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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2016-02-16 04:38, spike wrote:<br>
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<div>Camping in Death valley no Internet no radio email
intermittent. Hearing wild stories from other campers pls
refute oh pls do. <br>
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The best one I have heard is that it was Leonard Nimoy, ruler of the
Illuminati (he faked his death, you know) who ordered it. Because of
evil ObamaCare reasons. That story was made up by a spoof right-wing
site, but then a lot of people started to run with it (either to
prove the other side are nuts, or actually supporting a variant of
the theory).<br>
<br>
More seriously, after reading Tetlock's work, I have reduced my
estimate of the likelihood of clever political conspiracies. I have
no doubt some people *try*, but given that policy experts are lousy
at predicting consequences of events any plan involving steps like
"And then X will appoint Y, who will implement plan Z, with no trace
back to me. Excellent!" is very likely to fail. When even
superforecasters selected for their objective accuracy cannot do
reliable predictions very far in the future it seems unlikely
conspirators are any better. Especially in multi-agent situations
like the current US election, or situations where random events can
blow up (like in many parts of the middle east). <br>
<br>
A philosopher colleague pointed out that it is a strange world where
some of the best work in epistemology is being done by the US
intelligence community (especially IARPA). The really crazy part is
that they started only a few years ago - before that people
generally thought they knew what they were doing prediction-wise. I
think that overconfidence in how good we are at predicting
consequences is driving both conspiracy theorists (who take comfort
in that somebody is running things, even though they are evil) and
would-be political manipulators (who churn the mess with their
attempts). <br>
<br>
So if you want to run a "conspiracy", focus on actions that have
predictable effects - physical effects, things going according to
the normal legal, bureaucratic or traditional routine. Don't rely on
outside people acting as you want, don't act in domains where
outside events can overwhelm your influence. Shanteau's theory of
expertise gives great input to what skills you need to affect
things. Information leakage and side agendas grows nonlinearly with
group size. And so on. It is much easier to do a non-conspiracy
where you get people with shared interests to coordinate, pool
resources, and push for changes they want to see without all the
cloak-and-dagger stuff. Non-conspiracies are also more agile in
areas where predictability is lesser, but will of course have to
deal more with opposition. Conspiracies in theory avoid opposition
by being secret, but in practice they have to deal with it anyway:
the opposing interests will be acting in unpredictable ways in any
case, potentially wrecking plans with no idea what they were about.<br>
<br>
<br>
(I always smile inwardly when I cash checks from Steve Jackson Games
at my local bank, since the checks have the company's
eye-in-the-pyramid logo prominently displayed. I am getting paid -
tiny amounts - by the Illuminati! Fnord.)<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University
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