List of things that were conspiracies

• The Holocaust was a conspiracy.
• The whole Epstein scandal.
• Edward Snowden’s reveal of Mass Surveillance by the NSA.
• The building of the atomic bomb in WWII (depending on what definition you use).
• FTX gambling with their customer’s money

People don’t like calling these “conspiracies” because they carry such a baggage and connection with crazy conspiracy theorists. But just because someone says a group of people are doing something in secret doesn’t mean they are automatically crazy to believe that. To call something a conspiracy in the modern day is to also simultaneously discredit it but I think this is dangerous. History is full of harmful conspiracies conspiracies which are covered up by powerful people.

In general I think people are too unpredictable and chaotic to be able to conspire on massive scales in the modern age of mass media and recordings. My intuition is that the real truth is that no one is fully in-control and very few organizations are sophisticated enough to pull off secret plans on the large-scale many conspiracy theories operate on.

Massive scale conspiracies are hard to cover up because all it takes is a single plausible whistleblower.

I think a few things to keep in mind when evaluating conspiracy theories are:

1. Motive — Why would this conspiracy be doing this? (Ex: There seems to be a pretty good reason to fake the moon landing — the prestige of space travel in the eyes of the international community and morale across the nation. Force Russia to spend more money on the space race.)
2. Secrecy — Who would have to know about this conspiracy for it to happen? How is it possible that all these people are able to maintain the secret? (ex: Basically all of NASA would have to be on board to fake the moon landing — including normal scientists and engineers which doesn’t seem likely.)
3. Feasibility — How possible are the actions of this conspiracy? (Ex: I saw this one video that demonstrated that it might’ve legitimately been a harder technological feat to fake the moon landing than to actually do the moon landing.)