Crying wolf

There's a bias that's a bit like an inverted appeal to authority: anyone who repeatedly and stridently makes claims that prove to be unsubstantiated, far-fetched, or outright false eventually finds that people simply stop listening.  At that point, even if they did come up with something reasonable and insightful, it's doubtful that anyone would pay attention.

We've seen a number of people who've exhausted their credibility in that fashion here at Skeptophilia.  Some notable examples:

• Geneticist Melba Ketchum, who has claimed several times to have hard evidence of the existence of Bigfoot (including its DNA).  She wrote a paper about her findings that she finally was able to get published -- but only in a "scientific journal" she herself started for the purpose.  Worse still, it turned out that most of the citations in the paper were bogus, including one that says in the cited paper itself that it was written as an April Fool's joke.
• Author Richard C. Hoagland, who despite having (direct quote from the Wikipedia article about him) "no education beyond high school level... no advanced training, schooling, or degrees in any scientific field" has become famous for a variety of loony pseudoscientific ideas, my favorite one being that the hexagonal cloud patterns on Saturn are "produced by the same phenomenon that causes crop circles."
• Journalist Jaime Maussan, who says he has conclusive proof that some mummies found in Mexico aren't human -- i.e., are aliens.  Surprising absolutely no one -- well, no one rational, at least -- the mummies that have been DNA tested are one hundred percent Homo sapiens, and the ones Maussan is the most convinced are aliens show signs of recent tampering to make them look less human.
• Mark Taylor, a prominent evangelical inspirational speaker, who claims that having orchestral instruments tuned to A = 440 Hertz is a secret plot by the Freemasons to alter your DNA so that you will hate Donald Trump.  I'd like to be able to say that this is the most insane thing that Taylor has said, but that unfortunately would be a lie.

All four of these people have found that restoring your credibility once it's shot is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  Although in the case of Taylor, I suspect he doesn't care -- part of his shtick is that he's a Lone Voice Crying In The Wilderness, so he probably falls back on the impeccable logic of "Many brilliant truth-tellers have been considered crazy -- people consider me crazy, so I must be a brilliant truth-teller!"

In any case, the latest in this Parade of Shame is Luis "Lue" Elizondo, who was a U. S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and worked for the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and now is a prominent member of the UFO/UAP Truthers community.  Lately we've seen lots of claims that the U. S. government has concrete proof of extraterrestrial intelligence; a year ago there was a big hearing in Congress where people like alleged whistleblower David Grusch said they'd not only seen, but participated in the recovery and testing of, "non-human biologicals" and the spacecraft that allowed them to get here.  My point then, as now, was: fine, you want us to believe you?  Let's see the goods.  Turn at least some of it over to independent unbiased scientists for study, under peer review, and then we can talk.  But of course instead we have additional claims of an X Files-style coverup because of issues of national security, and so far what we've seen is bupkis.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MjolnirPants, Grey Aliens Drawing, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Now, Elizondo is publishing his memoirs, and you can bet they'll be replete with claims of UFO shenanigans.  The problem is, skeptic Jason Colavito got a hold of some advance excerpts, and besides the usual Cigarette Smoking Man antics you'd expect, Elizondo is making a whole bunch of other clams that make his UFO stuff look like Nobel Prize material.

One of the weirdest is that Elizondo says he's been haunted for decades by "glowing ghost bubbles."  There are green ones, clear ones, and blue ones -- the green and clear ones are harmless, he says, but the blue ones are "malevolent."  Then he launches into a bizarre passage about the veracity of the Book of Enoch -- one of the biblical Apocrypha, about which I wrote last year, and which (to put not too fine a point on it) is really fucking bizarre -- and in these excerpts he has a lot to say about our old friends the Nephilim:

Enoch's journey is filled with heavenly accounts, including descriptions of angelic and demonic hierarchy, God's throne, God's inner circle of guards, and even the language of the supernatural.  On paper, Enoch's travels don't sound that dissimilar to reported nonhuman encounters.  We also looked at the sixth chapter of Genesis.  That's the chapter that contains the story of Noah's ark.  Before we get to Noah, verses 1 through 4 of that chapter quickly share that otherworldly beings came to earth and mated with human women. Some translations call these offspring giants, while others refer to the visitors by the original Hebrew word, Nephilim, which some scholars say means something like fallen angels, or beings that cause others to fall.

At this point he seems to be aware that he's doing a synchronized skating routine with Erich von Däniken on very thin ice, because he goes on to say, "To be clear, I'm not advocating the ancient astronaut hypothesis that many today believe.  I'm simply drawing some interesting parallels."  Which is the woo-woo equivalent of making some loony claim and then excusing it by saying you're "just asking questions" (which a friend of mine calls "JAQing off").

The problem, of course, is that if Elizondo wanted anyone to take him seriously other than people who think Ancient Aliens is a scientific documentary, this kind of nonsense is not doing him any favors.  Admittedly, I haven't read the memoirs -- they're not available yet -- only the excerpts Colavito provided.  But honestly, given their respective track records, I'm much more likely to trust Colavito's perspective than Elizondo's.

