Maths Study Shows Conspiracies 'Prone To Unravelling'

[ramonmercado]

It figures, or does it? Some will no doubt ask to see his raw data.

Maths study shows conspiracies 'prone to unravelling'

It's difficult to keep a conspiracy under wraps, scientists say, because sooner or later, one of the conspirators will blow its cover.

A study has examined how long alleged conspiracies could "survive" before being revealed - deliberately or unwittingly - to the public at large.

Dr David Grimes, from Oxford University, devised an equation to express this, and then applied it to four famous collusions.

The work appears in Plos One journal.

The equation developed by Dr Grimes, a post-doctoral physicist at Oxford, relied upon three factors: the number of conspirators involved, the amount of time that has passed, and the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing.

He then applied his equation to four famous conspiracy theories: The belief that the Moon landing was faked, the belief that climate change is a fraud, the belief that vaccines cause autism, and the belief that pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer.

Dr Grimes's analysis suggests that if these four conspiracies were real, most are very likely to have been revealed as such by now.

Specifically, the Moon landing "hoax" would have been revealed in 3.7 years, the climate change "fraud" in 3.7 to 26.8 years, the vaccine-autism "conspiracy" in 3.2 to 34.8 years, and the cancer "conspiracy" in 3.2 years.

"The mathematical methods used in this paper were broadly similar to the mathematics I have used before in my academic research on radiation physics," Dr Grimes said.

Building the equation
To derive his equation, Dr Grimes began with the Poisson distribution, a common statistical tool that measures the probability of a particular event occurring over a certain amount of time.

Using a handful of assumptions, combined with mathematical deduction, Dr Grimes produced a general, but incomplete, formula.

Specifically, he was missing a good estimate for the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing. To determine this, Dr Grimes analysed data from three genuine collusions.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684

 

[ramonmercado]

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.

Figures

Citation: Grimes DR (2016) On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0147905. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0147905

Editor: Chris T. Bauch, University of Waterloo, CANADA

Received: September 23, 2015; Accepted: January 6, 2016; Published: January 26, 2016

Copyright: © 2016 David Robert Grimes. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: In this modelling paper, all data used comes from previously published sources and is available in the paper itself.

Funding: The author has no support or funding to report.

Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

1] by a broad-cross section of society. Belief in one conspiracy theory is often correlated with belief in others, and some stripe of conspiratorial belief is ubiquitous across diverse social and racial groups [2]. These concepts run the gauntlet from the political to the supernatural, and a single working definition is not easy to obtain. ...

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905

 

[Analis]

Nice graphs, but Grimes fell in a number of usual traps.

Firstly, his study relies on the assumption that these conspiracy theories, irrespectively of their merits or lack of, presuppose the involvment of the whole staff of the entities suspected of being responsible. While only a small fraction of them may be enough for it to work, then reducing the risks of leaks. It has other flaws, the lesser of them being not that it seems to equate the event that someones speaks with acceptation by both the public and elites, notably journalistic elites. Which is really simplistic. There are many cases when alledged conspirators have spilled the bloods, but were largely ignored, either because they were not believed or because the press did not relay their claims. And even in the case that a conspiracy gains wide public acceptation (as in the case of the killings of JFK, RFK or MLK), the ruling elites may keep on their routine of paroting the original official version.

 

[Tribble]

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

Research claiming to have cracked the numbers behind mysterious plots is flawed

There are several ways to tell when you’ve written a paper that’s not quite up to scratch. Lingering doubts perhaps, or stinging comments from the reviewers. A definite clue is when you turn on Thought for the Day and hear it cited as evidence for the resurrection of Christ.
Listen:

The paper in question, “On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs,” was published in open-access peer-review journal PLOS One a few days ago. It starts out with quite a good premise. There are a lot of widely held beliefs that, if true, would require an extraordinary number of people to be hiding something. If you think that man made climate change is a hoax, for example, then at a minimum tens of thousands of climate researchers and other scientists must be in on it in some way. If you think that NASA faked the moon landings then you have to deal with the fact that over 400,000 NASA employees would have been in some way connected to it.

