http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684
QuoteA study has examined how long alleged conspiracies could "survive" before being revealed - deliberately or unwittingly - to the public at large.
Dr David Grimes, from Oxford University, devised an equation to express this, and then applied it to four famous collusions.
The work appears in Plos One journal.
The equation developed by Dr Grimes, a post-doctoral physicist at Oxford, relied upon three factors: the number of conspirators involved, the amount of time that has passed, and the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing.
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.
"The mathematical methods used in this paper were broadly similar to the mathematics I have used before in my academic research on radiation physics," Dr Grimes said.
Building the equation
To derive his equation, Dr Grimes began with the Poisson distribution, a common statistical tool that measures the probability of a particular event occurring over a certain amount of time.
Using a handful of assumptions, combined with mathematical deduction, Dr Grimes produced a general, but incomplete, formula.
Specifically, he was missing a good estimate for the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing. To determine this, Dr Grimes analysed data from three genuine collusions.
The first was the surveillance program conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA), known as PRISM. This programme involved, at most, 36,000 people and was famously revealed by Edward Snowden after about six years.
The second was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the cure for syphilis (penicillin) was purposefully withheld from African-American patients.
The experiment may have involved up to 6,700 people, and Dr Peter Buxtun blew the whistle after about 25 years.
The third was an FBI scandal in which it was revealed by Dr Frederic Whitehurst that the agency's forensic analysis was unscientific and misleading, resulting in the imprisonment and execution of innocent people.
Dr Grimes estimates that a maximum of 500 people could have been involved and that it took about six years for the scandal to be exposed.
The equation he created represents a "best case scenario" for conspirators - that is, it optimistically assumes that conspirators are good at keeping secrets and that there are no external investigations at play.
Connecting the dots
Crunching the numbers from the three known conspiracies, Dr Grimes calculated that the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing is four in one million.
Though this number is low, the chance that a conspiracy is revealed becomes quite large as time passes and the number of conspirators grows.
The Moon landing hoax, for instance, began in 1965 and would have involved about 411,000 Nasa employees. With these parameters, Dr Grimes's equation suggests that the hoax would have been revealed after 3.7 years.
Additionally, since the Moon landing hoax is now more than 50 years old, Dr Grimes's equation predicts that, at most, only 251 conspirators could have been involved.
Thus, it is more reasonable to believe that the Moon landing was real.
Prof Monty McGovern, a mathematician at the University of Washington, said the study's methods "strike me as reasonable and the probabilities computed quite plausible".
Dr Grimes added: "While I think it's difficult to impossible to sway those with a conviction... I would hope this paper is useful to those more in the middle ground who might wonder whether scientists could perpetuate a hoax or not."
No doubt wouldn't make a bit of difference to conspiracy theorists, but it is good that the probability of said conspiracy can be at least examined mathematically. And one tenet, that the bigger the conspiracy and number of people involved leads to a greater chance of disclosure, certainly makes sense.
I just think it's funny how there are all kinds of government leaks all the time, but conspiracy theorists think that thousands of people can be silent about some pretty massive things for their entire lives without ever once spilling the beans.
I know a guy who swears up and down that there's a cure for cancer (he didn't specify which kind) but that the government won't use it. Why the fuck not? "Let's keep this amazing breakthrough that could make us all rich and famous a secret from the world." Makes total sense. And when the people in the know have family members who come down with cancer? Mum's the word!
I have a wife with MS and there has been ongoing research to come up with a cure and billions spent by pharmaceutical companies. There has been some noise made about them not wanting to find a cure for something they can sell stop gap meds for and make money. But in this case, one of the primary researchers is with U of U and I've personally met him, and I guarantee he's not going to hide anything- he has the disease.
My wife, a now retired LPN, spoke at a couple of seminars, so I've met some of the researchers and a slew of pharmaceutical reps. Got more free planners than I could ever use.
conspiracy theories abound. I've spent a lot of time looking into them, everything from the Illuminati to the long drawn out war we had on here over 9/11 with a conspiracy theorist. I'm glad somebody finally approached it scientifically.
