On the problems generating the viability of a mathematical model dealing with conspiratorial beliefs

Last week, PLOS ONE published a piece by a physicist, David Robert Grimes, which deals with the likelihood of conspiracies being kept secret over time.

Said article has been talked about a fair bit on the news over the last few days, and I've been asked by a great deal of people either to comment on it, or to outright debunk it. Given that I don't like commenting on something I haven't read, I held off saying much about it until such time I found time to not just read it, but also carefully pick through it. That time has past; I have read the piece and I am ready to give my opinion on it. This is the short version of my critique; the original version ballooned out to almost 4000 words, and I probably should turn that into an academic article of some sort. If you want the tl;dr version of my opinion, then skip to the end. Otherwise, let me edutain you.

Grimes' argument

Grimes' argument centres around the viability of conspiratorial activity, and how that weighs upon considerations of the rationality of belief in associated conspiracy theories. The structure of Grimes' argument is to:

  1. Establish a baseline for the viability of known conspiracies, and then
  2. Use that to assess a set of putative conspiracy theories.

There are problems with both of these parts of Grimes' argument, so let us go through them one by one. Namely:

  1. The examples he uses to generate his model don't fit his model,
  2. The model is insensitive to the vagaries of conspiratorial activity, and
  3. He has a weird definition of what counts as a leak.

This short article only focuses on the first part of Grimes' article, establishing the baseline of his model. I have thoughts on the second part of his analyis, but by showing up problems for the viability of the model, I can show that no matter what we think of those purported conspiracies here-and-now, the Grimes' model is not up the task of analysing them.

Known conspiracies

Grimes admits conspiracies occur. It is interesting, then, to see what his chosen examples of conspiratorial activity are. They turn out to be:

  1. The NSA's Mass Surveillance programme,
  2. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and
  3. The FBI forensic scandal.

Three examples really isn't very many, but Grimes uses them to estimate the parameters of his model about the viability of conspiracies over time.

  1. Conspirators are generally dedicated to keeping their activity secret or concealed.
  2. Leaks from a conspirator expose conspiracies and render them redundant.

However, his chosen examples do not fit these two assumptions, which is why he can't use them to generate a baseline for the viability of conspiratorial activity.

Take the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. If this cover-up of the unethical treatment of African-American men was exposed by conspirators, then Grimes is stretching the idea of a leak too far. Information about the experiment was published in medical journals; the cover-up, so to speak, was that the patients were not told about the experiment. The leaks – the various academic publications about the experimental results – did not end the experiments. Peter Buxton, who is often labeled as the whistleblower in this case, came to know about the experiments because of his job with the United States Public Health Service. He leaked the information to the press because his worries were not taken seriously by management. He was not a conspirator but, rather, a worried public official who learnt about the experiments without being involved in running them.

Then there is the case of Dr. Frederic Whitehurst and the FBI forensic scandal. This, like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, is a case where someone who was not a conspirator blew the lid on suspicious practices; Whitehurst was someone who, whilst checking and rechecking work, discovered that FBI management was not willing to discuss issues with that work openly. ((It's not even clear that this is a case of a conspiracy; what might be taken to be a cover-up could have just been the FBI just not listening to expert advice.))

What this says is that it's not clear two of the three examples of known conspiratorial activity fit Grimes' fit his model, which is a problem for his generation of the estimates that drive his predictions about putative claims of conspiracy.

Who are the conspirators?

A bigger problem still is that Grimes does not distinguish between conspirators and whistleblowers.

Take the NSA mass surveillance conspiracy theory, for example. Grimes would have us believe that Snowden was a conspirator who leaked information about what it was the NSA were up to, and this lead to the exposure of PRISM and related surveillance programmes. That certainly is one version of that story, but it's important to note that Snowden's narrative is that of being a whistleblower: Snowden – at least in his recounting – learnt what the NSA were up to, played the role of a good contractor, and was eventually granted access to the files he needed to show the world what it was the NSA were really doing. Snowden, on this version of the story is not so much a conspirator, but a whistleblower who went undercover at the NSA. As such, the Snowden revelations do not fit with the assumptions that drives Grimes' model.

