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The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. How many people work in Thailand's hard driv

The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. How many people work in Thailand's hard drive manufacturing plants? Hundreds? Thousands? How many people in the logistics channels? How many people are vending food to these employees? How many people in the US Government? Oh, and pulling this off would also require co-ordination with Thai Government. That's hundreds of people right there.

choeger 5y ago
You overthink this. The flooding might not have led to a crisis alone if the NSA or any other big buyer didn't place a huge order at that time. You also don't need a conspiracy to keep the procurements of a government agency confidential.
sinyug 5y ago
> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. Not if you can discredit those who dare to speak out by labeling them "conspiracy theorists," thereby discouraging others from coming out as well. I remember an episode from an old American sitcom where people make fun of the dad (an airline pilot) when he claims to have seen a UFO. It is the same thing. Any deviation from the standard narrative isn't tolerated by most people.
- pas 5y ago
  ... but aren't the observations itself part of the standard narrative, and the nonstandard part is how people explain them? (One standard explanation being that they are just some next-level high-tech stuff being tested.)
  - sinyug 5y ago
    > but aren't the observations itself part of the standard narrative Only in a technical sense. When people talk about UFOs, they are not referring to known things like weather balloons, planes or fighter jets, but, instead, to something out of the ordinary. However, every "standard" explanation offered is one of these things. The standard narrative here is: UFOs don't exist.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >The standard narrative here is: UFOs don't exist. That seems like a reasonable narrative considering that the definition of UFO you used basically means "aliens".
      - sinyug 5y ago
        You can come up with any number of scifi-ish explanations: aliens, humans from the future, lost/forgotten civilizations. But it could also be someone testing an uncommon craft. Frankly, we don't know, and one of the reasons is, I believe, people are hesitant to take a serious look at it (or even talk about it) because they don't want to be classified as kooks.
    - pas 5y ago
      I assume you mean UFOs as in "alien flying saucers". I think the rationally correct belief is that we simply have no evidence of aliens at this time, and since we virtually know absolutely nothing about what pilots saw (all we know is that there are these observations), we just fall back to our priors (base assumptions). Sure, it might be aliens. And hence the ancient aliens meme. It might all be secret military stuff. (Or the mix of the two, hence the storm Area 51 meme.) And in this case I don't see what's wrong with the standard narrative. If there are truly aliens flying regularly in our atmosphere we should strap a few 4K recorders on regular airline planes, and we just have to wait. Not to mention the increasing number of space launches and spacecraft up there. And increasing number of downward looking observatories.
betwixthewires 5y ago
> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. While I don't know anything about the theory being discussed here, the pervasive belief in Santa Clause among children disproves your point entirely.
- pas 5y ago
  Because of Big Santa (ie. parents). And that promptly fails when the cost of maintaining the Santa system gets too big (ie. as the child's mental faculties develop, plus as the child interacts with the outside world not controlled by the parents). So unless we all are living in a very well orchestrated NSA Truman show, it's unlikely that your argument applies.
  - salawat 5y ago
    Perhaps you should read Hogfather or Making Money by Terry Pratchett. In which the importance of the lies that society tells itself is touched upon. "All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" MY POINT EXACTLY -Hogfather For a TL:DR of Making Money, there's https://www.ft.com/content/1aebc9f8-70bb-11dc-98fc-0000779fd2ac https://www.ft.com/content/1aebc9f8-70bb-11dc-98fc-0000779fd... I'd still recommend the book though. There are so many things that are little more than flaky veneers taken for granted in adult human life that the fact anything works at all generally comes down to an intentioned group of people 'conspiring' to make it so, and no one ever bothers to ask about it, as it 'just werkz' and creates value. It's only a problem when too many externalities get ignored, in which case, everyone starts to notice. Once you understand this, the beauty of the 'conspiracy theorist' meme coming out of an intelligence agency to get people to stop taking those who ask inconvenient questions starts to take on a stroke of genius. You get people who rock the boat discredited out the gate, and reinforce the status quo. ...Until that document gets declassified and blows up in your face anyway.
K0balt 5y ago
At the time it was kind of an open secret in the industry. The floods were a convenient explanation, but a very large order from a client with a confidentiality clause ( very common in the industry) was widely known to be the main reason for short supply. It is possible that this client was someone else other than the NAS er... NSA but it is not very likely and at the time it was conventional wisdom among insiders that the "big spin" was the cause. There were even jokes about how all those drives spinning had to be oriented si that the precession wouldn’t slow down the earths rotation etc. Just because a customer orders a few gazillion of product x and wants to keep it quiet doesn’t make some kind of nutty conspiracy theory. It happens all the time. The Thailand floods drew down production even more, but without the giant order, there wouldn’t have been the same impact. Fun fact, any time two or more people want to keep something on the DL , it’s a conspiracy. Nearly everything that an intelligence agency does, is de facto, a conspiracy.
- andai 5y ago
  One of my favorite memes (in the sense of memetics) is the meme "conspiracy theorist". This phrase was weaponized by the CIA as a memetic self-defense mechanism. (Their own documents admit this!) But if you tell someone this, the meme itself is triggered in their mind, and their instinct is to not believe you, because you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >This phrase was weaponized by the CIA as a memetic self-defense mechanism. (Their own documents admit this!) That seems... totally expected? The problem comes when you're trying to use it as proof of something. Some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, but that doesn't mean every conspiracy is true.
- donalhunt 5y ago
  All big manufacturers bought whatever supplies they could get their hands on as soon as the impact of the floods was clear. Companies are uniquely positioned to minimise risk in their ability to execute. I remember this period well and aware that a number of large players basically bought up whatever supply was available to cover their needs in the short to medium term. The result was that retail pricing more or less doubled (if you could even get drives).
anticodon 5y ago
But where would a person speak to disclose the secret? Internet is very effectively censored by the US monopolies now. If something is not indexed by Google, it's effectively non-existent. FAANG censorship is fast and effective. E.g. there were many important US bureaucrats involved in the Theranos scandal (even current US president). When I try to find anything related to that matter now, Google returns pages with many links removed by censors. It's almost impossible to find people responsible for withdrawing money from US budget via Theranos. Also, assuming that 3 letter agencies were involved in the operation, any whistleblower would understand that destiny of Epstein will await her/him in near future. Also, there's no "independent" journalism, all media belong to few influential entities, there's only approved articles appear in newspapers, magazines, on TV and YouTube.
- ChrisRR 5y ago
  Literally anywhere, the internet isn't consored anywhere near as much as you think. If someone posted a plausible/verifiable account of what happened in a HN thread, then it would've made it halfway round the world before the NSA could take it down
- gruez 5y ago
  > But where would a person speak to disclose the secret? Internet is very effectively censored by the US monopolies now. So why didn't they bother censoring this comment?
  - Lammy 5y ago
    SNR is the censorship mechanism for the English web, not GFW-style.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Sounds nebulous and hard to falsify.
jeegsy 5y ago
> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. Where did this idea come from?
- bun_at_work 5y ago
  Not OP, but I think this is the source for their claim: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  Common sense and knowledge of human shortcomings. It's hard to keep a juicy secret.

