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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.
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.
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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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