Grimes does not distinguish between kinds of conspirators, let alone conspirators and whistleblowers. Conspirators are not homogenous; a conspiracy can look big, yet only feature a small number of people who know the full extent or aim of the conspiracy. Some members of the conspiracy will be lackeys, goons or even unwitting conspirators. It's possible to be involved in a conspiracy without realising you are conspiring. Not everyone in the NSA need necessarily know that the data they are collecting and processing has been illegally obtained, and FBI agents who are using forensic evidence to secure convictions may not have been informed by senior personnel that the evidence they are using is of dubious merit.

What is a leak, anyway?

Grimes asserts in his paper that a leak from a conspirator will expose a conspiracy and render it redundant. But 'leak' is an ambiguous term; some leaks are accidental, some are purposeful, and some 'leaks' don't even come from conspirators at all.

Take, for example, accidental leaks. These are cases a conspirator fails to cover up some facet of their conspiratorial activity. So, for example, in the Watergate Affair, it was surely a mistake or accident that Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the White House tapes. This was an accidental leak, one which – in part – helped expose the cover-up of who knew about the break-in of the Democrat National Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Contrast this with a purposeful leak, where, say, a disgruntled member of the conspiracy leaks information about the conspiracy in order to expose it. Such leaks are, for example, common when it comes to leadership coups, and a variety of political conspiracies, where there is an advantage to some former conspirator to out what has been happening, in order to either change sides or escape blame. ((Indeed, sometimes these leaks presage the fact that the conspiracy is on the verge of collapse, and the leak is a pre-emptive strike by certain conspirators to save face.))

Whatever the case, Grimes is committed to the idea that conspirators leak, and that such leaks expose and make redundant the conspiracy. But it is not clear that conspirators leaking is the only way in which conspiracies get exposed. Admittedly, Grimes is not expressly committed to the idea only conspirators leak. But, given that his model seems insufficiently sensitive to how leaking works, let alone the difference between leaks from conspirators and external whistleblowers, this is a problem.

Indeed, none of the examples Grimes uses, as outlined above, fit with the known conspiracies he uses to derive his model, let alone give him any justification to then show that a number of purported conspiracy theories are irrational to believe. As such, Grimes does not do enough to warrant his own theory, let alone allow him to then extend that analysis to purported conspiracies now.

tl;dr: Grimes’s article doesn’t just misrepresent the nature of conspiratorial activity, let alone how they are exposed, his article seems to mostly exist to justify our suspicion of ‘crazy’ conspiracy theories.

02/01/2016

Podcast – The Evidence Does Not Lie (But We Do)

In which our heroes discuss popular podcasts, Netflix and chill…

01/30/2016

Notes towards correcting a confused phenomenology of conspiracy theories – a reply to @sam_kriss

Do you know what is irritating? Arguments on the internet. Despite my obviously cankerous nature, I don’t really enjoy arguing online; it makes my heart race, et cetera, etc, amen. Still, sometimes it seems necessary, especially in cases where people write on a subject you know well, or just happen to be an expert in. Case in point: Sam Kriss’s piece on conspiracy theories, Notes towards a phenomenology of conspiracy theory. This is obviously a topic dear to my heart, and, given I am a regularly reader of Sam’s work, I was disappointed by his musings on the subject. So much so that I read it several times, over the space of a number of day days, each time finding another reason as to why I didn’t like it. As such, I wrote a(n admittedly lengthy) comment over at Sam’s blog, setting out why I found his proposed phenomenology so problematic.

Said comment has been in moderation for nearly two months now.

Rather than let my comment go to waste, I’ve decided to post a revised version of it here. It’s not particularly self-explanatory; you will need to read Sam’s piece to see where I am coming from. With that said, I think it’s important to have this response out there; there are a lot of very weird views on conspiracy theories making the rounds, and this happen’s to be a reply to one of them.

Hi, Sam. Long time reader; first time commentator. And like many first time commentators, I’m here to complain!

Let me start out by saying a little about who I am; I am a philosopher, like Charles Pigden, who writes on conspiracy theories. I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories (which, co-incidentally, Charles wrote the introduction to), and I have a number of articles coming out on the subject. I’m a social epistemologist by training, so I found it interesting that the basis for your short essay on conspiracy theories was both an attack on epistemology generally, and a criticism of the work of Charles Pigden specifically. Neither attack seems warranted to my mind, and I’d like to explain why.

