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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 wit

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.

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.