10,000 People Can't Keep a Secret = Red Herring?

A corrupt organization does something really sleazy behind the scenes, something that qualifies as a conspiracy. I blow the whistle, but the media won't publish my complaints, and my colleagues just ignore me.

Ten years later, I'm discussing the affair with some people, and someone says, "There was no conspiracy, because 10,000 people can't keep a secret."

Although their statement may not be literally true, it is true in this case - I spilled the beans myself. So we have a case where 9,999 people did keep a secret, but one individual came forward and made that secret public.

So when people say X number of people can't keep a secret, they're ignoring the fact that people who DO reveal secrets are often ignored.

What kind of term would you apply to the statement "10,000 people can't keep a secret" in this situation? Would you call it a red herring , or is there some better term?

David: I actually believe that 10,000 people can keep a secret. It would be more accurate to say they could be coerced into remaining silent . They could coerced by fear to keep silent and therefore keep a secret. The US government is the largest example of this with the people in government and government contractors who work in classified areas. Security clearance levels are used as part of a method to control access to information that should not be freely available to all personnel, and to control and prevent DISCLOSING information. Could 10,000 be convinced to remain silent? Absolutely. How? How about never being able to get a job again - after serving 10 years in Federal prison and being fined by the court too. Yes, how about having your life totally destroyed. That will keep one silent.

You are probably aware the government is using security classifications to cover up unethical actions or worse that they don't want disclosed. I am guessing you are aware of some of these happenings.
Similar in the corporate world. Severe penalties and fines.

A good recent example is Jeffrey Epstein. Recruiting and trafficking underaged women in plain sign for a 15 years or so. Many people knew. No one talked. Not even the victims. He operated with impunity by controlling his victims, and maybe by controlling (blackmail) his clients too.

Harry Weinstein. How many decades did he assault and rape women with no consequences because no one talked, because he was in a position of power .

Then there are overt conspiracies. Flat out conspiracies to commit evil acts. The Iraq War for one - narrative: "WMD". 1 million die. No WMD.

So yes 10,000 people can be coerced to remain silent. This is not the same as just deciding to "keep a secret." The detractors do not want to consider the conspiracy, so they frame their response the way you stated it: "10,000 People Can't Keep a Secret" What this is, is a form of ridicule . So it is partially the "Appeal to ridicule" It is sort of similar to "Appeal to Majority" except this is not a majority, it is a whole group of people being coerced into compliance. This absolutely does happen: Nazi Germany, North Korea, and it is always happening on smaller scales too.

So the detractors conclusion that 10,000 people cannot keep a secret, as you say, is twisting the narrative. But, 10,000 people can be coerced into compliance. The fact that 1 person does not keep the secret is insignificant because that person can ridiculed into insignificance and can just be ignored.

So I see Appeal to Ridicule in twisting the narrative to come to a desired conclusion to discount the "conspiracy"

There may be other fallacies involved. Maybe someone else will point out another fallacy.

Good comments. This is a confusing one. As you pointed out, large numbers of people can indeed keep secrets. The catch is that, even if someone breaks the silence, it may not matter, because they'll simply be ignored or ridiculed (or killed).

So the whole "They can't keep a secret" argument sounds like a red herring to me. But, at the same time, it sounds more complex.

The statement/claim "10,000 People Can't Keep a Secret" could be best described as hyperbole used to make a point; the point being the more grand the conspiracy, the less likely it is to be true.

So when people say X number of people can't keep a secret, they're ignoring the fact that people who DO reveal secrets are often ignored.

People who present good evidence are rarely ignored. Conspiracies have been and are exposed every day by whistleblowers who come forward to present evidence. It is any journalist's/media outlet's dream to expose such a conspiracy. Similarly, a scientist who presents evidence that leads to a paradigm shift would win a Nobel Prize (e.g., showing that the earth is flat, God created the universe 6000 years ago, evolution is bunk, climate change is a hoax, vaccines cause autism, etc..). The problem is, people often present "theories," personal testimonies, and really bad evidence (i.e., "Of course there are aliens in Area 51. Why else would it be so protected by the government???" or "I was anally probed by an alien so I know they are real.").

