lol yes. But it’s not the regular evidence of shoestring infrastructure and lack of process that casts doubt on these grand conspiracies. It’s the diminishing conditional probability, over time, that they are somehow always the exception.
Edit: or if you like, the bad toupees just make it increasingly hard to believe that all men with hair are wearing one
When flipping a coin once, the probability of getting heads once is 50% (1/2). When flipping a coin twice, the probability of getting heads twice is 25% (1/2 x 1/2). When flipping a coin 20 times, the probability of getting heads 20 times is 0.000001% (1/2 x 1/2 x … x 1/2). And so forth…
Concretely, even if we set an arbitrarily high probability of a single illuminati-deep-state-qanon-pizza fuck up being avoided or adequately papered over (i.e. if we assume extremely competent conspirators) we still can’t avoid conditional probability, because doing so repeatedly over time becomes increasingly (exponentially) improbable. The grander the conspiracy, the fewer “coin flips” it takes to reach infinitesimal probability of maintaining the secret, hence the expression “too many minions spoil the plot.”
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy
Cool resource, thanks for the share!
Basically “I can always tell” as an actually fallacy. Neat
lol yes. But it’s not the regular evidence of shoestring infrastructure and lack of process that casts doubt on these grand conspiracies. It’s the diminishing conditional probability, over time, that they are somehow always the exception.
Edit: or if you like, the bad toupees just make it increasingly hard to believe that all men with hair are wearing one
Can you explain?
When flipping a coin once, the probability of getting heads once is 50% (1/2). When flipping a coin twice, the probability of getting heads twice is 25% (1/2 x 1/2). When flipping a coin 20 times, the probability of getting heads 20 times is 0.000001% (1/2 x 1/2 x … x 1/2). And so forth…
Concretely, even if we set an arbitrarily high probability of a single illuminati-deep-state-qanon-pizza fuck up being avoided or adequately papered over (i.e. if we assume extremely competent conspirators) we still can’t avoid conditional probability, because doing so repeatedly over time becomes increasingly (exponentially) improbable. The grander the conspiracy, the fewer “coin flips” it takes to reach infinitesimal probability of maintaining the secret, hence the expression “too many minions spoil the plot.”