You can fool all the people all the time. This analysis supposes that people actually know, and are keeping it a secret. A secret that nobody knows, is safe ... at best someone will spout it randomly (JFK was reptilian?) ... but like the pod people we are, nobody will believe it. The problem for the guy in the movie about the pod people, is he was the last non-pod person. The pod people are paid to look the other way.
Selective skepticism is good, and most conspiracy theories fall to good skepticism (the Moon landing never happened?). But that isn't the same as ... people are basically bad and this life is a kind of Hell. It is less important if Hitler survived the Bunker, but that he existed at all.
And no, I don't think a lot of cures are being withheld. But capitalist pharmacy ... has no interest in curing people, only in making money. That isn't a conspiracy, that is human nature in groups. Individuals might want to cure something (like my daughter's fibromyalgia) but if they aren't funded, then it isn't happening. And the people with the money, are not humanitarians, the researchers are not different than the scientists at the Tobacco Institute.
Quote from: Hydra009 on January 27, 2016, 12:01:31 AM
I just think it's funny how there are all kinds of government leaks all the time, but conspiracy theorists think that thousands of people can be silent about some pretty massive things for their entire lives without ever once spilling the beans.
It really does defy logic especially in the social media age and evolving 24 hour news cycle, when people fall all over themselves to be the first to have breaking news. The old adage about a secret only working if it's between two people and one of them is dead comes to mind. Especially when it comes to cancer, I refuse to believe hundreds or even thousands of scientists, drug company executives, doctors, etc. could work that hard to keep something like that secret. Surely someone would eventually come into conflict with their personal ethics, leave evidence lying around, get their servers hacked, etc.
Seems like an odd thing; Quantifying a conspiracy theory's life expectancy. I know of one that's lasted for 2000 years.
Unless someone like Snowdon comes forward, there were plenty of people who accepted the benign intentions of the US ... and most still do. But I don't think there is any cure for cancer, secret or potential. Humans are a cancer, and you can't stop a fire with fire.
Quote from: SGOS on January 27, 2016, 07:11:04 AM
Seems like an odd thing; Quantifying a conspiracy theory's life expectancy. I know of one that's lasted for 2000 years.
Christianity doesn't count... it has been debunked multiple times. :lol:
On Dec. 7th, 1941, Sen. Gerald P. Nye (not the sharpest pencil in the box) was giving a speech to an isolationist audience of American First members. During his speech a note was passed to him saying that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. (I wonder if he knew where that was at the time?) He finished his speech about how we should stay out of the war. Then, backstage, he exclaimed "Roosevelt must have tricked them into attack us!" And right there a conspiracy theory was born.
Quote from: josephpalazzo on January 27, 2016, 07:17:28 AM
Christianity doesn't count... it has been debunked multiple times. :lol:
A writ of
habaeus corpus sanctum would have settled that lot at the start.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on January 27, 2016, 07:20:59 AM
A writ of habaeus corpus sanctum would have settled that lot at the start.
You're assuming there was a real Jesus. When you assume you make and ass of u and...
Quote from: josephpalazzo on January 27, 2016, 07:47:48 AM
You're assuming there was a real Jesus. When you assume you make and ass of u and...
No, I'm saying if they don't produce the body they have no case.
Quote from: Baruch on January 27, 2016, 06:46:53 AM
You can fool all the people all the time. This analysis supposes that people actually know, and are keeping it a secret. A secret that nobody knows, is safe ...
A secret nobody knows is not a secret. It's just something unknown. Also, conspiracy theories are about large-scale actions. Large-scale action cannot happen without large numbers of people being involved and know something about what's happening. They may not know everything, but they know enough such that any serious digging will reveal the unpleasant truth.
Quote from: Baruch on January 27, 2016, 06:46:53 AM
And no, I don't think a lot of cures are being withheld. But capitalist pharmacy ... has no interest in curing people, only in making money. That isn't a conspiracy, that is human nature in groups. Individuals might want to cure something (like my daughter's fibromyalgia) but if they aren't funded, then it isn't happening. And the people with the money, are not humanitarians, the researchers are not different than the scientists at the Tobacco Institute.
