Successful conspiracies go unnoticed and are hard to estimate.

Evidence

We find it intuitively believable that groups as high as a few dozen might collude successfully for years (as Major League franchise owners did to keep out blacks and maintain their antitrust exemption, but that is anecdotal and well known). Then there is the methodological issue that we have no robust studies of conspiracies that fail versus succeed because the ones that succeed go unnoticed and are hard to estimate. — Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 198

Categorization

• QUESTION: Interesting empirical gap: no robust failure-vs-success studies of conspiracies.
• XREF: connects to: Conspiracies refer to actual events while conspiracy theories are unverified accusations. — Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 170; Conspiracies involving over a thousand people mathematically fall apart quickly — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 174