If no one actually knows the plan other than the guy in charge, no one can leak the plan:
An example of compartmentalization was the Manhattan Project. Personnel at Oak Ridge constructed and operated centrifuges to isolate uranium-235 from naturally occurring uranium, but most did not know exactly what they were doing. Those that knew did not know why they were doing it. Parts of the weapon were separately designed by teams who did not know how the parts interacted.
Legit, if you want to know if a conspiracy is true, just wait 20-50 years and the CIA will declassify the related documents. Most of them are open secrets that happen to be difficult to corroborate as they’re happening. Very few rely on outright secrecy. More just plausible deniability during the period where the public would be up in arms about it.
I mean, I agree with you. I’m not claiming “there are no good toupees.” I’m pointing to [the alopecia market] as evidence that [a pill to cure baldness] couldn’t be kept secret by the [shadowy cabal of elites with gorgeous hair] for very long.
We can’t even stop our privates from telling their stripper girlfriend about the mission they’re going on the next day, and people think there’s a giant conspiracy out there where nobody talks…
Then there’s the Warrantless Wiretap program under the Bush Administration. Cheney kept the authorization memo in his personal lawyer’s safe. Only 7 people knew it existed. Shit still leaked.
Only 7. That’s perfect. I forget who said “three may keep a secret if two are dead” but of all the mustache twirling pricks in that admin, Cheney should have known.
Edit: it’s Ben Franklin’s joke, apparently. I doubt he’d mind.
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.
Edit: or if you like, the bad toupees just make it increasingly hard to believe that all men with hair are wearing one
When flipping a coin once, the probability of getting heads once is 50% (1/2). When flipping a coin twice, the probability of getting heads twice is 25% (1/2 x 1/2). When flipping a coin 20 times, the probability of getting heads 20 times is 0.000001% (1/2 x 1/2 x … x 1/2). And so forth…
Concretely, even if we set an arbitrarily high probability of a single illuminati-deep-state-qanon-pizza fuck up being avoided or adequately papered over (i.e. if we assume extremely competent conspirators) we still can’t avoid conditional probability, because doing so repeatedly over time becomes increasingly (exponentially) improbable. The grander the conspiracy, the fewer “coin flips” it takes to reach infinitesimal probability of maintaining the secret, hence the expression “too many minions spoil the plot.”
Such examples of OpSec competence make it easy to dismiss the majority of government conspiracy theories IMHO.
Compartmentalisation helps
If no one actually knows the plan other than the guy in charge, no one can leak the plan:
Legit, if you want to know if a conspiracy is true, just wait 20-50 years and the CIA will declassify the related documents. Most of them are open secrets that happen to be difficult to corroborate as they’re happening. Very few rely on outright secrecy. More just plausible deniability during the period where the public would be up in arms about it.
Right, because people never make simple mistakes 🙄
People who get paid half a mill to code mess up basic stuf like this by accident all the time
I mean, I agree with you. I’m not claiming “there are no good toupees.” I’m pointing to [the alopecia market] as evidence that [a pill to cure baldness] couldn’t be kept secret by the [shadowy cabal of elites with gorgeous hair] for very long.
They dropped this to make themselves look incompetent!
“No! This is not how the game is meant to be played.”
4D chess by the deep state!
I go back to the veteran comedian every time.
Then there’s the Warrantless Wiretap program under the Bush Administration. Cheney kept the authorization memo in his personal lawyer’s safe. Only 7 people knew it existed. Shit still leaked.
Only 7. That’s perfect. I forget who said “three may keep a secret if two are dead” but of all the mustache twirling pricks in that admin, Cheney should have known.
Edit: it’s Ben Franklin’s joke, apparently. I doubt he’d mind.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy
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.
Edit: or if you like, the bad toupees just make it increasingly hard to believe that all men with hair are wearing one
Can you explain?
When flipping a coin once, the probability of getting heads once is 50% (1/2). When flipping a coin twice, the probability of getting heads twice is 25% (1/2 x 1/2). When flipping a coin 20 times, the probability of getting heads 20 times is 0.000001% (1/2 x 1/2 x … x 1/2). And so forth…
Concretely, even if we set an arbitrarily high probability of a single illuminati-deep-state-qanon-pizza fuck up being avoided or adequately papered over (i.e. if we assume extremely competent conspirators) we still can’t avoid conditional probability, because doing so repeatedly over time becomes increasingly (exponentially) improbable. The grander the conspiracy, the fewer “coin flips” it takes to reach infinitesimal probability of maintaining the secret, hence the expression “too many minions spoil the plot.”
Cool resource, thanks for the share!
Basically “I can always tell” as an actually fallacy. Neat