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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   5861 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

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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Fellow Motteizans, what are your small scale conspiracy theories? I'm not talking grand narratives here. What minor, apolitical conspiracy theories do you explain to the next table at a diner.

For myself, I think at least some large portion of lottery drawings are not random. I base this belief on the fact that of repeat lottery winners, a suspicious number of them are math professors.

People convince themselves that lobster tastes really good because it's high status. It's expensive to bring live lobsters inland, so it's naturally pricey. Also there's the whole ritual of killing it right before the meal that makes it seem even more fancy.

Also it's one of the few foods where it's socially acceptable to dunk every bite in melted butter.

People just like having a high class way to eat melted butter.

Industrialization of marijuana production has resulted in steroid-bulked flowers that bear little resemblance to pot, which are subsequently relieved of much of what THC they do sprout before being shipped.

I used to smoke a LOT more than I do now, and so had a much higher tolerance, but killer buds would take maybe three hits and be wrecked. Now we pass around blunts of what looks like it should be as good or better--but it ain't.

Despite being so theoretically awesome, stuff usually doesn't even leave my fingers sticky these days. Hell, my roaches fall apart because they're so not-sticky, even after burning through 'em. They ain't s'posta do that.

Ime Udoka was run out of Boston for having a consensual affair with a married white woman, and the NBA looked the other way while the Celtics covered it up and dragged his name in the mud.

I feel like said married white woman being married to his employer is a vital part of the calculus here.

If you're not willing to get cucked to win a championship, you don't want to win enough. It's okay, most people aren't cut out for pro sports, but you need to leave and make room for the winners.

Didn't TJ Holmes also lose his job after a similar affair around the same period?

Hm...

Based if true.

Makeup and skincare products age your face and give you acne and bad skin to make you buy more makeup and skincare products.

I mean, if they don't, the industry is leaving money on the table.

That would make sense, but there's a lot of competition in the market and women do discuss skin care a fair amount.

If your thesis was true, you'd expect poor white women who went without an expensive skin care routine to have better skin in their old age.

That doesn't match what I've seen.

From what I've seen more expensive products do produce better results. I used to work in Canadian politics and there was a sharp salary division. Hill staffers got paid crap. Ministry staffers got paid well.

When a girl moved over to a Ministry it was obvious. Her skin was noticeably better after a few months. Long term it holds up. Although UV protection seems to be the bigger split.

Or she got better sleep and ate better and drank more water.

Multiple women moving to jobs that had worse hours. They were probably eating better.

Eh, I think you could also chalk it up to the ten million lifestyle changes that come with having more money. When I was super broke I had terrible skin because I was constantly stressed out and didn't have a regular schedule, now that I have a lot more money I use the same few products all the time and am really consistent with my skincare routine and have significantly better skin than when I was younger and broke, though I don't use any more expensive products.

there's a lot of competition in the market and women do discuss skin care a fair amount.

Yeah, but the competition really serves to obscure and obfuscate the market (for example the constantly shifting product selection is completely ridiculous) and the quality of discussion on skincare is basically at the same level of like horoscope talk in the majority of cases, even in extremely niche reddit skincare forums I would take most of the advice with a huge grain of salt

I mean, if they don't, the industry is leaving money on the table.

That depends on the level of scrutiny they get from whatever quality assurance regulations they have to comply to, the estimated probability of a employee turning whistleblower, or just random customer finding out, multiplied by the expected damage from the resulting lawsuits and public backlash. It's not especially unrealistic that if they did do this people would notice the trend, some scientist would do a statistical survey, and then lawyers would jump at the opportunity for a class action lawsuit, it happens for many products.

So it's entirely plausible that the expected value of doing so is negative and thus the company increases profits by keeping their products safe and effective. It's not guaranteed, I can see it going either way, but the entire point of being able to sue companies for damages is to act as a deterrent for this kind of behavior.

It doesnt have to be a conspiracy.

I know jackshit about skincare but my prior is covering up the pores on ones face for long stretches of time probably harms said faces skin even if by a miniscule amount.

A lot of things leave money on the table. The police don't usually train new criminals, and the cardiology department in the hospitals doesn't sponsor the addition of transfats to the cafeteria food.

Turns out we're not averse to doing so when there are obvious moral issues, most of the time.

But I believe the American Heart Association etc absolutely does endorse seed oils and warn against animal fats.

But that’s because they’re unwilling to go against consensus, not because they’re trying to drum up business.

It can be both. One of the things I'm always on about is the way that humans can coordinate with/against each other without even being aware that we're doing so. We have a conscious mind which spins up plausible excuses, and another hidden one which knows exactly what we're doing but also hides that from us, which makes us better liars. Including to ourselves.

Consider the old saying, "It is impossible to make a man understand something his income depends on him not understanding."

It's not something Americans have to worry about, but a lot of ancient and medieval history as we know it would look different if we didn't trust the surviving written sources, but only trusted archeology and paleogeography. If any historian tries to challenge some established theory, they will be branded a kook unless they first spend a quarter century establishing their career and slowly accumulating a list of publications that gradually question the established consensus more and more. Then they can finally drop the bombshell and use their authority to weather the storm of counterattacks. It takes multiple such bombshells until the consensus changes enough to be reflected in schoolbooks.

All the talk about the Grassy Knoll is a distraction. Lee Harvey Oswald actually shot JFK and was subsequently killed by Jack Ruby to tie up loose ends/ensure that he couldn't rat out who hired him.

@roystgnr already brought up the lost cosmonauts, but the lost cosmonauts. Over the course of my education and professional life I have had privilege of working with a number of steely-eyed-missile-men form that era and almost every one of them I talked to about it had some story about a lost cosmonaut or other flight that hadn't been officially acknowledged.

Epstein didn't kill himself.

Stephen Paddock was a Janet frequent-flier and chose his vantage point for the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was chosen because it gave him a clear line of sight to the terminal. The "conspiracy theory" is that there was a person or aircraft that was his true target and that shooting into the crowd at the music festival was merely a diversion/distraction.

