People see what they expect to see, not what is really there.
Pomeroo,
If you go for a walk on the beach some day after it's been windy, what do you see? Beautiful waves in the sand, evenly spaced, with magnificent bifurcations - always at just the perfect place to maintain the broad motif.
And as you look at those ripples in the sand, as far as the eye can see, ask yourself, "How do the zillions of tiny, dumb grains of sand 'know' how to arrange themselves into such coherent patterns many scale orders of magnitude greater than each grain?"
What would your answer be
Mr. Mathematical Impossibility?
Obviously, his answer would be that you are lying!
However, this question is not the best one, since grains of sands really are dumb, as they cannot even give their names, never mind explain general relativity.
A better question would involve an analogous effect involving intelligent beings - at least bonobo chimps, though it'd be better to stick with humans, who communicate so much better.
I'm sorry if this has already been mentioned (I haven't read all of the thread), but maybe what you need is some kind of a reverse Turing test. A normal Turing test uses humans to figure out if a machine is intelligent.
However, a reverse Turing test would most likely be taken by a computer. It would analyze 911 facts, including players within the great 911 mystery, and attempt to compute whether observed behaviors can simply be ascribed to statistically probable ranges of competence, both personal and institutional, constrained by inescapable national security filters. In a sense, it's trying to detect an evil intelligence within a background noise of expected functioning, SNAFU's and all.
I don't have a reference handy, but there was an artificial intelligence program that analyzed stories to predict likely culprits in a divorce. (My apologies if I mangle the details...) So, e.g., if the story included a section wherein a divorce-prone husband is waited on by a very attractive waitress, the waitress would get some weight as a partner in infidelity, and thus a possible cause of divorce.
A conspiracy-detecting program might work by developing a model for what 'normal' interactions are like. That means, they also have to model institutional dumbness, individual dumbness, individual honest mistakes (say in a generally competent person), etc., and not just assume that mission statements are followed to the 't', by picture perfect employees. I assume that bona fide conspiracies will, in fact, leave traces (so to speak) in
certain individuals' behavior. I.e., I assume that some 'fixers' will have to 'dumb down' official investigations, or flat out lie. Certain questions will have to
not be asked, and certain lines of investigation
not even begun to be followed. Certain SOP's will have to be either made inadequate, or allowed to persist in an inadequate state.
In other words, some people will have to consciously "be in on it", and not only help create a milieu where principled and individually competent people will nevertheless feel comfortable in partaking of institutional incompetence, but possibly also smack down whistle blowers and outside-the-box types who are inside the system, yet ask embarrassing questions of that system.
Unfortunately, not just creating such a computer program would be enormously difficult, but how would you validate it? It would be subject to the same sorts of criticism as the NIST report...
The divorce story AI program, BTW, was completely useless for any other purpose than for which it had been designed. That doesn't bode well for my proposal.
