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[TheBiggerFish]

Huh.

[Starver]

This thread is just here to identify those that the Conspiracy isn't fooling!  And those that the Conspiracy is fooling into accepting false Conspiracies to cover itself up.

[penguinofhonor]

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Where did you get that?

[Reelya]

You know the ironic thing? The current pope is accused of being part of an anti-christ conspiracy, mainly because he's softened the church's stance on gay marriage, abortion, while befriending muslims and Jews.

i.e., it's precisely because he's reduced the Catholic Church's paranoid "us vs the world" stance that he's accused of leading a conspiracy.

[hops]

I mean to be fair, isn't that exactly what the Antichrist is? He's supposed to create peace everywhere before fucking them over and damning everyone.

[Starver]

At least the Pope hasn't met the Antipope...

[Phmcw]

Guys, seriously?


Conspiracies happen all the time. If you don't know of any good conspiracy you're just uniformed AND you dramatically lack imagination. Not "I'm flying with dragons" imagination but "have any insight on an hypothetical situation" imagination.


Most common conspiracies involve ripping peoples off (taxpayers, investors or relatives, most of the time) getting undue power or getting out of a just punishment.


A bunch of them currently relate to control of financial market and of global policies for personal gains or enforcing one's personal beliefs.
Not that it's hard, Blackrock alone manage 5 trillions of dollars of assets ; they hold 5%  or more of the stock of 4 out of ten publicly traded American companies.

You can bet that they are influencing US policies to favour themselves.

[Catmeat]

Its pretty far fetched but I feel like global insulation is a precursor to something that likes warm enviroments with low oxygen. I know the insects will love it, but some bugs are delicious so I dont mind plus I love sunbathing on dark rocks and sheding my skin to grow.

[Reelya]

Actually insects will hate low oxygen. They don't have lungs and a circulatory system like verterbrates do, so they're very sensitive to low oxygen, growing much smaller. With increased temperature and low oxygen / high CO2 we'll switch to eating more plants, not bugs.

[heydude6]

But there's a problem with this argument: The set of known, successful conspiracies is a set of size zero. But that's because "known, successful conspiracy" is an oxymoron, rather than telling you anything about how many successful conspiracies really exist. If you uncover common traits of all known conspiracies, you are by definition excluding the successful ones.

I have an objection to that point, here are a couple of successful conspiracies:

The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy: Many lightbulb manufacturers pooled their resources together to create incandescent lightbulbs that would burn out quicker. Here's a Wikipedia article on it if you find the original article to not be professional enough for you.

NSA: Hopefully you already know this one, but basically the US government created an organization that constantly monitors your internet and phone activity. You might classify this more as an "open secret" (like with the glasses), but its important to remember that no one knew about the existence of the NSA for several years before Edward Snowden finally exposed it. Even with people being aware of it, the NSA didn't change its activities. Since then, equivalents in other countries have popped up and it seems like they are now the norm.


Maybe this due to a different definition in what a conspiracy is, but it seems like a "known, successful conspiracy" is one that either finished its work and revealed itself to the public (incandescent light bulbs are banned in USA now, so there's no harm in revealing that they are intentionally fragile anymore), or they are revealed, but still allowed to continue their shady activities.

[martinuzz]

I think Bork is an agent of Putin that has infiltrated the NSA in order to watch this forum, and report anyone whose conspiracy theories come close enough to the truth to be considered a threat. This thread is proof. He won't get me though, I've finished my tinfoil underground hypertoroid. (The benefit of a tinfoil underground hypertoroid obviously being that it can be worn as a inconspicious looking tinfoil hat)

[Reelya]

Yeah I know there are some examples of conspiracies which were successful, but were found out (or were common knowledge), I was really making a point about reasoning about the unknown from just knowns. You can't do it, because the set of unknowns by definition has different traits to the set of knowns.

Actually one of my programming lecturers points out the only decent thing Dick Cheney said. Paraphrasing: "there are known knowns, and known unknowns, and you can reason about those and plan for them, but there are also unknown unknowns, and you can't plan for those". In the realm of conspiracies, we have things that are known to have happened, things we suspect may have happened, and a mystery class of things that happened which nobody even suspects. Naturally, we can save very little about the last class of conspiracies, and we definitely can't draw conclusions about them from the known ones.

It's similar to serial killers. What we know about them is derived from the ones who've been caught or otherwise found out, left evidence or bodies. But there are a lot more missing people out there, and there could be entire classes of serial killers out there with methods we don't even known about. So when we say authoritatively that serial killers have this or that personality, that they tend to use this or that method, all that's derived from the study of ones who got caught or detected, never ones who properly covered their tracks. Are we developing the right methods to catch those people? We really can't say, since what we know is derived from studying the failures.

[x2yzh9]

You guys remember when the AIs went rogue on the Internet right? I don't think that was a conspiracy, I just think someone fucked up really bad. Or maybe it was to prove a point about AIs

[Starver]

)but its important to remember that no one knew about the existence of the NSA for several years before Edward Snowden finally exposed it.

I think you'll find that No Such Agency was an open secret (and more open than secret...) for at least a couple of decades before Snowden...

Or maybe that was just at my clearance level..  Can I just check your security pass again, sir.?