choeger 5y ago

You overthink this. The flooding might not have led to a crisis alone if the NSA or any other big buyer didn't place a huge order at that time. You also don't need a conspiracy to keep the procurements of a government agency confidential.

sinyug 5y ago

> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. Not if you can discredit those who dare to speak out by labeling them "conspiracy theorists," thereby discouraging others from coming out as well. I remember an episode from an old American sitcom where people make fun of the dad (an airline pilot) when he claims to have seen a UFO. It is the same thing. Any deviation from the standard narrative isn't tolerated by most people.

pas 5y ago
... but aren't the observations itself part of the standard narrative, and the nonstandard part is how people explain them? (One standard explanation being that they are just some next-level high-tech stuff being tested.)
- sinyug 5y ago
  > but aren't the observations itself part of the standard narrative Only in a technical sense. When people talk about UFOs, they are not referring to known things like weather balloons, planes or fighter jets, but, instead, to something out of the ordinary. However, every "standard" explanation offered is one of these things. The standard narrative here is: UFOs don't exist.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >The standard narrative here is: UFOs don't exist. That seems like a reasonable narrative considering that the definition of UFO you used basically means "aliens".
    - sinyug 5y ago
      You can come up with any number of scifi-ish explanations: aliens, humans from the future, lost/forgotten civilizations. But it could also be someone testing an uncommon craft. Frankly, we don't know, and one of the reasons is, I believe, people are hesitant to take a serious look at it (or even talk about it) because they don't want to be classified as kooks.
  - pas 5y ago
    I assume you mean UFOs as in "alien flying saucers". I think the rationally correct belief is that we simply have no evidence of aliens at this time, and since we virtually know absolutely nothing about what pilots saw (all we know is that there are these observations), we just fall back to our priors (base assumptions). Sure, it might be aliens. And hence the ancient aliens meme. It might all be secret military stuff. (Or the mix of the two, hence the storm Area 51 meme.) And in this case I don't see what's wrong with the standard narrative. If there are truly aliens flying regularly in our atmosphere we should strap a few 4K recorders on regular airline planes, and we just have to wait. Not to mention the increasing number of space launches and spacecraft up there. And increasing number of downward looking observatories.

