A sincere belief in the plausibility of large-scale (n>150, Dunbar's number say) secrecy is the main clueless trait in conspiracy thinking
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I suspect you could discover a constitutive law relating the speed with which a secret is leaked and the number of people who know it at t=0
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Human fraud/deceit detection evolved I think for accuracy at small hunter-gatherer group sizes, intuitions way off at larger scale
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There is a scale of secret-keeping beyond which it is easier to slow the diffusion by adding noise to leaks rather than trying to contain it
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This is the FUD point of a secret. D-Day involved FUD-defense of adding noise of Calais as landing location to keep Normandy less plausible
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When the energy/financial signature of a secret is too big to be hidden, you have to start "hiding" it in a sea of half-plausible accounts
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Ironically, at this stage, conspiracy theorists are part of the *mechanism* of keeping secrets, not people who reveal them
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Cryptography is just the nerdy-sexy tip of iceberg of sociology of secrecy. Steganography and conspiracy noise-mixing are higher-order arts
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Secrets don't leak when they hit NYT. That's the commoditization. They leak with first unauthorized knower exploiting it for unintended gain
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Okay, final thought in this on-the-DL tweetstorm: all mathematics is a conspiracy theory about the universe.
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it takes ~20 mins for breaking news to go from known about to verified (and published) at the NYT.
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