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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4218 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 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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I'm doing another low-stakes/small scale conspiracy theory thread(I think I'll probably start doing these once a quarter or so in the SSQ thread). What are your minor conspiracy theories? Not things that dramatically change how the world works(eg "the davos group is behind the simultaneous rise in both house prices and interest rates in the United States to eliminate home ownership"), nor that would be too interesting and sexy not to be common knowledge if they were both true and had sufficient evidence(eg "Bush was behind 9/11"). What are your boring, small scale schizo posting?

Bullets from me:

  • General health advice about salt is knowably false to most well-informed people. I think the same thing is probably true about cholesterol, but with the added motivation of public health advisors taking bribes from eg Kellogg and Coca-Cola to understate the effects of sugar, so they blame cholesterol instead.
  • The effects of Freon(R-22) on the atmosphere were drastically overstated to keep dupont's control over the provision of refrigerant at around the time the patent on R-22 was expiring.
  • School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.
  • The world population is probably massively overstated because officials in corrupt countries routinely inflate population figures in their areas of responsibility to try to seek budget increases/international aid.

Mine is that modern sexual-harassment activism is secretly funded by dating sites such as Tinder. Think about it: if you can't pursue women in the workplace, the gym, the street, or anywhere else, what's left? Online dating.

The spike in the production of incest-themed porn (stepbrother, stepdad etc.) over the last decade or so is not driven by consumer demand. Some entity (probably a state: candidates include China, Israel or Saudi Arabia) bought huge shares in MindGeek and other porn companies and are using their stakeholder leverage to encourage them to produce incest-themed porn at great volumes. The goal is to promote/normalise incest in the West, thereby increasing the rate of dysgenic reproduction and marginally lowering average Western IQs, making the West less economically competitive.

Beyond the other objections, incest kink has had a pretty sizable and long-present popularity in fandom spaces where the drivers and funders are more transparent, or where ... reproduction wasn't a particular risk, or both.

Which doesn't prevent your hypothesis, but it'd be funny to have a complex conspiracy for things people already were gonna do.

I'm skeptical that this would or could work. It also seems like it would be hard to keep secret.

I'm with you. Given the general lack of success of media companies to manipulate the audience into having preferred beliefs through putting out content pushing preferred messages, and the likely fact that in porn, if anything, the audience tends to be more motivated by pure id than with media in general, flooding sites with this just doesn't seem likely to work at all. Like, I've heard people talk a lot about incest porn and also "extreme" porn involving choking women and such taking over porn in recent years, but as a pretty regular consumer consoomer coomer who doesn't enjoy such things, I barely ever run into such things by accident, and even less when I'm looking for something specific. In fact, I don't think I've seen a single porn video of a woman being choked. Incest and pseudo-incest porn, it's easier to accidentally encounter, but also very easy to just find a near-equivalent video without it. It's just not that hard to avoid porn you're not into.

Ooh, one more! Epistemic status: fun to think about.

In 1956, it was hypothesized that under certain natural conditions, you could get a natural fission reactor if uranium was sufficiently concentrated. The geological conditions required are extremely particular.

In 1972, a uranium enrichment site in France discovered that their uranium samples from one particular mine in west central Africa were showing different isotope ratios than expected (specifically different U235 concentrations than expected). There was an investigation, and it was included that 2 billion years ago, the site of the Oklo mine was a natural nuclear reactor, and that explained the missing U-235.

As far as I can tell, there are no other examples of natural nuclear reactors anywhere on Earth.

The conspiracy theory is "some of the U-235 up and walked away, and the natural fission reactor thing was a cover story".

I don't think it's super likely to be true -- the evidence in the form of xenon isotope ratios and such is pretty convincing as long as it wasn't fabricated wholesale -- but it's still one of the more suspicious things I've seen.

if there was natural reactor 2 billion years ago, when it follows than 4 billions years ago with higher U-235 content there must have been more of them, but very little of that time remains.

That local governments often start construction projects on toll-free highways and roads and often delay them to divert traffic to tolled roads temporarily. I don't know how the economics of this works out, I just like the idea.