And that's coming from someone who would dearly love to see hard evidence of extraterrestrial life.

So there you have it.  One more example of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Like any other bias, it can lead you astray; the whole point of the fable is that eventually there was a wolf, no one believed the boy, and the boy got turned into a lupine hors-d'oeuvre.  But even if it's a bias, it's an understandable bias.  If Elizondo really does have good evidence of aliens but has blown his own credibility to the point that no one is listening any more, he has only himself to blame.

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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 happened today when I bumped into the study by David Robert Grimes (of the University of Oxford) published 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 saw a couple of weeks ago that the Freemasons collaborated in faking the deaths of Larry King and Rush Limbaugh -- 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 licensed under the Creative Commons allen watkin from London, UK, Weird graffiti (3792781972), CC BY-SA 2.0]

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 Illuminati, 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 view themselves as stalwart heroes, the only ones brave enough to blow the whistle on the Bad Guys.  My guess is that most of the adherents to conspiracy theories would read Grimes's paper, assume that the equation is correct, and conclude they're the geniuses 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.

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I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Roswell redux

Sometimes, I swear the universe is listening to me.

In my post yesterday, a story about the "Falcon Creek Incident" in Manitoba, I mentioned that the story was a lot more credible than Roswell.  So it is only fitting that less than an hour after I hit "publish," I found that Jocelyne LeBlanc over at Mysterious Universe had just posted a story...

... that UFOlogists are reopening the Roswell case.

My first thought was that I've read a lot of accounts by UFOlogists, and my impression was that the Roswell case was not, and in fact never will be, closed.  You've all seen the famous "alien autopsy" video, which was sold to television stations in thirty-three different countries by a guy named Ray Santilli (who said he had gotten the film from an anonymous military officer), but what you may not know is that a filmmaker named Spyros Melaris admitted that he and Santilli had faked the entire thing.

All this got from the UFO enthusiasts was a wiggle of the eyebrow that says, "of course you know that if someone admits it's a hoax, it has to mean that they've been threatened by the Men in Black."  In other words, evidence against something is actually evidence for it, if you squinch your eyes up and look at it sideways.

My visit to Roswell.  I'd tell you more, but I've been sworn to secrecy.

But you should prepare yourself for the whole thing rising from its shallow grave, ready to swallow the brains of True Believers everywhere, because there's just been a claim of a 2001 "leaked memo" involving physicists Kit Green and Eric Davis, and aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, and the memo says the autopsy video was real.

Green supposedly was briefed three times on the subject of the crash and the video, and was shown photos back in 1988 of the alien cadaver taken at the crash site.  The memo concludes, "The Alien Autopsy film/video is real, the alien cadaver is real, and the cadaver seen in the film/video is the same as the photos Kit saw at the 1987/88 Pentagon briefing."

Better yet, Bigelow et al. claim there are still tissue samples from the alien being held at the Walter Reed-Armed Forces Institute for Pathology Medical Museum, located in Washington, D.C.

But I haven't told you how all of this stuff became public:

Linda Moulton Howe.

As soon as I saw this name, my eyes rolled back so far I could see my own brainstem.  Howe is one of the "ancient alien astronauts" loons, a protégé of Erich von Däniken, about whom RationalWiki has the following to say:

Howe's gullibility and deceptive "reports" have caused even staunch Ufologists to give her extremely low marks for credibility... She occasionally asks real scientists for opinions on these matters, but then promptly dismisses or rationalises them away.

In fact, the site UFOWatchdog.com is even more unequivocal:

Someone once summed up Howe very well with two words: ' Media entrepreneur '.  While having been a major player in the cattle mutilation mystery, Howe's credibility has gone way downhill as she sensationalizes everything from mundane animal deaths to promoting Brazilian UFO fraud Urandir Oliveira and the Aztec UFO Crash Hoax while selling alien books, videos and lectures.  Howe dabbles in all things strange including Bigfoot, crop circles, alien abductions, and UFOs.  Howe also sits on the board of advisors to the Roswell UFO Museum along with the likes of Don Schmitt.  See Howe's site, which she actually charges a subscription for in order to access some stories.  Also see Howe turning an explained animal death into an encounter with Bigfoot.  A leap not even Bigfoot itself could make.

So yeah.  There's that.  I know I was pretty charitable with the Falcon Lake Incident yesterday, but this one is just making me heave a heavy sigh of frustration.  No one would be happier than me if alien intelligence did turn out to be real; in fact, it might even make me feel better about the lack of intelligence I so often see down here on Earth.  But much as (in Fox Mulder's words) I Want To Believe, this one's just not doing it for me.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

Defending the indefensible

I'm a pretty forgiving guy.  I recognize we all have failings, and heaven knows I've led a far from blameless life myself.  But there are two things that I find it hard to fathom, and nearly impossible to forgive.

Those two things are rape and pedophilia.