Given those kinds of numbers, it seems almost inevitable that leaks would occur. Can we predict how long a conspiracy of a given size will last? That’s the question asked by Dr David Grimes - the researcher, skeptic and writer who published the paper. If we can prove mathematically that a conspiracy involving 400,000 people can’t last more than a few months or years, then we can easily dismiss a number of popular beliefs.

It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately the answer is a resounding "no", and the resulting paper ends up being a sort of case study in how not to do statistics. Inevitably media outlets loved it, and so now news feeds are full of headlines like: “Most conspiracy theories are mathematically impossible,” “The maths equation threatening to disprove conspiracy theories”, “Maths study shows conspiracies ‘prone to unraveling’” and so on and on.

http://littleatoms.com/david-grimes-conspiracy-theory-maths

 

[AlchoPwn]

I don't agree with Martin Robbins' criticism of the Grimes article http://littleatoms.com/david-grimes-conspiracy-theory-maths

The primary criticism is this according to Martin Robbins is:
If the probability of exposure is accumulating over time then why does it start going down? You can’t make a conspiracy secret again! The increase each year should fall toward 0 as the population dies off, leaving the plots to trail off as flat lines.

Posit: If the probability of exposure is accumulating over time then why does it start going down?

Check the graphs again. The Blue line represents the chance of failure. The notable exception to the accumulation of exposure is in Fig 4. So what does the figure 4 with the probability line decreasing actually represent? Simply the dying off of the conspirators over the course of 50 years, because people die, and their secrets might die with them. This criticism by Robbins is therefore unfair.

Posit: You can’t make a conspiracy secret again!

In fact there are examples of conspiracies becoming secret again within history. For example, a guerrilla movement can be discovered and eliminated in situ, only to reconstitute itself from survivors. The same goes for other clandestine organizations such as terror cells, spy rings, so why not conspiracies? I would be more inclined to view survival of information as a more appropriate criticism of Grimes that what Robbins offers.

I can point to a variety of cases, but the best case for a Conspiracy that reconstitutes itself to my mind is the White Lotus Society, which has been fomenting revolt in China since the time of the Khans, and has been wiped out, only to reconstitute itself later. Many Chinatowns in the world still have a White Lotus run vegetarian restaurant even today, and they retain links to organized criminal syndicates across Asia. They are something of a favorite of mine as I bump into them every few years.

Real world examples aside, this is Robbins' misreading of what the data means.

Posit: So there aren’t enough examples, and the few listed aren’t very reliable.

We can't entirely blame Grimes for this. The fact is that there are relatively few conspiracies on anything like the scale of population that most conspiracy theorists propose, and for Grimes' purposes, he needs real examples of large scale proven conspiratorial crimes. Unsurprisingly these are few on the ground. As to the reliability? In what sense is the information unreliable? It is on record in court documents in the USA.

Posit: They’re the wrong kind (of conspiracy). We’re missing any data on conspiracies that have remained secret for obvious reasons.

And what are those reasons? That they are too secret to be discovered, or because they don't exist at all? This criticism is unfair. It is only reasonable to expect a study to model things which can be factually verified.

Posit: Two of the three predate the Internet era, and you’d expect a revolutionary global communications system to have some impact on communications.

The availability of more data is not necessarily the same as the availability of more information. People generally aren't aware that data isn't information until it is analyzed. The point being that having access to more information is no guarantee one way or the other of having more conspiracies found. Nor is it a guarantee that fewer will be found. Much depends on encryption algorithms. Therefore to demand some sort of "internet effect" on the data is spurious. The information should speak for itself. Don't put the theory before the evidence.

Posit: There aren’t any small conspiracies of say 10 or 20 people.