The "conspiracy theory" is that there was a person or aircraft that was his true target and that shooting into the crowd at the music festival was merely a diversion/distraction.

I'm slightly confused. Isn't shooting a single target easier if you haven't just kicked a hornet's nest and made everyone freak out?

Any sort of legislation mandating nutrition facts at sit-down restaurants would end with class action lawsuits.

"Why does it taste so much better at Applebys / Cheesecake Factory / Ruth's Chris / Nobu than what I make it at home, I'm a good cook!" Because that stuff is straight up loaded with salt, fat (usually butter), and sugar (the white death) to levels you would never even consider at home. The big "fancy" Italian spots like Maggiano's (spellcheck) are especially egregious here where their seemingly large menus are the same half dozen ingredients recombined and then coated in some variety of unbelievable fat-and-sugar sauce.

Quick aside: I fucking love all of those kind of places and consider them to be the crowning achievements of Western Society. Fight me

But the fact that people eating there don't have to actually look at the quantifiable hated they're laying down on their gastrointestinal and endocrine systems means that the meal is guilt free. In some weird backwards-economic-behavior way, I think the mid-tier expensive ones make people think that, because it was so pricey, it must be some level higher on the health scale. I believe this to be false. I think on a value-and-health adjusted basis, McDonalds/Chipotles are probably the best on the planet. I think prom-dinner-fancy places (Maggianos, Cheescake factory etc.) are heinously expensive and disaster for the body.

But fuck it, lava cake makes Mrs. Tollbooth frisky AF and your boy can go HAM on those breadsticks.

I've noticed a number of sit-down places, not even chains, that do put the calorie counts on their menu, without this legislation.

Nothing is wrong with salt or (saturated) fat though.

And actually another major reason they taste better is the incorporation of acid, which most home cooks ignore.

I've regularly heard the joke that part of what you're paying a restaurant for is not knowing how much butter/sugar they added.

I had seen calorie counts in some chain restaurants and apparently calorie counts are required in US chain (20+ location) restaurants as of May 2018. Of course, calorie counts is the bare minimum amount of nutritional info.

The UK has calorific values listed for everything on menus. Didn't see any meltdowns while I was visiting, but it was great for a broke student trying to get away with as few meals as possible.

Edit: Oops, you said "apolitical" which this hardly is; at the very least not back when it happened!

I'd say that there's a somewhat reasonable chance that the Red Army Faction didn't commit suicide but where executed by the West German police, as the circumstances are pretty suspicious:

They managed to smuggle guns into their cells in one of the most secure prisons in the world at the time, in a wing built especially for them. The guards a few meters away didn't hear any gunshots, Baader fired thrice, missed the first two, and finally died from shooting himself in the neck from behind using his right hand, but he was left-handed.

There was no fingerprints found on Raspe's gun and no gunpowder residue, even though his gun was lying in his hand when he was found. Meinhof's hanging was suspicious as well (wiki article, too many things to list here). Möller stabbed herself four times in the chest, survived, and claims to this day that somebody tried to assassinate her.

I haven't looked into this at all, but my priors lean heavily towards Flight 93 being shot down just because it would make so much sense in that situation, and then to concoct a heroic story of self-sacrifice.

The hijackers' decision to wait an additional 46 minutes to launch their assault meant that the people being held hostage on the flight very quickly found out that suicide attacks had already been made by hijacked airliners…

I think that turns it from heroic to…well, still heroic, but desperate. Winning wasn’t just a gamble, it was the only way for them to live.

Facts first:

  • Maxwell Ghislane, Epstein’s madame, was wealthy because her father paywalled science journals which had previously been free. It is widely believed that user MaxwellHill was her Reddit account, one of the earliest and most constant users.

  • Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz was a free info activist. He was in big legal trouble for using MIT’s fast Internet to freely download massive amounts of paywalled science journal archives. He died by hanging.

Theory:

  • The Maxwells’ science journal empire would have been threatened if Swartz’ free information activism had spread to the student populace. She used intelligence service tactics to get close to the inner circle of Reddit admins and powermods, and applied psychological tactics to push him to commit suicide.

Even if not true, it’s interesting that both Swartz and Epstein were found dead, hanged. Miss White in the server room with the noose.

Aaron Swartz is a tragedy. It's one of those cases where he was getting screwed because his lawyer didn't understand how to run a political case.

Lawyers understand the courtroom and how to strike deals with the prosecution. So naturally they want to keep the fight in the courtroom and avoid upsetting the prosecution more than necessary.

They didn't understand that Swartz was much more sympathetic to a lot of fairly powerful people than the academic publishers trying to protect their exorbitant pricing for research that's often publicly funded.

So his lawyers were telling him to keep quiet so they can make a deal, while the publishers were pressuring the prosecutors to make an example of him.

If he had made an aggressive public plea with details of his situation then all of the Silicon Valley tech people Obama needed for his 2012 election campaign would have gone to the Obama campaign and said "he's just a well meaning kid who made a mistake, cut him a deal or I won't support you".

Swartz would have just gotten probation at worst. Instead he snapped under the stress of the aggressive sentences prosecutors were demanding and killed himself.

Golly. It’s almost like hanging is a common method of suicide. Much harder to police the materials than firearms or even poisons. Psychologically, might be easier than jumping off a bridge. Has plenty of cultural cachet.

Also, I think a world where socialites can learn how to talk people into suicide looks pretty different than this one. As would a world where they need “intelligence service tactics” to chat with reddit admins.

Serious question, do you think Epstein killed himself? Because I don't think I have ever met someone who does.

My take is that him killing himself is perfectly understandable based on what we have.

He was a malignant narcissist who'd clearly run out his string. He'd lived an amazing life with living standards and prestige he would never, ever see again.

All that remained was a parade of indignities as Inmate X. Might as well check out.

I just can't quite bring myself to totally foreclose the other possibility though. It's also very easy to imagine. And more cinematic to boot.

