Secrecy failure equation

Every once in a while a piece of scientific research comes along that is so clever and elegant that I read the entire paper with a smile on my face.

This is what happened today when I bumped into the study by David Robert Grimes (of the University of Oxford) just published two days ago in PLoS ONE entitled, "On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs."  What Grimes did, in essence, was to come up with an equation that models the likelihood of a conspiracy staying secret.  And what he found was that most conspiracies tend to reveal themselves in short order from sheer bungling and ineptitude.  In Grimes's words:

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.

Grimes wasn't just engaging in idle speculation.  He took various examples of conspiracies that did last for a while (for example, the NSA Prism Project that was exposed by Edward Snowden) and others that imploded almost immediately (for example, the Watergate coverup) and derived a formula that expressed the likelihood of failure as a function of the number of participants and the time the conspiracy has been in action.  When considering claims of large-scale coverups -- e.g., chemtrails, the faking of the Moon landing, the idea that climatologists are participating in a climate change hoax -- he found the following:

The analysis here predicts that even with parameter estimates favourable to conspiratorial leanings that the conspiracies analysed tend rapidly towards collapse.  Even if there was a concerted effort, the sheer number of people required for the sheer scale of hypothetical scientific deceptions would inextricably undermine these nascent conspiracies.  For a conspiracy of even only a few thousand actors, intrinsic failure would arise within decades.  For hundreds of thousands, such failure would be assured within less than half a decade.  It’s also important to note that this analysis deals solely with intrinsic failure, or the odds of a conspiracy being exposed intentionally or accidentally by actors involved—extrinsic analysis by non-participants would also increase the odds of detection, rendering such Byzantine cover-ups far more likely to fail.

Which is something I've suspected for years.  Whenever someone comes up with a loopy claim of a major conspiracy -- such as the bizarre one I wrote about a few days ago, that the Freemasons collaborated in faking the deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman -- my first thought (after "Are you fucking kidding me?") is, "How on earth could you keep something like that hushed up?"  People are, sad to say, born gossips, and there is no way that the number of people that would be required to remain silent about such a thing -- not to mention the number required for faking the Moon landing or creating a climate change hoax -- would make it nearly certain that the whole thing would blow up in short order.

[image courtesy of photographer Michael Coghlan and the Wikimedia Commmons]

It's nice, though, that I now have some mathematical support, instead of doing what I'd done before, which was flailing my hands around and shouting "It's obvious."  Grimes's elegant paper gives some serious ammunition against the proponents of conspiracy theories, and that's all to the good.  Anything we can do in that direction is helpful.

The problem is, Grimes's study isn't likely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.  The conspiracy theorists will probably just think that Grimes is one of the Illumanti, trying to confound everyone with his evil mathe-magic.  Grimes alluded to this, in his rather somber closing paragraphs:

While challenging anti-science is important, it is important to note the limitations of this approach.  Explaining misconceptions and analysis such as this one might be useful to a reasonable core, but this might not be the case if a person is sufficiently convinced of a narrative.  Recent work has illustrated that conspiracy theories can spread rapidly online in polarized echo-chambers, which may be deeply invested in a particular narrative and closed off to other sources of information.  In a recent Californian study on parents, it was found that countering anti-vaccination misconceptions related to autism was possible with clear explanation, but that for parents resolutely opposed to vaccination attempts to use rational approach further entrenched them in their ill-founded views.  The grim reality is that there appears to be a cohort so ideologically invested in a belief that for whom no reasoning will shift, their convictions impervious to the intrusions of reality.  In these cases, it is highly unlikely that a simple mathematical demonstration of the untenability of their belief will change their view-point.

And there's also the problem that the conspiracy theorists think that they are the ones who are blowing the whistle on the Bad Guys.  My guess is that most of the adherents to conspiracy theories would read Grimes's paper, and assume that the equation is correct, and they're the heroes who are exposing the conspiracy and causing it to fail.  You really can't win with these people.

