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“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories.” … Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview. (more; HT Tyler)
Some people just like to be odd. I’ve noticed that those who tend to accept unusual conclusions in one area tend to accept unusual conclusions in other areas too. In addition, they also tend to choose odd topics on which to have opinions, and base their odd conclusions on odd methods, assumptions, and sources. So opinions on odd topics tend to be unusually diverse, and tend to be defended with an unusually wide range of methods and assumptions.
These correlations are mostly mistakes, for the purpose of estimating truth, if they are mainly due to differing personalities. Thus relative to the typical pattern of opinion, you should guess that the truth varies less on unusual topics, and more on usual topics. You should guess that odd methods, sources, and assumptions are neglected on ordinary topics, but overused on odd topics. And you should guess that while on ordinary topics odd conclusions are neglected, on odd topics it is ordinary conclusions that are neglected.
For example, the way to establish a new method or source is to show that it usually gives the same conclusions as old methods and sources. Once established, one can take it seriously in the rare cases where they give different conclusions.
A related point is that if you create a project or organization to pursue a risky unusual goal, as in a startup firm, you should try to be ordinary on most of your project design dimensions. By being conservative on all those other dimensions, you give your risky idea its best possible chance of success.
My recent work has been on a very unusual topic: the social implications of brain emulations. To avoid the above mentioned biases, I thus try to make ordinary assumptions, and to use ordinary methods and sources.
Best To Mix Odd, Ordinary
So that's why catgirls are so adorable! ^_^
Most of the time, in order to get a large number of people to be part of a conspiracy, you need to have a case that it's being done for a good reason. If you're trying to keep a secret, each person that learns the secret is a potential leak, and, to a first approximation, each person you might recruit to participate in a large conspiracy has the same chance of betraying you as a member of the general population. So you can indeed have a conspiracy that involves hundreds or even thousands of people, but only if it's a "good" conspiracy that most people would support.
For example, the biggest "conspiracy" ever concocted was the Manhattan Project - and not one person ever leaked anything about it to the Axis powers. Why? Because there would be almost no Americans that would be willing to perform that kind of betrayal. On the other hand, the details of the Manhattan Project were indeed leaked to the Soviet Union. After all, the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II. Why shouldn't they be involved in the war's most important R&D project? If you recruited an American at random, your chances of that person being a Nazi sympathizer was almost zero, but the chances of that person being a Soviet sympathizer was a lot higher.
This is where a lot of "ridiculous" conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 Truthers, become impossible to believe. If you don't have a population that you can safely recruit co-conspirators from, you can't have a conspiracy that involves more than a handful of people, and many conspiracy theories propose conspiracies that are huge violations of this rule.