On review, I will admit my original point was framed somewhat imprecisely. I did not mean to imply that it is highly unlikely that the government can manage to keep any large projects secret. I meant (as I think was obvious from the context) that it is very unlikely that the government would be able to keep something as large-scale, civilian-intensive, public, and high-profile as faking a series of moon landings secret for four decades. This probability is particularly low considering the alternative of, “They just did it.” As my original point was a rather offhand comment, I did not bother going into this level of detail.
Someone is being intransigent here.
I will confess to not really giving a damn about the details up to now, because I thought my point was rather obvious. I see there’s a bit of an inferential gap. In short, I think you vastly underestimate the prior improbability of your own claim, and vastly overestimate the relevance of your counterexamples, all of which are substantially different on numerous dimensions. I’ll spell things out in greater detail.
[Having taken two minutes to look at wikipedia, there does seem to be rather solid evidence of its veracity, what with the fact that there is experimentally observable apparatus on the moon where Uncle Sam says we landed. That’s besides my point, since it was strictly on the implications of massive government conspiracies being unlikely.]
There are pretty much exactly two possibilities: (1) the events are true as they were told to us, or (2) there was an elaborate conspiracy involving, on the one hand, whoever faked the actual video, and, on the other hand, whoever built all of the equipment to fake the launch, and every single significant person involved to this date has remained dead-silent. Other evidence is of course relevant to the ultimate question, but I’m sticking to my specific claim.
It seems fair to assume that if the moon landing were not technically feasible, some reputable scientist would be able to point this out. Therefore, if it is technically feasible, the simpler explanation is that things happened as claimed—what’s the benefit of faking it, and burning enough money to actually do it, when you could just actually do it? The conspiracy theory requires, in addition to a massive, complex conspiracy, the total silence of people who would likely have realized the equipment they were making would not work, or who were not actually making equipment.
People wouldn’t be driven to blow the whistle due to moral concerns—they’d be driven to do so for pure self interest. They’d become rich and famous if they had credible evidence. This is absolutely not the case for any other conspiracy you have named. That is an enormous distinguishing fact that you haven’t appreciated. None of the examples you gave were such that people stood to become rich or famous by blowing the whistle. And the Cold War is over, and still no one came forward, so patriotism is a pretty unlikely explanation.
More importantly, every single one of the counterexamples you’ve given is a non-story. It’s a lot easier to convince my spouse I’m not cheating by saying nothing than it is to do so by explaining on how I went on a luxurious tour across South East Asia, complete with video and tchotchkes. In every example you cite, it isn’t that the government told us a story that happened, and that then got proven wrong. It’s that the government didn’t tell us there was a story, and then people figured out there was. (And how long did “Nuclear testing is perfectly harmless” last in practice?) There was no serious public question of, “Is the government honestly studying syphilis, or is something else going on?”
Getting the government to run a conspiracy of this magnitude with no credible leaks of any kind, despite massive personal incentives to leak, requires a whole lot of things to go exactly right. Actually landing on the moon, after developing a robust space program and spending enough money to develop landing on the moon and launching giant rockets into space and having videos of people landing on the moon, is not nearly so unlikely.
On review, I will admit my original point was framed somewhat imprecisely. I did not mean to imply that it is highly unlikely that the government can manage to keep any large projects secret. I meant (as I think was obvious from the context) that it is very unlikely that the government would be able to keep something as large-scale, civilian-intensive, public, and high-profile as faking a series of moon landings secret for four decades. This probability is particularly low considering the alternative of, “They just did it.” As my original point was a rather offhand comment, I did not bother going into this level of detail.
I will confess to not really giving a damn about the details up to now, because I thought my point was rather obvious. I see there’s a bit of an inferential gap. In short, I think you vastly underestimate the prior improbability of your own claim, and vastly overestimate the relevance of your counterexamples, all of which are substantially different on numerous dimensions. I’ll spell things out in greater detail.
[Having taken two minutes to look at wikipedia, there does seem to be rather solid evidence of its veracity, what with the fact that there is experimentally observable apparatus on the moon where Uncle Sam says we landed. That’s besides my point, since it was strictly on the implications of massive government conspiracies being unlikely.]
There are pretty much exactly two possibilities: (1) the events are true as they were told to us, or (2) there was an elaborate conspiracy involving, on the one hand, whoever faked the actual video, and, on the other hand, whoever built all of the equipment to fake the launch, and every single significant person involved to this date has remained dead-silent. Other evidence is of course relevant to the ultimate question, but I’m sticking to my specific claim.
It seems fair to assume that if the moon landing were not technically feasible, some reputable scientist would be able to point this out. Therefore, if it is technically feasible, the simpler explanation is that things happened as claimed—what’s the benefit of faking it, and burning enough money to actually do it, when you could just actually do it? The conspiracy theory requires, in addition to a massive, complex conspiracy, the total silence of people who would likely have realized the equipment they were making would not work, or who were not actually making equipment.
People wouldn’t be driven to blow the whistle due to moral concerns—they’d be driven to do so for pure self interest. They’d become rich and famous if they had credible evidence. This is absolutely not the case for any other conspiracy you have named. That is an enormous distinguishing fact that you haven’t appreciated. None of the examples you gave were such that people stood to become rich or famous by blowing the whistle. And the Cold War is over, and still no one came forward, so patriotism is a pretty unlikely explanation.
More importantly, every single one of the counterexamples you’ve given is a non-story. It’s a lot easier to convince my spouse I’m not cheating by saying nothing than it is to do so by explaining on how I went on a luxurious tour across South East Asia, complete with video and tchotchkes. In every example you cite, it isn’t that the government told us a story that happened, and that then got proven wrong. It’s that the government didn’t tell us there was a story, and then people figured out there was. (And how long did “Nuclear testing is perfectly harmless” last in practice?) There was no serious public question of, “Is the government honestly studying syphilis, or is something else going on?”
Getting the government to run a conspiracy of this magnitude with no credible leaks of any kind, despite massive personal incentives to leak, requires a whole lot of things to go exactly right. Actually landing on the moon, after developing a robust space program and spending enough money to develop landing on the moon and launching giant rockets into space and having videos of people landing on the moon, is not nearly so unlikely.