Be that as it may, it's heartening to know that we now have some theoretical support for the idea that most conspiracy theories are bullshit.  Even if it doesn't change anyone's mind, it cheered me up considerably, and I'm thankful for that much.

Over the moon

There are some woo-woo ideas that will never die.

I don't care how far-fetched they are, how many times skeptics debunk them, they will still show up over and over again.  These things are like the woo-woo version of a deerfly in summer, buzzing around your head no matter how often you slap it away.

Such is the "faked Moon landing" thing.  It's the tiredest, oldest trope from the conspiracy theory mindset, and I thought that the people who buy into such things had moved on to bigger and better conjectures, such as claiming that every time something bad happens, it's a "false flag" to distract us from... um, even worse things that the government is allegedly hiding from us.

So it was with a weary sort of surprise that I saw the claim resurface not once, but twice, lately.  In the first rehashing, we hear that there has been a video of Stanley Kubrick released in which he admits that he filmed the Moon landing shots -- i.e., they were sound-stage fakes filmed in Hollywood.

In the video, Kubrick is allegedly being interviewed by filmmaker T. Patrick Murray, and says the following:

Kubrick: I perpetrated a huge fraud on the American public, which I am now about to detail, involving the United States government and NASA, that the Moon landings were faked, that the Moon landings ALL were faked , and that I was the person who filmed it. 

Murray: Ok. (laughs) What are you talking ... You're serious. Ok. 

Kubrick: I'm serious. Dead serious. Yes, it was fake. 

Murray: Why are you telling the world? Why does the world need to know that the Moon landings aren't real and you faked them? 

Kubrick: I consider them to be my masterpiece.

Then, supposedly Kubrick told Murray to hide the film for fifteen years -- and shortly afterwards, Kubrick died.

*cue scary music*

There are several problems with all of this, besides the obvious consideration that anyone who believes that the Moon landings were faked must have a single Hostess Ho-Ho where most of us have a brain:

• Both T. Patrick Murray and Kubrick's widow have come out with statements saying that the film is a fraud.
• The man in the interview really doesn't look (or sound) like the real Stanley Kubrick.
• At one point, the interviewer slips up and calls the guy playing Kubrick "Tom."
• The film is dated "May 1999," which is two months after Kubrick died.

But do go on about how convincing it all is.

The second story was probably triggered by the first bringing Kubrick's name back into the spotlight apropos of the Moon landings.  And what it claims is that Kubrick hid a bunch of hints regarding the fake Moon landings in his movie The Shining.

The website is a rambling, incoherent mess of "evidence" that includes such nonsense as the "explanation" about why Kubrick changed the number of the haunted room from 217 (what it was in the Stephen King novel the movie is based upon) to 237.

It's because it's 237,000 miles from the Earth to the Moon, of course.

Unfortunately, the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, where the movie was filmed, blows that silliness away -- right on their website, they explain that they did that because they didn't want people avoiding room 217, so they asked Kubrick to change it to a room number that doesn't exist in the hotel.

We are also given incontrovertible evidence like the fact that Stuart Ullman, the manager of the Overlook Hotel who gives Jack Torrance the job as caretaker, is wearing red, white, and blue (well, maroon, white, and blue, to be accurate), so the Overlook represents America.  And that Jack Torrance is the stand-in for Kubrick himself -- because neither one combs his hair much.  And that there is a "Native American motif" on the wall in one scene that "looks like rocket ships."  And that the snowstorm that strands the family in the hotel is "a symbol of the Cold War."

It couldn't be because the movie is set in the Colorado Rockies in winter, or anything.

Oh, and at one point, the character of Danny is wearing an Apollo 11 sweater, so when he stands up, we're witnessing the "symbolic launch of Apollo 11."

Someone asked Kubrick's directorial assistant, Leon Vitali, about that.  "That was knitted by a friend of [costume designer] Milena Canner," Vitali said.  "Stanley wanted something that looked handmade, and Milena arrived on the set one day and said, ‘How about this?’ It was just the sort of thing that a kid that age would have liked."

