[quote]chrisb71 wrote:
If you study certain people you can learn things that apply to other people you have not studied. By studying the people involved in conspiracies we know about, we learn about people involved in conspiracies we don’t know about.
Otherwise, all of criminology and sociology would fall apart. How could we claim to know anything about criminal behavior, because we only know about the ones we’ve caught? Though it is true if the sample is small, for instance our ideas about serial killers is still changing because we’ve caught so few.
But what I meant was, it’s in human nature. People talk, even if it’s on their deathbed because they don’t want to die with the secret. If you look how easily conspiracies that we know about are uncovered, and how very often people involved are the ones doing the uncovering, it think it’s safe to conclude human nature precludes keeping certain kinds of secrets. Especially the more people that are in on the secret the more likely someone will talk.
To believe otherwise we’d have to believe that in all the criminal conspiracies we’ve uncovered, the people involved were merely “weak” and couldn’t cover it up effectively. But there are other conspiracies where somehow they’re able to find large amounts of people who are not “weak” or “moral” and won’t fold. How would they find these people with such great intestinal fortitude that we have a hard time finding them?
Anyway, that was my point, it’s not the conspiracies we know a lot about it’s human behavior we know about, and the people involved in conspiracies we don’t know about yet are still humans and we can make predictions about their behavior.
maybe that explains it better …
The CIA info specifically was from Inside the CIA by Kessler, which is where I got the info that in the CIA at least, there are no conspiracies worth finding out since anything remotely moral ambiguous has been released (according to them 
)
[/quote]
Funny you mention it; it KILLS psychologists when sociologist take unjustifiable positions as a result of poor stats. The same is true in criminology. I wrote a report about this very topic not long ago, dealing with the polygraph. In police journals, it is reported as being over 90% accurate (the control question test). In psychological journals, the reported accuracy of the CQT is near chance. Why the difference? In police journals, they only know if a suspect was really lying or not based on the trial outcome. But, if a suspect fails the CQT, it is MUCH more likely they will take a plea bargain, or be found guilty in trial, regardless of their innocence. As a result, when a suspect fails, the courts tend support the finding. So police officers only receive feedback saying they were right.
In psychological studies, only cases where true condition is known are used (usually either someone else confessed, or it is a mock crime). The findings show huge error rates for innocents, meaning their is a huge “guilty” bias.
With conspiracies, you can’t say that they are all uncovered, because someone is too moral, that conclusion is unjustified. For instance, if people believe what they are doing is for a greater good, their rationalization will take care of their guilt. If it doesn’t, cognitive dissonance can kick in, until they do rationalize it away. If leaking it is against conspirator’s personal interests, they may not leak it.
Take a look at the CIA, a lot of what they did was never leaked until decades later when it was declassified. And even after declassification, the reports are so heavily sanitized, the full extent of what went down will never be known.