Rationality includes making probability calculations and weighing evidence. It is a fact that there is a strong correlation between the number of people who are asked/bribed/threatened to keep a secret, the more likely it is that the secret will be exposed. The testimony of the 80-year-old former NASA employee that "he saw a UFO" has to be weighed against the number of NASA employees who never made such claims. Statistically, we know a portion of the population is crazy, liars, starving for attention, etc. When we someone comes forward claiming to expose a conspiracy, and has no good evidence, the rational thing to do is to not accept their testimony as fact until evidence supports the claims being made is presented.

There is a saying "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'evidence'," which means that a bunch of people presenting bad evidence doesn't make good evidence. However, in some cases, more corroborating testimonies does make for stronger evidence. An example might be 30 strangers in a park of 200 people reporting simultaneously to the police that some guy ran through the park naked. The idea that 30 strangers made this up out of a population of 200 is far less likely than the fact that some guy really did run naked through a park. Situations and details matter.

A good skeptic must remain skeptical without being cynical, that is, they must not be dismissive yet know how to evaluate evidence, which often requires specific knowledge as well as general knowledge of statistics, sciences, psychology, and more. However, a good skeptic can't also adequately investigate every theory they are presented-- it is temporally impossible . This is why the maxim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" works well.

Dr. Bo is correct.

I'll add a few thoughts:

1. Powerful companies and government officials often ridicule truth-tellers.

2. There is the ancient myth of Cassandra. The god Apollo cursed her so she would always tell the truth, and no one would ever believe her. Do you feel that way sometimes?

3. Right now, conservative media in the USA and the UK are doing a great job of throwing up smoke screens to divert attention from various official misdeeds. Uncovering a conspiracy so the public will believe it is very difficult. But back to Dr. Bo: if the evidence is good enough, people will tend to believe the truth eventually.

It seems to me that this is a typical example of an illogical assertion rather than a statement of fact. I very much doubt that the person making the claim could provide evidence that 10,000 people couldn't keep a secret. The reality that, in this instance, one person has not kept that secret is not evidence for the claim unless that claim relates only to this particular set of 10,000 people. I don't know how to work out the potential number of combinations of 10,000 people within a world population of around 7.5 billion people but it must be quite a number. How one could effectively test the probability of 10,000 people not keeping a secret I can't imagine. (Perhaps someone out there is versed in probability theory and can throw light on the matter.).

Another problem I see with this statement is that if something is secret then it isn't known and if it isn't known then it can't exist and therefore there can be no such thing as a secret unless at least one person is aware of it. Once whatever composes that 'secret' is transmitted to another person then it is no longer a secret, unless there is some definition of how many people can know the same thing but beyond which that something can no longer be considered a secret.

A third problem is that if one accepts that, leaving aside how many people know a particular piece of information, a particular knowledge of whatever can be a secret if others do not know it, still doesn't support an argument that 10,000 people can't keep a secret. If secrets actually do exist then, by definition, many people will not know that those secrets exist and that being the case, how can one make the claim that n people can't keep a secret? There may well be a million and one secrets being held by 10,000 or even more people but precisely because whatever is 'secret' the rest of us don't even know that there is a secret, let alone what composes that secret.

Finally, if a secret is the shared knowledge of n people that is not to be shared with any others, how can we know that only that one group sharing that knowledge as a secret are actually the only ones that have that knowledge? Again, the very nature of holding something secret means that there could be many groups of people holding the same knowledge at the same time and regarding it as secret and not to be shared. Would that knowledge then still be 'secret'?

So, there is a paradox. We can't know how many people can possibly know and consciously not share something because they consider it a secret and neither can that group of people know whether others do know what they consider to be a secret and if others do know they won't however know that they know the 'secret' of the other group and may or may not consider what they know to be a secret, themselves. Thus, the whole notion of a 'secret' is without foundation and argument about them futile.

The assertion that many people do not see what you saw is intended to imply that what you saw might not be true. There is no fallacy involved, unless you not only know the infraction, but know that at least some of the 10,000 also know it. If you're a forensic accountant, you may have information no one else has, but then your "whistle blowing" should include a few printouts of the data.

Your opponent in the argument is casting aspersions, perhaps, and you don't need to overcome his disparaging comments. Present the data.

I would say the statement is a non sequitur. Legally, conspiracy requires an agreement between two people to commit a crime and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. It's irrelevant how many people knew about the conspiracy.

The suggestion from the statement is that out of the 10,000 people, several of them knew about the conspiracy, and of those that knew, at least one came forward with evidence. Both of those premises are factually questionable.