Let’s start with Pigden and his work, of whom you say:

Pidgen’s central proposition – that we should believe conspiracy theories, or at the very least investigate them while being open to the possibility that we might – is not dissimilar to mine, but the case he makes is an epistemic one, and given that there’s clearly something broken in epistemic reasoning, it’s inevitably insufficient.

Now, obviously, your comments on Charles’ work are due to your views on epistemology. Still, let me state outright that if you really think he – as you go on to say – “spent the bulk of his essay disproving a position that nobody actually holds”, then you clearly haven’t read much of the academic literature Charles is responding to. The position Charles defends (which is also defended by other philosophers: David Coady, Brian L. Keeley, Lee Basham, and myself, to name but a few) is one opposed by the likes of Karl Popper, Richard Hofstadter, Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermuele, Quassim Cassam, Jovan Byford, Karen Douglas, David Aaronvitch, Michael Barkun, Rob Brotherton, Chris French, Geoffrey Cubitt, Ted Goertzel, Neil Levy, Pete Mandik… Well, I could go, but I am sure you can see my point; to claim (as you do) that Pigden is tilting at windmills might rhetorically suit your argument, but it’s just not true. You, like Charles, might think the academic position he is arguing against is silly or mistaken, but it’s still a position a great many (I would even say the majority of) scholars and politicians hold as being self-evident.

That’s my first point. My second is that I think your criticism of Charles is confused, and that’s because you characterise modern epistemology in a way that I, as an epistemologist, don’t really recognise.

For example, you say that the ‘unspoken axiom behind all epistemology’ is about believing propositional truths.’ That hasn’t really been true since at least the 1960s, when Gettier challenged the ‘justified true belief’ account of knowledge in his paper ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ ((The JTB account was challenged earlier – see Russell’s Clocktower example – but Gettier’s piece was the one that set the epistemological scene for the second half of the 20th Century.)) Most of the epistemological work post Gettier has been focused on the whether we ought to believe propositions on the basis of various epistemic justifications, with the idea that we should simply believe propositions merely because they are true being very much a secondary consideration for most of us. ((The position you describe appears to be the naive empiricism of the early 20th Century. That was more a position in Metaphysics than it was one in Epistemology.)) After all, it’s hard to know some proposition is actually true, whilst it’s much easier – and interesting – to ask ‘What justifies belief in said proposition?’ ((Indeed, quite a number of epistemologists are worried about the idea of propositional truth even being necessary for knowledge, because of the worry that truth and justification aren’t necessarily linked.)) As such, your claim about the unspoken axion in epistemology is neither axiomatic (epistemologists debate this, so it can’t be an axiom), nor unspoken (epistemologists debate this publicly, so it’s definitely not unspoken).

I think your old-fashioned and inaccurate view on epistemology informs your subsequent criticism of Charles’ view in some interesting ways. For example, it’s not clear why you would think that the charge that Iraq had WMDs being a lie happens to make it not a conspiracy theory (something you hold against Charles’ view). After all, these things are surely complementary. One of the ways people successfully conspire is via lying. Think of it this way: Let’s say I don’t want it to get out that my friends and I are all shape-shifting lizards, whose entire academic purpose is to hide the existence of the New World Order. As such, we smear our opponents as charlatans, whose views are the result of them being high on the old ‘reefer madness’. It’s a lie, but since people believe it, it helps cover up what we’re doing. It seems pretty clear we’re conspiring here, and we just happen to be using a lie to do so.

For another, it also isn’t clear that your proposed example of a conspiracy theory which doesn’t fit Pigden’s definition doesn’t actually fit Charles’ definition. You proffer as an example of such a conspiracy theory this:

Had George W Bush instead announced that President Hussein were the high priest of an ancient Mesopotamian death-cult that had controlled humanity since the dawn of civilisation through the emasculating medium of writing, and that he could only be defeated by a sturdy gang of tooled-up all-American illiterates, some people might still have believed him, but that would have been unambiguously a conspiracy theory.

