On the other hand, what if everything IS connected? Suppose there is an intelligence that makes your big ol’ computer look like a child’s toy creating and running the universe?
In that case what that pastor in a slick suit told you makes perfect sense. As humans, created not evolved, we don’t have the capacity to know and understand everything, and chasing after every event in this world trying to make sense of it all turns out to be a fool’s errand.
Trust in God, do with all your might whatever your hands find to do and let the chips fall where they may.
Human brains are definitely wired to see patterns that aren’t there. Like the “face” on Mars. Pareidolia is a fascinating phenomenon. We are evolutionarily wired for it and other pattern recognition, like your snake/stick example. False positives are (or used to be?) less dangerous than false negatives.
I do this thing when I'm in the shower, no hurry, just letting hot water cascade over me while I gaze at the tile wall in front of where I'm standing under the shower head. The tile is faux marble and I can stand there and find animals, faces, gremlins, and goblins in those tiles. Same with clouds, or looking through the branches of a tree with the sky illuminating the gaps between the twigs and branches. Faces mostly. Endlessly amusing. I didn't know it had a name. Pareidolia.
I tie-dyed my curtains. The color is a mix of mostly blue and purple to mimic space, with some small reddish hues. Depending on the light outside, I've seen all sorts of faces and animals or gremlin like creatures in the design. It's fascinating. But I also see it as a Rorschach test, like what's on my mind right now that makes that design what I see?
That's an interesting connection. I hadn't thought about connecting the images to a frame or state of mind or emotion. I'll pay attention to that the next time I'm enthralled by the shapes my imagination materializes.
I remember having a conversation with my grandfather regarding JFK. He was a life long republican but in classic, served in Vietnam and lived through the Cold War fashion, he had a great deal of respect for JFK and for his service during war and in government, and he helped me form what I think JFK is from what I can only call a "political culture" angle, and what Epstein seems to be in a similar vein for the modern political climate.
Almost no one wants to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, and worse for some, did it alone, because it destroys the illusion that people, and especially Americans in my experience, like to build up to deny that sometimes the world truly is just randomly cruel. Much like your own comment on Epstein, that yes we can believe that the rich and powerful of our nation used children like, at best, bargaining chips to feed to evil people to prop themselves up, my Grandfather stressed that so many people come up with so many theories and issues with JFK because they don't want to contemplate that the world can be just so randomly cruel, that the actions of one motivated man with a grudge or irrational reason, can lead to the death of one of the most powerful and recognized people in the world. Could the CIA have been involved? The KGB? The mob? I had one professor who had a theory it was his wife, or his wife's family, who hired Harvey as vengeance for Kennedy's many issues with adultery and embarrassing his wife. But at the end of the day, a bullet was fired, a trigger was pulled and a man died.
In concept it's not that far away from how Epstein is being treated. We want there to be a vast network, a true "Conspiracy" in bright neon letters flashing on the news as people go to prison. Do I personally feel that there was something going on? Absolutely. Do I feel that powerful people liaised with Epstein and were uncomfortably close to him and his crimes? Of course. Do I think his suicide was a cover up? Not entirely. Do I think some things are fishy? With our governments track record I'd be a fool not to at least consider it. But at the end of the day, we may never get answers, we may never get closure, and right now we have so many more things that need to be dealt with. If releasing the information can help then release it. If it won't, then I won't forget it and I won't let others forget it either, but we also can't let paralysis on the issue distract and destroy anything and everything else in the name of an obsession.
Another excellent post Holly, thank you.
(I hope you do continue the American history and Constitution series at some point, I do miss those posts)
I prefer cock-up to conspiracy, as my secondary school English teacher advised me. If you look at actual conspiracies, it's amazing how quickly they unravelled. The Allied governments knew about the Death Camps within about two years of Auschwitz opening. (They didn't care, but they knew.) Similarly, the Watergate scandal involved the most powerful man in the world failing to cover up a simple burglary. Again, it unravelled in the space of about two years, discovered by two rookie journalists. It's difficult to imagine something like the moon landing or JFK conspiracies going undiscovered for over half a century.
Plus, as a Jew, I'm aware that most conspiracy theories turn out to be antisemitic sooner or later e.g. the way the Epstein conspiracy theory has suddenly become a theory about the Israeli government having a hold over the US government.