The fact that the alternative medicine "industry's" bread and butter is
exactly selling "cures" to ailments that pharmacology can't cure puts lie to this. See, a company would stand to make it big should a genuine cure is available to a big nasty like cancer, because they get every cancer sufferer on the planet after their cure â€" they'd be the only game in town â€" and there will always be a steady stream of new cancer sufferers to profit from. That huge influx of cash would absolutely be worth it. For once, the tragedy of the commons (here, the commons is all cancer patients) works to our advantage.
The problem for cancer and other chronic diseases is that the more we study them, the less likely it seems that there is a final "cure" for any of them. In order to say you're cured of cancer, you would have to get each and every single cancerous cell in your body, but the only way to assure this 100% is to kill the patient, because anything effective enough to get all those cancer cells are toxic enough to whack an unhealthy number of the normal cells. Also, any patient far enough along to have cancer has a pool of pre-cancerous cells that, while not cancerous now, are likely to turn cancerous in the future, even if the current cancer is cured. This has all come out in the primary research on cancer, which you need in order to develop all those treatments of cancer that are coming out all the time. Similar results have come out of other chronic diseases, like AIDS â€" indeed, AIDS has turned from an acute, lethal disease (with life expectancy of a few years) to a chronic, manageable disease within my lifetime due to the billions of dollars thrown at it by pharma and universities, but there doesn't seem to be a way to actually
cure it short of destroying the immune system and dooming the patient to life in a bubble.
You're right that pharma companies don't care about our health, but only about our money, but by the same token, they don't care about other pharma companies either. They
will screw each other over, and actual cures for what was previously been only treatable are killer apps.
Ah, one of my favorite conspiracy theories: "If men got breast cancer there would be a cure by now."
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on January 27, 2016, 08:25:05 AM
Ah, one of my favorite conspiracy theories: "If men got breast cancer there would be a cure by now."
Did nobody point out that men get breast cancer?
http://www.nationalbreastcancer.org/male-breast-cancer
Rare, but it happens.
I would put religion in the mass hysteria category before a conspiracy theory. Belief and theory are not the same.
Quote from: stromboli on January 27, 2016, 09:50:01 AM
Did nobody point out that men get breast cancer?
http://www.nationalbreastcancer.org/male-breast-cancer
Rare, but it happens.
I would put religion in the mass hysteria category before a conspiracy theory. Belief and theory are not the same.
I just replied, "Same with prostate cancer. If men got that there would be a cure by now!"
Quote from: stromboli on January 27, 2016, 09:50:01 AM
I would put religion in the mass hysteria category before a conspiracy theory. Belief and theory are not the same.
I don't actually know if Christianity can be defined as a conspiracy, and I agree about belief vs. theory. Most Christians don't conspire. They just believe. But there is a quality about the actions of architects that resemble a conspiracy, and the crap that takes place in the Vatican seems conspiratorial. Mormon leaders working in secret in their private building seem to act in a conspiratorial manner too. I realize I'm on semantic thin ice. But when conmen work in private to defraud regular people such as rank and file Christians, it strikes me as a conspiracy, or at least something closely related.
Quote from: stromboli on January 27, 2016, 09:50:01 AM
I would put religion in the mass hysteria category before a conspiracy theory. Belief and theory are not the same.
But initially, it was a conspiracy: a number of people had to start the rumors that someone going by the name of Jesus resurrected. After a certain time, with no one really challenging this floating balloon, and with more adherents, it became a matter of faith.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on January 27, 2016, 07:19:08 AM
On Dec. 7th, 1941, Sen. Gerald P. Nye (not the sharpest pencil in the box) was giving a speech to an isolationist audience of American First members. During his speech a note was passed to him saying that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. (I wonder if he knew where that was at the time?) He finished his speech about how we should stay out of the war. Then, backstage, he exclaimed "Roosevelt must have tricked them into attack us!" And right there a conspiracy theory was born.
