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This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry — it's easy to use and free to join.

Click the Zoom link below on the appropriate day/time...

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EVALUATING CONSPIRACY THEORIES: A GENERALIST APPROACH

INTRODUCTION:

Originally, I planned to discuss real political scandals that broke during different presidential administrations and resulted in formal investigations & criminal convictions and compare & contrast them with conspiracy theories that were less based on hard evidence than wild speculation. However, I thought that before we try to analyze specific conspiracy theories about a very controversial topic, it might be best to take a step back and try to devise a more detached way to evaluate conspiracy theories in general that we could apply to multiple topics.

Therefore, this meetup will focus on conspiracy theories in the abstract, both as a type of social phenomenon and as a type of flawed socio-political analysis. Wikipedia defines a conspiracy theory as "an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy [i.e. secret cooperation] without warrant, generally one involving an illegal or harmful act carried out by government or other powerful actors. Conspiracy theories often produce hypotheses that contradict the prevailing understanding of history or simple facts." The Wikipedia entry for "conspiracy theory" provides a fairly decent summary of research on the topic.

In a sense, this meetup can be considered a follow-up to one we had back in Feb. 2018 entitled "When Should Skeptics Defer to Expert Consensus".

Many people are resistant to the idea of deferring to the expert consensus on certain topics - of any topics - because they think the experts on a subject, although they may have more specialized knowledge, could also be engaged in some form of groupthink due to ideological biases or motivated reasoning based on who funds their research. Some people will go beyond just calling the experts "biased" and allege that they are actively promoting misinformation and colluding in support of a hidden agenda that's harmful to the populace. At that point, with allegations of intentionally malicious or criminal behavior by a powerful group, we're entering the realm of conspiracy theories.

Unlike most of our previous discussions where I ask people to watch a series of short video clips (along with some optional articles for additional reading), this discussion will be based around the 15 articles listed below. I certainly understand that most people don't have time to read all of them, so I've summarized their major points.

In terms of the format of the discussion, I plan to cover the topics in the order they're presented here, spending roughly 40 minutes discussing each of the 3 sections. As you can see, I've listed a series of questions under each subject heading that we can try to address.

I. "CONSPIRACY THEORY" AS A LINGUISTIC & SOCIAL PHENOMENON:

  • WHERE DID THE TERM "CONSPIRACY THEORY" COME FROM?
  • SHOULD WE REFER TO WELL-EVIDENCED, GENERALLY ACCEPTED CONSPIRACIES AS "CONSPIRACY FACTS"? OR DOES THIS INDICATE A MISTAKEN NOTION OF WHAT THE WORDS "FACT" & "THEORY" MEAN IN SCIENCE?
  • SINCE "CONSPIRACY" MEANS A SECRET PLAN BY A GROUP TO DO SOMETHING ILLEGAL OR HARMFUL, DOES THAT MEAN PHRASES LIKE "OPEN CONSPIRACY" OR "DISTRIBUTED CONSPIRACY" ARE CONTRADICTIONS IN TERMS?
  • SHOULD WE SIMPLY DEFINE "CONSPIRACY THEORIES" AS RUMORS ABOUT HIGH-LEVEL CORRUPTION & COLLUSION THAT HAVEN'T RECEIVED VERIFICATION FROM THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA OR THE LEGAL SYSTEM YET? IS UNVERIFIED SUSPICION INHERENTLY IRRATIONAL, OR ONLY WHEN WE INCLUDE ADDITIONAL CRITERIA LIKE WEAK EVIDENCE & POOR LOGIC?
  • WHY DO "CONSPIRACY THEORIES" APPEAR TO HAVE A DIFFERENT SOCIAL TRAJECTORY THAN MOST OF THE PROVEN CONSPIRACIES, I.E. WHY DO THEY TEND TO LINGER FOR DECADES AS UNSUBSTANTIATED RUMORS & URBAN LEGENDS? IS THIS MERELY SELECTION BIAS?
  • HOW DOES "DENIALISM" DIFFER FROM "SKEPTICISM"? WHEN SHOULD CRITICAL APPROACHES TOWARDS SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS & HISTORICAL NARRATIVES BE CONSIDERD VALID AND WHEN SHOULD THEY BE CONSIDERED AN IRRATIONAL "CONSPIRACY THEORY"?
  • IF CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE "POP SOCIOLOGY", MIGHT THEY HAVE SOME BENEFICIAL ASPECTS, E.G. CHALLENGING THE ELITE STATUS QUO? OR DO CONSPIRACY THEORIES MERELY SERVE AS A USELESS DISTRACTION FROM MORE RATIONAL ANALYSIS?
  • WHY DO YOU THINK THAT CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT POWERFUL ELITES GENERALLY DON'T GENERALLY ATTRACT THE SAME MAINSTREAM MEDIA SANCTION AS "MORAL PANICS" THAT DEMONIZE MARGINAL GROUPS? OR ARE MEDIA CIRCUSES AROUND ALLEGATIONS OF ELITE WRONG-DOING FAIRLY COMMON BUT SIMPLY DON'T GET LABELED AS "CONSPIRACY THEORIES"?
  • CAN A MEDIA OBSESSION WITH DEBUNKING CONSPIRACY THEORIES OVERSHOOT THE MARK AND BECOME A FORM OF "MORAL PANIC" THAT BENEFITS THOSE IN POWER BY DEFLECTING LEGITIMATE CRITICISM? OR DOES THE MEDIA UNDERESTIMATE THE INHERENT DANGER OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND THE THREAT THEY POSE IN TERMS OF INSPIRING VIOLENCE & EMPOWERING DEMAGOGUES?