Yep. The latest horseshit is that Mossad is faking Islamic terror attacks. Because why would anyone believe that Muslims kill those they believe to be blasphemous towards Mohammed?
I am pretty sure no one who believes in conspiracy theories has ever done any project management. It is hard enough for me to get six consultants working together and all on the same page; so the idea of an enormous, complex and secret conspiracy is quite laughable to me.
That being said, there are enough odd things about Epstein's death to make me think that something fishy happened...but I do not think it was anywhere near the extant of a widespread cabal of pedophiles secretly running the world.
Exactly. Everyone I know who’s deeply into conspiracy theories — and I know a lot of them — spent their career either working for themselves (so they were either alone or the boss, neither of which gives a realistic perspective) or in academia, which is a funhouse mirror.
"Let’s instead look at the most unassailable disproof of all: Southern women."
Speaking of conspiracies and Southern women, the story of Martha Mitchell (wife of John Mitchell, Attorney General of the United States during the Nixon administration) and Watergate makes your point. She was one of the first to reveal the secrets.
Well said, Holly. One thing that’s seldom pointed out is that individuals in similar circumstances will often desire similar outcomes and act in similar ways to achieve them. To those in different circumstances those actions will look coordinated or orchestrated—indistinguishable from conspiracy—even when they arise independently from individual self-interest.
I remember when phone's had party lines and growing up in the south, you could always pick it up and if you were quiet enough you could learn all the secrets. J. Edgar Hoover had nothing on them.
I grew up being taught about the rapture and didn't realize it was even debatable till ten years ago.
I don’t know who to attribute this to: Nothing is foolproof. Fools are too ingenious.
It’s possible that most people are too tired, too incompetent, too disorganized or too loudmouthed to work up a good conspiracy. In my own case, it’s all too possible that I’m also too apathetic to care to!
What could we be doing with the time we waste caring about conspiracies?
Interesting. If I understand your argument correctly, then the vast majority of conspiracy hypotheses are false because the average person who knows about the hypothetical conspiracy will, on average, convince more than 1 other uninvolved person that the hypothesis is true, leading to the conspiracy's unraveling.
I don't entirely agree with your argument (assuming I understand it correctly). It may be possible to bring the number of people convinced by a single person "in the know" down below 1, perhaps using a combination of propaganda and violence. If a group of 10 people working on a conspiracy only convince 2 uninvolved people of the conspiracy hypothesis who in turn only convince an average of 0.4 uninvolved people (and so on), then the conspiracy could survive for some time.
You’re inadvertently revealing yourself to have done very little scheming and planning, and it’s adorable. It’s so far beyond “convincing”. Not one engineer whose wife notices he packed for himself or whose cover story for why he needed things packed that didn’t match his intended destination. Not one speeding ticket or car accident on the way to or from the wrong place. Not one detail that gives away the fraud, across decades, thousands of opportunities for such, and multiple state lines. Having learned scheming and planning as a child, to survive Cluster B parents, I can tell you that any plan that requires more than two things to go right will fail.
I see. Ironically, I agree with most of what you have said. There are bound to be details that someone will notice. Moreover, any complex plan that requires more than two things to go right will fail, so a conspiracy that requires everyone to keep a secret to remain hidden from the public will fail miserably. However, I believe that conspiracies do not need everyone to keep the secret to remain hidden from the public, if whoever notices the details cannot convince others of the truth.
Suppose for a moment you are acquainted with a housewife who's husband is an engineer who is working at a defense contractor on something. This housewife is a generally reliable source of information, but can sometimes get things wrong. If, one day, she goes into elaborate detail about how her husband confessed to her about how he is working on a UFO, that aliens are real and that he's sick and tired of working for the man. She believes her husband but she can only give you her word. Do you believe her?
If the answer is no, then you have proven my point, since you will only be convinced via direct testimony or other forms of strong evidence that are easier to contain yet necessary to establish something as factual.
