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IMO the main problem with conspiracy theory is the "conspiracy": large groups of people are generally bad at closely cooperating without leaking information. Although it does happen, the other main problem with most conspiracy theories is requiring a long-term plan with broad predictions (like public perception) to mostly succeed, which (granted, in the public eye) seems to never happen. And to top it off, most conspiracy theorists don't provide an obvious motive and their evidence seems like obvious mistakes. So you expect me to believe this massive group orchestrated a years-long plan without any leaks or slip-ups, predicted what no-one else could (and relied on those predictions for their years-long plan, so they must have been either very confident or very reckless), except for these glaring flaw only a group of crackpots discovered; and why so much effort and risk, what couldn't be accomplished through simpler means? Well, it hasn't been disproven...
Emergent theories are easier to believe: rather than a group coordinating to do something, members all have similar motivation, and rather than planning ahead, their actions just happen to lead to or benefit from the outcome. In fact, there may be lots of coordination and omission, because people can identify their "ingroup" and "outgroup" mostly reliably and even subconsciously; but no center or plan, just natural human behavior, and it's not actually secret, the signs are obvious just not to you. The other thing about emergent theories is the leaders actually aren't human (there are none), and the plan actually isn't human-made (there is none), which explains no good motive and obvious flaws.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Consequently, never attribute a masterminded evil plan to typical human behavior on a large scale inadvertently causing big problems.
This is naturally just how people think but it isn’t how historical development and processes work. History isn’t the result of an overarching plan that only happens with some global elite at the press of a single button up in some nefarious high tower somewhere. When I was growing up, there were a lot of kids in my neighborhood that I saw and interacted with a lot due to their unavoidable proximity to my friend group, and I mentored a lot of younger peers and taught them quite a bit. There were a couple of them I can recall having to explain the concept path dependencies to. Things in the world don’t happen because of some “grand master plan.” They happen because overtime there’s a thousand little events taking place in the world that collectively add up in the direction of particular, emergent outcomes.
When people ask questions like, “Who rules the world?”, they think you can’t answer questions like that meaningfully without appealing to some ultimate, single factor explanation that unfolds like a conspiracy and explains why everything happens the way it does. It’s the US and multinational corporations that run the world, by and large. They just don’t run it like a cartoon conspiracy, because historical events are messy, incomplete, with countervailing forces against present day trends, along with everything else. It’s part of the natural historical lifecycle of things.
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This basically misunderstands the dynamics at play in real life wholesale:
This last point is very important to understand because the popular version of conspiracy theory, indulged in by the worst conspiracy theorists and the favorite strawman of debunkers, does often postulate large degrees of covert coordination, which allows real conspiracies to operate more-or-less openly without even being viewed as sinister. Obviously there are in fact covert actions that take place, but real life conspiracies (much like real life espionage) operates on a spectrum from covert to overt, and overt actions can be chained together with less overt actions to achieve desired goals.
It's true that the straw-man conspiracy theory, with 300 bloodsuckers sitting on thrones in Lichtenstein somewhere deciding the fate of the world isn't true (at least, I don't think it is; I haven't had direct personal experience of it) but the popular version of a conspiracy theory, where hidden forces work behind the scenes to sway the fate of the nation, is basically true. It's just that general shape that it takes is so familiar that it doesn't strike us as a conspiracy, because we're all conspirators. We've (almost) all signed an NDA, or spilled a rumor at just the right time, or "gundecked" a report to keep somebody from looking bad. And the "big" conspiracies often aren't really different from this in mechanism, only in ambition.
However these basically mundane ways can be very effective. They're just not very satisfying to people who are excited to learn about Hyperborea, lizard shape-shifters, or at least something out of a James Bond movie. Things like "the military spying on the President and leaking classified information to the press undermine his policies" not only happen, but can be successfully covered up for decades, and the details are so mundane that when they are released, conspiracy theorists and the public alike are barely aware of it, even though it's a textbook case study of supposedly-mythical "Deep State" at work.
Wasn't he (and Epstein) prosecuted? Not everyone was arrested, but especially with the amount implicated, Epstein is evidence against the elite successfully keeping conspiracies (although it did seem to involve everyone, so was particularly hard to keep). He was also publicly prosecuted once before his final arrest, the only reason it never made headlines is because the mainstream didn't care; look at how it suddenly cared years after his final arrest, more than ever before, (although this could be a conspiracy of its own) I suspect because some people realized Trump was involved and Biden (and other Dems that would be government staff) were no longer relevant.