No, I give decent odds he was murdered.

It’s not something I’ve given a ton of thought. I guess if there’s one place in life where you’d expect to see suicides, it’s high-profile criminals with zero chance of seeing the outside again. But there was enough weirdness around his death that the conspiracy theory passed the smell test.

If I was in Epsein's position, I would have killed myself.

I'm not entirely serious, but I am enthusiastic about moon landing conspiracy theories. If nothing else, I enjoy challenging friends on whether they've actually thought about just how weird the official story is and how many weird things have happened since.

I am a firm believer that many major sporting events have been rigged and that the leagues do everything they can to keep this quiet. If you can watch this game or this game and come away feeling like someone wasn't trying to get a desired result, I don't know what to tell you.

I've always thought that for conspiracy theories, it's best to analyze the counter-factual story rather than the official story. Lots of weird stuff happens in reality, but it's hard to tell how much weird stuff is the difference between, this obviously didn't happen that way and huh, I guess stuff is just weird sometimes.

For the moon landing, IMO any remotely plausible counter-factual is far more full of holes than the official story:

  • We were in a bitter competition with the Soviets at the time, who had plenty of space, radar, and radio tech themselves. If there was anything the least bit hinky about it, why wouldn't they have called us out? I'm sure they tracked the trajectory of the rockets and modules, the transmission source and content, etc.

  • Rocketry hasn't advanced all that much since then, but electronics and special effects have. Maybe we could make some nice fake videos of it now, but it probably would have been impossible to fake the video with 60s-era special effects technology. It's also a lot more plausible that, in the 60s, the government was far ahead of the private sector in rocketry, versus being far ahead of Hollywood in video special effects.

  • There's a hell of a lot of people who worked on the Apollo project, and a hell of a lot of artifacts of it lying around in public view. It's pretty implausible that all of it is fake and every single person is lying and has continued to lie consistently for decades, in many cases up to their deathbeds and through various types of dementia, with no obvious signs of massive amounts of money being thrown around. It's probably cheaper and simpler to actually go to the moon than to organize all of that.

I enjoy challenging friends on whether they've actually thought about just how weird the official story is and how many weird things have happened since.

Damn, that's good bait. Okay: I guess I haven't thought about it? The thing that most people seemed to think was weirdest was "we sent people all the way to the moon but then we couldn't get back for half a century", but we made it all the way to the moon as fast as possible by spending as much money as possible, hundreds of billions of dollars inflation-adjusted, with NASA funding then cut by 2/3rds once "we won the Space Race" had been demonstrated. We tried to switch to a cheaper launch vehicle design (but not a cheaper procurement strategy...) afterward, we failed, sunk cost fallacy kept that failure on our backs for decades, and now here we are.

My favorite space conspiracy is the Lost Cosmonauts theory, Heinlein version. "Ha ha we already put a man in space oh wait the retrorockets screwed up did we mention it was just a test dummy" sounds so much like an inept coverup of a death. If there actually had been a coverup I'd have expected some documents/details/myths to have been leaked in post-Soviet Russia, though, along with the N-1 failures and the more salacious retellings of Komarov's death.

my god

Why would someone think this was a good idea???

an uncrewed space capsule had indeed been orbiting the Earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket.

Derelict spacecraft already give off a powerfully lonely impression. If there’s a corpse in there…damn.

The thing that most people seemed to think was weirdest was "we sent people all the way to the moon but then we couldn't get back for half a century"...

This is, of course, kind of weird, but not nearly as weird as it being such a solved problem that we were sending golf equipment along for the ride! Or that moon rocks keep turning out to be fakes, or that we lost all of the telemetry data, or that everyone working on the Artemis Program keeps using verbiage that strongly implies that we have no idea how a ton of this is supposed to work. Of course, flipping through any of the conspiracy sites will provide a whole bunch more that's very weird. I don't really think it's a hoax, but I do think it's pretty weird that the people that are working on the current project don't really seem all that confident that going to the moon is something they can actually do. But really, my main question for friends is why they have such a high degree of confidence on something that they've really never even given a moment's thought to. Even though I think it's above the board, I still get a weird tingling when I notice how hard the Artemis Program is to pull off, but the Boomers tell me that when they were kids, they just grabbed some calculators and went right up for some casual golfing.

that everyone working on the Artemis Program keeps using verbiage that strongly implies that we have no idea how a ton of this is supposed to work.

To be fair, a lot of the Apollo Program approach was very much based around the concept of "keep trying something until it works", rather than actually understanding how it works. A number of different engine resonance issues were 'fixed' simply by throwing literal bombs into the stream and hoping they'd disrupt unintentional bombs. Even where they had decent models and fixes, sometimes they launched unfixed versions to try and hit deadlines: this was funny when coincidence with other unexplained problems saved lives, and less so when it ended them (on the ground!).

More broadly, fluid calculations are hard.

I think it's important to remember how complex manned spaceflight is and how chronically little attention is paid to end-to-end documentation. In fact, a big part of me thinks that utterly "complete" documentation is impossible because latent knowledge is so pervasive that sometimes you don't even realize you're using it as part of a step-by-step process. Furthermore, documentation outside of end user focused documentation is more about thinking through problems than a totally exhaustive record what what happened when and why for what reasons.

An interesting thought experiment I like to run with my developer friends; think of the most complex yet elegant piece of software you can think of...maybe the Linux kernel? Could Linux Torvals (or anyone) rebuild it from scratch so that its roughly functionally the same ... probably. Would the structure of the code be anything like it is .... probably not.

NASA engineers definitely know, remember (in an institutional sense), and appreciate the broad strokes of slinging a rocket at the moon, but its day one for all the details again.

or that everyone working on the Artemis Program keeps using verbiage that strongly implies that we have no idea how a ton of this is supposed to work.

Hey, I buy that. I work on a semi-mothballed flight sim that's evolved into C from a puddle of Fortran. Getting the damn thing to work on a machine from this decade is a daily struggle, and that's just on the technical end of things. Technical and logistics headaches in aerospace make perfect sense to me.