If the answer is yes, then how much separation will it take before the lurid tale slides back into unbelievability? Probably no farther than secondhand. If a friend of the engineer's housewife told you a garbled version of the hypothetical conspiracy, I don't think you would believe her. The true information about the conspiracy will rapidly fade into myth and legend, becoming indistinguishable from rumor. Rumor is, of course, something no reasonable person would believe. In fact, if someone tried to convince you of a conspiracy theory's veracity using only rumors and myths that happen to descend from firsthand testimony, I suspect you would be rather angry with them. They'd be wasting your time with unintelligent sludge.
Essentially, I believe that for a conspiracy theory to be blown open, a primary source or an exceptionally credible secondhand source needs to broadcast their evidence to millions of people all at once. I believe that this is preventable, though very expensive.
I would not believe it the first time or the second. By the third time, I’d know that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and that even if the details I’d heard were not precisely accurate, something was going on. That the moon landing happened just before divorces exploded, in addition to the nature of Southern womanhood, makes the likelihood of silence hit the asymptote of 0.
Your answer makes sense, by gathering data until you have a significant amount of evidence, you can figure out if something is going on once you receive enough data suggesting a pattern. Though, I will note that it leaves a pathway for small to medium sized conspiracies to remain secret. If everyone who works on a black project is located in an isolated area or is kept in teams small enough that there is almost never more than 1 active leaker, then gathering the necessary anecdotal evidence before it degrades into rumors will be difficult.
For the isolated area case, such as a small town in the middle of nowhere, you will at best know one person who lives there and could potentially tell you about the secret program (unless you live there yourself). If the black project is centered in small towns in the middle of nowhere, then it will be hard to gather the necessary evidence because the small towns are too isolated to frequently send out reliable anecdotal evidence towards you. Similarly, you are unlikely to know more than one person who is in direct contact with someone working on a conspiracy if the number of people working on the outlandish thing is small.
Forgive me for trying to use math as a cudgel, but I'm going to try and calculate how likely a 1000 person conspiracy is to escape notice assuming every person involved whistleblows, yet does not get picked up by major news outlets. I will try to use generous assumptions in this process to maximize your odds of discovering the conspiracy.
I assume that you will be able to collect possible evidence from approximately 2000 people over your lifetime. Moreover, I will assume that every person working on the program will whistleblow at some point, providing good secondhand evidence to 150 people each.
So then, the proportion of people who know about the program relative to the US population is n*150/360,000,000 with n being the number of people involved in the program over the course of your life. This proportion is also the probability that any given person will give you high quality anecdotal evidence for the existence of a conspiracy. As n is 1000, then the probability that any given person will provide high quality anecdotal evidence is 0.000416, meaning that the probability that any given person will not provide useful evidence is 0.99958.
Taking the probability that any given person will not provide useful evidence to the 2000 yields the probability that no one you know will provide useful anecdotal evidence. This is 0.4345, meaning that the probability of you getting one useful individual is 0.56547. From the remaining 1999 people, assuming you got someone with usable anecdotal evidence, the probability that you won't get another one is 0.4347. The probability that you will get both of them then becomes 0.31966. Running through the process a third time, the probability that you will get 3 independent, reasonable sources of anecdotal evidence for a conspiracy is only 0.1806.
If my assumptions and calculations are correct (they might not be, I haven't taken a stats class in a long time), it means that a 1000 person conspiracy has an 82% percent chance of escaping your attention and remaining secret from you as long as there is no media coverage amplifying a credible message. Under the right circumstances, that could hide something substantial.
Neither have time nor interest in continuing this, but this is the kind of thing where using Math is not particularly helpful. Think about the concept of "too big to rig." There are varying levels of plausibility to anything that the powerful might be wanting to keep secret. What seems flagrantly obvious to me and therefore much more likely to be discovered versus what an autistic person who doesn't read social cues might see as the same could be wildly different. This isn't like picking a card with replacement or something else for which Math is very helpful in calculating probabilities.
“Honey. No.
Bless your heart.”
Tell me you grew up in the South without actually telling me you grew up in the South 😃
Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. – B. Franklin (allegedly)
And even that is optimistic.
On the other hand, what if everything IS connected? Suppose there is an intelligence that makes your big ol’ computer look like a child’s toy creating and running the universe?
In that case what that pastor in a slick suit told you makes perfect sense. As humans, created not evolved, we don’t have the capacity to know and understand everything, and chasing after every event in this world trying to make sense of it all turns out to be a fool’s errand.
