A personal theory i have is that the "Sceptics"community is somewhat comprised of slightly socially naive stem educated people (sorry). They simply do not fathom the ruthlessness of the political or business world. Hackers are a notable exception, they usually have they usually are pretty adept at seeing propaganda and cover ups.<p>The notion that "i can prove that conspiracies are false with my math" makes me cringe the same way it makes me cringe when the sceptics community "Proves religion wrong", completely disregarding any psychological or anthropological explanations for such a phenomenon.<p>A good chunk of the highly educated people from the economic fields, Law, Public Relations and business world are much more manipulative and opportunistic than most "science people" understands.<p>Go to any of the hippest (and most expensive) night clubs in a european city and you will meet these kinds of people everywhere, earning huge amounts of money doing dubious business deals or polishing the images of morally questionable partners.<p>You won't meet many tech people there, but the ones you will meet will be in ad-tech, data-reselling, or affiliate marketing.<p>You won't se any nerds these places, as you won't se any nerds at PR or upper class "fund raising" events, where the small scale conspiracies are pretty obvious.
It seems that the original paper didn't consider participants' incentives to keep the secret.<p>> All three are based in the United States, two in law enforcement or security services where secrecy is part of the job description and the cost of breaking it is extreme.<p>There must be differences between conspiracies where the conspirators agree that the secrecy is proper or beneficial, and conspiracies where people are forced into it or simply become aware of the secret by chance or as part of a job. For that matter, there must be differences between conspiracies where people are trying to unmask them (for example, national security reporters who have heard a rumor about the existence of a secret program and are investigating to follow up on it) and conspiracies whose existence hasn't been hypothesized by outsiders.<p>Just today the Washington Post reported on internal CIA use of deception against its own staff:<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/eyewash-how-the-cia-deceives-its-own-workforce-about-operations/2016/01/31/c00f5a78-c53d-11e5-9693-933a4d31bcc8_story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/eyewa...</a><p>> Senior CIA officials have for years intentionally deceived parts of the agency workforce by transmitting internal memos that contain false information about operations and sources overseas, according to current and former U.S. officials who said the practice is known by the term “eyewash.”<p>In this case, there could be hundreds of people who think they know the truth about something, but really only a handful do. (The Post explicitly says this.) So even if one of those hundreds of people reveals what they know, the conspiracy won't really be revealed.
For any interested, I wrote an entire essay and some arguments in favor of conspiracy theory on Schneier's blog here:<p><a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psychology_7.html#c1503021" rel="nofollow">https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog...</a><p>I argue that conspiracy, or key elements of it, is a natural part of human behavior. You can see it in all kinds of legitimate things. You can also see it in many criminal activities. A subset of it would be what we traditionally call a criminal conspiracy good enough to leave only breadcrumbs. The conspiracy theories... one's using good investigation rather than cherry-picking... have to find and tie together these breadcrumbs to derive the hidden activity.<p>Academics almost exclusively tend to analyze why people must be wrong-headed if they investigate conspiracies, err, criminal activity. Instead, they should look at those that were proven right and wrong to identify data points for criteria or heuristics to help investigators get it right more often. What constitutes good evidence of a probable conspiracy vs what is just bias of researcher? A valid question and form of research.<p>However, it's nonsense and defies common sense to have their assumption that conspiracies don't happen and investigating one is equivalent to mental illness unless you have a confession in hand from perps.
Conspiracy's clearly don't exist, except when the US government is found guilty of them in court of law:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/09/us/memphis-jury-sees-conspiracy-in-martin-luther-king-s-killing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/09/us/memphis-jury-sees-consp...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Assassinations" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...</a>
If you throw everything together it's uninformative.<p>1. Obviously, some things are successful "conspiracies" to continue nefarious activities despite what would be public aversion: An obvious example is the clergy sex abuse case.<p>2. Obviously, other supposed conspiracies are bullshit: Chupacabra, Moth-man, LGMs at Area 51.<p>3. Other things are a kind of readily identifiable, if you are historically literate, forms of opportunism: The rise of the security state and the neocon wars after 9/11, for example. 9/11 wasn't an "inside job" but it was cynically exploited about as far as possible. From Winston Churchill to Rahm Emanuel, politicians have known not to waste a good crisis. "Cui bono?" Yeah, the people who jumped on it and exploited.
Good point, worth skimming [if you've heard of the original article].<p>Maybe a better direction to go would be "how long until leaks occur" given the number of people on a project. This isn't that different [although it's less click-bait-y than mentioning conspiracies], and you'd have lots of examples from industrial products.<p>How often do Apple product releases leak? How long does it usually take for them to leak?<p>There should at least be enough data to do something interesting.
"Paper disproving the concept of conspiracy theories found to be erroneous; spawns multiple conspiracy theories and adds credence to innumerable more"
So, he never actually said it was a cumulative failure curve. I'll admit a graph of the probability of failure per year (non-cumulative) may be less expected, but doesn't necessarily indicate an error on the authors part.<p>And the bit about his estimates of the number of conspirators in the NSA.. he says the exact same thing: "In the PRISM case, the figure of 30,000 comes from total NSA staff. In reality, the proportion of those employed would would have knowledge of this program would likely be a lot less but we take the upper bound figure to minimize the estimate of p."
It always annoys me when reading about this paper, that the Climategate (parts 1 & 2) incident is ignored.<p>It doesn't prove that there's a climate-change conspiracy, but it was a bona-fide attempt by someone who had access to internal documents to whistleblow.<p>I don't understand why NSA - Snowden is an example of a conspiracy being exposed but UEA - Climategate is not.<p>Unless of course, it's career suicide for an academic to come within a mile of being seen to portray climate change as a conspiracy. Which could be taken as more evidence that there is a conspiracy.