FDR with the cooperation of Congress, because of Japanese behavior in their war with China, had cut off oil and steel to Japan. That was an act of war that had to be dealt with. The Japanese chose the wrong way to respond ... the alternative was a too great loss of face.
The actual plan was for the Japanese to attack the US in the Philippines first, and then Hawaii would be used to reinforce the Philippines. The US Navy had only that summer been forward deployed from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were too smart and the Americans (initially) too dumb to imagine any other outcome (but Billy Mitchell knew better). The Navy and Army commanders in Hawaii were scapegoated, because they actually were stupid. I am convinced that McArthur knew better, yet his legendary war fighting abilities were crap until a year later. McArthur botched the defense of the Philippines, precisely because he was counting on reinforcements from Hawaii, which never came. It was generally assumed in racist America, that the Japanese would be lousy fighters.
The America First people were backers of Hitler ... people like Prentice Bush.
Quote from: josephpalazzo on January 27, 2016, 10:26:06 AM
But initially, it was a conspiracy: a number of people had to start the rumors that someone going by the name of Jesus resurrected. After a certain time, with no one really challenging this floating balloon, and with more adherents, it became a matter of faith.
And easy assumption, because "Jesus" means "G-d's Salvation". It would be hard to imagine a messiah under any other name.
Quote from: Baruch on January 27, 2016, 12:57:13 PM
FDR with the cooperation of Congress, because of Japanese behavior in their war with China, had cut off oil and steel to Japan. That was an act of war that had to be dealt with. The Japanese chose the wrong way to respond ... the alternative was a too great loss of face.
No idea what an act of war is, then? Got it. We cut off oil and steel because the Japanese were using them in real acts of war against a friendly country, China. Japan would have been out of luck on both materials anyway as we geared up for war against Germany. The oil was being demanded by the military, to build up our strategic reserves, by Britain, who was resisting acts of war by Germany, and the American public was wondering why they couldn't get gas on Sunday while we were sending it to Japan so they could kill Chinese.
Quote
The actual plan was for the Japanese to attack the US in the Philippines first, and then Hawaii would be used to reinforce the Philippines. The US Navy had only that summer been forward deployed from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were too smart and the Americans (initially) too dumb to imagine any other outcome (but Billy Mitchell knew better). The Navy and Army commanders in Hawaii were scapegoated, because they actually were stupid. I am convinced that McArthur knew better, yet his legendary war fighting abilities were crap until a year later. McArthur botched the defense of the Philippines, precisely because he was counting on reinforcements from Hawaii, which never came. It was generally assumed in racist America, that the Japanese would be lousy fighters.
The US Fleet had been forward deployed since the year before. Adm. Richardson had complained that the facilities at Pearl were inadequate for the Fleet, and FDR ordered Kimmel to replace him.
Quote
The America First people were backers of Hitler ... people like Prentice Bush.
The Committee to Defend America First were not so homogeneous as you claim. There were Quakers, and militant North America only people and variations in between. However, America First never had more than 800,000 members total, and far fewer active members. The isolationists never passed any legislation they proposed and never blocked any legislation they opposed.
I used to teach this stuff.
BTW, the oil and steel embargoes were Executive Orders, no input from Congress needed.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on January 27, 2016, 01:10:44 PM
BTW, the oil and steel embargoes were Executive Orders, no input from Congress needed.
Just another example of Presidential over-reach ;-) FDR couldn't have gotten it thru Congress I suppose. The majority of Congress before Dec 1941 wanted nothing to do with the war in Asia or Europe. But not out of pacifism ... puleese. The US had a prepared war plan to go to war against the British Empire to steal Canada, until 1939.
I don't think the Quakers and other pacifists, would have numerically made a difference. My own father's father was pro-German, as was my mother's family (being German-American). The Ford Motor Company, IBM, the bankers associated with J P Morgan etc including Prentice Bush, were heavily involved in industrial development in Germany, especially Prussia/Silesia. Also Lindbergh was pro-German. IBM was responsible for the tabulating machines that facilitated the roundup of Jewish people in Germany. Henry Ford was a raving anti-Semite, Hitler gave him a hero of industry award and kept a signed photo. Until after WW II, the Americans were more into eugenics and anti-Semitism than the Germans. Joe Kennedy Sr was one of the German lovers too ... JFK had to be assigned to the Pacific, to get him away from German femme fatales operating in London.