Trust in God, do with all your might whatever your hands find to do and let the chips fall where they may.
Human brains are definitely wired to see patterns that aren’t there. Like the “face” on Mars. Pareidolia is a fascinating phenomenon. We are evolutionarily wired for it and other pattern recognition, like your snake/stick example. False positives are (or used to be?) less dangerous than false negatives.
I do this thing when I'm in the shower, no hurry, just letting hot water cascade over me while I gaze at the tile wall in front of where I'm standing under the shower head. The tile is faux marble and I can stand there and find animals, faces, gremlins, and goblins in those tiles. Same with clouds, or looking through the branches of a tree with the sky illuminating the gaps between the twigs and branches. Faces mostly. Endlessly amusing. I didn't know it had a name. Pareidolia.
I tie-dyed my curtains. The color is a mix of mostly blue and purple to mimic space, with some small reddish hues. Depending on the light outside, I've seen all sorts of faces and animals or gremlin like creatures in the design. It's fascinating. But I also see it as a Rorschach test, like what's on my mind right now that makes that design what I see?
That's an interesting connection. I hadn't thought about connecting the images to a frame or state of mind or emotion. I'll pay attention to that the next time I'm enthralled by the shapes my imagination materializes.
I remember having a conversation with my grandfather regarding JFK. He was a life long republican but in classic, served in Vietnam and lived through the Cold War fashion, he had a great deal of respect for JFK and for his service during war and in government, and he helped me form what I think JFK is from what I can only call a "political culture" angle, and what Epstein seems to be in a similar vein for the modern political climate.
Almost no one wants to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, and worse for some, did it alone, because it destroys the illusion that people, and especially Americans in my experience, like to build up to deny that sometimes the world truly is just randomly cruel. Much like your own comment on Epstein, that yes we can believe that the rich and powerful of our nation used children like, at best, bargaining chips to feed to evil people to prop themselves up, my Grandfather stressed that so many people come up with so many theories and issues with JFK because they don't want to contemplate that the world can be just so randomly cruel, that the actions of one motivated man with a grudge or irrational reason, can lead to the death of one of the most powerful and recognized people in the world. Could the CIA have been involved? The KGB? The mob? I had one professor who had a theory it was his wife, or his wife's family, who hired Harvey as vengeance for Kennedy's many issues with adultery and embarrassing his wife. But at the end of the day, a bullet was fired, a trigger was pulled and a man died.
In concept it's not that far away from how Epstein is being treated. We want there to be a vast network, a true "Conspiracy" in bright neon letters flashing on the news as people go to prison. Do I personally feel that there was something going on? Absolutely. Do I feel that powerful people liaised with Epstein and were uncomfortably close to him and his crimes? Of course. Do I think his suicide was a cover up? Not entirely. Do I think some things are fishy? With our governments track record I'd be a fool not to at least consider it. But at the end of the day, we may never get answers, we may never get closure, and right now we have so many more things that need to be dealt with. If releasing the information can help then release it. If it won't, then I won't forget it and I won't let others forget it either, but we also can't let paralysis on the issue distract and destroy anything and everything else in the name of an obsession.
Another excellent post Holly, thank you.
(I hope you do continue the American history and Constitution series at some point, I do miss those posts)
Another great piece. I love your writing and the topics you pick. The "southern women" proof that we went to the moon is irrefutable. Thanks.
I prefer cock-up to conspiracy, as my secondary school English teacher advised me. If you look at actual conspiracies, it's amazing how quickly they unravelled. The Allied governments knew about the Death Camps within about two years of Auschwitz opening. (They didn't care, but they knew.) Similarly, the Watergate scandal involved the most powerful man in the world failing to cover up a simple burglary. Again, it unravelled in the space of about two years, discovered by two rookie journalists. It's difficult to imagine something like the moon landing or JFK conspiracies going undiscovered for over half a century.
Plus, as a Jew, I'm aware that most conspiracy theories turn out to be antisemitic sooner or later e.g. the way the Epstein conspiracy theory has suddenly become a theory about the Israeli government having a hold over the US government.
Yep. The latest horseshit is that Mossad is faking Islamic terror attacks. Because why would anyone believe that Muslims kill those they believe to be blasphemous towards Mohammed?
