You know the new math paper that we have been spoon-fed to believe "proves" conspiracies must eventually fail? Well the paper itself shows that isn't true.
78 2016-01-28 by daddie_o
TL;DR: This article has been making the rounds of late. We have been told that it appears to "prove" that conspiracies (especially large ones) are doomed to exposure/failure. However, there are two key graphs in the paper that actually show that conspiracies will have a very low probability of being discovered if people are murdered to stop the conspiracy from being discovered. Thus, the paper does NOT demonstrate that conspiracies will eventually be exposed. His own model shows that under certain assumptions (which he himself posits) it's actually much more likely that a conspiracy will remain hidden rather than be exposed. But we've been spoon-fed to believe the results mean just the opposite.
I've seen some criticism (which I agree with) of the model and assumptions made by the paper's author, David Grimes. But I haven't seen anybody point out the very basic fact that -- under certain assumptions that Grimes himself makes -- his model actually shows a very low probability of exposure of the conspiracy.
Let me try to explain:
There are really 3 key assumptions to the model/equation: the likelihood of 'defection,' the number of conspirators involved, and the rate of death of the conspirators.
Think about it this way, let's say that 100 people are in on the conspiracy. Then let's say there is a 5 in a million chance for each person to defect and expose the conspiracy (or make a mistake that exposes it) -- that is the arbitrary likelihood that he assigns. So under those assumptions, how many years is it likely to take for the conspiracy to be exposed? (Of course this assumes that defection will necessarily lead to exposure, which we all know is not the case if you control the media, but that's another argument entirely.)
The answer to this question depends primarily on the death rate of the people involved in the conspiracy. If you need new people to maintain the conspiracy as original conspirators die off, then it is likely to be exposed more quickly. But if not and people die off naturally, then the overall likelihood of exposure is reduced with each new death. And if people die off at an unnatural rate presumably because they are killed (or what Grimes refers to as "removed extrinsically"), then the likelihood of exposure is going to go down much faster (how fast depends on the rate of 'extrinsic removal').
Here is a link to two key figures from the paper. The graphs show the likelihood of the conspiracy failing or being exposed (Y-axis) in any given year after the start of the conspiracy (X-axis is time in years). Note that these likelihoods are not cumulative over time.
The top graph compares the conspiracy 'failure rate' of 3 different scenarios. They all assume that there are 5000 conspirators and that the likelihood of someone defecting from the conspiracy (or fucking up) is 5 in a million (which BTW is a completely arbitrary number. If he had chosen a lower likelihood, then the likelihood of exposure would be even lower, but never mind). The only difference between these three models is their assumptions about the death rate of co-conspirators:
The 'constant conspirators' line corresponds to the assumption that there are always 5000 co-conspirators, the 'Gompertzian decay' model assumes a natural death rate, and the 'Exponential decay' line assumes a higher than normal death rate (reduced by half every 10 years). If co-conspirators are dying at this higher rate then the equation shows that the maximum likelihood of discovery is only 12% after 14 years (before and after that, the likelihood is much lower). This means that according to his own model, conspiracies are much more likely than not to remain a secret.
To make matters worse, he comes back to this model at the end (see the bottom figure in the link) and basically says: well, if people are being killed to keep the conspiracy quiet, this would make surviving co-conspirators more (not less!) likely to defect - because it would create panic and disunity. (I'm not making this up!! That's what he says. It's right there in the paper.) So then he runs a model where he assumes that killing co-conspirators increases the likelihood of survivors to spill beans, and lo-and-behold this means the conspiracy will have a 70% chance to be exposed (see graph on the bottom right) rather than a 6.5% chance (see graph on the bottom left). If, instead, he had made the assumption that killing co-conspirators would make people less likely to talk, then he would have come the conclusion that the maximum likelihood of conspiracy failure would be less than 6.5%. (BTW, it is 6.5% in this model instead of 12% as above because he assumes half the people are dying off every 5 years instead of every 10; I believe he chose this quicker die-off rate because it increases the chances of exposure under the assumption that fast-die off will raise the probability of defection).
Note also that he uses some real-world examples to fill in some of his assumptions and tries to estimate the 'actual' likelihood of defection, based on 3 conspiracies that have been exposed (though he arguably makes some faulty assumptions even about these real world conspiracies). From this he concludes that conspiracies are bound to fail (as we have been hearing non-stop). As others have pointed out, this method suffers from a major problem of selection bias, or what is also known colloquially as "cherry picking."
As I've shown, his own model shows that under certain assumptions (which he himself posits) it's actually much more likely that a conspiracy will remain hidden rather than be exposed. But, of course we're spoon-fed to believe the results mean just the opposite.
20 comments
19 transfire 2016-01-28
5,000 co-conspirators? I would doubt most big conspiracies have more than a few dozen people with any significant knowledge. Everyone else is strictly compartmentalized.
