When I was about ten years old, the experts told me that animal fat was poisonous to a top predator. I did try eating margarine, but it seemed kind of nasty.
Ever since, I have had a certain amount of trouble trusting the experts. I wonder if the methods the experts are using are really the sorts of methods that reliably find the truth.
But as a very wise man once said:
Three can keep a secret, if two be dead. And if I thought my hat knew my counsel I would cast it into the fire.
If a theory relies on there being a conspiracy, then that is a priori a very high burden on it. Conspiracies are hard and unstable.
Once there’s an actual conspiracy theory about your conspiracy, the cat is pretty much out of the bag, and it becomes even harder and less stable.
I do think that it can be a good heuristic to pay attention to the thoughts that are unwise to express in polite company. But it’s usually not so much a conspiracy as the usual human tendency to try to silence political enemies, which needs little co-ordination.
Three can keep a secret, if two be dead. And if I thought my hat knew my counsel I would cast it into the fire.
If a theory relies on there being a conspiracy, then that is a priori a very high burden on it. Conspiracies are hard and unstable.
Some social structures can evolve that allow secrets to be kept with larger numbers of people. For example, intelligence agencies are not only compartmentalized, but the employees making them up all assume that if someone approaches them offering to buy secrets, that it’s probably one of the routine counterintelligence operation within the agency that draws out and prosecutes untrustworthy employees. As a result, the employees basically two-box their agency and never accept bribes from foreign agents, no matter how large the payout. And any that fall through the cracks are hard to disentangle from disinformation by double/triple agents posing as easily-bribed-people.
It’s much more complex than that, but that’s just one example of a secret-keeping system evolving inside institutions, effective enough not just to keep secrets, but to thwart or misinform outside agents intelligently trying to rupture secret-keeping networks (emerging almost a hundred years ago or earlier).
When I was about ten years old, the experts told me that animal fat was poisonous to a top predator. I did try eating margarine, but it seemed kind of nasty.
Ever since, I have had a certain amount of trouble trusting the experts. I wonder if the methods the experts are using are really the sorts of methods that reliably find the truth.
But as a very wise man once said:
Three can keep a secret, if two be dead. And if I thought my hat knew my counsel I would cast it into the fire.
If a theory relies on there being a conspiracy, then that is a priori a very high burden on it. Conspiracies are hard and unstable.
Once there’s an actual conspiracy theory about your conspiracy, the cat is pretty much out of the bag, and it becomes even harder and less stable.
I do think that it can be a good heuristic to pay attention to the thoughts that are unwise to express in polite company. But it’s usually not so much a conspiracy as the usual human tendency to try to silence political enemies, which needs little co-ordination.
Some social structures can evolve that allow secrets to be kept with larger numbers of people. For example, intelligence agencies are not only compartmentalized, but the employees making them up all assume that if someone approaches them offering to buy secrets, that it’s probably one of the routine counterintelligence operation within the agency that draws out and prosecutes untrustworthy employees. As a result, the employees basically two-box their agency and never accept bribes from foreign agents, no matter how large the payout. And any that fall through the cracks are hard to disentangle from disinformation by double/triple agents posing as easily-bribed-people.
It’s much more complex than that, but that’s just one example of a secret-keeping system evolving inside institutions, effective enough not just to keep secrets, but to thwart or misinform outside agents intelligently trying to rupture secret-keeping networks (emerging almost a hundred years ago or earlier).