I am pretty sure no one who believes in conspiracy theories has ever done any project management. It is hard enough for me to get six consultants working together and all on the same page; so the idea of an enormous, complex and secret conspiracy is quite laughable to me.
That being said, there are enough odd things about Epstein's death to make me think that something fishy happened...but I do not think it was anywhere near the extant of a widespread cabal of pedophiles secretly running the world.
Exactly. Everyone I know who’s deeply into conspiracy theories — and I know a lot of them — spent their career either working for themselves (so they were either alone or the boss, neither of which gives a realistic perspective) or in academia, which is a funhouse mirror.
Great piece. This applies to so much, and unfortunately seems to be the model for a lot of journalism these days.
"If you start with the conclusion, you can always find the data points that get you there.
Especially if your audience doesn’t check your work."
As an aside, if you haven't seen it and want to watch an entertaining conspiracy movie, check out Capricorn One.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077294/
The 1970's was also a heyday of conspiracy theories post Watergate. Made for some great movie plots. Three Days of the Condor also comes to mind.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/
"Let’s instead look at the most unassailable disproof of all: Southern women."
Speaking of conspiracies and Southern women, the story of Martha Mitchell (wife of John Mitchell, Attorney General of the United States during the Nixon administration) and Watergate makes your point. She was one of the first to reveal the secrets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell
The Slow Burn podcast and subsequent series on Epix covers the less well known aspects of Watergate.
Well said, Holly. One thing that’s seldom pointed out is that individuals in similar circumstances will often desire similar outcomes and act in similar ways to achieve them. To those in different circumstances those actions will look coordinated or orchestrated—indistinguishable from conspiracy—even when they arise independently from individual self-interest.
I remember when phone's had party lines and growing up in the south, you could always pick it up and if you were quiet enough you could learn all the secrets. J. Edgar Hoover had nothing on them.
I grew up being taught about the rapture and didn't realize it was even debatable till ten years ago.
THANK YOU!
I don’t know who to attribute this to: Nothing is foolproof. Fools are too ingenious.
It’s possible that most people are too tired, too incompetent, too disorganized or too loudmouthed to work up a good conspiracy. In my own case, it’s all too possible that I’m also too apathetic to care to!
What could we be doing with the time we waste caring about conspiracies?
Interesting. If I understand your argument correctly, then the vast majority of conspiracy hypotheses are false because the average person who knows about the hypothetical conspiracy will, on average, convince more than 1 other uninvolved person that the hypothesis is true, leading to the conspiracy's unraveling.
I don't entirely agree with your argument (assuming I understand it correctly). It may be possible to bring the number of people convinced by a single person "in the know" down below 1, perhaps using a combination of propaganda and violence. If a group of 10 people working on a conspiracy only convince 2 uninvolved people of the conspiracy hypothesis who in turn only convince an average of 0.4 uninvolved people (and so on), then the conspiracy could survive for some time.
You’re inadvertently revealing yourself to have done very little scheming and planning, and it’s adorable. It’s so far beyond “convincing”. Not one engineer whose wife notices he packed for himself or whose cover story for why he needed things packed that didn’t match his intended destination. Not one speeding ticket or car accident on the way to or from the wrong place. Not one detail that gives away the fraud, across decades, thousands of opportunities for such, and multiple state lines. Having learned scheming and planning as a child, to survive Cluster B parents, I can tell you that any plan that requires more than two things to go right will fail.
I see. Ironically, I agree with most of what you have said. There are bound to be details that someone will notice. Moreover, any complex plan that requires more than two things to go right will fail, so a conspiracy that requires everyone to keep a secret to remain hidden from the public will fail miserably. However, I believe that conspiracies do not need everyone to keep the secret to remain hidden from the public, if whoever notices the details cannot convince others of the truth.
Suppose for a moment you are acquainted with a housewife who's husband is an engineer who is working at a defense contractor on something. This housewife is a generally reliable source of information, but can sometimes get things wrong. If, one day, she goes into elaborate detail about how her husband confessed to her about how he is working on a UFO, that aliens are real and that he's sick and tired of working for the man. She believes her husband but she can only give you her word. Do you believe her?
