![]() ![]() 'You assume per person in the conspiracy, per unit time, there is some very, very small but non-zero chance of failure. His paper, published online by PLOS ONE last week, applied a mathematical model based on genuine conspiracies to four alleged conspiracies: that the US moon landings were a hoax, that climate change is a fraud, that unsafe vaccinations are being covered up, and that the cure for cancer is being suppressed by the world's leading pharmaceutical firms. Could you try to model the likelihood-even if you make conspirators very, very good at keeping secrets-and work out how many people would have to be involved and then estimate what the failure rate would be for some of the big science conspiracies?' 'You get these accusations, and it made me curious. 'I find that if you're trying to convince people of the importance of vaccination or the reality of climate change or things like this, there is a backbone conspiracist narrative that people throw up there and go, "Science is a big conspiracy and you're in on it,"' he says. At times, commenters have responded to his articles about climate change and vaccination with accusations that he is part of the conspiracy. Grimes is a physicist working in the field of cancer research, as well as a science communicator who writes for The Guardian and The Irish Times. ![]() Modelling the likelihood of a big science conspiracy 'Anyone who has worked with academics will tell you that's like herding cats.' 'The thing about science is that because everyone is testing each other and you're trying to falsify things to make sure that no one is cheating, to get scientists to all conspire on something you would literally need everyone in a particular field to decide they were sticking to one story,' Grimes tells Sunday Extra. Many popular conspiracy theories, however, assume large numbers of people have deceived the public for decades. ![]() That's because there's always the possibility of an accidental or intentional leak, even in incredibly secretive organisations. Because of the sheer number of people involved, even if these people are amazing secret-keepers overall, there will eventually be whistleblowing or some clumsy mishap that allows a leak to happen.Given that these three conspiracies existed and were kept secret for years before being exposed to the public, is the idea that the moon landing was a hoax really so fanciful?Īccording to Oxford researcher David Robert Grimes, the likelihood of a conspiracy surviving undetected is related to how many people are involved and how long the deception goes on. ![]()
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