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The Science They Don't Want You to Know



I am currently working on a YouTube project called "The Science They Don't Want You to Know", where I will cover science that various organizations and individuals don't want to be known by the general population for one reason or another.  It will be set up in seasons, since there are so many related topics to consider.

The first season will cover conspiracy theories which affect public health.  In it, I will run be dependent on two papers, one which revolves around the mathematics of known conspiracies, and the other which describes the psychology of conspiracy theorists.  The math paper, which is written by Professor David Grimes of the University of Oxford, looks at various conspiracies which have been leaked to the public.  Examples of this include the NSA spying on us, the old syphilis "experiments", and Watergate.  What he did was to use these known cases of conspiracies to develop a model for figuring out what the probability would be for a leak per person involved per year, and applied that model to current conspiracy beliefs, such as global climate change and the vaccines-cause-autism hypothesis.

Fear the needles!
I will endeavor to extend on Grimes' work by incorporating more conspiracy theories which we know happened in the past in order to get better statistical analysis for potential conspiracies going on now.  Since this is a mathematical endeavor, it is something which a spreadsheet is a good tool for the analysis.  With this in mind, I am working with this in Google Sheets, and you can see my logic and progress here.  The first substantive video will look over the specific math to figure out the value for the per-person-per-year probability from the known cases to be applied unknown cases, for which one video will cover one conspiracy theory.

The psychology paper is an experimental method for determining what kind of personality prompts a belief in conspiracies.  What they did was to provide surveys to people in order to determine how confident they are in their own self-worth, confidence in the governments ability to conspire against the masses, and confidence in the governments willingness to do so.  What these researchers have found is that there are two factors which typically prompts conspiratorial beliefs; individual narcissism and "negative" self esteem, namely poor opinion of oneself.  Basically, one has to be down on themselves and have a high self-importance.

This doesn't make sense that any individual would have these two traits at the same time; it didn't to me either.  Then I realized that this is equivalent to low self worth relative to government and corporations and low opinion of government and corporate entities when it comes to conspiracies.

The lizards are coming to enslave us all!
We are powerless against them!
So with this in mind, another element I will look at is those who believe these conspiracies, and if they show the low self esteem and high narcissism to fall into the conspiracy theorist group.  This will determine if they are merely paranoid or if they're on to something real, regardless of how close to reality the conspiracy as a whole is.

The season will open with a top ten revealed conspiracy video, a top ten unconfirmed conspiracy video, the video figuring out the math behind the the known conspiracies, and then one video per unknown conspiracy which would have an impact on public health.  I will also post one blog per conspiracy which I have sufficiently finished researched for this season.

So until next time, take that as you will.
K. "Alan" Eister Î”αβ

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