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One of my conspiracy theories is that the saying "two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead" is itself a psyop to make the masses believe that widespr

One of my conspiracy theories is that the saying "two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead" is itself a psyop to make the masses believe that widespread conspiracies involving hundreds or thousands of people aren't practical to pull off. Large groups of people absolutely can actively or passively conspire and all remain quiet about it if their incentives strongly align. And if one of them breaks rank, then we can just pay off the news media to ignore them or paint them as a quack.

googlryas 4y ago
See: operation snow white. It may have utilized up to 5000 covert agents, and was only detected perhaps due to an observant librarian.
- fundad 4y ago
  See also COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
- anonporridge 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
colpabar 4y ago
Yeah, maybe it's just that I'm a decent liar, but the way that people so readily dismiss the possibility that groups of people can lie together and get away with it is just so confusing to me. There are people with secret families! The federal government lied about iraq having weapons and used it to justify invading another country! Believing that wealthy/powerful people aren't able to work together in secret to make themselves richer/more powerful is just so naive to me.
- HEmanZ 4y ago
  I think everyone knows it's not that no one can lie, its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed. A conspiracy requiring a significant footprint of people, money, resources, and generated artifacts can hold for only so long. E.g wartime atrocities involving hundreds of people might hold for a few years, or until the end of a war, but not longer. The lies of the Bush administration could hold long enough to get into war, but not for say 30 years. Usually this argument is super solid against the kinds of "long running super conspiracies" that people argue for. E.g: - The earth is flat and the fact it is a sphere is a lie told by generation of scientists and elites. 1000s (or more?) of people * hundreds of years. Ya right. - The moon landing was faked and everyone at NASA at the times knew it. 60 years * hundreds or thousands of people * massive resource spend and physical footprint: ya right.
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    > its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed It's also very easy to overestimate the likelihood of discovery, since it turns out all of these factors are correlated. Remember, the conspiracies you find out about are, by definition, the ones that didn't stay secret. Now consider how many secrets you keep, and how many secrets of comparable magnitude you know about arbitrary other people.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
This doesn't seem different from the idea that accusations of Conspiracy Theorist! are used to discredit legitimate concerns. It's hard to dismiss after thinking about it. I think about how little a worker drone will even know about the business strategies employed by management and how they personally could be "conspiring" and doing bad things in practice without even knowing. It's worth it to be wary whenever someone accuses another of being a conspiracy theorist. Admittedly, some might be the actual disconnected-from-reality conspiracy theorist but one should always use a discerning eye when the claim is thrown around.
vsareto 4y ago
You wouldn't want all participants having the same level of knowledge, so you compartmentalize and change the information. The juicy stuff that indicts you is kept at a higher level, while the lower ranks are given different versions to make it seem legal. Companies do this routinely by controlling information within the company that might have illegal underpinnings for their actions. However much of the annoying noise from conspiracy theorists involve people who all know they are doing illegal stuff and choose to do it anyway and keep quiet about it and they make it out to be some massive, evil, covert conspiracy party.
Nasrudith 4y ago
That is a variation of a Benjamin Franklin quote about three people being able to keep a secret if two are dead. There are similar principles in military science about limited sizes of surprise attacks because logistically at some point it becomes completely obvious to anybody with working eyes or ears if say, the PRC relocated the entirety of their army off the shore of Hong Kong. Let alone the cumulative probabilities of human failures including in blackmail and bribery or how quickly the finances would add up in paying off people noticing you paying them off, and then people who notice the abnormal flow of currency. There is no guarantee in these principles in the same way there is no guarantee that WWI wouldn't happen due to the interconnectedness of the European countries and how much they would have to lose. They were still right about the latter being an unmitigated disaster, as the unprestigious "backwater hicks who barely count as civilized", the US and the USSR became two world leading superpowers instead of the other leading empires. But that same "Unlikely because would be incredibly stupid and lead to losing a lot." level of guarantee applies to nuclear deterrence.

googlryas 4y ago

See: operation snow white. It may have utilized up to 5000 covert agents, and was only detected perhaps due to an observant librarian.

fundad 4y ago
See also COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
anonporridge 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

colpabar 4y ago

Yeah, maybe it's just that I'm a decent liar, but the way that people so readily dismiss the possibility that groups of people can lie together and get away with it is just so confusing to me. There are people with secret families! The federal government lied about iraq having weapons and used it to justify invading another country! Believing that wealthy/powerful people aren't able to work together in secret to make themselves richer/more powerful is just so naive to me.

HEmanZ 4y ago
I think everyone knows it's not that no one can lie, its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed. A conspiracy requiring a significant footprint of people, money, resources, and generated artifacts can hold for only so long. E.g wartime atrocities involving hundreds of people might hold for a few years, or until the end of a war, but not longer. The lies of the Bush administration could hold long enough to get into war, but not for say 30 years. Usually this argument is super solid against the kinds of "long running super conspiracies" that people argue for. E.g: - The earth is flat and the fact it is a sphere is a lie told by generation of scientists and elites. 1000s (or more?) of people * hundreds of years. Ya right. - The moon landing was faked and everyone at NASA at the times knew it. 60 years * hundreds or thousands of people * massive resource spend and physical footprint: ya right.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  > its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed It's also very easy to overestimate the likelihood of discovery, since it turns out all of these factors are correlated. Remember, the conspiracies you find out about are, by definition, the ones that didn't stay secret. Now consider how many secrets you keep, and how many secrets of comparable magnitude you know about arbitrary other people.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago

This doesn't seem different from the idea that accusations of Conspiracy Theorist! are used to discredit legitimate concerns. It's hard to dismiss after thinking about it. I think about how little a worker drone will even know about the business strategies employed by management and how they personally could be "conspiring" and doing bad things in practice without even knowing. It's worth it to be wary whenever someone accuses another of being a conspiracy theorist. Admittedly, some might be the actual disconnected-from-reality conspiracy theorist but one should always use a discerning eye when the claim is thrown around.

vsareto 4y ago

You wouldn't want all participants having the same level of knowledge, so you compartmentalize and change the information. The juicy stuff that indicts you is kept at a higher level, while the lower ranks are given different versions to make it seem legal. Companies do this routinely by controlling information within the company that might have illegal underpinnings for their actions. However much of the annoying noise from conspiracy theorists involve people who all know they are doing illegal stuff and choose to do it anyway and keep quiet about it and they make it out to be some massive, evil, covert conspiracy party.

Nasrudith 4y ago

That is a variation of a Benjamin Franklin quote about three people being able to keep a secret if two are dead. There are similar principles in military science about limited sizes of surprise attacks because logistically at some point it becomes completely obvious to anybody with working eyes or ears if say, the PRC relocated the entirety of their army off the shore of Hong Kong. Let alone the cumulative probabilities of human failures including in blackmail and bribery or how quickly the finances would add up in paying off people noticing you paying them off, and then people who notice the abnormal flow of currency. There is no guarantee in these principles in the same way there is no guarantee that WWI wouldn't happen due to the interconnectedness of the European countries and how much they would have to lose. They were still right about the latter being an unmitigated disaster, as the unprestigious "backwater hicks who barely count as civilized", the US and the USSR became two world leading superpowers instead of the other leading empires. But that same "Unlikely because would be incredibly stupid and lead to losing a lot." level of guarantee applies to nuclear deterrence.