-- Robert Blaskiewicz, "Nope, It Was Already Wrong" (CSICOP)

One of the first things to consider when discussing conspiracy theories is where & how the term originated. Interestingly enough, there's a conspiracy theory about the term "conspiracy theory" - i.e. that it originated in a 1967 CIA memo that encouraged the use of the term to discredit critics of the U.S. government. An article at the skeptic website CSICOP addresses this allegation, and notes that there was a CIA memo released in 1976 via a FOIA request (Dispatch 1035-960) that outlined arguments that field operatives could use to counter conspiracy theorizing abroad and advised where those arguments might have the largest effect.

However, the term "conspiracy theory" can be traced back much further. The earliest appearance of “conspiracy theory’ in the OED goes as far back as 1909 to an article from the American Historical Review, but Blaskiewicz dug up a reference to the term "conspiracy theory" in the medical literature of 1870, during a public debate about the growth of asylums and allegations of mistreatment of inmates in the UK. An article in The Journal of Medical Science contains a passage stating: "The theory of Dr. Sankey as to the manner in which these injuries to the chest occurred in asylums deserved our careful attention. It was at least more plausible that [sic] the conspiracy theory of Mr. Charles Reade." Thus, from the context, we can determine that "conspiracy theory" was being used to mean an implausible allegation of secretive collusion in some sort of wrong-doing as early as 1870.

-- Christina Sterbenz, "9 Huge Government Conspiracies That Actually Happened" (Business Insider)

Lists of proven conspiracies, sometimes referred to as "conspiracy facts", often circulate online. This article from Business Insider lists several "government conspiracies" that actually happened:

  1. Denatured Alcohol during Prohibition - The U.S. Department of the Treasury poisoned alcohol during Prohibition, and hundreds of people died.
  2. The Tuskegee Experiment - The U.S. Public Health Service lied about treating black men with syphilis for more than 40 years.
  3. SV40 in the Polio Vaccine - More than 100 million Americans received a polio vaccine contaminated with a potentially cancer-causing virus.
  4. Gulf of Tonkin Incident - Parts of the incident, which led to U.S. intervention in Vietnam, never happened.
  5. Operation Northwoods - Military leaders reportedly planned terrorist attacks in the U.S. to drum up support for a war against Cuba;
  6. MKULTRA - The government tested the effects of LSD on unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens.
  7. Project Azorian - In 1974, the CIA secretly resurfaced a sunken Soviet submarine with three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles;
  8. Iran-Contra Affair - The U.S. government sold weapons to Iran, violating an embargo, and used the money to support Nicaraguan militants.
  9. The Nayirah Testimony - A public relations firm organized congressional testimony that propelled U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War.

-- Mike Rothschild, "Nine True Conspiracies That Actually Aren't True or Conspiracies" (Skeptoid)

Rothschild reviews the conspiracies from the above article and argues that they don't fit the usual definition of a "conspiracy theory" - i.e. "a popularly held... non-evidenced belief that a group of powerful people secretly worked together to do something harmful, that later had compelling evidence to prove that said conspiracy was real." He judges that only 5 of them (1, 2, 6, 8, 9) were actually government conspiracies proven to be true, but they did not percolate as rumors among the public for years until evidence was finally uncovered. Instead, the public was in the dark until evidence of the conspiracy was released, at which point it was openly acknowledged & discussed in the mainstream media. As for the other 4 "conspiracies", Rothschild argues that the SV40 claim has been debunked; there was two Gulf of Tonkin incidents - one real attack & one case of jittery sailors firing at shadows; Operation Northwoods never left the initial planning stage; and Project Azorian was merely a secret military operation, not a conspiracy.

