Math Says Conspiracies Are Prone To Unravel (bbc.com)

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."

Comments

Re:I pause before saying causation

[penguinoid]

And yet, the global-scale sock heist conspiracy remains at large.

Re: Paper doesn't account for successful theories

[Talderas]

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.