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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."
Its a fake conspiracy theory when my nephew believes it. 100% accuracy within 5 seconds.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Of course, that's what THEY want you to believe!
You guys ain't foolin' anyone, I know the truth!
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
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?
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.
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 landing is extremely small, but the likelihood that three people who worked together to have someone assassinated can keep that secret is very high.
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 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).
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?
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.
It's not that simple, is it?
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.
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, 9/11 inside job, and the moon landing the conspiracy theorists come out very quickly -- a lot faster than even the shortest times listed in the summary.
It's not enough that a conspiracy be revealed, it must also be generally believed to be true. Just about any evidence can be explained away, after all. Equally, we can very easily give undue weight to flimsy evidence. It's entirely possible that we believe false conspiracies on flimsy evidence, and deny true conspiracies with solid evidence.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
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 wonder drug, all would have to not want to make money in a competitive business where not all the companies have identical offerings.
But hey, a true conspiracy theorist is unshakable in their conspiracy theories.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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 because there is something wrong with the core and NASA never went to the moon and are engaged in the Kenyan Army's plot to take over the world, andand everything else that we believe in is wrong.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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/...
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.)
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.