Victimizing the less powerful turns my stomach.  I can barely stand even reading news stories that involve those two acts, which is why I felt actual nausea at a trio of disgusting articles about the recent revelation of a massive coverup by the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania involving the rape of 1,200 (possibly more) children by priests.

Let's start with the response to the scandal by Dr. Taylor Marshall, Catholic theologian, who at least acknowledged the problem -- more than a lot of church leaders have done -- but then proceeded to deflect the blame in a way that is as maddening as it is baffling.  Here's what Marshall had to say:

Three reasons for sexual scandals:

1. Denial of Christian faith. These clerics are secretly atheists, agnostics, or Satanists who see the Church as a social justice network that pays well and provides a lifestyle of insurance, income, retirement and unquestioned access to compromised men and vulnerable children.
2. Homosexuality. The 2004 John Jay Report publicized that 80% of priest abuse victims are male.  The orientation of abuse was overwhelming homosexual According to James Martin and Larry Stammer, 15–58% of American Catholic priests are homosexual in orientation.  Father Dariusz Oko of Poland has suggested that 50% of the bishops in the United States are homosexual.
3. Evolution of the mega-diocese. Since 1900, the concept of the Catholic diocese has morphed into something that would not be recognized by Christians of the medieval period, and certainly not by the Church Fathers.

So the reason priests have molested children is not because they're sick, predatory, and in a position of power, and are being overseen by men more concerned about the church's image than they are about protecting children.

No, the reasons are atheists, gays, and big churches.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons license Samuli Lintula, Altar of Helsinki Catholic Cathedral, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, who said that Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is "anti-Catholic" and "salacious" for going after pedophile priests.  Donohue, who is known for his vitriolic, combative Catholicism-Is-Never-Wrong stance, had the following to say:

Shapiro said that "Church officials routinely and purposely described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate contact. It was none of those things."  He said it was "rape." 

Similarly, the New York Times quoted from the report saying that Church officials used such terms as "horseplay" and "inappropriate contact" as part of their "playbook for concealing the truth." 

Fact: This is an obscene lie.  Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word "rape" means.  This is not a defense — it is meant to set the record straight and debunk the worst case scenarios attributed to the offenders.

First of all, how does Donohue know that "most of the alleged victims were not raped?"  That certainly contradicts a lot of the information that's been released (see the next article for more information about that).  And instead of defending the church and the priests, how about a little compassion for the children that were hurt?

Worst of all, there's the piece by Hemant Mehta that I would not recommend you read unless you have a far stronger stomach than I have, that gives details about a number of the cases being investigated.  I read it with an increasing sense of horror, not only because of the disgusting nature of the crimes committed, but because of the sheer number.  Mehta's list goes on and on -- but it bears mention that these are only cases that are being prosecuted in one state in one country.  Multiply that by the size of the Catholic community worldwide, and the imagination boggles.

And besides the scale, the other thing that will jump out at you is the lengths to which church leaders will go to protect not the victims, but the priests and the church.  Consider, for example, a letter from the bishop to Father Thomas Skotek, after it was revealed that he'd raped an underage girl, who became pregnant, and then paid for her to have an abortion.

"This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are," the bishop's letter said.  "I too share your grief."

This letter was written to Father Skotek, not to his victim.

The whole thing leaves me reeling.  It bears mention that I knew one of the first pedophile priests to be prosecuted and jailed for his crimes -- Father Gilbert Gauthé, who in the late 1960s and 1970s raped over a hundred boys in southern Louisiana.  At first, instead of turning Gauthé in for his crimes, the two bishops who supervised him, first Bishop Maurice Schexnayder and then Bishop Gerald Frey, moved him from one parish to another an effort to hide the scandal.  All that did, of course, was simply to give Gauthé a new batch of children to molest, and the crimes themselves didn't come to light until 1983.  (Despite my being a child when I knew him, Gauthé never acted inappropriately toward me, probably because he knew my grandmother, with whom I was living at the time, would have strangled him with her bare hands if he had.)

The most horrifying thing of all is that these kinds of crimes are not, as they have often been characterized, the sole provenance of the Catholic Church.  They can occur any time you have two ingredients -- a power structure that puts the leaders in a position of absolute authority over their followers, and people running the whole thing who are more bent on protecting themselves and their institution than they are on protecting innocent victims.  (If you want to read a novel that shows a similar thing in a different setting, read Ava Norwood's book If I Make My Bed In Hell, which is simultaneously one of the most beautifully written, and most disturbing, works of fiction I've ever read.)

As horrifying as it is, I hope the cases in Pennsylvania will uncover the similar instances of pedophilia that must exist in equal numbers in other places.  The victims have a right to have their voices heard, and their wrongs redressed, insofar as that is possible.  The perpetrators need to face justice for what they have done.

And the people like Taylor Marshall and Bill Donohue who are still making excuses and defending the church leaders rather than showing the slightest compassion to the victims need to shut the fuck up.

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I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

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.