Vitali also said that he'd seen a documentary that connected Kubrick and the film to the Moon landings, and spent the entire time he was watching it "falling about laughing," adding that the contention is "absolute balderdash."

Not that this will convince the conspiracy theorists.  A higher-up denying things just makes them conspiracy harder.

So anyhow, this one will bounce around for a while on the interwebz, and then sooner or later fade back into well-deserved obscurity.  But there's no reason to believe it will be gone.  The oldies-but-goodies never stay gone.  They keep coming up like clockwork...

... like the rising of the Moon.  Wonder if that's a coincidence?

Nah, probably not.

Moon tracks

My friend and fellow blogger Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math, which you should all check out) recently sent me a couple of links that are interesting by virtue of what they almost certainly won't accomplish.

Jesus Diaz, writing for Gizmodo, tells about a question he asked to Grey Hautaluoma, of the NASA Department of Public Affairs.  Diaz asked if the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was going to be taking photographs of the lunar landing sites.  Hautaluoma responded, "Yes, it will. We don't have a timeline yet for viewing the Apollo sites, but it will be in the near future."

And Diaz, in his Gizmodo piece, said, "Suck it up, conspiracy theorists, because soon your cuckoo stories about the US simulating the Moon landings will be over forever."

And sure enough, eventually the LRO did get photographs sharp enough to do that.  Here is one:

 The lines are the paths of the LRV (the "Moon Buggy") and the paths of footprints of the astronauts!

The problem is, there is no way this is going to silence the conspiracy theorists.  Nothing will.

There is a saying that is widely used amongst skeptics, that "you can't logic your way out of a position that you didn't logic your way into."  Now, let me be up front that I don't think that's always true.  Logic, and inductive reasoning, are marvelous ways to bootstrap yourself up out of error, and none of us came into this world pre-fitted with a logical view of the world.  Erroneous ideas, after all, are easy to come by -- our perceptual apparatus is notorious for getting it wrong, and between that and wishful thinking out of fear or desire, it's no wonder we sometimes don't see the world as it is.

But the aforementioned cliché does get it right in one sense; if on some level you don't buy logic and evidence as the sine qua non of understanding, then you and I aren't even speaking the same language.  It's why it is generally futile to argue with the devoutly religious.  Faith is, at its heart, not a logical process.  We're not accepting the same basis for how you "know" something, and pretty quickly the argument devolves into either pointless bickering or "well, you can believe what you like, of course."

And the same is true of conspiracy theorists.  Theirs is a different non-logical basis for understanding, but as with the devoutly religious, it has little to nothing to do with evidence.  The foundational idea for the conspiracy theorists is that there is a giant disinformation campaign on the part of Someone (the government, the Illuminati, the Reptilians, the Russians, the Muslims, the Vatican, the Jews -- or some combination thereof).  Because of that, you can't trust anything that comes from them or from anyone in cahoots with them (which, after all, could be anyone).

After that, there is nothing you can do.  Nothing will ever convince them, because any evidence you bring out -- such as the above photograph of the Moon's surface -- will be judged as altered, Photoshopped, faked.  If you claim that you've analyzed the photograph and it shows no signs of having been doctored, the response is, "They're a pretty clever bunch, those Conspirators."  If you insist, you're considered a dupe or a pawn.  If you really insist, you must be... one of them.

So with conspiracy theorists as with the Borg, Resistance Is Futile.  That's why conspiracy theorists are the only group of people I enjoy arguing with less than I enjoy arguing with Young-Earth Creationists.  The creationists are at least demonstrably wrong.

With the conspiracy theorists, you can't demonstrate anything.

So the LRO photographs, unfortunately, haven't accomplished much, and the Moon-Landings-Were-Faked crowd is still going strong.  I continue to hope that one day they'll give it up and admit their mistakes, but the only way that will happen is if they change their criterion for belief to "whatever the evidence supports."

It could happen, but I'm not holding my breath.