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A little bit of critical thinking and some basic understanding of the sciences could do us all good, it would even reduce the need for those pesky fact checkers we have discussed earlier and might save us from some of the stupidest conspiracy theories. This part of the media guide is about a certain flavour of conspiratorial thinking.
Let us disregard for a moment the group of journalists who merely carbon copy press releases from the three big news agencies — because they are going to be replaced by AI sooner rather than later — and consider just those with outstanding contributions, independent analyses, those who don't automatically agree with prevailing opinions or pursue the same stories as the majority of their colleagues. Some of them come from mainstream media, but were too honest to "fail upwards" and became marginalised or lost their jobs and found it necessary to continue on their own, a few are citizen journalists with a variety of backgrounds.
Investigative reporting implies delving deeply into the subject matter. This is where knowledge and understanding matters, which is not necessarily the same thing as scholarly degrees. A lack of basic scientific understanding can spoil the best efforts. The ahistorical absorption into the near present is bad enough, though perhaps not as pervasive. It takes time to read up on science as well as on history, time otherwise spent reporting from the field, that is, typically from home behind the computer screen.
One genre of investigative reporting pursues the method "follow the money". When it comes to science there is a fine line between appropriately trusting the natural and legitimate authority of researchers (because they are experts in their field) and questioning their conclusions based on their funding. This uncertainty of motives has recently disturbed and distorted the debates about vaccines, and previously GMOs.
If a qui bono argument can be made it may be sufficient for the reporter to ignore any other leads. For example, there are reports about inside trading shortly before the 9/11 events, so this may be taken as "overwhelming evidence" for suspecting involvement rather than a coincidence.
The funding of organisations is often scrutinised and there is a kind of guilt by association as soon as one of the supposed villains is found among the patrons. Familiar names such as Soros, the Clintons, the Koch brothers, Adelson, or Gates, as well as think tanks and NGOs often figure in this kind of reasoning. That is not to say that these individuals and organisations should not be scrutinised, just that financial ties as such are no proof of wrongdoing. Except when it is.
Some establishment figures seem to have a hand in every organisation. Influential as they may be, we must not think that they are always able to carry out their agenda. This is an error frequently committed by some vigilant observers, who analyse every speech these powerful people make and nit-pick details seemingly indicative of some half-hidden agenda that only the "cabal" of wealthy companions are supposed to be aware about. Such commentators, and there are quite a few, are easily disqualified as conspiracy theorists. But their critique is legitimate, if not always based on solid evidence or stringent analysis.
By all means, it is fair to criticise wealthy, influential individuals who lobby politicians and fund think tanks and NGOs to carry out their prefered agenda. Even if they were perfectly benevolent the wealth inequality gives them too much power over questions that should be decided by the people for the society still to resemble a democracy. Funding vaccination against measles is not a bad thing to do (yes, there are those who think it is, perhaps because they are not scientifically educated), but it should be a matter of public debate and decision which noble causes get funded, and in what way.
Just to take one more example, because it stands out among the rest: Criticism against Bill Gates often picks up certain remarks he has made about population size, noting that we are in trouble should it continue to grow. Indeed, given the current resource consumption in the rich parts of the world we are in great trouble already. A sustainable population size at current levels of consumption would be significantly smaller than it is now. There are some alternative solutions to this: hope that continued efficiency gains and inventions will save us, reduce our consumption levels (which isn't possible in the poorest parts of the world), or reduce population size. Any combination of the three strategies is of course possible. However, when this line of reasoning is brought up, there are immediately cries of eugenics and the evil new world order.
A slow and controlled population reduction should be much preferable to any of the alternatives, which are famine, high mortality through pandemics, and war. Still, the thought of any collectively organised population control is so despicable to individuals who care strongly about personal freedom that they resort to magical thinking. "We have survived hard times before, we'll come up with a solution this time too" they say. It's not wrong to hope, but to imagine that we could keep on in the same way as until recently is pure madness.
Let's turn to the closely related subject of true and imagined conspiracies, and discuss a theoretical article on conspiracy theories and their prospects of surviving by David Robert Grimes, published in PLOS One in 2016. The paper introduces a statistical model that relates the number of co-conspirators to the expected time until the conspiracy is discovered.
Grimes: On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs
Sunstein & Vermeule previously had defined conspiracies as "an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role." Unfortunately, this formulation does not make it sufficiently clear that there are both real and imagined conspiracies.
