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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   2936 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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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 think this is also due to the nature of a conspiracy to do a legal act versus an illegal act.

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.

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

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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