A. You generally can’t keep the existence of a large organization that engages in clandestine activities secret.
Before I learned about this Epstein stuff, I thought this was a very strong heuristic. Now I don’t.
I’m not intentionally trying to stay very up to date with Epstein stuff, but isn’t it the case that there actually was quite a lot of whistleblowing (mostly from the victims and their families?), but their whistleblowing was somewhat silenced / didn’t meet the standard of “legal evidence” or something? (In case it’s unclear: genuine question.)
(This doesn’t invalidate your point, but changes the specific formulation of what happened here, insofar as it is representative of real-world ~conspiracies.)
Also, a heuristic argument against conspiracy theories is only a heuristic argument against conspiracy theories, i.e., it’s fallible, so the Epstein counter-example does not necessarily constitute strong evidence against the value/validity of this heuristic argument.
A thing that’s salient to me at the moment is that lots of stupid memeplexes circulating in the water supply inoculate the population against their close (superficially similar), but more real(istic) neighbors, i.e., you get exposed to a bunch of obviously bonkers conspiracy theories, and as a result desensitize to “yet another ‘conspiracy theory’”, even if there’s some reasonable evidence that there’s something plausibly concerningly real about it.
their whistleblowing was somewhat silenced / didn’t meet the standard of “legal evidence” or something?
There were probably many people who realized that they don’t have any legal evidence, and could be exposing themselves to a defamation lawsuit, so they didn’t say anything.
When someone says “if many people were involved in conspiracy, someone would expose it”, there is a huge difference between “exposing” a conspiracy in the sense that you report a crime and call the journals, and “exposing” it in the sense that you privately tell your friends that something bad happens somewhere and they should avoid it.
I’m not intentionally trying to stay very up to date with Epstein stuff, but isn’t it the case that there actually was quite a lot of whistleblowing (mostly from the victims and their families?), but their whistleblowing was somewhat silenced / didn’t meet the standard of “legal evidence” or something? (In case it’s unclear: genuine question.)
(This doesn’t invalidate your point, but changes the specific formulation of what happened here, insofar as it is representative of real-world ~conspiracies.)
Also, a heuristic argument against conspiracy theories is only a heuristic argument against conspiracy theories, i.e., it’s fallible, so the Epstein counter-example does not necessarily constitute strong evidence against the value/validity of this heuristic argument.
A thing that’s salient to me at the moment is that lots of stupid memeplexes circulating in the water supply inoculate the population against their close (superficially similar), but more real(istic) neighbors, i.e., you get exposed to a bunch of obviously bonkers conspiracy theories, and as a result desensitize to “yet another ‘conspiracy theory’”, even if there’s some reasonable evidence that there’s something plausibly concerningly real about it.
There were probably many people who realized that they don’t have any legal evidence, and could be exposing themselves to a defamation lawsuit, so they didn’t say anything.
When someone says “if many people were involved in conspiracy, someone would expose it”, there is a huge difference between “exposing” a conspiracy in the sense that you report a crime and call the journals, and “exposing” it in the sense that you privately tell your friends that something bad happens somewhere and they should avoid it.