Jim Leppard makes a fairly valid criticism of Rothschild's argument in the 1st comment & offers a better definition of a conspiracy theory: "It seems to me that your definitions have at least two weaknesses:

(1) it promotes a view of 'theory' as necessarily unverified speculation, which is a source of misunderstanding about science, and

(2) they seem designed to make your thesis (conspiracy theories are never true) tautologically true.

Wouldn’t it be better to say that 'conspiracy theories' are usually believed on the basis of ideological reasons, founded in identifying anomalies in a mainstream explanation or historical account of an event where we should expect to find anomalies due to normal errors which arise from testimony and other sources due to the complexity of the event, rather than being based on the best explanation that accounts for all available evidence. A conspiracy theory that lacked these deficiencies could be demonstrated to be true, but most are not and have not been, yet are believed anyway."

-- Rationalwiki, "Denialism vs Skepticism"

Rationalwiki defines denialism as “the refusal to accept well-established theory, law, fact or evidence”. In scientific contexts, the denialist can deny a cause, an effect, the association between the two, the direction of the cause-and-effect relationship, or the identification of the cause-and-effect relationship. Often denialists practice minimization and use misplaced skepticism to give an unwarranted veneer of scientific thinking. Major scientific targets of denialism include evolution, global warming, the link between HIV and AIDS, the link between smoking and lung cancer, and evidence that there is no correlation between vaccination and autism. Denialism can also occur in the realm of historical scholarship – perhaps the most infamous version is Holocaust denial.

People often wrongly conflate skepticism and denialism, as proponents of both seem to "deny" that something exists until they're convinced otherwise. Denialists themselves often claim to be “skeptics”, and very rarely self-identify as “denialists”. But to say that a skeptic is a "homeopathy denier" and that a Holocaust denier is a "WWII history skeptic" would be wrong. While both "skepticism" and "denialism" have a critical tone, the positions are different in how they view and acquire and interpret data. Skepticism is a method while denialism is a position.

Skepticism is an essential part of the ethos of science, as it allows for theories to be treated as provisional truths but suggests new experiments to strengthen or falsify them. Skeptics look at experiments to ensure that they were performed properly with the appropriate controls, proper data analysis, and so on. The skeptical method involves examining all data and coming to a conclusion that it produces. In the realm of history, the skeptic approach is analogous to "historical revisionism" which generally acknowledges that a well-evidenced historical event occurred, but reinterprets existing evidence, introduces new evidence, reassesses the motivations and decisions of the participants, or reverses older moral judgments about heroes & villains. Conversely, denialism in historical scholarship is usually "historical negationism" - i.e. it denies a well-evidenced historical event even occurred.

Denialists view data as a means to a predetermined end – minimizing its importance if it goes against their opinion, highlighting it if it supports them, or just plain misrepresenting it for their own purposes. Skeptics keep an open mind until data shows that a hypothesis is invalid, while denialists start with the conclusion and look for support. To put it another way, denialism embraces confirmation bias while skepticism seeks to avoid it.

-- What-When-How, "Making Sense of Conspiracy Theories"

In the 4th & 5th section of the article, the author contrasts two different types of conspiracy theories - the "paranoid style" that is often common among marginal groups and focuses on alleged conspiracies among powerful elites and the "moral panic & scapegoating" type that is more common among the middle & upper classes, the mainstream news media & politicians and focuses on alleged conspiracies or epidemics of deviancy among marginal groups.

In the 6th section of the article on the function of conspiracy theories, the author notes that some scholars who take a "cultural studies" approach to conspiracy theories are less interested in debunking them than understanding them. The cultural studies approach "does not see the believers in conspiracy theory as unwitting dupes but as active shapers of theories that help them to make sense of a confusing world. It tends in effect to be a fairly charitable reading of popular beliefs. Where some critics would dismiss conspiracy theories as a failure to understand the complex processes of historical causation, this view argues that conspiracy theory is a kind of pop sociology, a way of making sense of structure and agency in a time when official versions of events and more academic forms of explanation fail to capture the imagination of a disillusioned public.