Until long after Japan invaded China, China's principle ally was Germany, not the US. Nationalist Chinese troops wore German helmets when defending Singapore against the Japanese. But everyone "played" China ... getting their feat wet, but not seriously involved. Stalin's support, on again, off again, for the Chinese communists, didn't bear fruit until late in the war. It was because everyone had given up on China, in 1940 (9 years after the initial invasion of Manchuria), that Hitler switched sides to Japan, who had traditionally been allied to GB.
Now post-facto ... I certainly agree with the embargo on Japan. But that is cheating. The Japanese could have wiggled free, but their egos trapped them, just like pride trapped the German leadership.
The conspiracy, a real conspiracy at that, that comes to mind is the Watergate scandal.
Quote from: Sal1981 on January 28, 2016, 06:04:19 AM
The conspiracy, a real conspiracy at that, that comes to mind is the Watergate scandal.
Not to the R-people ... the CREEP guys were simply lost, looking for the men's room. The real Nixon scandal, was taking the US off of the gold standard. That and young Henry Kissinger promising Mao that the old Henry Kissinger would move all the American factories to China. Agnew was no big deal, he was only guilty of taking too-small bribes when governor of Maryland.
A life span of a conspiracy theory depends on it function and from what kind of circumstances it was born, because they are also collective productions of a society created to cope with a certain situation. Like many 9/11 examples. Or JFK ones. It's a huge trauma that affects anyone which a society feels helpless and struggles to cope with.
Do they benefit/profit groups and communities in the society? They'll live on.
Conspiracy theories are so very different from each other in nature, there are many types. Some are so powerful they are not even seen as one and create categories for a given culture. A conspiracy theory is not just a series of illegally planned and executed political events and crimes commited that start at a certain date and following a process to a goal ending at another date. It's not just what individuals or some groups create to manipulate, but something societies produce collectively themselves or define certain events as one in self defense or blame another party for any unwanted situations, events that have huge influence in big scale.
An example for the classic one. The Gladio Operation(s) is a conspiracy theory for the American society and it is not much different than the absurd Illimunati for most Americans. Interesting thing is the amount of Americans who have come to realise the scale of interventions made by their governments in the last 70 years around the world constantly getting higher in the last 10 years. But while there is a reasonable systematic descriptions and explanations made by experts of these events, it always stays as a conspiracy theory, although conspiracy theories of ths kind often identify by far fetched tangled secrets noone actually knows. It's not beneficial, it is rejected also the proof of how the whole workd is against the said culture.
On the other hand, same society lives in a few other conspiracy theories of a different kind they collectively created by official and social conracts and living in them as if they are the natural environment. For example, that nonwhite people in the US are the biggest threat for whites and nonwhites alike. Or that Americans paranoia of the ultimate need of defending themselves with firearms. Everybody is after them. Another one is that the perpetrators of mass shootings are mentally ill psychopaths and that's why they happen. It's impossible to see for most Americans that these are collectively created conspiracy theories to conform and accomodate whatever is going wrong.
The important point is that they are all beneficial and profitable in some way, be it rejected or accepted.
Trying to calculate something like this with math is pretty silly in my opinion, bceause we are talking about masses of people. If they could do that they should also be able to calculate the centrfugal and centripetal forces based on power zones or them changing hands that shape all kind of relations globally.
But then even if they can, is it possible to transform this kind of information into knowledge to put into use in a practical way? (Besides the impossibility of the ideal intention) Sounds like a delusion to me.
The greatest conspiracy theories create whole nations, religions, even civilizations. Are Americans any more likely to be immune to realizing that this applies to their own society? So I am not sure it is wrong to be a conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theory that takes wings, will establish the next civilization. Culture is like that ... giant turtles all the way down.