I don't understand this concept. I see it all over the internet. But I don't get it.

At what point did we stop believing it was possible for people to conspire to commit crimes?

Nobody disputes, for example, that the convictions of the Watergate conspirators - for the charge of conspiracy - was based in fact.

So how is it that we can now say that fact and conspiracy can't be part of the same pattern?

It's true that a huge majority of conspiracy theories are bogus and lack evidence. But it's also true that, albeit rarely, conspiracies do occur.

Orthogonal doesn't mean opposites, it means they're perpendicular i.e. unrelated.

I understand.

But they're not unrelated.

Sometimes a fact pattern reveals a conspiracy.

Your previous response indicates that you did not understand, and you are now backtracking.

Yes, I misinterpreted.

Rather the ones we thought were "conspiracy theories" (over the past few years at least) most of them turned out to be true. It might be really unpopular to say it here but the Biden admin really fucked up on this one big time. I presume most people, from all parts of the political spectrum, are not willing to go through another round of pandemic induced lockdowns, deaths of friends and family members, hospitalizations etc just because some careless mad scientists unleashed a lethal virus on the entire human population "by mistake". There is no excuse for this.

Majority of us (99%) do not have any level of expertise to gauge if this sort of Research is beneficial to humanity or not. We can only go by "belief" that those experts who are overseeing this get it right. That "belief" has been shaken big time post 2020. All the flip-flops by Fauci and Co has only contributed to denting the image of this part of the scientific community. And to restart it again, when we still have no conclusive evidence of what actually happened in the previous pandemic (I believe it is Wuhan lab that was responsible but my belief has no weight unless it is actually verified) we should not be restarting any such research.

Also such research must not be the purview of one single country or few countries (US/China). Permission must be sought from all member nations of UN before any such research is carried out as it has potential to wipe out humanity.

I took the go to mean whether something is a conspiracy and whether something is a fact aren't tied. You can have any of the permutations. I think very often you get what looks like conspiracy when there is actually no communication between parties, rather it is swarm behavior, each ant acting based on its observations and motives. But sometimes the ants have to chat, then it is a conspiracy.

You're right; I misunderstood the comment to mean, "the matter of whether something is a conspiracy, and the fact pattern of that thing, are unrelated."

But it seems like what the commenter meant was, "the matter of whether a given act is properly regarded as a conspiracy, and then the evidence supporting a particular instance of that act, are unrelated."

That's not what orthogonal means. Your counter-examples are exactly what orthogonal means; they are independent attributes.

Consider some other class of crime.

If I said, "the matter of whether a crime is premediated, and the fact pattern of that crime, are orthogonal attributes."

You'd say: "That's not true - the fact pattern is how we determine whether there was evidence of premeditation."

It's the same for conspiracies. The fact pattern is not orthogonal; it's integral.

1) the rabbit jumped: (not conspiracy, fact could be true or false)

2) jfk was assassinated by the CIA: (conspiracy, fact could be true or false)

What concept are you referring to when you say you don't understand it?

I took the comment to mean, "the matter of whether something is a conspiracy is unrelated to the fact pattern of the event."

I apologize, for that's obviously not what you meant now that I see this comment.

But perhaps you can acknowledge that this assertion is pervasive on the internet: that if something is a conspiracy, it is so because of the beliefs of the believers, rather than the fact pattern of the event.

If you look at the comment I originally replied to, OP says something like "when does conspiracy become fact". In having a enough conversations about the topic of conspiracy, you realize people are conflating conspiracy as laying(lying?) on the spectrum of likelihood. So when they say "when does conspiracy become fact?" it sounds like our understanding of the topic evolves from being a conspiracy to instead being a fact. Why would the conspiracy aspect vanish into thin air? If it was a conspiracy then now it is a conspiracy with some sort of proof. It appears this bizarre redefinition of the meaning of conspiracy came from its incessant association with the word theory. If OP had instead said "when does conspiracy _theory_ become fact" I would have no qualms with the usage. But its hilarious how there are people on either side of this stupidly generic debate who cannot even properly understand the usage of the word conspiracy.

Agree in full.