-- Türkay S. Nefes, "Review of Jack Z. Bratich's Conspiracy Panics" (Soc. Research Online)

Jack Z. Bratich, a media studies professor at Rutgers, wrote a book entitled "Conspiracy Panics" (2008) that extends the more charitable, cultural studies approach to conspiracy theories and incorporates postmodernist concepts from the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Bratich argues that there is not a clear definition of conspiracy theory, and the perception of the concept is dependent on “truth regimes” – i.e. the types of discourse a society accepts and makes function as true. He criticizes "political rationality" - i.e. the idealized way in which people are supposed to understand politics - and argues that the mainstream response to conspiracy theories is a symptom of “govermentality” – i.e. the way governments try to produce the citizen best suited to fulfill the governments' policies. He questions the tendency to associate conspiracy theories with paranoia and political extremism, and claims that this is a way of labeling conspiracy theories as political pathologies.

Bratich's book investigates the way “conspiracy panics” function in left-wing politics, where the position of the mainstream establishment left is typically that conspiracy theories are a diversion from real politics and an inadequate oversimplification. He proposes that left-wing activism is diminished by conspiracy panics, and criticizes left-wing activists that ignore conspiracy theories' radical democratic potential.

  • Note: Bratich's suggestion that conspiracy theories hold "radical democratic potential" has been echoed by the political scientist Michael Parenti. The linguist & political critic Noam Chomsky has been more critical of conspiracy theories, seeing them more as a useless distraction, and has urged left-wing activists to utilize "institutional analysis" instead. For more on this dispute, check out the following links:

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/125.html

https://aotearoaawiderperspective.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/michael-parenti-on-conspiracy-theories-and-the-left-wing-paranoia-about-them/

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II. USING LOGIC TO UNDERSTAND CONSPIRACIES:

  • ARE DAVID HUME'S ARGUMENTS AGAINST MIRACLES USEFUL FOR DEBUNKING CONSPIRACY THEORIES, OR ONLY THE SUBSET THAT INVOLVE VIOLATIONS OF KNOWN SCIENTIFIC LAWS?
  • CAN OCCAM'S RAZOR HELP US GAUGE THE PLAUSIBILITY OF A CONSPIRACY THEORY FROM THE NUMBER OF CLAIMS & THE "LAW OF CONSERVATION OF BELIEF"?
  • DOES THE BASE RATE OF MISTAKES & ACCIDENTS LEAD TO THE HEURISTIC THAT WE SHOULD ASSUME A "COCK-UP BEFORE CONSPIRACY" (I.E. HANLON'S RAZOR)?
  • IF CONSPIRACY THEORISTS MODIFY THEIR THEORY OVER TIME AS THEY GET NEW EVIDENCE, CAN THEY MAKE THEIR THEORY MORE PLAUSIBLE, OR THIS JUST A FORM OF "POST HOC THEORIZING" THAT CAN MAKE A CONSPIRACY THEORY UNFALSIFIABLE?
  • IS THE "SHILL GAMBIT" - I.E. DISMISSING THOSE PRESENTING CONTRADICTORY EVIDENCE AS SPREADERS OF MISINFORMATION - AN AUTOMATIC RED FLAG?
  • CAN A GROUP'S OPENLY STATED GOALS HELP SOLVE THE COORDINATION PROBLEM FOR CONSPIRATORS? IF SO, SHOULD WE LESS SUSPICIOUS OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES THAT ALIGN WITH A GROUP'S OPENLY STATED GOALS?

-- Katherine Smith, "The Public Trust Skepticism Factor" (TPV)

Smith discusses the philosophy professor Brian Keeley's work on conspiracy theories & his major concepts, which differ from Grimes' mathematical approach by being grounded in logic. Keeley offers an analysis of conspiracy theories inspired by David Hume's critique of miracles, which are, by definition, violations of natural law. Hume argued we are not warranted in believing in miracles based on even multiple testimonies from reliable eyewitnesses, since the laws of nature are derived from a much larger amount of eyewitness testimony and thus offer much stronger evidence. Keeley argues that, unlike miracles, there is no a priori method for distinguishing "warranted" conspiracy theories from those which are "unwarranted", provided they don't invoke violations of natural laws.

