When working in their near lives, people have an intuition about how many people can be told about something salacious without it becoming public knowledge. Even in circumstances where everyone is properly motivated and there are low rewards for becoming an informant, like a middle school classroom, we understand intuitively how hard it is to keep everyone from leaking information to the teacher. The airquoted “conspiracy theorist” first and foremost rejects their internal social navigation sensors.
I’m confused about this.
On the one hand, keeping secrets is hard. There’s the aphorism that “two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead”. It’s been well-argued on LW that once you lie or keep a secret, you quickly get into epistemic problems, e.g. because keeping one lie continually requires further lies. And so on. I don’t dispute this. And that doesn’t even get into other topics like how most organisations lack security mindset and practice security through obscurity, so that e.g. a sufficiently motivated hacker should be able to uncover their secrets.
On the other hand, ignore conspiracies for a minute. Private information definitely exists. We don’t actually know particularly well what goes on in the day-to-day of corporations or government agencies, whether in democratic countries or dictatorships. China has a population of 1.4 billion, which necessitates an enormous bureaucratic apparatus; how do they keep any information private? Also, if keeping secrets was sufficiently hard, surely the concept of “whistleblower” wouldn’t be as newsworthy as it is, right?
And yet, how can both points be true in the same universe? Keeping information private can be hard or easy, but not both. Is the synthesis supposed to be that powerful organisations can’t keep secrets, but that they can keep uncovered secrets from becoming public? Is it that the Internet is so saturated with conspiracy theories that we can’t distinguish true whistleblowers from invented nonsense? Is it that, against all intuition and logic, secrets somehow become easier to keep as organisations increase in size?
Or is this whole line of thinking fundamentally confused?
I’m glad you’re confused! You will find the next few posts helpful. But as a teaser: I absolutely hate it when people outright say something like “only N people can hold a secret at the same time”. Most people have all worked in offices where, for example, one person had a crush on another person and literally everybody in the office knew except that person. Or for another example, in an office where everybody but the floor manager knew that the work they were doing was pointless. It’s the circumstances that determine the half life of private information. There’s no “upper limit” to the amount of people that can “hold a secret” “in general”—the question is always, which people, from who, what information are they hiding, and for how long do they need to keep it under wraps?
Factors can certainly pull in opposite directions and vary in importance by situation. Noise is a very real issue and I think there is a threshold on the amount of incriminating evidence a wistleblower needs to have of a conspiracy before being credible and that increases with the size, profile, etc of the group in question. You’d naturally expect the number of people making up stories to go up with the number of people aware of the alegedly conspiring group’s influence. Or maybe another way, we should expect information about small conspiracies to be filtered differently from serious criminal ones and again differently for nation state level ones. The level of coersion a state like the US or China can apply when sufficently inconvenienced is also a world beyond other actors.
I’m confused about this.
On the one hand, keeping secrets is hard. There’s the aphorism that “two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead”. It’s been well-argued on LW that once you lie or keep a secret, you quickly get into epistemic problems, e.g. because keeping one lie continually requires further lies. And so on. I don’t dispute this. And that doesn’t even get into other topics like how most organisations lack security mindset and practice security through obscurity, so that e.g. a sufficiently motivated hacker should be able to uncover their secrets.
On the other hand, ignore conspiracies for a minute. Private information definitely exists. We don’t actually know particularly well what goes on in the day-to-day of corporations or government agencies, whether in democratic countries or dictatorships. China has a population of 1.4 billion, which necessitates an enormous bureaucratic apparatus; how do they keep any information private? Also, if keeping secrets was sufficiently hard, surely the concept of “whistleblower” wouldn’t be as newsworthy as it is, right?
And yet, how can both points be true in the same universe? Keeping information private can be hard or easy, but not both. Is the synthesis supposed to be that powerful organisations can’t keep secrets, but that they can keep uncovered secrets from becoming public? Is it that the Internet is so saturated with conspiracy theories that we can’t distinguish true whistleblowers from invented nonsense? Is it that, against all intuition and logic, secrets somehow become easier to keep as organisations increase in size?
Or is this whole line of thinking fundamentally confused?
I’m glad you’re confused! You will find the next few posts helpful. But as a teaser: I absolutely hate it when people outright say something like “only N people can hold a secret at the same time”. Most people have all worked in offices where, for example, one person had a crush on another person and literally everybody in the office knew except that person. Or for another example, in an office where everybody but the floor manager knew that the work they were doing was pointless. It’s the circumstances that determine the half life of private information. There’s no “upper limit” to the amount of people that can “hold a secret” “in general”—the question is always, which people, from who, what information are they hiding, and for how long do they need to keep it under wraps?
Factors can certainly pull in opposite directions and vary in importance by situation. Noise is a very real issue and I think there is a threshold on the amount of incriminating evidence a wistleblower needs to have of a conspiracy before being credible and that increases with the size, profile, etc of the group in question. You’d naturally expect the number of people making up stories to go up with the number of people aware of the alegedly conspiring group’s influence. Or maybe another way, we should expect information about small conspiracies to be filtered differently from serious criminal ones and again differently for nation state level ones. The level of coersion a state like the US or China can apply when sufficently inconvenienced is also a world beyond other actors.