This week's blog post got me back to thinking about a conspiracy theory video I watched a few months back. Around Christmas time, I watched a youtube video by Kurzgesagt on how to test whether or not a conspiracy theory might be true. He proposed that asking a simple questions "does the the theory affect rich and powerful people" is enough - if the answer is yes, then it's probably a conspiracy theory (for example: the theory that a cure for cancer is being withheld because it would destroy the profits of the pharmaceutical companies isn't true, because if it was rich people wouldn't die of cancer).
This made me wonder if others were also looking into more scientific means of debunking these theories. In doing some google-work, I came across a recent study out of Harvard University, that set out to develop a mathematical model to test the validity of conspiracy theories based on how fast they spread. Essentially, physicist David Grimes proposed a model that estimates how long any particular conspiracy could likely be kept secret by all of the people involved in it. The model analyses the number of people/parties involves in the theory and the length of time it has been ongoing, cross-referenced with data based off of previously-discovered theories, to come up with answers like this: if the moon landing had been faked, rumors of this would have been circulating within 3.68 years. The model also estimates that for a conspiracy to stand a chance at staying hidden for over 100 years, it must have a maximum of 125 involved parties. In this model, then, the controlled variable is the average amount of time, per party, that a conspiracy has, historically, managed to remain a secret for. The independent variables are the number of parties involved in the specific theory under study, as well as its age.
Although I am not going to pretend that I understand even a smidgen of the math involved, the experiment raises a lot of questions about how information is spread in modern society. It makes me wonder if the minimum number of parties required to keep something secret (for a certain amount of years) would actually be less now, owing to the interconnected nature of modern day society. If so, would this model (if found to be somewhat accurate), require constant revision in order for it to be able to keep up with the constant advances in modern day communication technology? It's also a curious study for the simple fact that this is a physicist who is studying how information is spread - who knew!
Sources:
Hays, Brook. "Scientist Develops Math Model to Test Conspiracy Theories." 27 January, 2016, UPI News, http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/01/27/Scientist-develops-math-model-to-test-conspiracy-theories/6791453919235/
Kurgesaght - In a Nutshell. "The Ultimate COnspiracy Debunker." 18 December 2014, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hug0rfFC_L8
I like that a math model will find its way into most things! This has been the rule of thumb for conspiracy "deny-ers" for a long time: "someone will want their 15 minutes."
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering whether or not this kind of mathematical mapping can be done without the perspective of time.