However, Keeley does think that there is a cluster of characteristics often shared by unwarranted conspiracy theories. In addition to making a probabilistic argument similar to D.R. Grimes below (i.e. the more people involved in a conspiracy the more likely it would be exposed), Keeley also brings up the issues of "Errant Data" – the alleged slip-ups the conspirators made that those who believe in a conspiracy have spotted – which creates the "Conspiracy Theory Paradox", i.e. if the powerful group that orchestrated a complex conspiracy could pull it off, why can't they suppress the publication of the Errant Data?

Keeley also faults conspiracy theorists for their "Critical Thinking Trap" saying that "unwilling to abandon what they know to be the truth; that is, that the institutional view is false, theorists are forced into a Degenerative Research Program... where the auxiliary hypotheses and initial conditions are continually modified in light of new evidence in order to protect the original theory from apparent disconfirmation." Basically, this continual additional of ad hoc rationalizations & post hoc theorizing leads to "overfitting" the data and eventually makes the conspiracy theory unfalsifiable.

Keeley also notes that there's some motivated reasoning on the side of the conspiracy theory debunkers – they're defending the institutional view in part because they feel society can't function without public trust in those institutions.

-- Matthew R. X. Dentith, "Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously" (Phil. Papers)

Matthew R. X. Dentith is a philosophy professor at the University of Waikato in New Zealand whose research includes analyses of why we have grounds to be suspicious of official theories, the reliability of the transmission of rumors and the role of trust in the acceptance of theories. In a collection of essays by various philosophers and curated by Dentith entitled "Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously", many of the essays debate the relative merits of Generalism and Particularism. Generalism is the view that there are a generalized set of heuristics that can be used when analyzing all manner of conspiracy theories to determine their degree of plausibility, whereas Particularism is the view that we should appraise individual conspiracy theories rather than appraise them in light of our views of the class of conspiracy theories generally. They also discuss various intermediate positions referred to as "defeasible generalism" and "reluctant particularism" that advocated investigating the particulars of theories about smaller, simpler & shorter-lived conspiracies but also ruling out larger, more complex & longer-lived conspiracy theories as candidates for serious investigation.

In a later essay entitled "In Defense of Particularism: A Reply to Stokes," Dentith replied to Patrick Stokes who advocated "reluctant particularism".

Stokes was concerned that, even aside from epistemological questions, we should be ethically reluctant to validate conspiracy theorizing when it involves the "morally serious act of accusation" and can result in conspiracy theorists, for example, harassing the parents of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. More generally, Stokes is concerned about how "conspiracy narratives" can be used to demonize large classes of convenient scapegoats by repeating certain claims over & over regardless of how much evidence that we might lay against them. Dentith responds by arguing one "can theorise about conspiracy theories without making accusations", and that "to theorise about a conspiracy—to wit, to engage in conspiracy theorising—is a different task from hooking into an existing conspiracy narrative to press a point."

Note: For more on Detith's views, check out his TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlvS-GrA00I

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Facebook post on Hanlon's Razor (Jan. 19, 2016)

The rationalist blogger & AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky had an insightful Facebook post on conspiracy theories several years ago:

"To revise Hanlon's Razor, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to an enormous complicated system full of conflicting incentives getting stuck in a weird equilibrium. When that weird equilibrium is crushing people in its gears, don't attribute that harm to a conspiracy of evil powerful people who planned it all and profit from it. There is no master plan behind the US medical system, it's just an enormous complicated thing that got stuck. Even if there's a billionaire or politician benefiting from the current setup, they didn't cunningly plan for the US medical system to be dysfunctional, and they couldn't make anything be different by choosing otherwise. Conspiracies of evil people plan how to profit from the System's current stuck state. They don't decide where it gets stuck."

  • Eliezer links to a clip from the film, "The Cube", entitled "There is no one is in charge" -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boDgkH7Yw-0

Yudkowsky concludes: "Being able to appreciate this strikes me as a critical developmental stage of political maturity, and I wish I knew how to teach it. Or as John Kelsey put it in the comments: 'We see a broken watch and infer a Watchbreaker'."

To understand Yudkowsky's comment, it helps to know that "Hanlon's Razor" is an old adage that states "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately explained by stupidity".

Hanlon's Razor is essentially a special case of Occam's Razor, a principle in the philosophy of science which states that, assuming equal explanatory power, the simplest solution (formally, the one with fewest assumptions) should be preferred. Assuming evil intent is a pretty big assumption, especially when we know that many people are stupid or incompetent and often make mistakes, and that even intelligent & competent people still make mistakes from time to time, so in general we shouldn't be too quick to jump to the conclusion that a bad thing is intentional rather than an accident.

