Gobbo wrote:Actually history has shown again, and again that the larger, the harder it is for people to conceptualize, and consequently believe. I mean, just think about it.
There is that famous quote from Hitler's general that reiterates this in better prose.
I'm kind of disappointed you followed up that previous argument with this one. This one sucks too.
I would say more but I'm at work and can't really type too much here.
Do you agree that, to a point, a conspiracy is more vulnerable to leaks as it gets larger? Let's say there's a point where people's ability to conceptualize a conspiracy starts to break down. Up to that point, you must say that a conspiracy is more vulnerable when more people are in on it.
It also seems like, if conceptualizing the conspiracy is the problem, you have 1) super-humans at the top who
can conceptualize large organizations, and 2) less conspiratorial conspirators, e.g. the people doing the work of the conspiracy don't really understand what they're doing.
I think both these points suggest that at the levels at which conspiracies become less-leaky with size, they also become less like conspiracies as we generally understand them.
I guess this is not a universally accepted notion, but to my mind the evidence suggests that even the outliers are within relatively strict constraints for how large an organizational apparatus they can understand. Those at the top, while more powerful and better informed, are probably similarly unable to understand the full extend of their actions. As such, though they may have conspiratorial and sinister motives, the outcomes are likely to be off; at best, they will understand that large systems are chaotic (in the butterfly-effect sense), and thus that the best the outcome can be predicted is by a probability distribution.
Even assuming there are super-humans, uncannily able to comprehend large organizations and chaos-defying foresight, the rest of the people, who might be part of the conspiracy in the legal sense that they know they are doing something wrong, and what they do has the effect of furthering the ultimate goals of the conspiracy's mastermind, they aren't part of the conspiracy in that they aren't acting towards the purported goal. This has the effect of making the conspiracy less top-down, of making it not a conspiracy controlled but a network of independent actors. Even if individuals are able to reliably coax a desired response from the network, the size of the conspiracy as such is actually quite small, and the theory under which conspiracies become leakier as they grow is not refuted because this is a small conspiracy.
Ultimately, all this still makes larger conspiracies harder to pull off. The less the underlings know, the more they act not for the conspirators motives, but for their own, and the less likely that they will act in the conspirator's interests and against their own. And even when everyone
is on the same page, perhaps deceived into acting on bad reasons, the large the conspiracy the more noise there will be in its actions, i.e. the more individual decision makers will choose incorrectly when attempting to further the conspiracy (especially since this setup seems to select for people that aren't great at choosing the best way to achieve their goals).