I'm still very skeptical of this: so far all the "evidence" I've seen has been unconvincing and not very plausible. How come UFO reports have gone down so much since the proliferation of cameras and other technology that would verify them?
Samsung and "Smart TVs" in general have been known for years to spy on users. And the recent revelations are also evidence against a successful conspiracy. Samsung employees never had strong incentive to leak these features, because the reaction would be "duh", and consumers who pay attention and care have long abandoned Samsung's TVs.
A "conspiracy" by definition must be secret. You're right that large groups operate in the open, with basic obfuscation or a low profile so most people don't realize what they're doing. But that's not necessarily intentional (they probably present themselves as ordinary and ethical...because they genuinely think they are); and when it is, it's trivial to bypass if one looks closely, which only roughly fits the idea of "secret".
Right, but years after it was an open secret that he was abusive.
You see my point. You're correct to be skeptical. But the idea that something leaking thwarts the thing just isn't true; did Weinstein stop abusing women once it was clear other people had learned about it? No, he was convicted for things that happened years and years later! Similarly, if there's any truth at all to the UFO thing, the conspiracy has been ticking along despite being "leaked" in the 1940s.
I don't think they have gone down.
The idea that cameras and other technology could verify them is mostly nonsense anyway; pictures and (accounts of) radar returns of "UFOs" have been public for years and it's not some slam-dunk that persuades people; believers will believe them even when they are fake and skeptics will doubt them even if they aren't. Step outside and take a picture of an airliner at cruising altitude with your cell phone. What's that tell you if you don't already know it's an airliner? Next to nothing, and setting up a radar in your back yard to get a skin return doesn't tell you much more unless you have NTCR.
Of course in real life most people have better things to do than e.g. sort through old photographic plates looking for bright spots and thus it's pretty much only people who go looking for UFOs who find them, which rather taints the credibility of the whole affair.
Any conspiracy that's been verified is "evidence against a successful conspiracy" inasmuch as people are aware of it and don't really dispute it. But a successful conspiracy is one that accomplishes its goals; once that happens, it often doesn't actually matter if people are aware of it (hence why we learn new things about World War Two and the Cold War every year.)
But at the same time no conspiracy by definition is secret, because by definition at least two people must know. This is a neat little trick you can use to argue that no conspiracy is really a conspiracy, because (obviously) inadequate steps were taken to keep it secret. But obviously if the conspiracy is illegal it's no defense that you didn't try to keep it a secret. Similarly, I would argue that "secrecy" has various levels, and that simply because something is not secret to everyone or even to non-members of the conspiracy does not render something not a conspiracy.
For instance, look at the famous example of how the Soviet Union was able to deduce that the US was working on an atomic weapon (because, as I understand it, the American scientific literature on the topic dried up). Just because the Soviets were able to figure it out does not mean that there was not an attempt to keep it secret. Furthermore, it was successfully kept secret from the public. Finally, it's noteworthy that the effort was detected precisely because of the conspiracy to keep it secret.
Thus there was a conspiracy to cover up information and it succeeded, albeit imperfectly. The fact that it was not perfect does not mean that there is a conspiracy.
It very much can be intentional; there's a reason "black money" organizations exist (and that's on the legal side of things.)
I think it's helpful to step back and ask yourself if knowing the information would make a material difference. For instance, PR firms are real, and businesses hire them, and sometimes PR firms even publicize which businesses they work with or vice versa. There's no secret there. Nevertheless, newspapers do not disclose that they've been assisted by a PR firm on a story. Why not? Would knowing they have been materially change the way you read the article?
Similarly with ghostwriters. If you've read an op-ed (not a column, but an op-ed) in a newspaper, there's a good chance it was ghostwritten, and this fact is also public. But this is not disclosed. Why not? Would knowing who wrote it materially change the way you read the op-ed?
(Check out Paul Graham's "The Submarine" if you haven't already, it highlights a lot of what I am trying to gesture at.)
So it is that when you open up a newspaper, the entire thing is riddled with little falsehoods or lies of omission that create a false impression, and are the result of not one grand unified conspiracy but dozens of little trivial ones. And as I said, not much different in kind than you adhering to your corporate NDA, or not telling a friend that you're regifting their present, or winking at a subordinate's smoke break, or what have you - but vastly different in ambition because the goal of these little conspiracies is to change the world in which you and I live. And those are relatively mundane, but the same mechanisms that can obscure these little mundane conspiracies can also serve to conceal the CIA recovering a secret Soviet submarine, or USAID trying to undermine the Cuban government by creating a Twitter clone. Tor (which was made by the US Naval Research Laboratory, by the way) conceals the online activity of the petty drug purchaser and the U.S. intelligence operative alike.
