Conspiracy Or Coordination Problem?

An argument often given against conspiracy theorists is that it's implausible that thousands of separate people could ever keep a secret.

Something I've realized lately is that often the answer to this can just be "it's a coordination problem": lots of people know the secret, and would prefer to expose the secret, but any single person exposing it will pay huge costs (and receive little personal benefit), so it's hard for the various secret-knowers to coordinate to publicize it.

Take the Edward Snowden revelations. I think that anyone speculating before 2013 about the surveillance network Snowden disclosed would have been told 1) this is a crazy conspiracy theory, 2) it's impossible, because thousands of people would have to know about it, and a thousand people can only keep a secret if 999 of them are dead.

Edward Snowden paid a high price for revealing the secrets, and seems to have done an unusually effective job of it – you can easily imagine a world where he paid an even-higher price and didn't successfully publicize the secrets either.

And personally I suspect that Snowden was pretty unique in his willingness and ability to blow this particular whistle: I think that without this one very specific person getting the secret out, it might have been decades or more before they became public. Was there a conspiracy? Or just a coordination problem among secret-knowers?

On a much smaller scale, when I was a college student I spoke with various social science professors who privately trashed the research of many of their famous colleagues, saying Everyone Knows that Professor X's research doesn't actually replicate and is ultimately false. (Not the X-Men guy, I believe his research was pretty robust, but you know what I mean).

But calling out these colleagues publicly would have been bad for their careers, so for a long time this collective falsehood was maintained. Eventually the "replication crisis" became public, but I think there were decades before that where a bunch of people basically knew about it, but managed to keep a collective secret. Was that a conspiracy, or just a coordination problem?

I don't know any world-shattering secrets myself, but I can see the same dynamic play out with the few small things I know which would be Of Public Interest but don't ever seem to become public.

For example, a famous politician had a longtime media reputation for avuncularity, but everyone I've met who directly worked with him describes him as being aggressive and abusive, and says that everyone else in politics-world knows this too.

So political journalists are surely aware of it, but each writer or editor individually knows that going public about it would only cause them grief, and they don't. (If you know what you're looking for you can sometimes see oblique references to his behavior in articles, but nobody ever seems to say it outright).

Is it a conspiracy that there's no public accounting of something highly newsworthy that thousands of people know? Or is it just a coordination problem?

Ultimately I think a common thread across these coordination problems is that the people who benefit from the secret have concentrated benefits while the general public suffers a diffuse cost.

Meanwhile, anyone exposing the secret would have concentrated costs and very little personal benefit. So the public discourse remains a little less truthful, even before a specific power threatens consequences for anyone who exposes the truth.