If the answer is no, then you have proven my point, since you will only be convinced via direct testimony or other forms of strong evidence that are easier to contain yet necessary to establish something as factual.
If the answer is yes, then how much separation will it take before the lurid tale slides back into unbelievability? Probably no farther than secondhand. If a friend of the engineer's housewife told you a garbled version of the hypothetical conspiracy, I don't think you would believe her. The true information about the conspiracy will rapidly fade into myth and legend, becoming indistinguishable from rumor. Rumor is, of course, something no reasonable person would believe. In fact, if someone tried to convince you of a conspiracy theory's veracity using only rumors and myths that happen to descend from firsthand testimony, I suspect you would be rather angry with them. They'd be wasting your time with unintelligent sludge.
Essentially, I believe that for a conspiracy theory to be blown open, a primary source or an exceptionally credible secondhand source needs to broadcast their evidence to millions of people all at once. I believe that this is preventable, though very expensive.
I would not believe it the first time or the second. By the third time, I’d know that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and that even if the details I’d heard were not precisely accurate, something was going on. That the moon landing happened just before divorces exploded, in addition to the nature of Southern womanhood, makes the likelihood of silence hit the asymptote of 0.
Your answer makes sense, by gathering data until you have a significant amount of evidence, you can figure out if something is going on once you receive enough data suggesting a pattern. Though, I will note that it leaves a pathway for small to medium sized conspiracies to remain secret. If everyone who works on a black project is located in an isolated area or is kept in teams small enough that there is almost never more than 1 active leaker, then gathering the necessary anecdotal evidence before it degrades into rumors will be difficult.
For the isolated area case, such as a small town in the middle of nowhere, you will at best know one person who lives there and could potentially tell you about the secret program (unless you live there yourself). If the black project is centered in small towns in the middle of nowhere, then it will be hard to gather the necessary evidence because the small towns are too isolated to frequently send out reliable anecdotal evidence towards you. Similarly, you are unlikely to know more than one person who is in direct contact with someone working on a conspiracy if the number of people working on the outlandish thing is small.
Forgive me for trying to use math as a cudgel, but I'm going to try and calculate how likely a 1000 person conspiracy is to escape notice assuming every person involved whistleblows, yet does not get picked up by major news outlets. I will try to use generous assumptions in this process to maximize your odds of discovering the conspiracy.
I assume that you will be able to collect possible evidence from approximately 2000 people over your lifetime. Moreover, I will assume that every person working on the program will whistleblow at some point, providing good secondhand evidence to 150 people each.
So then, the proportion of people who know about the program relative to the US population is n*150/360,000,000 with n being the number of people involved in the program over the course of your life. This proportion is also the probability that any given person will give you high quality anecdotal evidence for the existence of a conspiracy. As n is 1000, then the probability that any given person will provide high quality anecdotal evidence is 0.000416, meaning that the probability that any given person will not provide useful evidence is 0.99958.
Taking the probability that any given person will not provide useful evidence to the 2000 yields the probability that no one you know will provide useful anecdotal evidence. This is 0.4345, meaning that the probability of you getting one useful individual is 0.56547. From the remaining 1999 people, assuming you got someone with usable anecdotal evidence, the probability that you won't get another one is 0.4347. The probability that you will get both of them then becomes 0.31966. Running through the process a third time, the probability that you will get 3 independent, reasonable sources of anecdotal evidence for a conspiracy is only 0.1806.
If my assumptions and calculations are correct (they might not be, I haven't taken a stats class in a long time), it means that a 1000 person conspiracy has an 82% percent chance of escaping your attention and remaining secret from you as long as there is no media coverage amplifying a credible message. Under the right circumstances, that could hide something substantial.
Neither have time nor interest in continuing this, but this is the kind of thing where using Math is not particularly helpful. Think about the concept of "too big to rig." There are varying levels of plausibility to anything that the powerful might be wanting to keep secret. What seems flagrantly obvious to me and therefore much more likely to be discovered versus what an autistic person who doesn't read social cues might see as the same could be wildly different. This isn't like picking a card with replacement or something else for which Math is very helpful in calculating probabilities.
That's fair. I'm glad that we had some constructive engagement, even though neither of us managed to change each others mind.