A recent academic paper was published a few days ago which purports to discredit all conspiracy theories – using bad mathematics to prove its point. The paper, “On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs,” suggests that many popular conspiracy theories would require an extraordinary number of people to be hiding something in order for them to be true. For instance, if you believe climate change to be fraudulent, the paper’s author suggests that tens of thousands of climate change researchers and scientists would need to be actively covering it up. The paper also suggests that if the NASA moon landings were faked, over 400,000 NASA employees would have to be in on the scam. Littleatoms.com reports: Given those kinds of numbers, it seems almost inevitable that leaks would occur. Can we predict how long a conspiracy of a given size will last? That’s the question asked by Dr David Grimes – the researcher, skeptic and writer who published the paper. If we can prove mathematically that a conspiracy involving 400,000 people can’t last more than a few months or years, then we can easily dismiss a number of popular beliefs. It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately the answer is a resounding “no”, and the [...]