I think the Moon landing footage as broadcast to the public were definitely faked with the help of Stanley Kubrick; it's functionally indistinguishable from the real thing because he insisted that it all be filmed on location.

I do think it's pretty weird that the people that are working on the current project don't really seem all that confident that going to the moon is something they can actually do

Yeah, that's what the people who actually managed to do it said too- though if they had their doubts it's not like they would have really been permitted to air them at that point. It's not like we don't understand the physics of landing on other celestial bodies, given we throw stuff at them all the time (the Moon, Mars, and on occasion others too)- but the vast majority (all?) of the institutional secret sauce when it comes to engineering manned spaceflight with nothing but a slide rule and mid-20th-century materials science is 6 feet under now. And that goes for the Soviets just as well as it does the Americans; at least the Soviets didn't really stop cranking out Progresses.

And really, Artemis seems to me to suffer from F-35itis given they're both peacetime craft; there's a lot more bullshit they want/need the computers to automatically deal with now. "Just hit it with a hammer" and "turn it off, then back on again" was fine for Apollo (the fact that the people they sent tended to be test pilots meant they expected training to take up a lot of the slack)- and the telemetry they had was, I suspect, relatively minimal. But that's not fine for Artemis, built to a tighter budget with pilots that don't have the 20 years flying prototype fighter jets to fix anything too technical that goes wrong up there. And considering that they had to re-invent literally everything I'd say the project is coming along about as quickly as one would expect.

not nearly as weird as it being such a solved problem that we were sending golf equipment along for the ride!

The national security objective was achieved, and they managed to pull it off the first try. If your project isn't getting renewed and you know it, but the fuel and development costs are already paid for, why not go for victory laps?

Oh well, at least you can shoot the laser at it and determine that there's definitely something there from the reflectors they left behind.

Census demographics are wrong and manipulated to keep the peace in the USA.

Here's one that's related. The reason for the intense fight over Trump asking about citizenship on the census was because accurate citizenship information would make some current service locations illegal.

Spending federal money on social services for illegal aliens was banned in the 80s. Courts ruled that so long as the office was serving >50% citizens the service was legal, and also they weren't allowed to ask about citizenship at the location.

There are almost certainly things like federally run dialysis clinics in parts of California that serve less than 50% citizens, and they'd need to be shut down if there was ever an accurate count.

That's funny, when I was in Japan recently I was thinking there seemed to be way more than 2.3% of the population non-Japanese as officially claimed. I always thought racial statistics in the US seemed pretty accurate though, how do you think they might be different?

I went to Japan a few years back and would’ve thought 2.3% to be an overestimate! I was in a road trip around Kyushu at the time. Before that I’ve gone to Hokkaido and around Honshu as well, and my impression is that 2.3% is probably too high for most prefectures.

Were you in Tokyo (+ surrounding cities) or Kyoto perchance?

I was staying in a suburb of Tokyo but have been as far south as Hiroshima and as far north as a few hours north of Tokyo by train. I've visited small towns and big ones, there are definitely more foreigners in Tokyo and Kyoto but there are still a lot outside the major cities too.

This page claims that most of the foreigners who live in Japan are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Filipino, combined making up 77% of all foreigners in Japan. So these are basically "invisible" minorities to me as I can't really quickly identify those ethnicities apart from Japanese (unless I hear them talk or they're like, obnoxiously stereotypically nouveau riche Chinese or particularly non-Asian looking Filipino) which means that only (less than) 1.771 percent of the Japanese population is a visible minority to me and it seems impossible. I saw tons of Indians/South Asians followed by tons of whites and a fair number of blacks (mostly appearing to be from rich western countries like the US though also- Kenyans or Nigerians or wherever the guys at the bars in Kabukicho are from.) I don't know how I can account for tourism- I'm guessing if even as much as 80% of the white and black people I saw were there as tourists it still leaves tons of people who live there full time. I doubt most of the Indians/SA people I saw were just tourists because many of them work at convenience stores and there are tons and tons of Indian, Nepalese and Bengladeshi restaurants.

Granted I still hear small children in large groups say "gaijin! gaijin!" when I walk past them, I make shop clerks in department stores so uncomfortable that they hide when they see me and shop clerks in small stores will like, cower in the back room when I come in some times so I'm definitely still enough of an outsider as a white man to cause anxieties among the Japanese (and before you think I'm criticizing them in any way or that I'm implying that I expect different treatment- I'm not and I don't! I wish every country was an ethnostate with a rich indigenous culture and I aim to make my presence as unobtrusive as possible) but in no way do I feel like I'm a 1.7 percent rarity as a visible minority in Japan, it has to be closer to like 5 percent (granted I don't know how I could objectively gauge this seeing as I'm white.) I will say that Japan is still far, far more ethnically homogenous than anywhere else on the planet I've been, it's very common that I'm the only non-Asian when I'm on train cars or at restaurants but it never feels like it's the case 98% of the time, it seems closer to like 90 or 95 percent of the time.

it's very common that I'm the only non-Asian when I'm on train cars or at restaurants but it never feels like it's the case 98% of the time

Keep in mind, if you're looking at a room of let's say ten randomly selected people, you've rolled the gaijin spotting dice ten times, not just once.

0.98 to the power of 10 = about 82% probability of not seeing a gaijin ten times in a row.

I mean, you're a visiting foreigner so you're probably going to go to places where there are more visiting foreigners than average.

I did take that into consideration as well, I was in Japan for three months and lived in a random Tokyo suburb but traveled to small towns while I was there and I've been to Japan two other times before covid also and generally avoid touristy places like the plague and I'm basing my observations on all that, not as a random tourist who flew to tokyo for 2 weeks and took the shinkansen to Kyoto and back

See my reply to 2Rafa

Well an easy one is that there are definitely more illegal immigrants than in 2004 or whatever but officially we’ve been stuck at the same number since then ie 11 million.

