The Truth is Out There! (haunting music in the background)

The above line, made hugely famous by the X-Files TV show, conjures up the equally famous background score to mind almost immediately. The innumerable number of subplots of the main one – that there is information about extra-terrestrials that the government is hiding – have helped the producers mint quite a bit of money. But more on that later (surprise surprise). For now, we'll move to something at least as interesting.

Let us look at a few conspiracy theories, and I'll try to show where they come up short. The Pearl Harbor conspiracy is fairly popular. The proponents say that US officials were aware of the imminent Japanese attack, but purposefully chose to do nothing. Such an allegation is based on two assumptions: that the US officials had all the necessary information, and that they consequently acted rationally. Graham Allison (of Rationality Theorem fame) found that while the government did have all the necessary information, this information was scattered across departments. The entire picture wasn't formed in time. Bureaucracy was thus the main reason for the government not acting in time. Also, some of the information was actually misunderstood – the harbor was on alert, but for Japanese sabotage, not an aerial attack.

The Bible Code, a book by Michael Drosnin, was fairly popular a few years ago. In this book, he shows that many things that happen today in the world have actually been coded into the Old Testament, i.e. the Torah, which is written in Hebrew. He uses a computer to find certain terms in the Torah, by searching rows, columns and diagonals. He also went on to show how the Bible predicts the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the then Premier of Israel. Now, this is not a true blue conspiracy theory, but it does have elements of one (if you receive a lot of forwards, you might be able to draw parallels with how one can fold a $1 bill in a certain manner to predict the 9/11 mishap). The problems with such a theory are equally obvious and startling. Such a finding is quite random, in the sense that if one looks in any voluminous book in an old language (which the Torah certainly is) one is bound to find a column or diagonal that matches a certain word. This is just plain old and simple probability. A similar error occurs in Zeitgeist, where the filmmaker says that the advent of Jesus was simply an announcement of the beginning of the age of Pisces (see the movie to understand what this means). He goes on to prove this by presenting approximately ten paragraphs from the New Testament that mention the words 'two' and 'fish', and mind you, they don't always occur together in these chosen lines. Consider an exercise, where one uses a computer to generate a million paragraphs randomly, using nouns and filler sentences that are present in the Bible. Any math professor (or student) will guarantee that in a million such randomly-generated paragraphs, one will be quite likely to find at least 10 with these two words in them. This is akin to the famous analogy coined by Nashim Nicholas Taleb in Fooled By Randomness, where he says that if one has a billion monkeys typing on typewriters, one of these monkeys will definitely end up writing the Hamlet (Although it is widely believed today that Shakespeare was a plagiarist, I in no way want to add to speculation that he kept a private army of lesser primates).

One last theory must be debunked, at least partially, before I call it a day. Let me move on to the Pentagon conspiracy. Proponents say that a Boeing never hit the Pentagon, as the only released photos show no sign of the debris that one would expect from a Boeing collision (of course, the reasons are more numerous, but this is the basic one). The fact that the FBI refused to release any security camera footage has added to the speculation. The simple reason (Occam's Razor) for the fact that the photographs show a shadow approaching the Pentagon, and then show the damage, is that the number of frames captured per second is less than that required to capture such a collision. And the simple reason for the lack of any debris is that probably the debris fell on spots that the camera didn't capture (recall the no evidence of disease = evidence of no disease fallacy).

So you see, conspiracy theories are, more often than not, simply an indication that somebody out there is making some elementary logical errors. As a consumer of such theories, one must curb one's appetite for sensationalism, if one wants to maintain a realistic perspective. But of course, there's one more angle to this long-winding story – the economic one. When we look at that, we'll probably understand the most emphatic reason yet for the existence of these amazing inventions of idle minds.