Yup. In more modern politics, we’ve seen it in the trans debate. “I can always tell when someone is trans” is a fallacy, because you only notice the trans people who aren’t fully passing. It’s pure selection bias, where a large part of the population is convinced that all trans people look like beefy dudes in dresses.
lol yes. But it’s not the regular evidence of shoestring infrastructure and lack of process that casts doubt on these grand conspiracies. It’s the diminishing conditional probability, over time, that they are somehow always the exception.
If we flip a fair coin once, the odds of not getting tails is 50%. If we flip twice, the odds diminish to 25%. Flip 20 times, the odds diminish to 0.000001%.
This is the conditional probability that makes the concealment of large and/or longterm conspiracies implausible: we say that the odds of getting heads on the 100th toss, conditioned on the probability of having already gotten heads 99 times, is less than a billion billion billion to one.
And the grander the conspiracy, i.e. the more individuals involved, the more “coin flips” regularly occur, and the faster these infinitesimal odds are reached — hence the expression “too many minions spoil the plot.”
So while mistakes are indeed unsurprising, the fact that none have ever uncovered big old conspiracies (especially the likes of flat earth, fake moon landing, aliens, etc.) suggests the odds of their veracity are, at this point, vanishingly small.
I think it's important to agree on a definition of "conspiracy theory" and also on what qualifies as spoiling or revealing the plot in these discussions. Otherwise we're probably talking about different things.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy
Basically “I can always tell” as an actually fallacy. Neat
Yup. In more modern politics, we’ve seen it in the trans debate. “I can always tell when someone is trans” is a fallacy, because you only notice the trans people who aren’t fully passing. It’s pure selection bias, where a large part of the population is convinced that all trans people look like beefy dudes in dresses.
Cool resource, thanks for the share!
lol yes. But it’s not the regular evidence of shoestring infrastructure and lack of process that casts doubt on these grand conspiracies. It’s the diminishing conditional probability, over time, that they are somehow always the exception.
Can you explain?
If we flip a fair coin once, the odds of not getting tails is 50%. If we flip twice, the odds diminish to 25%. Flip 20 times, the odds diminish to 0.000001%.
This is the conditional probability that makes the concealment of large and/or longterm conspiracies implausible: we say that the odds of getting heads on the 100th toss, conditioned on the probability of having already gotten heads 99 times, is less than a billion billion billion to one.
And the grander the conspiracy, i.e. the more individuals involved, the more “coin flips” regularly occur, and the faster these infinitesimal odds are reached — hence the expression “too many minions spoil the plot.”
So while mistakes are indeed unsurprising, the fact that none have ever uncovered big old conspiracies (especially the likes of flat earth, fake moon landing, aliens, etc.) suggests the odds of their veracity are, at this point, vanishingly small.
Gotcha.
I think it's important to agree on a definition of "conspiracy theory" and also on what qualifies as spoiling or revealing the plot in these discussions. Otherwise we're probably talking about different things.