In addition to knowing what Hanlon's Razor is, it also helps to know that Yudkowsky is a proponent of Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available.

Yudkowsky is implicity arguing that Hanlon's Razor can be derived from a special Bayesian interpretation of Occam's Razor - see e.g. this MIT paper.

The Bayesian Occam's Razor says that with each variable you add to a hypothesis it's probability of being correct goes down according to the "law of conservation of belief." (Failure to account for this is known as the "conjunction fallacy".) This means that (ceteris parabus) when we seek to explain a pattern of data points, a simple linear trend governed by one variable is more likely than a curve governed by two variables, which in turn is more likely than a complex fluctuating trend line with many variables that has perfect correlation. This is because, in general, the multi-variable explanation tends to be "overfitting" the data and confuses a lot of fluctuations caused by noise to be part of the signal. Complex models tend to fail to accurately make future predictions because the "noise" they mistook for part of the signal was random and will be different in the future. The assumption of "noise" comes from entropy, i.e. things tend to become disordered over time, and so the social world always has a background level (or "base rate") of random events.

When we apply the Bayesian Occam's Razor to our socio-political world, we get Hanlon's Razor. Due to entropy, we should normally assume there's a background level of randomness & mistakes that create uncertainty (think of "Murphy's Law" and the "fog of war"). We can see signs of agency & purpose in our socio-political world amid the background of randomness, and that's the result of intentional cooperation & competition between various agents as well as broad trends caused by unintended convergences of interests (e.g. the "Invisible Hand" of the market or the "Tragedy of the Commons"), rather than perfect orchestration of almost everything by an omnipotent, omniscient secret cabal with completely loyal followers working in lockstep.

This is not because powerful people & their servants are necessarily nice & law-abiding, but because omnipotence & omniscience are both prohibitively expensive and improbable. Powerful people tend to compete with each other and followers don't always follow orders. (Successful conspirators tend to be aware of Murphy's Law and don't add too many variables or actors to their plans.) Notice that Hanlon's Razor doesn't compel us to become a "coincidence theorist" and assume every social phenomenon is entirely random, just that a lot of bad things that happen have aspects that are random and/or the result of unintended convergence. Thus, powerful people tend to plan & control some things but also have to try to make the best of general trends and random events (i.e. "never let a crisis go to waste") rather than planning & controlling everything.

-- Scott Alexander, "Too Many Dare Call It Conspiracy" (Slate Star Codex)

The rationalist blogger & psychiatrist Scott Alexander argues that too many "perfectly reasonable hypotheses get attacked as conspiracy theories, derailing the discussion into arguments over when you’re allowed to use the phrase." However, he suggests some criteria that he thinks can help us distinguish plausible conspiracy theories from implausible ones.

Scott says the "Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories" is: “You can’t run a big organization in secret without any outsiders noticing or any insiders blowing the whistle.” If we keep this in mind, Scott thinks we can say that conspiracies that are aligned with the stated goals of a group are far less likely to result in whistleblower leaks than those that run contrary to the group's stated goals.

Thus, for example, the CIA can fix elections in foreign countries, and if somebody whistleblows, they will not receive the thanks of a grateful country - they’ll probably just be arrested for leaking classified information. However, fixing US elections would take a powerful conspiracy within the CIA. You would have to hide it from the idealistic young recruits who come in hoping to make the world safe for democracy. You would have to convince all the other CIA agents to hide it from Congress, from the other intelligence services, and from any CIA agent who wasn’t on board. And a whistleblower really would receive the thanks of a grateful country. Although the CIA gets the advantage of existing publicly, the intra-CIA conspiracy to fix elections doesn’t, and so the Basic Argument strikes it down. (The CIA does work on lots of things the public wouldn’t approve of, like MKULTRA. But the bigger and more controversial they are, the more likely they are to get leaked, which I think supports this theory. At some point the CIA recruits start saying “This isn’t what we signed up for”, and then the usual conspiracy dynamics apply.)

The Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories gives some heuristics for when conspiracies might be more or less plausible. The typical Illuminati-style theory violates all of them; other theories that only violate a few might still be true. Some of these heuristics might be things like:

A. You generally can’t keep the existence of a large organization that engages in clandestine activities secret. If you have an overt large organization that engages in clandestine activities, and everybody knows about it, they can sometimes accomplish conspiracies compatible with their public-facing mission statement but are unlikely to accomplish conspiracies very far outside the range of that statement.

