I imagine this could be tricky to research even if people wouldn’t try to obfuscate the reality (which they of course will). It would be difficult to distinguish “these two people conspired together” from “they are two extremely smart people, living in the same city, of course they are likely to have met each other”.
For example, in a small country with maybe five elite high schools, elite people of the same age have high probability to have been high-school classmates. If they later take over the world together, it would make a good story to claim that they already conspired to do that during the high school. Even if the real idea only came 20 years later, no one would believe it after some journalist finds out that actually they are former classmates.
So the information is likely to be skewed in both ways: not seeing connections where they are, and seeing meaningful connections in mere coincidences.
Small groups have a bigger problem: they won’t be very well documented. As far as I know, the only major source on the Junto is Ben Franklin’s autobiography, which I’ve already read.
Large groups, of course, have an entirely different problem: if they get an appreciable amount of power, conspiracy theorists will probably find out, and put out reams of garbage on them. I haven’t started trying to look into the history of the Freemasons yet because I’m not sure about the difficulty of telling garbage from useful history.
I imagine this could be tricky to research even if people wouldn’t try to obfuscate the reality (which they of course will). It would be difficult to distinguish “these two people conspired together” from “they are two extremely smart people, living in the same city, of course they are likely to have met each other”.
For example, in a small country with maybe five elite high schools, elite people of the same age have high probability to have been high-school classmates. If they later take over the world together, it would make a good story to claim that they already conspired to do that during the high school. Even if the real idea only came 20 years later, no one would believe it after some journalist finds out that actually they are former classmates.
So the information is likely to be skewed in both ways: not seeing connections where they are, and seeing meaningful connections in mere coincidences.
Small groups have a bigger problem: they won’t be very well documented. As far as I know, the only major source on the Junto is Ben Franklin’s autobiography, which I’ve already read.
Large groups, of course, have an entirely different problem: if they get an appreciable amount of power, conspiracy theorists will probably find out, and put out reams of garbage on them. I haven’t started trying to look into the history of the Freemasons yet because I’m not sure about the difficulty of telling garbage from useful history.