Yet in a world where Bush had said such a thing, this would be as much a lie as the WMD story. Yet you say this lie is ‘unambiguously a conspiracy theory’, whilst the actual lie about WMDs, which was told in this world, is not. I’m honestly not sure why you think your ‘unambigious’ example of a conspiracy theory in anyway contradicts Charles’ definition, let alone how it is different from the example you chastise him for using.

And not just that; it’s not even clear Pigden holds to the idea you attribute to him – that a conspiracy theory is a proposition that can be taxonomically isolated by its propositional content – because Pigden (like most philosophers who write on the topic) classifies these things we call ‘conspiracy theories’ as a species of explanation. That means a conspiracy theory consists of a set of propositions arranged as an explanatory argument. The position you take against Pigden – that a conspiracy theory is a relation between propositions – turns out to be Pigden’s position in the first instance.

I think the inconsistency of your proposed view and what you take it Charles is arguing for or against comes out of your skewed view of epistemology generally. You take it that as conspiracy theories can be expressed as single propositions, epistemologists judge them as singular propositions. Yet that’s not what we do at all. We take it that they are explanatory hypotheses, made up of multiple explanans. We then argue just how we are meant to appraise both the individual explanans, and the explanatory argument itself. That’s why we can, in some cases, condemn particular conspiracy theories, whilst also admitting that some of the evidence used by proponents of said theories is worth considering seriously.

Which brings me to my greatest worry with your piece; despite your professed views, I think you end up being the kind of conspiracy theory theorist that Charles is arguing against (i.e. you turn out to be one of his ‘windmills’). After all, you claim that:

Conspiracy theory is not a theory that posits a conspiracy, but the hypostasisation of conspiracy to the level of theory, or occlusion as a general system of Being. It’s not just that public events have hidden causes: the seen is only an attribute or epiphenomenon of the unseen, which is essential to reality. In many conspiracy theories, the primary aim of the conspiracy seems to be the presentation of an experience in which the conspiracy itself does not outwardly appear.

That seems awfully like the kind of theories about conspiracy theories Charles is ’tilting’ against. You seem to be characterising conspiracy theories in generalist terms, trying to find a way to provide for a general analysis of all conspiracy theories. Charles, however, takes a particularist approach, one where we judge individual conspiracy theories on their respective merits. Maybe that’s the rub? ((Note how you find yourself having to say ‘many conspiracy theories’; already the generalist project you are engaging in begins to falter.))

Still, you will be happy to know that you are not along in your views; your final thoughts on what these things called ‘conspiracy theories’ are reminded me of Mark Fenster’s book on the topic (“Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture”). Whilst I don’t think theorising about conspiracy theories in the way you do is particularly helpful, it is certainly a popular one. Hopefully you’ll take these comments in the way I intend them; not as a vicious attack on your views, but as an opening for a better discussion on conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorising.

Cher,

Matthew

P.S. Then there are your various legalistic and historical arguments. With regard to the law, just because something is a legal concept, that does not make it neither epistemological nor phenomenological. Talk of conspiracy theories goes back at least a hundred years, so the fact it might not have been legally codified until recently tells us very little about the concept itself. That, handily, brings us to history. You might want to look at the works of historians who have written on conspiracy theories and conspiracy narratives (Victoria Emma Pagán’s ‘Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History’, Gordon S. Wood’s ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century’, and Geoffrey Cubitt’s ‘The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth Century France’ come to mind) for a broader discussion of conspiracy theories pre 1977 (although if you want something modern, try Kathryn S. Olmsted’s ‘Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11’)

01/25/2016

Call for papers – Special issue of Argumenta on “The Ethics and Epistemology of Conspiracy Theories”

Just a note to philosophers and social scientists that they have until November of this year to work on a paper which could appear beside one of mine in a special issue of Argumenta on the ethics and epistemology of conspiracy theories. See here.

01/21/2016

Conspiracy Round-up – January 2016

Is the Bundy takeover of the Malheur national wildlife reserve a conspiracy theory? I guess it depends on what you are interested in. If we’re worried that we’re not calling these people ‘terrorists’, then there’s a question as to why (one answer to which will be some claim of a concerted – and maybe secretive – effort by the media and government not to call white people terrorists). There’s also the issue that many of the occupiers are conspiracy theorists themselves, and believe in a state-led conspiracy to deprive them of their natural rights (namecheck: Agenda 21), or that slavery never happened. Whatever we want to call then, they are certainly paranoid enough. Also, why are the authorities strangely absent? What could possibly explain that?

