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

I have a simpler method ...

[BarbaraHudson]

Its a fake conspiracy theory when my nephew believes it. 100% accuracy within 5 seconds.

Re:I have a simpler method ...

[Longjmp]

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 ;-)

I pause before saying causation

[rmdingler]

Pick your motivation. Protection of family, life-changing wealth, to obtain a cure for a disease-ridden child, or even, no problem, I'm a sociopath....Think of it like this: if you had to do a crime, how many people would you involve unnecessarily?

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.

Hmmm... seems to be intrinsically faulty

[Derekloffin]

The crucial value he is using how often do conspiracies fail, but then uses failed ones to measure the length of time. Isn't that kinda like asking how long until your car explodes, and only looking at cars that explode as your data. On top of that, looks like he is using only a same size of 3 to determine this metric making it even more questionable. While I applaud the effort, this doesn't seem to convincing.

Paper doesn't account for successful theories

[Okian Warrior]

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 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

[sg_oneill]

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.

Re:Paper doesn't account for successful theories

[bloodhawk]

I don't think it accounts for those at all as it CAN'T. The fact is 99% of conspiracies could be wildly successful, but because they are successful we won't know or it could be every one of them has eventually failed, he is working from incomplete data, worse he is working from a heavily biased section of the data (i.e. data that leant towards failure). we don't know the data behind what leads to a successful conspiracy only what leads to failed ones. It also doesn't take into account that most people don't tend to believe people that come out about conspiracies. For a conspiracy to fail not only must it be leaked but it needs to be believed by the public. Someone could come out today and say he was the man on the grassy knoll and fired the fatal bullet (and be telling the truth), unless he had concrete proof all it would take is one agency saying he is disturbed or making it up and the conspiracy continues.

Re:Paper doesn't account for successful theories

[PopeRatzo]

I don't think it accounts for those at all as it CAN'T. The fact is 99% of conspiracies could be wildly successful, but because they are successful we won't know or it could be every one of them has eventually failed, he is working from incomplete data, worse he is working from a heavily biased section of the data (i.e. data that leant towards failure). we don't know the data behind what leads to a successful conspiracy only what leads to failed ones.

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.

Re:What about the Manhattan conspiracy?

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.