You're going to feel like my comparison of PR firms to the Grand Illuminati Council of Lizardfolk is absurd, that the former doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy theory. But I'm trying to tell you that the latter is a weakman that trains your mind to dismiss real conspiracies. The voice in your head that says "that's trivial to bypass if one looks closely" is the same voice that tells you not to look closely.
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One of my favorite episodes of the X-Files was one where Mulder got mind-swapped with a guy whose entire job was creating fake conspiracies, selectively leaking to the press, etc. all to distract from the real secret stuff that the feds were doing.
People eat this up because they know the « feds » are a criminal (natural law, inb4 But The Badge) conspiracy, but the issue is this overemphasizes their competence. They are also not that smart. In fact you know how on TV you consume propaganda about how they have genius analysts working for them? They don't in real life. They contract out technical stuff like cracking locked phones to criminal (natural law) corporations. It's actually kind of pathetic. The state is clearly this unintelligent appendage sucking out intelligence from the broader civil society; it is not self-generating.
The actual quality of "the feds" depends on the fed. Some of their personnel (NSA geeks, Navy nuclear technicians) are extremely intelligent (at least as far as test-taking goes).
The areas of the federal bureaucracy that select for politicking in particular are quite capable of pulling off conspiracies.
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The Futility of Emergence:
Now as for what you wrote specifically, I would call this individualistic theory, and not emergent. That's clearer. But you said:
Let's use red tribe as an example. Clearly, some of their members plan ahead. Are you modeling mice here, or men?
Partially true. Conspiracy = coordination + secret. Sometimes, there's not-secret coordination. However, there is no requirement that there be no center or plan at all. Very often in human groups there is, in fact, a center and a plan. Like Donald Trump and Project 2025. What is more interesting is thinking about the ultimate power of this center. Usually it is there, but it only partially explains phenomena.
No, usually human groups have leaders.
Typically there are some plans and the plans are in fact made with the big brain in the skull which evolved for a reason to be able to make plans.
Members do plan ahead and sometimes coordinate, they may have leadership, may even believe they are forming a conspiracy. The difference from a real conspiracy theory is that the actual plans and coordination are a small part of the overall process, and the leaders have little control over it; more like, the process started and they happened to notice and ride it, but they didn't cause it to happen and it would've happened without them (maybe with others instead).
Or it could be a big but not complete part of the process, and the leaders have a lot but not complete control over it. Or big could be moderate. How do you know whether it's big, moderate, or little/small? What are you basing this off of?
It depends what you mean. In general leaders ride their followers, because they do not have the power of mind control. But their plans are the product of agency.
The typical conspiracy theory heavily implies if not outright states near-complete centralization: a group (spontaneously or after an event) meets, plans something, and carefully orchestrates it. The reality, that what they were planning started without them and would continue without them (via some other group), or that their plan was a small part of what the conspiracy theory accuses them of, makes the theory misleading: it gives the impression these people have more competence and foresight than reality.
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The secret ingredient is moralism and ideology. You have to establish beforehand what a good person believes, and what only a bad person would support. This way, a leak can be dismissed as a traitor, a heretic, an inhuman monster. This can and often is substantially emergent (where IMO the term "prospiracy" is nice), but plenty of people actually know perfectly well what they're doing. Another valuable trick in the book is establishing that not only is it immoral to reveal the conspiracy, it is already immoral to even investigate. That way, a conspiracy can simultaneously recruit large numbers of people, with only very few being in on the details in practice.
I've personally seen this in action on HBD, where many geneticists think it's true, yet actively spread slander about anyone who publicly talks because they genuinely believe that revealing it would have terrible outcomes. But the basic principle is always the same, whether it's companies, cults or large-scale activism.
Do they believe that? The motivation has always struck me as more like "I have to make public statements about HBD being evil in order to progress in my career," not that it'll result in a Fourth Reich.
Of course, that's speculative about interior mental states we don't have access to, but so is the Fourth Reich hypothesis.
I've seen it a few times, from people who admit to the whole progressive spiel about blank slates and non-hbd being false, yet want to keep it in place lest society instantly devolve into some genocidal nazi-like hellscape where the strong brutally discriminate against the weak...