Matt Taibbi has an interesting take on why we are taking cowboys who cry seriously, which is a less problematic analysis than it sounds. But the best thing about it, is that people are sending them dildos.

James F. Tracy, who we interviewed on the podcast in the middle of last year, has been fired from Florida Atlantic University, where he was tenured. An awful lot has been written on it. Some defending Tracy, some taking him to task. Some even saying that the university should not hide its real reasons for the termination.

There’s certainly a discussion to be had about the role of academic freedom, and the associated duties. Northwestern’s Arthur Butz, for example, was not fired for his Holocaust denial. (which is not to compare what Tracy has alleged to have done with anti-Semitism; this is merely an example of a university defending what many rightly would take to be highly offensive behaviour because it was not relevant to Butz’s position).

I do want to call out one article on this, however, which is a perfect illustration of how framing a debate can make one side look more or less bad. This piece about the HONR network talks about harassing people who are sceptical about the official theory of what happened at Sandy Hook. Yet if you think asking people to prove their dead children ever existed is a bad thing, the HONR network looks like it might be a conspiracy of well-intentioned people who just want to stop further trauma. Framing, as we know, can really affect how you view a story.

In other academic conspiracist news: the University of Wollongong has accepted a PhD promoting anti-vaccination views. It’s proving to be quite controversial, and looks like it lacks a lot of rigour. Interestingly, the supervisor of the PhD, Brian Martin, has a long history of supporting students with controversial projects.

Also, we increasingly know more about who are sceptical about vaccines, and it’s not the poor and uneducated.

The search for MH370 has now turned up two 19th century shipwrecks, but no MH370.

Terrorist asks Twitter followers what he should bomb.

This article from The Intercept deftly moves from discussion of the various open plots against Jeremy Corbyn to discussion of how some on the Left are hawkish about the Middle East. Corey Robin has some additional notes.

Why do conspiracy theories take hold in Russia? Basically, everyone either loves or hates Putin.

Ashley Madison might be increasing its user base. Someone suggested to me that Ashley Madison was always a conspiracy; it was really just an extortion racket. That’s why they never checked the emails people used to sign up with; it didn’t matter to them, as long as people wanted to pay the fee to get the account associated with their email deactivated.

As predicted, Volkswagen executives knew about the emissions scandal well before it ever came out, somewhat destroying their claim it surprised them at the time (I guess they were surprised their cover-up wasn’t successful).

You might ask if there was a conspiracy to hide what is killing all the bees.

Finally, did you know there was a conspiracy to hide just how big a Nazi and anti-semite Heidegger was? Well, there was/is.

01/19/2016

For the Love of Evidence

Over Xmas I listened to Serial, and had a few thoughts about it. Post Xmas I have been catching up on Undisclosed, the pseudo? Spiritual? Something “sequel” to Serial, which follows the exploits of Rabia Chaudry and her friends, as they get to gripes with the case of the murder of Hae Min Lee by Adnan Syed. ((Adnan was accused, and eventually convicted, of the murder of Hae Min Lee back in February, 2000. The evidence used to convict him mostly consisted of a congruence between the sole key witness in the case, Jay Wilds, and a series of cellphone pings which placed Adnan in the vicinity of where Hae Min Lee’s body was buried on the day it was alleged she was murdered.))

Both Serial and Undisclosed are interested in their use of evidence. Serial takes the journalistic avenue of searching for the “smoking gun”, which will either show Adnan to be clearly innocent or guilty. Undisclosed takes the more lawyerly approach of trying to show that the inferences the prosecution made in the case are clearly unsound. Both podcasts are about the evidence, but they privilege different kinds of evidence.

Evidence is awkward. “Smoking guns” – pieces of evidence which uncontroversially support one and only one explanatory hypothesis – are rare. Most “smoking guns” end up being examples of evidence which at best strongly supports one hypothesis and at worst supports one hypothesis only if a certain number of assumptions are taken to be true. Many things which are called “smoking guns” aren’t; the evidence everyone says showed Richard Nixon was guilty with regards to Watergate – the missing Oval Office recordings – only look conclusive if you assume the lapse in the recording is relevant to the Watergate Affair (and not, say, a discussion about Nixon covering up the existence of a space navy).

