@WelshPixie I've heard variations of that story ... far too often.

@dredmorbius pleh :(

@WelshPixie Lauren Weinstein at G+ has talked about April Fool's jokes that ... had lives. The Onion being taken as legit.
My own occasional satire being misinterpreted.

@dredmorbius Ah yeah, the Onion thing. That too. :/

@dredmorbius "[...] historical examples of exposed conspiracies do exist and it may be difficult for people to differentiate between reasonable and dubious assertions."

"[...] the results of this model suggest that large conspiracies (≥1000 agents) quickly become untenable and prone to failure."

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905

@stefanieschulte There is that, though there's always the possibility of survivor bias -- the /effective/ large conspiracies are hidden for a long time.

Case in point: a friend had a professor who'd been engaged in a deep-sea research project in the Pacific in 1974, spening several weeks aboard the vessel. He returned to his oceanographic research, to read in the newspaper in 1975 that he had been aboard the Glomar Explorer whilst it was recovering a sunken Soviet submarine.
1/

Mind: the story broke, it wasn't revealed (it's also the source of what's now apparently referred to as the "Glomar Response", "We neither confirm nor deny", as I just learnt researching this).

But it was possible for a large contingent of the crew of the vessel, with /two/ open-sea bays, to be completely oblivious to what actually transpired.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSF_Explorer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response

@stefanieschulte
2/end/

I'm aware of a few other similar stories and mysteries which make me suspect that at least /some/ conspiracies do manage to go to the grave.

When you're a very small part of a very large project, it's difficult to get the full picture. Especially when that's being deliberately obscured, and close-held by a small number of people.

@stefanieschulte
3/end/

@dredmorbius Yes, but the paper I cited is about conspiracies for which thousands of people need to be privy to the secret. I think this is really quite unrealistic. Imagine how difficult it is to get everybody to act a certain way in a large company, or to get them to keep some "business secret" (especially if it might be of interest to others).

@stefanieschulte Point.

@dredmorbius If such a conspiracy had a larger-scale effect (visible to the public), then the people involved would probably understand what happened - and if there were thousands of them, the conspiracy would probably get revealed sooner or later.

@dredmorbius Here is a good example for the kind of conspiracies I had in mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy

It it was real, it would probably be uncovered soon.

(I put this behind a CW because certain people from the north-east of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, rather dislike this story...)

@stefanieschulte @dredmorbius people who dislike this story are humour impaired.

And (German tidbits) Otto Waalkes once had a show where he reported from Dr. Oetker's pudding mines in Bielefeld ;-)

@cynix @dredmorbius The original post at http://www.bielefeldverschwoerung.de/ is quite hilarious, too.

Unfortunately, it's not available in English, as far as I know. Google does an ok job translating it, but a lot of the fun gets lost, anyway: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bielefeldverschwoerung.de%2F

@stefanieschulte @dredmorbius

BTW, some of those involved in the 1994 "Bielefeld" events are reachable here, e.g. @Isotopp and even they guy who started it all is still online (https://plus.google.com/+AchimHeld), so "they" never managed to silence all. Unless they had been cloned and replaced?

@stefanieschulte You have been decieved. 😁

@stefanieschulte @dredmorbius That never was a conspiracy theory, but a parody on those. Achim Held and others studying computer science at Kiel University were having fun reading "Magazin 2000" and following de.alt.ufo on USENET. The Bielefeld Conspiracy theory took elements from all of this, content and style, and remixed that, as a joke.

We all have been active in de.talk.bizarre at that time, and did several "out of area" missions.

@dredmorbius @stefanieschulte A dtb "out of area" mission was where people from dtb collaborated to invade another newsgroup, deliberately provoking, parodying or otherwise disturbing normal procedure there. For example, dtb trolled de.news.admin in more than one way extremely successfully.

We learned the hard way that it is impossible to parody, troll or otherwise top de.alt.ufo hardcore people.

@Isotopp @dredmorbius This is clearly stated e. g. in Rationalwiki:

"Well, it's just for lulz really."

However, they also point out that "its absurd proposition and painful logic is no different to any other conspiracy theories you might care to mention." I think this is the reason why the parody became so popular (because it's so eerily similar to the "serious" conspiracy theories).

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy#Impact

@stefanieschulte @dredmorbius "its absurd proposition and painful logic is no different to any other conspiracy theories you might care to mention" Yes, that's how Achim designed it, and how we sold it. Computer Science students experimenting with memetics, for the lulz, accidentally being quite clever at it.

We should have designed a religion instead, and sold that, the way Scientology works. Then maybe I wouldn't have had to work for a living.

@Isotopp @dredmorbius Yes, it's really a work of art, I think (even if the people who created it probably weren't aware of this at the time).

@mjb The Hairpin Bend theory of Libertarianism has a lot to recommend itself:

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-libertarians-come-across-as-arrogant

@dredmorbius Indeed. Not only did I grow up. I became educated. And not at university, where I eschewed the liberal arts but much later when I determined to become well-read in the classics and broadened my interests beyond STEM.

@mjb Similar path here.

Much of that education in the past 5 years or so. Uni was 3 decades ago.

@dredmorbius Ditto. 10 years now for me. Uni was '70s.

@dredmorbius https://is.gd/DodONz

@mjb https://www.noblesoul.com/orc/critics/humor.html