Noting that conspiracy theories are often skeptical of scientific claims (moon landing hoax, climate change denialism, vaccine skepticism), Grimes recognises that there have been a number of actual conspiracies or scandals where people have acted in stealth but have later been discovered. According to Grimes' model, a leak of information from within a conspiracy, whether deliberate as in whistle-blowing, or accidental, happens with a certain probability over any given time interval.
Grimes assumes that conspirators are "in general dedicated for the most part to the concealment of their activity. We further assume that a leak of information from any conspirator is sufficient to expose the conspiracy and render it redundant".
The model is both interesting and useful, although already these premises are questionable. Snowden has reminded us that the most wide-reaching conspiracies of our time are carried out in the open, including gerrymandering, manipulation of interest rates, or the introduction of technologies that everyone is free to possess but in trouble if they don't.
Plans can be discussed and decisions made openly, yet receive less public attention than baseless and clueless speculations such as pizza gate and other tales of Q-anon. Journalists may not be interested in, or even capable of understanding the matter, or they just jump on the story that will generate most clicks. So, even if a conspiracy carried out under concealment were exposed, the fact that it becomes publicly known may not matter that much after all.
That said, Grimes' insight that the more people involved in a conspiracy, the shorter its expected secretive and thus operational period, is sound.
For estimating parameters of the model, which Grimes does, one needs data such as the number of people working on the conspiracy and time until exposure, both of which are difficult to assess with any precision, given the secretive nature of real conspiracies. The number of conspirators may also change over time, which complicates matters. Grimes considers three cases, one of a constant number of conspirators, one in which the population diminishes gradually by natural death, and one scenario of internal feuds leading to exponential decline; he does not consider the possibility of an increasing work force needed to operate the conspiracy.
Doing scientific research is a collective endeavour, with scientific communities comprising hundreds of thousands of researchers. It follows by necessity that such large communities would not be able to uphold any conspiracy for very long, before some disgruntled scientist decides to inform the rest of the world about their ongoing scam. As Grimes points out, the likelihood of an external critical analysis discovering the cover-up makes it likely to fail even sooner.
While conspiracies do undoubtedly happen, their continued secrecy is probably more due to keeping the number of agents low than having an intrinsically small per agent per time leak probability.
There are also the mechanisms of compartmentalisation and the phenomenon of plausible deniability to take into account, if not in science at least in politics. A highly compartmentalised organisation has employees engaged in small parts of a project, they have no overview of all of it and may have a very limited understanding of its greater purpose. Plausible deniability often takes the form that superior project managers don't want to be informed about how exactly certain tasks are being carried out. In other words, these two mechanisms would partially block the information flow within an organisation and reduce the likelihood that anyone involved would notice any wrongdoing, possibly inciting someone to leak.
In science any collective deception effort is extremely unlikely, in part because results in published papers are sometimes scrutinised by other scientists — not always immediately, and some papers are at most read by the reviewers, but such papers would do no harm anyway, no matter how full of faked results they were. It is safe to assume that deliberate deceptions would result in claims eye-catching enough to get thoroughly examined by peers, and debunked if any flaws were to be found.
Thus even if a small devious cohort of rouge scientists falsified data for climate change or attempted to cover-up vaccine information, examination by other scientists would fatally undermine the nascent conspiracy.
As the purpose of the study, Grimes writes:
One of the major motivations is to help counter-act anti-science beliefs from gaining a foothold by quantifying how extraordinarily unlikely it is that a cohesive scientific fraud could take place on such massive scales.
As the author finally observes, this rational explanation of how conspiracies are prone to suffer from leaks sooner or later will not convince hard believers, for whom any attempted rational explanation only entrenches their beliefs.
Crucially, the argument depends on statistical reasoning, which for most people is an unnatural and strained mode of thinking. (Statistical reasoning is an example of slow thinking in Kahneman's terms; it takes considerable effort.) Contrast this with the kind of reasoning that analyses everything from a personal gains and connections perspective: follow the money and who knows whom, and there you have your answers. The latter kind of analysis must feel more compelling insofar as it provides rapid answers that appear convincing. And that is not to say that the analysis of personal gains and power structures is in any way irrelevant, or that it must lead to false conclusions. But in some cases it is insufficient.
Part eleven (internet censorship)
Part twelve (this one)
Part thirteen (psychology of propaganda)
The Oxymoronist Media Guide is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This part first published on January 21, 2022.