I'd be shocked if there was only 1 sample from the Oslo mine. This is a super trivial thing to verify, and I would have assumed both the US and IAEA at a minimum would have done so.

I did a brief read through the references in the wikipedia article and found a handful of non-French scientists who've published about Oslo, but I don't see any references to actual samples taken from the mine except the French one.

School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.

They resist Direct Instruction at lower levels because it's very happy-clappy/scripted and the teachers hate it.
They avoid hardcore tracking and generalized testing out of subjects because of ideological reasons. This is despicable. They do not contemplate individual full tutorial because of budget, but would admit from their classroom size model that it's probably better, just not contemplating that it's hypothetically two standard deviations better.

I suspect that the common core math curriculum was deliberately designed to be obtuse so that engaged parents can't help their kids with their homework, increasing reliance on the public school system and sabotaging high performance students to "level the playing field" for students whose parents can't/won't help them with their homework.

Why would high performance students need help from their parents? Especially if we talking about core math curriculum.

When I say high performance (which makes them sound like sports cars--I meant high-performing), I don't really mean the the absolute cream of the crop Ivy League-bound STEM types. I mean more the A and B level students at your typical public school with attentive parents who help them with their homework. Mainly I was talking about myself. I was a bright kid but sometimes struggled with math, and I would not have been nearly as academically successful as I was if my parents hadn't been able to help me work through concepts I wasn't able to grasp during class.

Perhaps I should have said "middle class with a stable home life" rather than "high performance."

It's very possible that high performing students are high performing because their parents are helping them.

Bingo.

I’ve always believed that the US government blamed Oswald because they couldn’t actually solve the crime but were afraid of both the potential for nuclear war with Russia and the crisis of confidence that would result from the case being known to be unsolved. The rapidity of the arrest is pretty weird to me — within hours the man was in custody, there was an official story, and the weren’t looking for accomplices or other potential shooters or co-conspirators. They were firm that there was only one shooter despite witnesses stating that there were shots coming from the grassy knoll.

Aliens are a cover story for advanced weapons.

This article decisively convinced me that Oswald did it himself. The battery of evidence presented forecloses the possibility of a second shooter. It was remarkable learning how many of the supposed irregularities which conspiracy theorists have pointed to as evidence of a second shooter were simply wrong e.g. Jim Garrison mistakenly believed the Zapruder film showed three shots being fired in the space of an impossibly fast 5.6 seconds, because he was under the misapprehension that the Zapruder film was filmed at 24fps. It was actually filmed at 18.3fps, meaning it depicts three shots in 8.3 seconds.

Did someone (Mafia, CIA etc.) put Oswald up to it? Sure, maybe. Is it deeply suspicious that Jack Ruby killed Oswald before he could face trial? I think so. But I don't think there's any good reason to dispute the claim that Oswald committed the actual assassination by himself.

Amusingly I've always been reasonably certain that Oswald did do it and equally certain that it was a hit planned by either by the mob, or by the CIA using the mob as intermediaries, and that's why he had to be bumped off before getting his day in court.

Likewise, I know that at least one semi-prominant UFO incident resulted the crew of a classified flight test program getting chewed out for "flat-hatting".

By "know", do you mean you know personally about the UFO story, or just that it's a theory you feel certain is true?

It's beyond the scope of rational debate to suggest that Oswald was scapegoated because the US government couldn't solve the crime. The specific, legal evidence against Oswald is overwhelming. Consider:

  • He was seen going into the book depository, by people who knew him.
  • He was seen coming out of the book depository.
  • He was seen in the book depository, in the window where the shots came from.
  • The gunshots and bolt action of the weapon were clearly heard by three men only a few feet away, looking out the window below him.
  • An eyewitness to the shooting, across the street, flagged down a policeman and gave a description of Oswald.
  • He was seen fleeing the scene.
  • He was seen carrying a long package, which he claimed was curtain rods, into the building before the shooting.
  • His rifle was found hidden in the building after the shooting.
  • Repeated ballistics test have proven the weapon had fired at least one of the shots that struck the president.
  • His fingerprints were on the weapon. *His palm print was on the box that was used to steady the weapon.
  • He left all his worldly money out on the TV at his wife's place,and left her a kind of goodbye note. *When a policeman stopped him an hour later, he murdered the policeman.

