David "Grimey" Grimes and Conspiratorial Beliefs
When the physicist David Grimes, or Grimey as I like to call him, came out with his sensationalized paper “On the viability of conspiratorial beliefs”, the media, drooling at the mouth, applauded. Conspiracy theories, after all, run counter to most mainstream narratives and, if they did exist, hard-hitting newsroom journalists would have uncovered them long ago. Look at the Watergate scandal, the media’s shining hour: where they proved that Nixon used many of the same tactics that the media uses on a regular basis. However, it quickly became clear that members of the media either lack the intellectual capacity or curiosity to understand the problems with Grimey’s “proof”.
Grimey’s paper is a clear attack on the what he labels as “anti-science” beliefs. Of course, his representation of these beliefs completely lack nuance, choosing to categorize a broad spectrum of ideas together and assuming that the most hardline form of these views are representative of these movements as a whole. For example, most of the criticisms of climate “science” do not even claim that climate change is a hoax, at least not literally. The criticism of climate science is generally multi-variate, ranging from the infeasibility of solving the purported problem through vast government spending and miracle solutions, the 98% consensus lie, the failure to weight costs and benefits equally, and the failure to consider the temperature dependence of cloud stratification in climate models.
Those are just a few of a vast range of topics that require nuanced consideration when talking about climate change. Most of those ideas fall under the realm of conspiracy theory due to media fear-mongering and the promotion of sensationalist climate alarmists who do gain large financial rewards by pushing their theories. To say otherwise is, frankly, absurd. There are dozens of predictions made by a small group of people, most recently that the world will end in 12 years, which in any other realm would be considered nothing short of a cult. The push by the media and certain climate scientists to radically alter human behavior with scant returns and cripple Western economies while allowing so-called “developing countries” to emit large amounts of the boogeyman gas are just a couple of the things that Grimey’s “conspiracy theorists” are attacking.
But even if he had presented a nuanced interpretation of conspiracy theories, his model is inherently flawed to the point where it is simply not useful and never will be. Grimey uses a sample of three conspiracy theories that came true to estimate his parameters. He does this knowing absolutely, positively nothing about his population. For those three conspiracies, there may have been thousands of real conspiracies that were never found out. Because of the very nature of conspiracies, where there are strong incentives to keep a secret, parameters can never be adequately estimated. Ever.
Aside from that, when running his model over a list of “conspiracy theories”, Grimey vastly overestimates the number of co-conspirators that would need to be involved. Most conspiracies require the involvement of only a few people. This is because most people within an organization are working independently of one another with little knowledge of the big picture. The Manhattan Project worked this way and the secret may have continued indefinitely without the conspirators choosing to reveal it.
Now, his overestimation of the number of conspirators involved would be fine, except for his model to be useful in any way, one would need to have a decent estimate of the number of conspirators involved in a given conspiracy to run it through the model. Again, this is not information that is possible to ascertain without the conspiracy being revealed in the first place.
He also assumes that leaks large enough to cause the failure of a conspiracy theory exist. But do they? And what, for that matter, is failure? What if a massive conspiracy is revealed with hundreds or thousands of affidavits, physical evidence, video evidence, digital evidence, and insiders admitting to the existence of a conspiracy… and it is ignored? What if it is simply called a conspiracy theory? Failure does not exist if the leaks, even massive leaks, are ignored. In the words of Napoleon, history is a set of lies agreed upon.
In short, Grimey’s model is completely and utterly useless. It was clearly a project he made in his spare time, and he made no attempt for it to be predictive or useful in any way. But it still deserves to be criticized because it perpetuates the idea that conspiracy theories are necessarily wrong. I have even heard one commentator claim that they are wrong by definition. The fact is that people believe in conspiracy theories because they are skeptical of those in positions of power, many conspiracy theories either wind up being true or were never conspiracy theories in the first place (often times, rational scientific discourse is labelled as conspiracy theory). It is a weasel phrase used primarily by propaganda outlets who prop people like Grimey up to silence dissenters.