Serial is very much a journalist’s very long form take on Adnan’s presumed innocence. Sarah Koenig ums-and-ahs over whether she thinks Adnan can really be guilty (relying heavily, I should add, on just how nice and normal he seems to her on the telephone), eventually claiming that she couldn’t have convicted him should she have been on the jury. Her reason: the State’s case against Adnan doesn’t survive scrutiny because there is no decisive which supports the claims the Prosecution made.

The argument presented by Koenig in Serial for Adnan’s likely innocence is interesting precisely because the evidence used by the Prosecution did, in fact, lead to a verdict of guilty; Koenig and her producers end up claiming that it’s not so much the evidence which decided Adnan’s guilt but, rather, the way in which it was selectively cited. Koenig and co. do not go so far as to allege misconduct from the police and the courts in this matter; it’s entirely plausible for a listener of the podcast to think “That’s just how things were done in Baltimore back then.” Which is to say that the things which allowed certain parts of the evidential record to be unquestioningly presented by the Prosecution was just a feature of the system at the time. ((Both Serial and Undisclosed emphasise that things have changed in the intervening years.))

The argument in Serial, then, is that the evidence was the evidence, but it did not support the prosecution’s take. The fact it was not challenged by the defence was a fault of the Defence. That’s a different take from that in Undisclosed. Undisclosed asserts some kind of conspiracy by the police. Or, at least, some of the hosts toy with the idea without necessarily ever stating it outright. ((I should point out that I’m only halfway through the current crop of Undisclosed episodes, so this issue of conspiracy might get addressed more fully in a later episode.))

Undisclosed takes Serial as a starting point for the analysis of the inadequacies of the prosecution of Adnan Syed, but rather than looking for the “smoking gun”, Chaudry and co. look at the inferences the police made in the case. They argue not only are these inferences wrong (such as how they rely on cellphone pings to track Adnan on the day they suspect the murder took place), but that the police knew of these issues; the investigating officers were not blithely ignorant of the inconsistencies but, rather, knowingly working around them in order to secure a conviction.

Undisclosed – if you will excuse a cliche – goes for the jugular: the police not only decided early on that Adnan was the killer, but they quite deliberately coached witnesses to ensure that he was convicted, even in the face of evidence they knew indicated he probably could not have committed the crime the way they claimed it played out. ((Not only that, but due to the success of Serial, the key witness and prosecutors have slightly changed their stories; see this interview in The Intercept))

The idea that the police secure convictions unethically is uncontroversial. ((Undisclosed spends an entire episode – almost an hour and a half – detailing previous cases of dubious and eventually overturned convictions which were investigated by the detectives who charged Adnan.)) What tends to be said these days is that it doesn’t happen as often as it did. In that respect Chaudry and co. thesis is not remarkable, especially since as lawyers they are probably much more sensitive to, and aware of, cases where the police do not play fair. However what they claim is, in the end, a conspiracy theory: the police and the prosecution knowingly kept from both the defence and the jurors evidence that would have cast doubt on Adnan’s innocence, and they have continued to maintain that the conviction is secure to this day.

Chaudry and co. come to this conclusion of conspiracy via an analysis of the way the prosecution sorted and presented the evidence. The hosts of Undisclosed are interested in how inferences were drawn from the available evidence, and how said inferences were either followed up, ignored or presented. Unlike Koenig, Chaudry and co. are willing to entertain the notion that the authorities had an agenda. ((One of the interesting aspects of Serial was Koenig’s claim that she thought it was unlikely the pursuit of Adnan as prime suspect could have been motivated by racism. Chaudry and co. seem to think it’s quite possible Adnan’s arrest and then denial of bail was – given what was said in court – very racist indeed.))

So, why is this interesting, and why is this of interest to me? Well, because evidence is something which is poorly understood by most people. People fetishise evidence, and some professionals fetishise particular kinds of evidence.

Take Serial. Koenig really wants a “smoking gun” which shows either Adnan is guilty or innocent. She does not find one, and so ends up saying that if she had been on the jury, then she could not have convicted him. That is to say she finds in favour of reasonable doubt (an understandable position), but can’t shake the idea that maybe he was guilty after all. The thing which would sway her belief – the “smoking gun” evidence – is just not available.

