8 ms·

The maths of the paper disproving conspiracy theories don't add up

107 points by r0muald 11y ago

schoen 11y ago
It seems that the original paper didn't consider participants' incentives to keep the secret. > 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. 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. Just today the Washington Post reported on internal CIA use of deception against its own staff: 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 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/eyewa... > 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.” 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.
wrsh07 11y ago
Good point, worth skimming [if you've heard of the original article]. 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. How often do Apple product releases leak? How long does it usually take for them to leak? There should at least be enough data to do something interesting.
- wnevets 11y ago
  >How often do Apple product releases leak? How long does it usually take for them to leak? how many of those are actually leaks and not "guerilla" marketing like movie trailer leaks.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    Wouldn't they leak every time if intentional? The fact that pics only rarely get released in advance implies the leaks aren't authorised.
    - IanCal 11y ago
      Not necessarily, a constant reliable stream of information isn't as 'interesting' as more random results. I think the right terms for this are "variable reward" and "variable interval" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
nickpsecurity 11y ago
For any interested, I wrote an entire essay and some arguments in favor of conspiracy theory on Schneier's blog here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psychology_7.html#c1503021 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog... 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. 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. 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.
- FreedomToCreate 11y ago
  I agree that there are probably some conspiracies, even statistically its bound to happen. People always have something to hide. Whats ridiculous though are the infowars type of sites that literally state everything is a conspiracy and that every action a government or cooperate official makes is to enslave people and make more profits.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Oh yeah, those are ridiculous. The academic research was even valuable on how people fall into that trap. The double standards for media evidence was one of best points that I remember. So, Im not blanket supporting conspiracy claims so much as saying we need fo recognize the need for some and focus on how to evaluate them effectively.
  - astrodust 11y ago
creezy 11y ago
Conspiracy's clearly don't exist, except when the US government is found guilty of them in court of law: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/09/us/memphis-jury-sees-conspiracy-in-martin-luther-king-s-killing.html http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/09/us/memphis-jury-sees-consp... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Assassinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...
- c3534l 11y ago
  The argument in the paper (and I admit I find the analysis unconvincing) was the a successful conspiracy requires a relatively small number of people involved to successfully carry out and to go a long time undetected, not that they don't exist.
headgasket 11y ago
it's was a coverup attempt!!! :-)
kossTKR 11y ago
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. 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. 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. 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. You won't meet many tech people there, but the ones you will meet will be in ad-tech, data-reselling, or affiliate marketing. 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.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  Having spent time in both the tech world and the politics world, in my experience it is the conspiracy theorists who are naive. Generally the common denominator in conspiracy theories is that there is a group of people who are secretly in control and are purposefully causing things to happen to further their own particular agendas. As you point out, it is true that a lot of powerful people really are trying desperately to further their own agendas. But the false part is that there is a small group who is really in control. The truth is, no one is in control. Sounds scary, right? Which explains the attractiveness of conspiracy theories.
  - logicrook 11y ago
    It depends a lot on your definition of 'conspiracy theory'. If you only consider crazy babblings about martians, sure, but... Do you remember that before Snowden, the whole NSA thing was a tinfoil-hat worthy idea? And what the NSA does goes beyond what moderately tinfoily people thought. "Conspiracy theory" is often a good way to get rid of the pursuit of truth.
ender89 11y ago
"Paper disproving the concept of conspiracy theories found to be erroneous; spawns multiple conspiracy theories and adds credence to innumerable more"
idiotclock 11y ago
The title isn't grammatical. Math and Do must agree.
marcus_holmes 11y ago
It always annoys me when reading about this paper, that the Climategate (parts 1 & 2) incident is ignored. 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. I don't understand why NSA - Snowden is an example of a conspiracy being exposed but UEA - Climategate is not. 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.
- zitterbewegung 11y ago
  I think the reason that Climategate was ignored is because the original author had n=3 to prove his point. If his n was bigger it might have been studied but that seems like an issue of not having enough data points in the original author of the referred paper and not of his analysis. If you had a larger n you might find a different pattern also .
- magicalist 11y ago
  > I don't understand why NSA - Snowden is an example of a conspiracy being exposed but UEA - Climategate is not. Because when Snowden's documents were analyzed the evidence matched reality, while when the "Climategate" emails were analyzed all that was found was normal researcher chatter? Seriously, the critics of the emails quoted a few phrases out of context that sounded bad but weren't and couldn't point to any change made to data or methods that wasn't already publicly documented. Then a bunch of independent bodies went through the emails and data and agreed all was good. Mainstream rejection of a story is not evidence that that story describes an ongoing conspiracy. You might as well ask why Obama - Birthers is not considered an example of a conspiracy being exposed. Unless of course, it's career suicide for a politician or journalist to come within a mile of being seen to portray his citizenship as a conspiracy. Which could be taken as more evidence that there is a conspiracy.
  - marcus_holmes 11y ago
    my point has nothing to do with whether you believe climate change to be a hoax or not, or whether it is a hoax or not. The point is that someone exposed a bunch of internal documents in an attempt to whistleblow what they considered to be a conspiracy. The reason there's no parallel with the Birther thing is that no-one in the Obama camp attempted to whistleblow. The reason there is a comparison with Snowden-NSA is because Snowden was a whistleblower. The paper in the article holds up the climate change conspiracy theory as "it can't be a conspiracy because no-one attempted to whistleblow it" while completely ignoring that someone DID try to whistleblow it. Again, whether or not there was actually any conspiracy doesn't matter. Someone "on the inside" thought there was and attempted to whistleblow. It needs to be included in the list of failed conspiracies regardless of whether it actually was a conspiracy or not.
quasarj 11y ago
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. 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."
Zigurd 11y ago
If you throw everything together it's uninformative. 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. 2. Obviously, other supposed conspiracies are bullshit: Chupacabra, Moth-man, LGMs at Area 51. 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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
_monster_ 11y ago
Are there massive conspiracies? Just look at the set of religions in the world to control people-- and you will already have your answer.
- fsloth 11y ago
  Conspiracy is usually something that is non-obvious. The sociodynamics of religion are quite obvious, and closer to a mass hysteria. The parish provides a sufficient population that enables social proof to convince people automatically of the correctness of believing and belonging. It's not that the priesthood makes people believe things - it's the people, and the social proof and the social pressure that does this. The priesthood gains political power (which all men yearn, consciously or not), and when co-operate with the state provide a channel of mass control and communication. Thus the people perpetuate the belief, and the state has no incentive to intercede.

