Very nice.

Nice ad hominem + straw man fallacy combo.

You presume specificity where I presented ambiguity, arguing against a scenario that you mostly created in your own imagination to flesh out my words. And you don't know me, but presume to label me. Real strong logic there.

I play the devil's advocate, and my (admittedly weak _and_ vague) example is not something I believe. It's just an illustrative example I should have spent more time selecting a more suitable alternative for.

The real point I wanted to make stands on its own merits, independent from the the strength of the poor example I so hastily suggested. And that is that not all conspiracy requires explicit collusion. Sometimes we conspire improvisationally, operating on tacit shared understandings, without leaving a trail of conversational exchanges to report on.

Thank you for posting a cogent and sensible reply, which honestly critiques the actual scenario proposed in my earlier comment. That's refreshing.

I also agree with you, as far as that goes. I don't personally believe that pharmaceutical companies are trying to suppress cancer cures. In fact, I'm delighted at the visible progress researchers have made along the lines to cure cancer, and am pretty hopeful that we'll see a broadening availability of powerful and precise curative treatments for a great diversity of cancers in the near term.

On the other hand, your comment doesn't address the principle I was trying to illustrate, that conspiracy and collusion can happen in a tacit form, which is consequently resistant to exposure by defection. This is my fault for lazily proposing such a weak example. I'll have to think through a better one if I actually care to progress the dialogue on this topic.

Cheers!

Nice straw man + ad hominem combo.

You don't know me.

Here you assume the proposed conspiracy is that of the research being suppressed after being conducted. That may be the typical scenario purported by conspiracy theorists, and it seems we can agree it doesn't make much sense.

As a hypothetical pharm exec with a motive to suppress curative results, presumably in the interests of profitably medicating chronic conditions over a lifetime instead, why would you bother funding undesirable (to your bottom line) lines of research in the first place?

The hypothetical I proposed is rather that of not funding (much) curative research in the first place. Suppressing research results would indeed be an implausibly difficult mess in many or most cases. Instead, you systematically focus funding and organizational support on the more profitable endeavors of creating medications that treat symptoms over a lifetime of chronic illness. This way, instead of absurdly wasting efforts and funds producing and then suppressing curative research results, you just don't produce it in the first place. After all, you're the exec, and you get to to decide what to fund.

I don't promote this viewpoint as dogma. I simply play the devil's advocate.

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.

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, and I don't need to tell anyone that I can see this, nor does anyone have to tell me. If asked about why I chose one substance to support over another, there should be bountiful plethoras of plausible excuses at my fingertips. My colleagues who would also profit from the smokescreen will find their own reasons and excuses for going right along with it. We need never say we are doing this.

I'm not accusing anyone. I have no specific situational factual knowledge to act on. I'm just pointing out possible features in the game-theoretic landscape, and how not all collusions need be explicit, nor vulnerable to defection in the same way as explicit collusions would be. Those who get this should have a competitive advantage in more safely profiting from nefarious and exploitative choices.

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.

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 two parties align their actions to mutually benefit at the expense of others by these tacit decision processes, then it could be argued that they are conspiring without explicitly saying so.

The key point that remains is to establish how exactly two parties would reach an accord in this way, without explicitly setting terms or strategy. One possibility is simply leveraging the capacity to recognize that another party is already using a concordant strategy, and simply taking actions to directly or indirectly support their use of this strategy at the expense of others, without explicitly saying so to them or anyone else.

It's basically acting on mutual exploitative interests within a game-theoretic attractor space, while avoiding the risks of doing so explicitly. Most of you won't be convinced until I can proffer some more concrete examples, however. Which is exactly one good reason such tacit conspiracies can resist exposure.