The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

by Steven Novella

Grand conspiracy theories tend to grow larger and more complex until they collapse under their own weight. In the PLOS One paper, Grimes set out to do a probability failure analysis of grand conspiracies. What’s the probability that they will fail from within, meaning that someone who is in on the conspiracy either deliberately or accidentally exposes the conspiracy sufficiently that it fails? He didn’t consider extrinsic failure—being exposed by outside investigation. Grimes used real historical conspiracies as his guide, namely the National Security Agency spying scandal (exposed by Edward Snowden), the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and the FBI forensics scandal. In order to make a mathematical model of grand conspiracy failure, he had to plug in several factors. These include: How many people would need to be involved in the conspiracy; how does that number change over time; and how reliable is each individual on average? From the historical examples, he came up with a range of reliability and then used the most reliable end of the spectrum for his calculations to come up with the most conservative estimate of failure probability. How the number of conspirators changed over time is an interesting variable. For some conspiracy theories, like the alien recovered from a crashed saucer at Roswell, the people involved at the time would die off over the years, reducing the number of people who can expose the conspiracy and decreasing the probability that this would happen. H...