betwixthewires 5y ago

> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. While I don't know anything about the theory being discussed here, the pervasive belief in Santa Clause among children disproves your point entirely.

pas 5y ago
Because of Big Santa (ie. parents). And that promptly fails when the cost of maintaining the Santa system gets too big (ie. as the child's mental faculties develop, plus as the child interacts with the outside world not controlled by the parents). So unless we all are living in a very well orchestrated NSA Truman show, it's unlikely that your argument applies.
- salawat 5y ago
  Perhaps you should read Hogfather or Making Money by Terry Pratchett. In which the importance of the lies that society tells itself is touched upon. "All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" MY POINT EXACTLY -Hogfather For a TL:DR of Making Money, there's https://www.ft.com/content/1aebc9f8-70bb-11dc-98fc-0000779fd2ac https://www.ft.com/content/1aebc9f8-70bb-11dc-98fc-0000779fd... I'd still recommend the book though. There are so many things that are little more than flaky veneers taken for granted in adult human life that the fact anything works at all generally comes down to an intentioned group of people 'conspiring' to make it so, and no one ever bothers to ask about it, as it 'just werkz' and creates value. It's only a problem when too many externalities get ignored, in which case, everyone starts to notice. Once you understand this, the beauty of the 'conspiracy theorist' meme coming out of an intelligence agency to get people to stop taking those who ask inconvenient questions starts to take on a stroke of genius. You get people who rock the boat discredited out the gate, and reinforce the status quo. ...Until that document gets declassified and blows up in your face anyway.

K0balt 5y ago

At the time it was kind of an open secret in the industry. The floods were a convenient explanation, but a very large order from a client with a confidentiality clause ( very common in the industry) was widely known to be the main reason for short supply. It is possible that this client was someone else other than the NAS er... NSA but it is not very likely and at the time it was conventional wisdom among insiders that the "big spin" was the cause. There were even jokes about how all those drives spinning had to be oriented si that the precession wouldn’t slow down the earths rotation etc. Just because a customer orders a few gazillion of product x and wants to keep it quiet doesn’t make some kind of nutty conspiracy theory. It happens all the time. The Thailand floods drew down production even more, but without the giant order, there wouldn’t have been the same impact. Fun fact, any time two or more people want to keep something on the DL , it’s a conspiracy. Nearly everything that an intelligence agency does, is de facto, a conspiracy.

andai 5y ago
One of my favorite memes (in the sense of memetics) is the meme "conspiracy theorist". This phrase was weaponized by the CIA as a memetic self-defense mechanism. (Their own documents admit this!) But if you tell someone this, the meme itself is triggered in their mind, and their instinct is to not believe you, because you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
- gruez 5y ago
  >This phrase was weaponized by the CIA as a memetic self-defense mechanism. (Their own documents admit this!) That seems... totally expected? The problem comes when you're trying to use it as proof of something. Some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, but that doesn't mean every conspiracy is true.
donalhunt 5y ago
All big manufacturers bought whatever supplies they could get their hands on as soon as the impact of the floods was clear. Companies are uniquely positioned to minimise risk in their ability to execute. I remember this period well and aware that a number of large players basically bought up whatever supply was available to cover their needs in the short to medium term. The result was that retail pricing more or less doubled (if you could even get drives).

anticodon 5y ago

But where would a person speak to disclose the secret? Internet is very effectively censored by the US monopolies now. If something is not indexed by Google, it's effectively non-existent. FAANG censorship is fast and effective. E.g. there were many important US bureaucrats involved in the Theranos scandal (even current US president). When I try to find anything related to that matter now, Google returns pages with many links removed by censors. It's almost impossible to find people responsible for withdrawing money from US budget via Theranos. Also, assuming that 3 letter agencies were involved in the operation, any whistleblower would understand that destiny of Epstein will await her/him in near future. Also, there's no "independent" journalism, all media belong to few influential entities, there's only approved articles appear in newspapers, magazines, on TV and YouTube.

ChrisRR 5y ago
Literally anywhere, the internet isn't consored anywhere near as much as you think. If someone posted a plausible/verifiable account of what happened in a HN thread, then it would've made it halfway round the world before the NSA could take it down
gruez 5y ago
> But where would a person speak to disclose the secret? Internet is very effectively censored by the US monopolies now. So why didn't they bother censoring this comment?
- Lammy 5y ago
  SNR is the censorship mechanism for the English web, not GFW-style.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Sounds nebulous and hard to falsify.

jeegsy 5y ago

> The plausibility of a conspiracy theory diminishes as the number of people necessary to keep the secret increases. Where did this idea come from?

bun_at_work 5y ago
Not OP, but I think this is the source for their claim: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
BenjiWiebe 5y ago
Common sense and knowledge of human shortcomings. It's hard to keep a juicy secret.