The Maths of Conspiracy Theories

[Jubal]

I thought this was interesting - basically a mathematical model someone's built to estimate how difficult covering up conspiracies actually is. Turns out "difficult" is the answer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35411684

It's difficult to keep a conspiracy under wraps, scientists say, because sooner or later, one of the conspirators will blow its cover.
A study has examined how long alleged conspiracies could "survive" before being revealed - deliberately or unwittingly - to the public at large.
Dr David Grimes, from Oxford University, devised an equation to express this, and then applied it to four famous collusions.
The work appears in Plos One journal.
The equation developed by Dr Grimes, a post-doctoral physicist at Oxford, relied upon three factors: the number of conspirators involved, the amount of time that has passed, and the intrinsic probability of a conspiracy failing.
He then applied his equation to four famous conspiracy theories: The belief that the Moon landing was faked, the belief that climate change is a fraud, the belief that vaccines cause autism, and the belief that pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer.
Dr Grimes's analysis suggests that if these four conspiracies were real, most are very likely to have been revealed as such by now.
Specifically, the Moon landing "hoax" would have been revealed in 3.7 years, the climate change "fraud" in 3.7 to 26.8 years, the vaccine-autism "conspiracy" in 3.2 to 34.8 years, and the cancer "conspiracy" in 3.2 years.