10 daddie_o 2016-01-28
Yes, that is another problematic assumption he makes. Many fewer conspirators would mean much lower chance of exposure. His examples are cherrypicked to include conspiracies that presumably would have included hundreds or thousands of people...
You know what they say, when you assume you make an Ass out of U and Me....
1 magnora7 2016-01-28
Exactly, that is the thing wrong with this paper. It assumes compartmentalization doesn't exist, and that everyone in the organization knows everything about what the organization is doing. This is almost NEVER true.
-1 omenofdread 2016-01-28
Well, by your logic, those people would be involved... even if they were not aware of the scope of what they are involved in.
2 daddie_o 2016-01-28
Yes, but they might not know enough to expose/spoil the conspiracy.
11 know_comment 2016-01-28
Ah, Scientism. The hypocritical paradox that "no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically".
"There are conspiracies... But only conspiracy theories which are proven to be true are actually true." What a strange self referential loop.
I've yet to see a study which shows the denial and equivocations of anti-conspiracists/ debunkers who have been shown proof a conspiracy.
The study is a poorly written and ill-conceived hit-piece designed to push furtive fallacy bullshit. The only reason it passed academic muster is because of the inherent bias of the eco chamber from whence it's hatched.
criticism of vaccination practices = BAD/DANGEROUS
skepticism of carbon-based climate change model that claims world threatening effects can only be reversed through a non-democratic participatory economic model
because these conspiracy theories are prevalent AND dangerous, there is a need to discredit them. As such, we've designed a flawed study to show that conspiracies simply can't exist!
I'm not a conservative white male, Dr. Lewandowsky, and I feel threatened by your insistence at my "psychopathological ideation" and the "danger" it represents to society.
2 lf11 2016-01-28
I owe you a beer for teaching me the term, "scientism."
1 pjvex 2016-01-28
I see this more and more from the putative liberals I come across. I mentioned something regarding Hillary Clinton bring a criminal (and she and Bill were running drugs from Mena). My adversary brings up my self-absorbed "conspiracy theories" with a link to some page that describes a mental disorder, with his implication that I might be suffering from it.
I had never heard of the disorder he linked to, but I know that in history people who speak the truth are all too often silenced as delusional misfits who aren't even competent enough to manage their own autonomy.
2 thing_on_a_string 2016-01-28
its how they silenced critics in the USSR, ditto also in the UK back in the day.
there was a dissident/radical student in London, crashed his car into the gates of Buckingham palace for some protest reason, arrested and detained and whisked off to some psychiatric hospital for unknown 'treatment', likely never seen again at least with a whole brain.
he would have gotten a surgical or chemical Leucotomy without a doubt for targeting the royal family mafia elite.
1 daddie_o 2016-01-28
Yes, the Grimes paper is contributing to the growing movement to equate critical thought with insanity. It's actually scary. One can imagine a world where people in the "land of the free" will be locked up in asylums for not towing the party line, just like in the USSR and other places.
[Here is what Cass Sunstein,]([http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/) influential economist at Harvard and former head of the office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration wrote in a paper that was later expanded into a book published in 2014, titled Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas:
"What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5). "
1 pjvex 2016-01-28
Sunstein is an egocentric and overweening sycophant in his efforts to please those in academia and government who champion central planning in it's many forms.
Conspiracy theorists would naturally pose a threat to central planners.
3 Bradderall420 2016-01-28
The two best examples to adequately discredit his bold conclusions are 'The Manhattan Project' and 'The Gulf Of Tonkin Incident'. Here's why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project - Beneath the section titled 'Secrecy' you'll learn just how massive this operation really was. Over 100,000 people were involved and briefed of the importance of secrecy. Punishments would be 10 years and $131,000. Over 100,000 people all working in a "dark city" they forged from the ground up in no time, managed to keep this a secret long enough to employ it's findings (the atom bomb). So for well over 4 years a massive amount of people kept their mouths shut. Then secondly, the Gulf of Tonkin.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident - Here all you have to do is read the first couple paragraphs to realize how easily they were able to withhold truthful information. It happened in August 1964, for the next 30 years there were many inquiries into it's legitimacy, and even at one point in 1995 when former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara met with former Vietnam People's Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp to ask what happened on that day in 1964. He responded "Absolutely nothing". Yet it wasn't until 2005, over 40 years since the incident, that the files were declassified. They showed that on August 4th, 1964, there weren't even any North Vietnamese ships in that area. Let alone ones firing on American ships. It also goes on to show that on August 2nd, two days earlier, that an American ship fired a couple shots off at a Vietnamese ship over 10,000 yards away. This also came as a direct order from Captain Herrick, yet this initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first. So there you have it, you absolutely cannot ascertain any data or information even remotely credible that shows a correlation between time, people involved, etc.