107 points by r0muald 11y ago

It seems that the original paper didn't consider participants' incentives to keep the secret. > 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. 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. Just today the Washington Post reported on internal CIA use of deception against its own staff: 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 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/eyewa... > 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.” 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.

wrsh07 11y ago

Good point, worth skimming [if you've heard of the original article]. 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. How often do Apple product releases leak? How long does it usually take for them to leak? There should at least be enough data to do something interesting.

wnevets 11y ago
>How often do Apple product releases leak? How long does it usually take for them to leak? how many of those are actually leaks and not "guerilla" marketing like movie trailer leaks.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  Wouldn't they leak every time if intentional? The fact that pics only rarely get released in advance implies the leaks aren't authorised.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    Not necessarily, a constant reliable stream of information isn't as 'interesting' as more random results. I think the right terms for this are "variable reward" and "variable interval" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement

nickpsecurity 11y ago

For any interested, I wrote an entire essay and some arguments in favor of conspiracy theory on Schneier's blog here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psychology_7.html#c1503021 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog... 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. 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. 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.

FreedomToCreate 11y ago
I agree that there are probably some conspiracies, even statistically its bound to happen. People always have something to hide. Whats ridiculous though are the infowars type of sites that literally state everything is a conspiracy and that every action a government or cooperate official makes is to enslave people and make more profits.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Oh yeah, those are ridiculous. The academic research was even valuable on how people fall into that trap. The double standards for media evidence was one of best points that I remember. So, Im not blanket supporting conspiracy claims so much as saying we need fo recognize the need for some and focus on how to evaluate them effectively.
- astrodust 11y ago

creezy 11y ago

Conspiracy's clearly don't exist, except when the US government is found guilty of them in court of law: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/09/us/memphis-jury-sees-conspiracy-in-martin-luther-king-s-killing.html http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/09/us/memphis-jury-sees-consp... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Assassinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...

c3534l 11y ago
The argument in the paper (and I admit I find the analysis unconvincing) was the a successful conspiracy requires a relatively small number of people involved to successfully carry out and to go a long time undetected, not that they don't exist.