I think the number of other minorities is manipulated down as well.

Peace in what sense?

People might pursue radically different policies if the census data was accurate.

Maintain the status quo.

Which ways do you think TPTB skew the data?

See my reply to 2Rafa…

Here's an inverse conspiracy theory that's also technically a conspiracy: Flat Earthers don't exist.

It's held up as the archetypical example of conspiracy theory believers, but I'm convinced that pretty much everyone who expresses support for Flat Earth theories - well over 99% - is knowingly playing along in a giant hoax, for a sense of community and the amusement of getting ridiculous stories published in serious newspapers. (Some of them don't actually realise this and think that only they themselves are roleplayers while the rest of their group are serious).

A good friend of mine's mother is a flat earther, they do exist. They are crazy for several other reasons though.

The Flat Earther thing looks superficially like 20th century science crackpottery, but it's socially more like a fandom. The old-school crackpot theorists were individual deranged people pursuing their theories about free energy generators or the value of pi being wrong. Flat Earth is a worldview stance more than a complex scientific theory, and all that's expected of a follower is to assert that they believe this to be a fact. "Pi is actually 3.1446..." or "nuclear power isn't real" don't have quite the same immediate worldview shifting juice for someone reading about them and then professing to believe them as "the Earth is flat" has. The people making the Flat Earth materials might be mostly insincere, but the follower fandom seems quite real, and before social media crackpot theories didn't really have fandoms like this.

I've talked to earnest flat earthers, they definitely exist

Anecdotal but I know a genuine believer. He is very into other conspiracy theories as well.

Here is inverse inverse conspiracy theory: modern flat earthism, when it suddenly appeared about 2012 - if you remember, you would remember deluge of slick, professionally made Youtube videos - was not product of believers, was not a joke, but experiment how could disinformation and fake news spread on then new social media (it turned out it can spread like wildfire).

Anyway, if the Earth is not flat, it should be. See you on Kek island.

I think it's just hardcore in-group testing. "We wanted to create a group where just getting into it meant demonstrating extreme commitment ... but in a purely "I BELIEVE" way." My main evidence for this is the Behind The Curve documentary which shows that the main Flat Earth dude was just looking for a girlfriend and the main Flat Earth lady was just looking for a boyfriend (I think after a divorce or death?) and so they pre-tested the hell out of each other with the Flat Earth community and now have super hard to break enforced bonding via shared delusional belief.

If the world were as big as that chart it would be so much more interesting.

Crazy how much lower res the continents get as you go out. Hopefully some day cartography will advance enough that we can see the truth.

I believe this one. “The Flat Earth Society” used to be a fictional group cited to mock people, like calling someone “president of the The Narcissists’ Fan Club”.

I remember someone once telling me it was a skeptic’s group dedicated to promoting scientific thinking, by providing challenges such as defeating the view cited in its name. However, I did a few Google searches a few years ago and found no evidence of such a group ever having existed.

I remember joining the flat earth society on a lark, and it seemed like most of the people in their forum had joined on a lark. There were a few zetetic schizoposters ranting about mass graves for former guards of the antarctic ice wall but I was never that sure they weren't trolls.

I remember being in school during geography and actually signing up for this. I signed up on a school email, which is now lost to time, but I specifically remember them being a legit web site.

I choose to believe it's a psy op.

I suspect that the flat earth society is a lot like many so-called "right wing militias", nine hundreds feds rationalists and one sincere autist who will be used by said feds/rationalists to justify why normies suck and ought to be disenfranchised.

As the joke goes, 14/88 stands for 1 FBI agent, 4 state troopers and 8 8th-graders, a typical composition of a right-wing extremist cell.

And it breaks up when the State troopers lose patience with the FBI agent's increasingly violent rhetoric and decide he needs to be taken out before he blows up a building.

For myself, I think at least some large portion of lottery drawings are not random.

For myself, I think that large portions of lottery drawings are fake. People win small amounts, but the billion sized mega jackpot winners are fake, winners shown on TV are crisis actors. The money goes to top secret black budgets/Swiss bank accounts of more deserving people than normies who bought a ticket (pick and choose what you see as more plausible)

Evidence? Just made it up, but it feels legit.

If you have relatives who are spending their disposable money (and more) on lottery tickets, share this conspiracy theory with them.

I've actually known two lottery winners who both won more than 6mil usd, one significantly more. This is an easy conspiracy to believe in b/c the first thing anyone with a brain does when they win is put significant effort and resources into vanishing as effectively as possible. Wealth management firms have entire packages of services to help with it. For many many people I know personally a sudden influx of 10m+ usd could potentially ruin their lives if they can't escape their current "friends" and family effectively.

These two aren't necessarily small-scale, but they are relatively compact by conspiracy standards (ie, they could be true while the rest of the world is still basically Blue Pilled)

-- Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were a work. Snowden is a deep-state public Kamikaze, by revealing that the government was doing something hard that the NSA was bad at doing (finding target communications in the haystack that is general communications streams), no self-respecting terrorist or spy or drug lord would use the public channels that the NSA is known to be monitoring. Then the terrorists all download the "encrypted" supposedly secure apps...which the NSA either puts out itself, or has a backdoor into, or just finds it easier to monitor who is using the secure apps than it was to go through all the insecure communications. So they set up this big scary leak that publicized it better than any other effort possibly could.

-- Affirmative Action is not primarily targeted at increasing diversity or reparations or whatever the fuck. It serves the primary purpose of stripping the Talented Tenth from URM communities, preventing those communities from ever really improving or forming alternate cultural power bases. If you're a fairly high-iq, conscientious, young Black or Hispanic male, and your choices are between starting a business in your (normally shitty) community or going to Harvard, which are you gonna pick? And a community needs smart and talented men to make the (normally stupid) decision to start a business. Charles Murray has written a lot about the Big Sort of High IQ individuals as a result of educational/professional meritocracy and the negative effect that can have on community; but think about it, it is so much sharper for Black students.