2 TheHero_RedditNeeds 2016-01-28
The study is once again an example of Academia trying to prove in theory what has already been refuted in practice.
2 daddie_o 2016-01-28
These are great examples that show just how cherry-picked are the examples that Grimes uses to try to 'prove' his preconceptions. Other good examples are all the known conspiracies involving child sex trafficking and pornography that get exposed but the investigations are shut down as soon as they start to get close to the people at the top.
3 Balthanos 2016-01-28
The landing at Normandy during WWII is a great example of a conspiracy where numbers of people were aware. The US and UK conspired to trick Germany into thinking they were planning to land elsewhere.
2 bigtimeball4life 2016-01-28
Military types pretty good at conspiracies eh?
1 slim_ironwood 2016-01-28
I fail to see anything scientific about this article. Most of the numbers are chosen at completely random. The author then proceeds to suggest that every single person employed with an offending corporation is also in the know, and prone to spill the beans. Who in their right mind would think this is the case?!
Additionally, there's simply no way to judge the human aspect of secrecy and the thousands of factors that go into whether or not someone may risk their life to expose a lie. The threat of death can't be plotted on a graph...the whole notion is ridiculous.
Opinions on Climate Change and Vaccination Safety within the science community generally rely on data the individuals themselves did not provide. Thus, if the results of the study are manipulated or biased in any fashion, the number of conspirators would only have to include those releasing the numbers. Then, you have HAARP - maybe Climate Change IS real, but it's entirely man-made? I would tend to think Vaccinations could be studied far more easily, given the available data in regards to death and diseases in places where shots were and weren't given. So while I personally don't support all vaccinations, I'm more prone to believe its safety based on that.
Also - where in the graph is allocated money factored in? Millions and millions of federal dollars would undoubtedly skew the numbers, especially when nobody was really hurt or killed, as in many of the hoax shootings.
1 Amos_Quito 2016-01-28
Of course this ignores the fact that many conspiracies ARE exposed as such, but that government officials have no desire to take action against the conspirators, and on the whole, the public is just too damn lazy/apathetic to force the officials to take action.
Prime example: It is now common knowledge that "justification" for the Iraq war of 2003 was based on falsified "intelligence" that our leaders knew damn well to be false. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and scores of other government and military officials blatantly LIED to the American public - telling us that Saddam had WMD's, that he posed an imminent threat to "our ally" in the Middle East, and the brashly implied that he was involved with al Qaeda, and the planning and execution of the 9-11 attacks.
ALL LIES.
This conspiracy of deception which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and left US taxpayers holding a $2 TRILLION price tag was blown open long ago. It is arguably one of the greatest crimes in history, and not ONE government official involved has been charged, let alone brought to justice.
Now consider the MASSIVE conspiratorial fraud surrounding the Housing Bubble in which government officials winked-and-nodded as Glass Steagall was repealed, allowing investment banks and other financial institutions to toss mortgage loans around like chips at a craps table, making untold fortunes as the Housing Bubble expanded, and double-dipping to reap massive gains again as it collapsed, crashing the world into a recession, bankrupting entire nations, and effectively creating an unfathomable transfer of real wealth from the hands of the Middle Class to the claws of the obscenely wealthy - who were then treated as "victims" Too Big To Fail welfare cases who the taxpayers were told they MUST "bail out" lest the sky should fall and kill us all.
Again, the conspiracy has been fully exposed, yet not a single bank executive or government official charged with regulating these criminal industries has been charged, let alone punished. On the contrary, they continue to reap the rewards of their crimes.
Those are just two examples off many.
It is not that conspiracies do not exist or are never exposed, it is that the system has become so thoroughly corrupt and the PEOPLE are so dull-eyed and apathetic that the conspirators have become fearless, committing their acts with full confidence that they are "untouchable".
And sadly, they are right.
1 daddie_o 2016-01-28
Too true
1 Synj3d 2016-01-28
I'd say that his whole argument is poppy cock. For one main reason, how ever it is very important.
5 in a million = 5/1,000,000 people expose the conspiracy.
That number can be reduced and would be by anyone who actually knows how to do math.
5/5 =1
1,000,000/5 = 200,000
1/200,000 = the new number and the exposure rate seems a little different.
So he is trying to say that only one person out of 200,000 thousand will expose the conspiracy. If you assume each conspiracy has 5,000 people you would need 40 conspiracies for only one to be exposed.
And if you have 5,000 conspiracies and as conspirators die out they are replaced you would need nee 195,000 conspirators to reach the exposure rate.
That being said the one can be anywhere in 200,000 but as to when and where that one will expose the conspiracy it will almost certainly not be immediately.
Therefore the exposure rate seems to be high for what he is suggesting as the number.
None of his data adds up. In my opinion.