The Undisclosed discussion of evidence is all about poking holes in the official theory of the murder of Hae Min Lee. What the hosts are interested in is the hypotheses you can reasonably infer from other evidence, which is not just a kind of evidence, but the kind of evidence we typically rely on a day-by-day basis. For example, you think your child is eating all the biscuits, and your only evidence is that whenever you want a ginger nut there aren’t any. You know you bought some earlier, but now the kids are back from school, and there are none left. From that you infer “The kids ate the biscuits” and you charge them with this most heinous of crimes.

For the hosts of Undisclosed the issue is not that they have a smoking gun, but rather that the inferences drawn from the available evidence in no way support the idea Adnan could have committed the crime the way the State claimed he did. ((A constant issue I have with Undisclosed is how they move from “The State’s case is implausible” to the attendant claim “Adnan did not murder Hae Min Lee”. It’s not at all obvious that the details of the prosecution case being at fault means the general thesis is false (although it does show it’s hard to believe). It’s quite possible Adnan killed Hae Min Lee, the police somehow know he killed Hae Min Lee, but the actual details are so fuzzy that no clear story has emerged. But that’s by-the-by, really.)) For the people behind Undisclosed, the case falls over because the details the investigators inferred from the morass of evidence fail to survive scrutiny.

On one level this is good, because it shows up issues in the investigation, and casts doubt on the security of Adnan’s conviction. Yet it also doesn’t provide evidence for an alternative explanatory hypothesis of who committed the crime. ((Whilst the hosts of Undisclosed do think that Jay Wilds is a suspicious character, as of yet they are not claiming he was the real murderer.)) As such, the evidence which undergirds the analysis in Undisclosed can lead to a “So?” kind of response. “Sure”, people might say, “the case against Adnan looks shaky, but who else could have committed the crime?” ((I do have an issue with the strict literalism the makers of Undisclosed engage in; if someone says in their testimony “it happened a year ago”, then they take it that it pretty much happened 12 months ago. This kind of “If someone says x, then they only mean x” is a common trope in reasoning, which doesn’t really reflect the fact most of us are not all that precise when we speak. Most people gesture towards detail, as opposed to give a frank and full accounting, so the idea we should take all testimony literally does, I think, in many cases suggest radical inconsistencies where only minor details are at stake.)) That is to say, if you understand any explanation is going to rely on a certain amount of selective evidence use, and that all explanations of social phenomena (like murder) are going to have loose ends, then apparent inconsistencies can be waved away as being part of the difficulty of ever getting the full story of what really happened.

Now, this is to be expected; the hosts of Undisclosed are lawyers and all they need show is that there is reasonable doubt about the theory Adnan murdered Hae. However, an awful lot of the theory which drives their approach to instilling a feeling of reasonable doubt is about bolstering the theory the police and prosecution conspired to get a guilty verdict. Admittedly, they present a lot of evidence to support this theory, from weird plea deals with a key witness, previous cases in which the investigating officers obtained insecure convictions, the way in which evidence in favour of the defence was never given to Adnan’s legal team… It certainly looks suspicious. However, some of that suspicion comes simply from believing in the innocence of Adnan and seeking to explain away the guilty verdict.

Now, assumptions are crucial when making inferences; evidence is only evidence with respect to surrounding theories. The hosts of Undisclosed are practicing lawyers and they know how to show up the problems with rival theories. However, their strategy with dealing with the official theory is – to my mind – as frustrating as Sarah Koenig’s eventual conclusion. They present grounds for reasonable doubt, based upon good evidence of a conspiracy. Yet they downplay response to their conspiratorial claims either by simply not recognising that there could be non-conspiratorial explanations for some features of the case, or claiming such non-conspiratorial explanations are prima facie unlikely. It seems the rhetoric of defending Adnan is more important than a careful analysis.

And there’s the rub; maybe it should be. If you were really convinced that an injustice had been done, would you pepper your argument with “But, of course…” or would you do your best to persuade others of your righteousness? I wager it’s the latter, and that, just maybe, I’m judging the epistemic merits of podcasts when, really, I should be much more interested in their rhetoric.

01/12/2016