The scope of the study as stated was to look into the feasibility of large scale "illuminati scale" conspiracies of hundreds and thousands as supposed by the people who say that NASA is a Nazi conspiracy that is lying about the Flat Earth. While there are a plethora of smaller conspiracies to draw upon, they aren't relevant to this study, which is about modeling LARGE conspiracies.

Posit: All of the examples are big, institutional or community affairs. 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.

Yes, this is the ideal model for the sort of institutional conspiracy theory that is generally put about by conspiracy theorists. The criticism is therefore unfair.

For the most part therefore I dismiss Robbins' article, and so would any informed person who read the paper more closely than Robbins apparently did. Much as theists often argue for a god of the gaps, Robbins seems to be fighting to preserve the notion of the existence of a "meta-conspiracy" wherein he knows a conspiracy exists, therefore any evidence that it doesn't must be wrong. This is called confirmation bias and is inadvisable.

 

[ramonmercado]

Maths: the Synthetics versus the Analysts and political conspiracies.

A FORGOTTEN EPISODE in French-occupied Naples in the years around 1800—just after the French Revolution—illustrates why it makes sense to see mathematics and politics as entangled. The protagonists of this story were gravely concerned about how mainstream mathematical methods were transforming their world—somewhat akin to our current-day concerns about how digital algorithms are transforming ours. But a key difference was their straightforward moral and political reading of those mathematical methods. By contrast, in our own era we seem to think that mathematics offers entirely neutral tools for ordering and reordering the world—we have, in other words, forgotten something that was obvious to them.

In this essay, I’ll use the case of revolutionary Naples to argue that the rise of a new and allegedly neutral mathematics—characterized by rigor and voluntary restriction—was a mathematical response to pressing political problems. Specifically, it was a response to the question of how to stabilize social order after the turbulence of the French Revolution. Mathematics, I argue, provided the logical infrastructure for the return to order. This episode, then, shows how and why mathematical concepts and methods are anything but timeless or neutral; they define what “reason” is, and what it is not, and thus the concrete possibilities of political action. The technical and political are two sides of the same coin—and changes in notions like mathematical rigor, provability, and necessity simultaneously constitute changes in our political imagination.

In 1806, the Kingdom of Naples was occupied by a French army and integrated into Napoleon’s imperial system. The French and their local supporters had a clear agenda: they wanted to transform the semifeudal society into a centralized administrative monarchy with a liberal economy. This ambitious plan, however, soon ran up against obdurate realities like muddy roads, brigandage, popular insurgencies, and the thinly disguised hostility of powerful local elites. There was another problem, too. Open a Neapolitan university textbook of the time and you will see that the French had to fight their battles in a land where their mathematics was wrong.

While armed and cultural resistance against the French invaders’ imperial ambitions happened in other parts of Europe, the Neapolitan case is particularly interesting because it includes a mathematical resistance. This resistance took the form of a distinctive mathematical culture that was hegemonic in that kingdom for several decades—from the late 1790s to the 1830s. Contemporaries called it the Neapolitan synthetic school. The name referred to synthetic (or pure) geometry, a geometry that does not use coordinates and algebraic formulas to study figures and solve problems. Leading Neapolitan mathematicians embraced it as the veritable foundation of all mathematics. Only its methods and assumptions, they believed, could be trusted.

What the Neapolitans most adamantly did not trust was what they called, not without irony, the “very modern mathematics.” This body of knowledge, associated mainly with France, was characterized by the rapid advancements of an algebraized form of infinitesimal calculus and by its stunning and far-reaching practical applications. It had severed its connections with Euclidean geometry, and was referred to as “analysis”—a term that, in this context, meant a vast array of algebraic methods and algorithmic procedures that could be used to represent how things change, whether those things were, say, the trajectory of a cannonball or agricultural productivity. ...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article...rn-mathematics-and-the-political-imagination/

This essay is adapted from Massimo Mazzotti’s 2023 book Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity, available now from the University of Chicago Press.