B. When a group has an obvious interest in an outcome, its members can coordinate upon that outcome without there being any conspiracy.

C. When a group is able to form an internal culture in which their nefarious goals seem reasonable and prosocial, they can coordinate upon them in ways that might look like a conspiracy to outsiders.

D. All else being equal, small conspiracies are likelier than big conspiracies. A cult may take over a town without the average person knowing it; it would be more surprising for them to take over a country.

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III. USING PROBABILITY & NETWORK ANALYSIS TO UNDERSTAND CONSPIRACIES:

  • HOW DO SIZE, DURATION, DEFECTION RATE & MORTALITY RATE DETERMINE THE PROBABILITY OF CONSPIRACIES REMAINING SECRET?
  • WOULD COMPARTMENTALIZATON OF A CONSPIRACY (E.G. SPY/TERRORIST CELLS) CHANGE THE EFFECTIVE SIZE OF A CONSPIRACY WITH REGARDS TO PROBABILITY OF LEAKS?
  • WHAT SHOULD BE CONSIDERED A "LEAK" THAT EXPOSES A CONSPIRACY - I.E. HOW MUCH MAINSTREAM MEDIA ATTENTION SHOULD WE EXPECT IT TO GARNER? SHOULD WE ASSUME PUBLIC EXPOSURE WILL ALWAYS PUT AN END TO A CONSPIRACY, OR MIGHT IT MERELY CHANGE IT TO AN "OPEN CONSPIRACY" (E.G. NSA PRISM PROGRAM)?
  • ARE SINGLE-EVENT CONSPIRACIES LESS LIKELY TO BE LEAKED THAN LONG-TERM CONSPIRACIES, SINCE MORTALITY CAN EVENTUALLY BURY THE SECRET IN THE FORMER CASE?
  • IS THERE SOME WAY TO DISTINGUISH IMPLAUSIBLE CONSPIRACY THEORIES FROM EXPLANATIONS OF REVEALED CONSPIRACIES BASED ON THEIR NARRATIVE STRUCTURE, SUCH AS DIFFERENCES IN THEIR COMPLEXITY AND "MULTI-DOMAIN" VS "SINGLE DOMAIN" FOCUS?
  • WHY DO TERRORIST NETWORKS & TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS BOTH DISPLAY A POWER LAW DISTRIBUTION, AND WHAT MIGHT THIS TELL US ABOUT REAL-WORLD CONSPIRACIES & "CONVERGENCE OF INTERESTS"?

-- Natalie Shoemaker, "What's The Probability that the Moon Landing Was All a Hoax? One Man Has Done the Math" (Big Think)

The mathematician David Robert Grimes has shown why conspiracies are increasingly unlikely the more people that are involved and the more time that elapses. This is based off a model using Poisson statistics which shows that the chance of defection increases logarithmically over time – i.e. the same type of curve you’d get if you plotted the odds of rolling a six from a growing number of dice – your odds get closer and closer to 1 but never quite reach it. (This makes sense to those familiar with game theory, since it's similar to the chance of defection in a multiplayer version of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.)

Grimes explains how this applies to the odds of a conspiracy staying secret: "When the amount of people involved in a conspiracy increases, the rate at which the conspiracy will be revealed increases (whether by some sort of whistleblower or by an accidental slip of the tongue). For a conspiracy of even only a few thousand actors, intrinsic failure would arise within decades... For hundreds of thousands, such failure would be assured within less than half a decade.”

However, note that the above statement applies to a sustained conspiracy with new members periodically joining (e.g. suppressing a cure for cancer), whereas with a one-time event with a fixed set of conspirators (e.g. JFK assassination) mortality could lead to a conspiracy being "buried" without discovery after 60 years or so.

-- Martin Robbins, "The maths of the paper disproving conspiracy theories don't add up" (Little Atoms)

Robbins agrees with D.R. Grimes' overall thesis – i.e. if you have a lot of people, hiding a conspiracy becomes incredibly unlikely – but takes issue with aspects of Grimes methodology:

(1) Grime only studied 3 conspiracies which is a very small dataset, and they're all from large organizations (NSA, FBI, US Public Health Service).

(2) In the case of the NSA, Grimes assumed all 30,000 employees knew about the PRISM program, which is highly unlikely since it would include low-level staff.

