On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs

[progressoid]

Here ya go nerds. Data!

Actually, I haven't had tine to read it. Here's the abstract. More at the link.

Abstract

Conspiratorial ideation is the tendency of individuals to believe that events and power relations are secretly manipulated by certain clandestine groups and organisations. Many of these ostensibly explanatory conjectures are non-falsifiable, lacking in evidence or demonstrably false, yet public acceptance remains high. Efforts to convince the general public of the validity of medical and scientific findings can be hampered by such narratives, which can create the impression of doubt or disagreement in areas where the science is well established. Conversely, historical examples of exposed conspiracies do exist and it may be difficult for people to differentiate between reasonable and dubious assertions. In this work, we establish a simple mathematical model for conspiracies involving multiple actors with time, which yields failure probability for any given conspiracy. Parameters for the model are estimated from literature examples of known scandals, and the factors influencing conspiracy success and failure are explored. The model is also used to estimate the likelihood of claims from some commonly-held conspiratorial beliefs; these are namely that the moon-landings were faked, climate-change is a hoax, vaccination is dangerous and that a cure for cancer is being suppressed by vested interests. Simulations of these claims predict that intrinsic failure would be imminent even with the most generous estimates for the secret-keeping ability of active participants—the results of this model suggest that large conspiracies (?1000 agents) quickly become untenable and prone to failure. The theory presented here might be useful in counteracting the potentially deleterious consequences of bogus and anti-science narratives, and examining the hypothetical conditions under which sustainable conspiracy might be possible.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0147905

[DetlefK]

1. The diagrams on pages 5 and 10 are very interesting:

If the conspirators kill each other, the probability of a leak peaks very fast and then decays very slowly. Overall probability very low. (~10% in the example)

If the conspirators die off of old age, the probability of a leak peaks after a long time and then decays pretty fast. Overall probability medium. (~40% in the example)

If the number of conspirators stays constant, the probability of a leak increases monotonely over time. The longer the time, the higher the probability someone will eventually spill the beans. (~75% after 60 years in the example, for a group of 5000 conspirators)





Based on parameters derived from blown conspiracies, the model predicts that conspiracies like a moon-landing-hoax or a climate-change-hoax or a vaccination-hoax or a cancer-research-hoax would have been blown the latest after 5-10 years.