Add to that that Lee Harvey Oswald was a hyper-political lunatic. Oswald's behavior over the previous years was absolutely consistent with that of an assassin. He was moody, abusive, erratic, and didn't get along with anybody. He promoted his incomprehensible politics night and day. He had earlier attempted to assassinate another national figure, General Edwin Walker. He was everything that you would expect an assassin to be.

What more evidence could you possibly want?

One of the reasons why I don't find most Kennedy conspiracy theories plausible is that the patsy was the least difficult element of the conspiracy to get right, and Oswald was an almost uniquely poor choice of patsy for any of the plausible conspiracies. Re. your case, if the people doing the cover-up were worried about the potential for nuclear war with the Soviet Union, why pin the blame on someone who had defected there and back again rather than a domestic criminal?

Depending on who actually did it, a patsy who fits the stereotype of "angry black man", "Southern conservative", or "mafia" would have worked a lot better for achieving the aims of the conspiracy.

The main reason I don't find most Kennedy conspiracy theories plausible is that the vast majority of historical Presidential assassination attempts look like the Warren Commission version of the Kennedy assasination - a lone assassin who is either outright crazy (e.g. John Hinkley shooting Reagan) or who is not quite normal and has weird fringe political views. So I have a high prior on "lone nut" and the problems with the Warren Commission's ballistics are not sufficient to override it without evidence of a specific conspiracy.

Re. your case, if the people doing the cover-up were worried about the potential for nuclear war with the Soviet Union, why pin the blame on someone who had defected there and back again rather than a domestic criminal?

I brought this up with my father, who can be something of an arrogant midwit outside of his narrow areas of expertise. When I pointed out that Oswald was a diehard socialist who had previously defected to the Soviet Union, he scoffed and said "if he was such a diehard socialist, why didn't he try to defect to Cuba?"

My response was simple: "He did."

In September 1963, he travelled to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City to apply for a visa... Oswald told the embassy officials that he wanted to visit Cuba on his way to Russia, so the Cubans sent him to the Russian embassy to collect a permit to enter the Soviet Union. When it was denied, Oswald burst into tears and started to wave his revolver in the air.

I haven't fully fleshed this one out but big pharma appears to have some amount of control over the FDA.

There are effective and unique Russian drugs (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-descended-upon-psychopharmacology/) that the FDA goes out of their way to keep out the hands of Americans. You can't get them prescribed by US doctors and the FDA has been cracking down on vendors that sell them (https://liftmode.com/product-discontinuation/). It is legal to import and sell them if you market them as 'not intended for human consumption' but they appear to be cracking down on this by arguing that the vendor knows that customers are buying with the intent to consume them.

If the FDA really cared about it's stated goal of 'protecting the public health' then it would create a safe and legal path for these drugs to be obtained by Americans. Since the FDAs actions benefit American big pharma at the expense of public health I would assume that big pharma has some amount of influence/control over the FDA.

For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.

  • The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.
  • The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
  • Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
  • Israel has at least one satellite with undisclosed purpose and capabilities that uses free space point-to-point optical communication. If true, that means that the Jews have secret space lasers.

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years.

Forgive my ignorance, but what would this imply?

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

Not commenting on this directly, but I remember back at $UNIVERSITY (a top 100 school) listening to a math professor discuss career prospects for math majors. On one hand, they could go into academia, get paid peanuts, but get all the fame of publishing their work. On the other, they could work for The Nation's Top Employer Of Mathematicians, get paid well to work with really really smart folks on hard problems, but have to suffer in 10-20 years when someone else published the same results in open academic literature that they couldn't ever talk about, and never get credit for.

Or they could go into finance, but that mostly just paid well and was boring from a research perspective.