These are much smaller

-- Elevator buttons do nothing. The door doesn't close any faster if you press the button but it gives you something to do.

-- The Bachelor Season 25 producers removed a contestant from the show and edited her out of the earlier episodes in post production. Either because she got Covid, literally died, or did something so horrible that it couldn't be associated with the show at all.

-- Trump 100% originally ran for President on a dare from Bill Clinton. It was supposed to be a joke run to weaken JEB! and Ted Cruz and soften them up for HRC in the general, then he got there and thought huh maybe I can win the damn thing. None of the principals involved can admit to it after it went the way it did.

-- Significant portions of accepted history are misinterpreted fiction, and we have no way of proving which are which.

Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were a work.

This depends on which version you think is an accurate description of what Snowden revealed. For example, the version @2rafa gives:

capable of effectively trawling trillions of Facebook messages or emails that raised flags

...just isn't the sort of thing that Snowden's documents revealed. Most of the discussion was around two different programs: 702 and 215.

702 was never about trawling trillions of FB messages/emails. It was that if they found a specific term that was uniquely associated with a foreign intelligence target (e.g., they rolled up Terrorist A, got into his computer, found the email address for Terrorist B), they could go to various companies and said, "Give us anything that crosses your wire that has this email address for Terrorist B." This is eminently doable; not really even that hard, even.

215 was an attempt at bulk collection of metadata (who talked to who, for how long), which didn't include the content of those comms. This would be, on its face, useless for trawling for specific messages that raised red flags. Instead, it was just things like, "Well, Terrorists A, B, and C all talk to this other number, so prooooooobably we should check that number out," or, "Terrorist A's number, which had been talking to Person B and Person C on a regular basis, suddenly disappeared, and at the same time, this other new number started talking to Person B and Person C with approximately the same regularly. Mayyyyyyybe, that's Terrorist A's new number." This is much more "needle-in-the-haystack" type of a problem, and they pretty publicly admitted that it was much less effective at doing much (was able to do some things, but much more inefficient).

So, a possible refined version of this conspiracy theory would have to be something like, "We'll use Snowden to target some 'vulnerable' journalists (who are 'vulnerable' to wildly exaggerating), and hopefully, to paraphrase the old saying, the wild exaggerations will travel the world before our consistent media push to describe it more circumspectly can get its shoes on." In this case, you'd sort of have to posit that the entire push to rein back in the perception was, itself, a sort of second-order psyop, because if they just wanted Snowden to make all the people who are most likely to pay close attention to sources and methods freak out and change their behavior, they'd want to just be silent and let Snowden make everyone believe that they're omniscient.

While strictly speaking they didn't admit to searching all comms, they did show that they could do so. If I'm a terrorist or a foreign hostile operative, I'm very much going to treat "NSA can search my comms" with "NSA will search my comms." Because I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life in Cuba.

I mean, it depends on what you mean by "could". Like, they're trying to be in a position so that they 'could' search Vladimir Putin's comms... and if they're ever in that position, then they probably 'could' search some rando terrorist's comms.

-- Significant portions of accepted history are misinterpreted fiction, and we have no way of proving which are which.

While not exactly the same thing, a tremendous amount of the popularly imagined history in the English speaking world is actually the fantasies of the 19th century. A minor but obvious example is knights in shining armor. Most armor was dark and unpolished, if not outright colored black. The armor is still around and there are tons of paintings.

Oh very much so. This goes back much further than the 19th century. The weapons, clothing, social structures, and language of the Homeric epics or the Mahabharata probably reflected more closely on the time of their writing than on the time period they proposed to portray.

And then you think of all the statues to fictional characters that are built! And for that matter, even for events that are within living contact for me, I worked with Vietnam Vets growing up and they told me the best way to understand it was to watch Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. Fiction over time can become part of our understanding of history. A few hundred years hence, these distinctions can get lost. Especially once you get into Epistolary or Diaristic novels.

I guess that’s a corollary to people thinking the peak of Renaissance artisanal armor was perfectly normal for the year 900.

I really don’t think the NSA’s tech (certainly in 2013, long before modern AI) was capable of effectively trawling trillions of Facebook messages or emails that raised flags.

It might have been possible, they might even have been doing it! But it's so much easier if all the terrorists just start using Telegram or Signal or .onion nonsense and rather than look through every FB message, you just look through the tiny number of encrypted messages.

Honestly I’d be curious how much illegal activity was conducted through in game chat for PC games. I’d imagine that would be incredibly difficult to monitor, especially older games. Seems like a pretty sneaky way of getting messages through.

Have you seen Four Lions? https://youtube.com/watch?v=xR5rKr-p6lc

I remember seeing a bunch of weird Grand Theft Auto images on imgur years ago that were supposedly Russian number station posts.

The Bachelor Season 25 producers removed a contestant from the show and edited her out of the earlier episodes in post production.

Can you expand on this? What's the evidence?

If you need more explanation of the show feel free to ask me, but I don't want to explain the whole concept again and make this comment too long.

Basic facts that pointed to conspiracy (keeping in mind this was like two or three years ago now and I'm going from memory)

-- This was one of the covid seasons which took place entirely on a single isolated resort, Nemacolin in PA.

-- Between episodes 2-4, the count kept being wrong between the contestants shown on screen and the quotes from contestants. ITMs would have contestants saying "OMG THERE ARE EIGHTEEN GIRLS HERE HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET ANY TIME?!" and then they'd announce the lineup and it would only have seventeen girls.

-- Multiple early group dates were team competition/sports dates where the girls were split into teams, but despite having the easy option of either leaving one more girl home or taking one more girl with, the group taken was an odd number. Why would you bring 13 girls for a sports competition and end up with uneven teams? And if you did, why didn't we hear the team with 6 girls complain that the other team had 7?

-- Whole dates were filmed, and teasers/previews leaked from outside sources that came in to host confirmed it, but were never shown on camera. Tens of thousands of dollars and hours of time spent on putting it together, and then just disappeared.