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For some yes, but one of my PhD supervisors who is otherwise not shy to get into fights has, after a pint in private at the pub, all but explicitly said that he thinks the public is simply not ready. To him, the average person is really bad at parsing statistical average differences as anything but "is better than", the worst racists will feel vindicated, it's just going to result in a lot of unfair discrimination, and it's not even clear if that discrimination will be strictly speaking irrational. I may not entirely agree with him, but I 100% believe that he believes this.
And one part where I've not quite changed, but let's say expanded, my mind on is how bad zealots can be depending on ideologies. I'm convinced the same kind of person who used to mindlessly support the Nazis in the 30s (or the communists in the USSR), has been mindlessly supporting the left in western countries since ca the 70s. It's a person that thinks in black and white extremes and can't handle anything but simple moralistic tales, who is always looking for scapegoats.
This may seem like a terrible indictment of them as people, and it mostly is, but it also means that we've successfully "defused" them, since the left of that time simply wasn't that bad in comparison. Getting them into campaigns for LGBT rights, environmental protections or animal right of some stupid spotty owl or whatever other issue impacting 0.1% of people was actually kind of a good deal. What we really need to avoid is that these people switch again to a murderous ideology, whether far right or far left. The problem is they've been steadily moving towards the murderous far left, and there seems to be no way to hold them in check which doesn't also involve empowering the far right. But they'll never go away, only ever get into different ideologies.
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But wouldn’t business be impossible if this were true? Wouldn’t the notion of a trade secret or an agreement with confidential terms just not exist?
Some software projects (e.g. highly anticipated new video games) are in development for years before their existence is made public, and the interested parties do manage to keep it a secret before the public announcement. Presumably, there were some such projects that got canceled before the announcement, and they were doomed to permanent obscurity.
Or think about source code. Surely there are some highly valuable commercial software packages whose source code has never been leaked, yes? (Ignoring recent advances in AI reverse engineering.)
ADDENDUM: Although I’m certainly not unbiased here, I imagine that there’s an equally strong reciprocal bias among some individuals of a more Rationalist bent towards believing that conspiracies are impossible; if it is possible for groups of people to successfully hide valuable information, then this would mean that social and political factors can stymie the free flow of information, which runs counter to the dream of completing a fully rational and scientific analysis of reality that is unencumbered by social limitations.
I think there's a general principle that exists that the more impactful (I searched for a better term and could not come up with it) the thing that is being planned is, the greater risk of the conspiracy falling apart: what keeps a conspiracy together is a unity of purpose and goals. The greater the material impact upon the world, both (in general) the larger number of people you need to recruit, and the more difficult it is to align the preferences of all those involved.
I think it is probably much easier to keep a group of people silent about making a new video game or car than it is to say, conduct a terrorist attack or false flag.
I think this is also due to the nature of a conspiracy to do a legal act versus an illegal act. For one, a conspiracy to do something that is legal means that the conspirators will face no repercussions for not revealing the conspiracy: as far as they're concerned, the value proposition is all in keeping silent and there's no gain in it for them (and often quite a bit of punishment) for yapping. Furthermore, the nature of the enterprise being legal means that to maintain secrecy the conspirators are able to establish an effective bureaucracy to deter leaks: scrupulously collecting evidence of who has access to what materials at what time. Obviously an illegal conspiracy would not be seeking to create a parallel paper trail where it exhaustively collects data on the discrete nature of criminality of the various participants.
I'm not sure I really buy this distinction in common use; this would move hypothesizing about e.g. UFO cover ups mostly out of the realm of a conspiracy theory, since presumably it's not actually illegal for the government to e.g. conduct crash retrievals and reverse-engineering and classify all of their findings.
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Sure, that’s a reasonable thing to believe. But now we’ve moved from “people can’t keep secrets” to “well they couldn’t keep a secret that big”. Now we’ve entered the domain of qualitative judgements.
Yeah, that is more accurate. Game developers can keep projects secret because there's no point in leaking and a big point in not doing that (you've been working on this project for years, why spoil it?) Companies can keep trade secrets because it would be apparent if a competitor stole them, then the financial gain would be undone by lawsuits, and what other motive is there?
But ethics violations are frequently leaked, although we don't know if they're a small fraction of those committed. And the more severe the violation, especially when it starts falling apart (e.g. because it relies on a conspiracy-theory-sized plan), the more likely someone bails to cover themselves, or accidentally does something suspicious.
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