(3) The very low probability Grimes uses for the annual chance an individual will leak information (0.0005%) seems way too low.

(4) Robbins discovered that Grimes made a basic calculus error that causes his equations not to account for a changing population at all, although "in truth it doesn’t affect the conclusions too much, because the timelines for the conspiracies Grimes looked at were so short that mortality didn’t really kick in."

(5) Robbins also points out that it's unclear what qualifies as a "leak" for the purposes of unmasking a conspiracy, e.g. many climate skeptics would consider the Climategate emails to be a leak that disproved the "global warming hoax" but most climate scientists would not.

Note: For more on problems with the assumptions in Grimes' paper, see the entry at WikiSpooks (although beware, it's essentially a wiki for conspiracy theorists).

-- Timothy R. Tangherlini, at al.,"An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web" (PLOS)

Timothy R. Tangherlini is a professor of folklore at UCLA who has pioneered computational work for describing their narrative structures. In the above paper, he & his colleagues present an automated tool for the discovery and description of the narrative frameworks of conspiracy theories that circulate on social media, and actual conspiracies reported in the news. They base this work on two repositories of blog posts & news articles describing the well-known conspiracy theory Pizzagate from 2016, and the New Jersey political conspiracy Bridgegate from 2013.

Per the abstract: "Inspired by the qualitative narrative theory of [A.J.] Greimas, we formulate a graphical generative machine learning model where nodes represent actors/actants, and multi-edges and self-loops among nodes capture context-specific relationships. Posts and news items are viewed as samples of subgraphs of the hidden narrative framework network. The problem of reconstructing the underlying narrative structure is then posed as a latent model estimation problem...

We show how the Pizzagate framework relies on the conspiracy theorists’ interpretation of 'hidden knowledge' to link otherwise unlinked domains of human interaction, and hypothesize that this multi-domain focus is an important feature of conspiracy theories. We contrast this to the single domain focus of an actual conspiracy. While Pizzagate relies on the alignment of multiple domains, Bridgegate remains firmly rooted in the single domain of New Jersey politics.

We hypothesize that the narrative framework of a conspiracy theory might stabilize quickly in contrast to the narrative framework of an actual conspiracy, which might develop more slowly as revelations come to light. By highlighting the structural differences between the two narrative frameworks, our approach could be used by private and public analysts to help distinguish between conspiracy theories and conspiracies."

Note: To learn about Tangherlini's use of an AI to study the structure and dissemination of conspiracy theories, check out this episode of Mike Walsh's podcast.

-- Alvin N. Saperstein, "Why Do Terrorist Attacks Satisfy A Scaling Law?" (APS)

To the extent that powerful people organize & conspire to do bad things, how can we estimate the probability of the size of their conspiracies and the magnitude of their effects on society? Studies of terrorism show that the size of terrorists cells and the magnitude of terrorist attacks (measured in casualties) both follow an "inverse power law distribution" — i.e. if you chart the size of the attack or the size of the terror cell on the y-axis and frequency (or probability) on the x-axis, you get a curving L-shaped line. That's because there's only a few mass-casualty attacks every few years and only a few large, multinational terrorist organizations at any one time like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, but there's a lot of small terrorist cells and lone wolf terrorists that collectively make many attacks that each cause a few deaths. This is probably a good model to use for other types of conspiracies, since terrorism is merely a type of conspiracy conducted by non-state actors, although it's often sponsored by states. (Saperstein's essay linked above is fairly technical but provides additional details.)

-- Andy Coghlan & Debora MacKenzie w/ James Glattfelder, "Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world" (New Scientist)

The scaling law found in terrorist networks also appears within the realm of international business & banking, an area that has often fascinated conspiracy theorists. In 2011, right as the Occupy Wall Street movement was gaining international attention, a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich undertook an empirical study of the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs) which combined the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the TNCs. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The study revealed a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1,318 core companies had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20% of global operating revenues, the 1,318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60% of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40% of the total wealth in the network. In effect, less than 1% of the companies were able to control 40% of the entire network. Most were financial institutions – the top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs. (While the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, this is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do.)

The researchers emphasize that the “super-entity” they found is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world, since such structures are common in nature. Concentrated networks form because newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups.

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. They feel that 147 TNCs is too many to sustain extensive collusion, although they suspect the 147 may compete in the market but act together on common interests – and resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

Note: For more on this study, check out James Glattfelder’s TED talk.

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