-- ITMs and other sudden cuts seemed to indicate that events or people were edited out. Whole days seemed to disappear, or ITMs would seem to refer to someone not shown.

The simplest explanation for all of these is a secret contestant who got Covid and was removed. There were eighteen girls, and they edited the voiceovers/announcements to remove her name. The team competition was run fairly, and then they eliminated one name. The dates that were cut entirely featured the cut contestant in a leading role/exclusively, to the point where it was better to cut them entirely than to butcher them. The cut contestant was promised a leading role in a later season, the rest were bribed with Paradise or threatened with lawsuits.

According to the linked Wikipedia article, it seems it was a simple case of cancelling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bachelor_(American_season_25)#Controversy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bachelor_(American_season_25)#Controversy

You misread the article, Rachel won the whole show. She got the most screentime of anyone.

I like these. You say we can't prove which parts of accepted history are fiction, but do you have any specific examples you believe are off base?

Not at all.

I just see how fiction develops in our own times. Certain fictional characters, Sherlock Holmes for example, become stock characters for a time period, they are written and rewritten, and many adaptations present themselves as "factual" if you aren't in on the joke or don't notice where it is shelved in the library. And I see how much of ancient literature and history we lost, we often only have one or two sources for significant periods of history. If a thousand years from now they had no real sources about early 20th century England, but they found various Holmes stories and references, they might think he was real.

ETA: I think a good example of someone who might be fake is Socrates. We have no writings from him directly, only from students who use him as a mouthpiece, and a few references from other contemporaries using him as a trope. It's not hard to envision Plato creating this character, Xenophon adapting him, and Aristophanes mocking him, etc.

-- Trump 100% originally ran for President on a dare from Bill Clinton. It was supposed to be a joke run to weaken JEB! and Ted Cruz and soften them up for HRC in the general, then he got there and thought huh maybe I can win the damn thing. None of the principals involved can admit to it after it went the way it did.

Hmmm .... imagine you are a boxer hired to participate in fixed match. You are supposed to convincingly fight for few minutes and then lose, but your opponent is so bad that you KO him by mistake and win.

You can enjoy your victory, but have lots of explaining to do afterwards.

This could explain Trump's lackluster campaing in 2016, this could explain Trump's face when he saw the states going red and number of delegates going up, this could explain why Trump had no victory speech prepared.

Most of all, this could explain the extreme rage that Trump inspired and extreme attempts to bring him down.

The plan wasn't to have him win the primary and take a dive in the general, it was to have him enter the Republican primary, force the "serious" Rs like Bush and Rubio and Cruz to take ridiculous unpopular positions and look silly arguing with Trump, ultimately lose the primary, and then HRC crushes a Bush or a Rubio who took absurd positions in the primary campaign. The early Trump campaign was intensely flamboyant, and seemed highly unserious by contemporary political standards, everyone assumed the establishment would rally and knock him down.

What happened then was some combination of

  1. Trump's "absurd" positions turned out to have a massive following among everyday Americans. He started winning. He knocked out like seven serious R contenders one after another, and at first knocking out Jeb Bush and Chris Christie was helpful for HRC, but he got addicted to it, and pretty soon there weren't any R contenders left.

  2. Bannon, who in this theory was a patsy they all thought was a nut who wouldn't achieve anything, the equivalent of the director they hire in The Producers, took it seriously and was extremely talented. Springtime for Hitler was hit!

  3. Trump realized he liked winning, and would give it a shot. He started drinking his own kool aid, buying his own sales pitch.

  4. Clinton (et al) tried to puncture the Trump surge by attacking him personally and leaking info on him. Trump took offense at this, and said OK you're gonna try to hurt me, I'm not taking a dive. He was willing to take the L, but the other guy has to pull his punches in that situation, if you make it a survival problem the Tomato Can has to fight back.

I have a heavy prior against this conspiracy theory based on the fact that running a presidential campaign is incredibly stressful and chaotic yet Trump (despite running a, shall we say, creative campaign) never had a major logistical or basic operational fuck up. He didn't miss a debate or a big event to my knowledge.

But.....

I remember reading articles about him being chronically late to rallies. This was often portrayed as Trump being a prima donna and resisting taking the stage until he was damn well ready. But what if it was actually a Benny Hill scene behind the scenes and he was arriving just in time (or very fucking late) to event after event and just getting up to the stage and saying whatever the hell was on his mind. Therein lies my second "Damn it, @FiveHourMarathon might have something here" idea --- Trump's relationship with his rally crowds was legendary. It really was him at his Zenith. I wonder how much that turned into a forest fire creating its own wind and propelling Trump into the mindset of "no, actually, voters want me to be President."

This is where point 2 comes in, the staff they put together turned out to be shockingly competent. The plot never recovered.

never had a major logistical or basic operational fuck up

You think Fours Seasons Landscaping rally mix-up was a deliberate joke?

I love the Producers theory and I would love to see a movie made one day of this scenario.

Elevator buttons do nothing. The door doesn't close any faster if you press the button but it gives you something to do.

This one is definitely not true. I've timed how long doors take to close normally, and then validated that pushing the button will immediately close (ahead of the normal time). It could be true for some elevators, but it's not true for all (and the theory doesn't qualify its claim as being only about a subset of elevators).

The Americans with Disabilities Act prescribes a minimum time an elevator door must remain open regardless of what buttons are pressed

This is correct. Even on older models the control panel is highly configurable by the owner/operator. The primary purpose of the firefighter key/code is to unlock full control of the panel for emergency services or a technician. In the US most of them will be in a rather restricted configuration considering our special mix of idiocy and litigiousness.

Which continent do you live on? I've convinced myself that elevator door close buttons only work about 10% of the time in North America and the rest of the world but about 90% of the time in East Asia. Maybe I'm just more inclined to follow rules and expect things to work in East Asia though.

I live in Northern Europe and if there is a button to close the doors in the first place (there isn”& always), it works much more often than not.

