On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs
Fig 1
Projected failure probability L for a conspiracy of 5000 initial conspirators and p = 5 × 10−6 with different population assumptions.
The blue sold line depicts L over time with a constant level of conspirators being maintained. The red dotted line shows a single event with Gompertzian decay of the conspiring population, assuming an average initial age of 40 years old and the dashed orange line shows an exponential decay with number of conspirators being halved every 10 years. In the first case, the likelihood of conspiracy failure always increases with time. In the Gompertzian case, the chances of failure initially increase towards a maximum (L = 0.38 after 29 years in this example), but the death of conspirators with time acts to decrease probability of failure after this. Finally, if conspirators are removed extrinsically, then the curve hits a maximum (L = 0.12 after 14 years) before decaying to lower likelihoods as less conspirators exist to betray confidence.