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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."
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.
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.
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.
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...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
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.