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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1867 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why are the Jews trying to burn down and steal Patagonia in Argentina? Why there, of all places? Plan Andinia is said to originate this, but what was the preceding interest before or contemporaneously with Theodore Herzl, does it somehow correlate with the NSDAP exodus after WW2 for becoming a serious option, despite existing settlements in Palestine? I imagine blood and soil should trace back to a time and place, so I can’t imagine a nomadic diasporic Anglo desiring a random South American place to reunify instead of UK/US/AU/NZ/CA.

https://x.com/paykells/status/2010611343251104209?s=46

https://open.substack.com/pub/ddgeopolitics/p/unmasking-the-flames-israels-shadow

These chicks are way too hot for me to trust them on geopolitics.

This reminds me of a post I made about grassroots movements and the math of why that trait matters. If you have two variables x,y which combine to create some output f(x,y) which is increasing with respect to both x and y, (as a simple example, f = x * y ) then observing one of the variables to be large decreases your estimate on the size of the other one. (Ie, if you know f and y, but can't observe x directly, you estimate x = f / y). Or more generally you construct a partial inverse function g(f,y), and then g will be decreasing with respect to y.

In less mathematical terms, you observe an effect, you consider multiple possible causes of the effect, then one of them being high explains away the need for the others to be high. In the grassroots example: there are lots of protestors, this could either be caused by people being angry, or by shills throwing money around to manufacture a protest (or maybe a combination of both), you observe shills, then you conclude people probably aren't all that angry, or at least not as angry as you would normally expect from a protest of this size (if they were, and you had both anger AND shills then the protest would be even larger).

In this case, you observe a post about a political event which is getting a lot of attention, f. This popularity could be caused by a number of things, such as insightful political commentary (x), or hot woman (y). You observe large y, this explains the popularity, your estimate of x regresses to the average. It need not be the case that hotness and attractiveness actually correlate negatively, or at all, for this emergent negative correlation to appear when you control for popularity/availability.

Isn't that Berkson's paradox?

Kind of. I guess it's Berkson's paradox applied to a specific class of cases where the the output is easy to observe (and often just "this is a big enough deal for me to have noticed it"), and the variable you care about is harder to directly observe than other variables.

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