what they witness directly, and what they can infer and deduce from these direct sources.
All of that secret research, and none of us or any other researcher can see it. I can see why you are a conspiracist, because you don't know how science and biology works.
Damn bilderburgers and Vril hotties anyhow! Poisoning white people with Jet Contrails and Floride (did you know that it increases the intelligence of everyone but god fearing white people? Vaccines poisoning our children and suppressed prepetual motion machines that could make all humankind free of worry, the Earth is going to blow up b
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If I were a pharm exec choosing which studies to support, there are many factors I would have to weigh in my decisions. A tacit bias towards non-curative medications is plausibly more profitable
This may make sense to a layman, but it completely misunderstands how the pharma business works. The vast majority of any research efforts they undertake, no matter what the goal, will crash and burn, some of them very expensively. Obviously the companies decide what to target based on likely profitability, but dec
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For instance, is there some cabal going on to lower wages, reduce workforce and erode the middle class? Is a company leader required to appear before a secret board of conspirators where he has to sign in blood his commitment
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For a leak to occur, there has to be a conscious knowledge of explicit facts to leak. It's possible to make decisions by a tacit process, with nefarious motivations, hidden even to the deciding agent by post hoc rationalizations that depict a more benign justification for the decisions.
These processes of self-delusion happen throughout each day for most people. Without ever explicitly discussing the nefarious aspects of a decision, a would be defector has no concrete facts to point to. If for some reason tw
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What about conspiracies with systematic plausible deniability in the acts of consensus? For example, if pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer would that necessitate an explicit admission of the conspiracy even between conspirators? If not, then how exactly would the conspiracy be vulnerable to leakage?
It is really really hard to have a conspiracy on that level. You're going to have hints from somewhere, usually earlier research. Science doesn't happen in a vacuum., and tends toward increment.
Another problem is - in a competitive environment - you're going ot have to argue that none of the companies want to make any money off ther new treatment. Even if company A, B, and C collude, company D can swoop in and make a killing.
Because Every company would have to know all of the aspects of producing your
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So in the examples above, have, say, there been mass-scale inexplicable deaths among the vast numbers of NASA employees, drug manufacturers, climatologists and vaccine/autism researchers?
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If one person dies, it still leaves behind the other people who know of the conspiracy.
Of course, some conspiracies are easier to keep quiet about. If you have say 5 people who have any knowledge or evidence of the conspiracy then they can keep quiet until they all die pretty easily. If there are 5000 people who know of the conspiracy then it's much more difficult, probabilistically, to have all of them take the secret to their grave. Thus the likelihood that no one has spilled the beans on a fake moon l
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The problem with one person "accidentally" dying is that now you have everyone that they know interested. Not to mention the killer and the people that the killer associates with.
Look up Macbeth if you want an example.
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The math is there, you can look it up and read it. Sure there are some assumptions but they're not based on the number of expected conspiracies out there.
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Well they are based on conspiracies that were proven to be untrue. Presumably, conspiracies that were never uncovered aren't factored into his equations. It could be that the vast majority of conspiracies "work," and stay secret forever.
Re:how often we can expect conspiracies fail (Score:4, Interesting)
The math was based on conspiracies that were proven to be true. The PRISM program at the NSA revealed by Snowden, the Tuskeegee syphillis experiments, and the FBI hiding the fact that it's forensic analysis was faulty.
But this sounds like you didn't read the article or the paper. He didn't say he had proven anything. It was a mathematical model based on things we do know. I know slashdot doesn't like to read the articles, but for this particular story there seems to be an abundance of commenters proclaiming that they don't believe any of it without even knowing what "it" is because they haven't read it.
He did not do any analysis on the likelihood that an unknown conspiracy would have been revealed, because... um, it's an unknown conspiracy. He did give numbers on 4 known conspiracy theories though and the numbers seem plausible. He gives no guesses whatsoever about the number of total conspiracies undiscovered or otherwise.
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Well...looks like we got ourselves a reader! [youtube.com]
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You can't make a conclusion about mean or average _excess_ speed, or prevalence of speeding on highways just by working with the population of all the measured drivers and the caught drivers. For there is a subgroup of drivers who successfully evade such measurements, e.g. by featuring radar-detection tools, obtaining info about speed detector locations, having the connection to erase records, favoring unmetered places or times etc. You can establish lower _bounds_ on speeding behavior but the _real_ number
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started talking about some of the fraud in the major AGW stories, I think that conspiracy has already unraveled.
Cites? References? I'll look all of them up I promise.
Or were you just showing smarts by posting as a coward?
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And the fraudulent data was not wholesale invention of numbers either.
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When I took a graduate-level physics of the weather class we discussed why the US Navy's readings over water that show a cooling trend shouldn't be released. Too many ignorant people would use them as evidence against global warming.
Funny, how my graduate level physics courses never pretended hiding evidence was a moral good.
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So you think it is reasonable that scientific researchers are denied raw data making it impossible to replicate findings? You think it is alright to conspire to hide the truth because some people are ignorant? How do you expect verification without replication? Why do you fear the truth being told if your arguments are sound?
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Yep. We need to "uncover" a conspiracy by the terrorists to lower oil prices so more CO2 is produced, causing a sea rise that will inundate the evil USA. Then the Republicans will be racing each other to see who can be tougher on global warming.
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Please, name a single life lost to climate change.
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Nobody is dying in Europe, they are dying in a war in the Middle East. Syria is a drought prone region, climate change has nothing to do with the political crisis there.
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What about the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job orchestrated by the government?
They aren't competent enough to orchestrate something like that. They also weren't competent enough to stop it, despite getting plenty of notice about some of the orchestrators [cbsnews.com]. That doesn't make them any less responsible.
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What about the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job orchestrated by the government?
They aren't competent enough to orchestrate something like that. They also weren't competent enough to stop it, despite getting plenty of notice about some of the orchestrators [cbsnews.com]. That doesn't make them any less responsible.
It's hard to believe that the same government that built the SR71 blackbird and operated it in secret convincing many "useful idiots" that 'they aren't UFO's' is so incompetent that they couldn't stop a bunch of extremists from flying a plane into the largest buildings of the largest US city. How can any other security theatre be justified as effective in the wake of such a bungle.
Rather than theorize I ask if it is possible that the US military could develop drone aircraft technology in 2001 and deploy i
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The math seems to be about the likelihood of someone spilling the beans. Thus the more conspirators the harder to keep the secret. Even posthumously (people do find letters or diaries revealing secrets after death). The best way to keep the secret is to keep the number of conspirators to a minimum. The most popular conspiracy theories on the other hand usually involve a huge number of people all trying to keep a secret from being exposed. Thus Yugo with a smaller number of employees would stand a bette
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How can "the belief that climate change is a fraud" a conspiracy theory when climate change has yet to be proven? Climate change can be proven to be false just by going threw all the research, we already know there are many things that are wrong and edited data to make it look real
*Citation needed*
I'll admit that I haven't gone through ALL the research, but the research I have seen is pretty compelling that climate change exists. NASA has some good and well cited evidence in support of it here [nasa.gov] but if you're one of those people who refuse to change your mind even in the face of overwhelming evidence, I doubt there's much I can do to change your mind on the subject.