I live in the US.

They work almost all of the time in South Asia. I was aware of the 'myth' in question, but unquestionably validated that they did do what they advertised pretty much everytime I checked.

The Bible is simply veiled moral allegory. In some cases of the Old Testament it’s also history, but the rest is entirely allegory. Even the books which read as not allegorical are, in fact, allegory, and even beyond the fist layer of allegory reads another allegory. In a book like Job, nearly every noun in every sentence is an allegory. In the Gospel, most of the scenes are also expertly concealed allegories. Virgin birth? Dead in a tomb? Allegory.

Wait, this is a conspiracy theory?

I think it’s the most reasonable—and interesting—reading of the Bible. The books are clearly laden with meaning, partly from the enormous weight of history, partly from the composition process. It says things that are obviously, literally false, but have reasonable interpretations or poetic license. Biblical aesthetics are so strong that they have dominated Western cultural products. I don’t think you get that without some layers of narrative and allegory.

Biblical aesthetics are so strong that they have dominated Western cultural products. I don’t think you get that without some layers of narrative and allegory.

It's possible, or possible it works the other way around. Our culture has been shaped by the Bible for thousands of years, so of course now the morals it teaches seem to slot very well into the rest of our understanding of the world. You will hear sayings, moral teachings, etc. and then years later hear them from the Bible and think "that sounds like what I believe" when really those teachings came from the Bible in the first place.

Some is practical advice for the operation of a church. Women should be silent in church. If they've questions they should ask their husbands at home.

There are too many immoral degenerates to avoid all of them. Don't eat with the degenerates who claim to be Christian.

A lot of companies in ${CurrentYear} still have long laborious online job application processes that involve re-inputting things that are already in your resume/CV (and possibly a cover letter) because their HR are consciously or subconsciously selecting for employees high in conscientiousness, conformity, and obedience.

And of the right demographics: Please select your pronouns, your race/ethnicity, whether you identify as LGBT+. Such information is only for survey and reporting purposes, of course, and will totally definitely not affect your candidacy (pinky-swear).

A lot of companies in ${CurrentYear} still have long laborious online job application processes that involve re-inputting things that are already in your resume/CV (and possibly a cover letter) because their HR are consciously or subconsciously selecting for employees high in conscientiousness, conformity, and obedience.

Take this a step further. ATS systems track your keystroke accuracy to estimate your IQ. If I had to make an ATS software, I would put in all kinds of proxies in like this.

Or a step back, put in some hard-to-interpret nontechnical questions as further proxy IQ tests.

I can say definitively that’s false at the tech company I work for at least.

'Technology' in primary education is only to facilitate a shift to online learning materials that schools now must subscribe. It's a grift by educational publishers to increase reoccurring revenue and provide make-work jobs for Education post-graduates.

Sunscreens prevention of cancer other than physical zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, mud, style preparations.

HIV dose not cause AIDS, it's iatrogenic and grift to sell drugs.

'Technology' in primary education is only to facilitate a shift to online learning materials that schools now must subscribe. It's a grift by educational publishers to increase reoccurring revenue and provide make-work jobs for Education post-graduates.

That's basically the history of common core.

Is there no path out of this particular stupid? Textbooks that are expected to last 15 - 20 years would seem to be better value. Our textbooks in the 80's were frequently from the 60's.

The subscription doesn't tell the whole story either, our small K - 5 elementary is spending 300k over two years to refresh / replace all the chromebooks used to access online learning materials.

I have no trouble believing any of those things, but do you have a bit more supporting evidence/narrative for the latter two? Specifically what medical treatment you think causes AIDS- most people I've heard of questioning the HIV/AIDS link do so from the position that it's caused by immune system collapse brought on by repeated and excessive infection with uncommon diseases through sodomy or iv drug use.

Not sure I've supporting evidence or a good narrative. It's a conspiracy that doesn't cost me.

AZT induces number of adverse reactions.

Idiopathic CD4-lymphocytopenia is a thing, but presumably if this cohort also tested positive for HIV, then it'd be AIDS and wouldn't be idiopathic.

Sunscreen prevents burns by blocking / absorbing UVA. People are then able to stay in the sun longer than they otherwise might were they subject to developing a burn. They tan less as UVA is responsible for tanning. Less tanning makes them more susceptible to UV absent sunscreen than they may otherwise be, if they had beautiful golden tan. Also sunscreens seems to contain benzene more often than it should.

Some of us are of certain descent such that we don’t tan. No matter how much time we spend unprotected in the sun.

Skin Type I and II

Low stakes conspiracy theory: referees in the NHL (hockey) are instructed to deliberately make games more "competitive." They're not on the take or rigging it things for a certain team, but they are encouraged to keep things within distance, mainly by calling marginal penalties or not calling obvious penalties. You see it most obviously in the playoffs (it becomes near impossible to get a call for all but the most egregious infractions when approaching overtime), but it's present through the entire regular season as well. The strongest predictor of which team will get the next power play is who got the last power play.. Once your team is up a few goals, the power plays predictably disappear as well. The NHL uses various ways to enhance the "competitiveness" of the league which is one of its major selling points compared to other sports leagues, including a deliberately distortionary points system that ranks teams much closer together than it should. The only time an NHL ref has been suspended in recent history is when he accidentally said the quiet part out loud.

More sports ones:

  • Major League Baseball deliberately juiced the ball starting in the 1990s to increase offense

  • NBA referees can easily swing a game by 20 points. Michael Jordan was given preferential treatment by the refs that was tantamount to ensuring victory. Take a look at how officiating changes in the last couple of years have corresponded with James Harden's falloff as a scorer.

Related to MLB in the 90s, Jose Canseco and the Oakland As.

Sometimes I wonder how much of early Sabermetrics was a way to identify and sign new juicers in a way that preserved plausible deniability for ownership.

I believe the same is true for NBA playoffs favoring the team that's behind in the series in order to maximize the chances of a longer playoff series and more money.

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