headgasket 11y ago

it's was a coverup attempt!!! :-)

kossTKR 11y ago

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. 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. 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. 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. You won't meet many tech people there, but the ones you will meet will be in ad-tech, data-reselling, or affiliate marketing. 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.

snowwrestler 11y ago
Having spent time in both the tech world and the politics world, in my experience it is the conspiracy theorists who are naive. Generally the common denominator in conspiracy theories is that there is a group of people who are secretly in control and are purposefully causing things to happen to further their own particular agendas. As you point out, it is true that a lot of powerful people really are trying desperately to further their own agendas. But the false part is that there is a small group who is really in control. The truth is, no one is in control. Sounds scary, right? Which explains the attractiveness of conspiracy theories.
- logicrook 11y ago
  It depends a lot on your definition of 'conspiracy theory'. If you only consider crazy babblings about martians, sure, but... Do you remember that before Snowden, the whole NSA thing was a tinfoil-hat worthy idea? And what the NSA does goes beyond what moderately tinfoily people thought. "Conspiracy theory" is often a good way to get rid of the pursuit of truth.

ender89 11y ago

"Paper disproving the concept of conspiracy theories found to be erroneous; spawns multiple conspiracy theories and adds credence to innumerable more"

idiotclock 11y ago

The title isn't grammatical. Math and Do must agree.

marcus_holmes 11y ago

It always annoys me when reading about this paper, that the Climategate (parts 1 & 2) incident is ignored. 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. I don't understand why NSA - Snowden is an example of a conspiracy being exposed but UEA - Climategate is not. 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.

zitterbewegung 11y ago
I think the reason that Climategate was ignored is because the original author had n=3 to prove his point. If his n was bigger it might have been studied but that seems like an issue of not having enough data points in the original author of the referred paper and not of his analysis. If you had a larger n you might find a different pattern also .
magicalist 11y ago
> I don't understand why NSA - Snowden is an example of a conspiracy being exposed but UEA - Climategate is not. Because when Snowden's documents were analyzed the evidence matched reality, while when the "Climategate" emails were analyzed all that was found was normal researcher chatter? Seriously, the critics of the emails quoted a few phrases out of context that sounded bad but weren't and couldn't point to any change made to data or methods that wasn't already publicly documented. Then a bunch of independent bodies went through the emails and data and agreed all was good. Mainstream rejection of a story is not evidence that that story describes an ongoing conspiracy. You might as well ask why Obama - Birthers is not considered an example of a conspiracy being exposed. Unless of course, it's career suicide for a politician or journalist to come within a mile of being seen to portray his citizenship as a conspiracy. Which could be taken as more evidence that there is a conspiracy.
- marcus_holmes 11y ago
  my point has nothing to do with whether you believe climate change to be a hoax or not, or whether it is a hoax or not. The point is that someone exposed a bunch of internal documents in an attempt to whistleblow what they considered to be a conspiracy. The reason there's no parallel with the Birther thing is that no-one in the Obama camp attempted to whistleblow. The reason there is a comparison with Snowden-NSA is because Snowden was a whistleblower. The paper in the article holds up the climate change conspiracy theory as "it can't be a conspiracy because no-one attempted to whistleblow it" while completely ignoring that someone DID try to whistleblow it. Again, whether or not there was actually any conspiracy doesn't matter. Someone "on the inside" thought there was and attempted to whistleblow. It needs to be included in the list of failed conspiracies regardless of whether it actually was a conspiracy or not.

quasarj 11y ago

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. 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."

Zigurd 11y ago

If you throw everything together it's uninformative. 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. 2. Obviously, other supposed conspiracies are bullshit: Chupacabra, Moth-man, LGMs at Area 51. 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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

_monster_ 11y ago

Are there massive conspiracies? Just look at the set of religions in the world to control people-- and you will already have your answer.

fsloth 11y ago
Conspiracy is usually something that is non-obvious. The sociodynamics of religion are quite obvious, and closer to a mass hysteria. The parish provides a sufficient population that enables social proof to convince people automatically of the correctness of believing and belonging. It's not that the priesthood makes people believe things - it's the people, and the social proof and the social pressure that does this. The priesthood gains political power (which all men yearn, consciously or not), and when co-operate with the state provide a channel of mass control and communication. Thus the people perpetuate the belief, and the state has no incentive to intercede.