The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.

I find "Omicron was a lab leak" to be >10%. But given that it emerged in South Africa, the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

I don't consider bears shitting in the woods to be a conspiracy theory.

the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

I mean University of Cape Town is ranked 160th best in the world, putting in in the same ballpark as Tufts and Northeastern. There's definitely sufficient competence there to do something like this. Hell, at the not-even-ranked-in-the-top-2000-in-the-world university I went to I could name at least 3 professors who could pull that off with the knowledge and facilities they have available to them.

But given that it emerged in South Africa

Why do you take this as fact?

"Emerged in South Africa" is likely correct: the first probable case was identified in Pretoria, SA on 2021-11-04, and the first confirmed/sequenced samples were also from SA and Botswana that same week. There weren't any confirmed cases outside of SA until 2021-11-24, so I think "originated in South Africa" is pretty likely.

Sure but how many other African states were doing any sequencing? Or even any substantial testing? It’s quite possible that the variant was evolving in Africa for a long while until it was discovered in South Africa. Also if you were a super duper shady institution releasing modified viruses into the wild you would probably not release in your own country and not even somewhere it can be detected quickly. So black Africa is a perfect candidate

gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

I’d thought SA had more than a bit of competence left, just not enough to go around and a government that didn’t care if it was functional or not.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

James Clapper? And even if you think that's history, he got away with no consequences, publicly, so now they all know it's safe. How is this sub-10%?

For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.

Emphasis mine. Original words mine too but the emphasis was from this time.

The joke with that one was that it's an open secret that certain officials (and yeah I was also thinking about James Clapper) can lie to congress without repercussions, but it's still conspiracy-flavored to point it out.

Poor reading skills mine; thanks for not making the correction as snarky as it deserved to be.

I think my eye jumped straight to the "Omicron was a biological anti-weapon" conspiracy theory and just assumed you were going for wacky 10%-or-much-much-less improbabilities ... but now I've also read your reply justifying that one, and though it still doesn't push my needle above 10% you're clearly not just brainstorming /r/writingprompts material here.

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work. However the idea of neural networks for semantic classification or machine translation or similar has been known for a very long time, so I could totally see them trying to use the (quite meh) state of the art at the time with a lot of compute.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

Probably over 10%? A lot of people, including people with power, say things that are various degrees of lies.

The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.

<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work.

It's an offshoot of the widely-reposted AI Twitter claim that 'we could have trained GPT-2 in 2004' (or with 2003 levels of supercomputer compute). And that might well be true, idk. Here's one of the biggest sources.

What's less believable is that nobody involved in this hypothetical effort at the NSA decided to just get rich in the private sector after coming up with technology decades ahead of the competition.

Guess i was wrong! I'd actually read that post before, seems I forgot.

Sometimes my "real" justifications build on a lot of accumulated knowledge and ideas, and writing those all out would take longer than I wanted, so I don't, and substitute for something shorter instead. Sometimes the shorter thing is wrong, though. So my 'real' reason for saying .1% was something about how mathematics and coordination and coming up with ideas is hard, and as we observe society develop we're seeing the best of everyone we have slowly stumble into being more and more correct, and it's almost impossible to beat that privately on something as big as 'GPT' because you have to do all of the research work that tens of thousands of the brightest machine learning researchers did in public over the past few decades. Like, the manhattan project was secret, but it used all of the best people we had and wasn't secret forever. The NSA can keep some cryptographic techniques secret, but not the entire concept of cryptography secret.

[Omicron]

<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.

For a random variant I'd agree. But omicron was really weird in a lot of ways though, and I'd actually put this one at more like 30% (and 80% that something weird and mouse-shaped happened).

  1. Omicron was really really far (as measured by mutation distance) from any other sars-cov-2 variant. Like seriously look at this phylogenetic tree (figure 1 in this paper)
  2. The most recent common ancestor of B.1.1.529 (omicron) and B.1.617.2 (delta, the predominant variant at the time) dates back to approximately February 2020. It is not descended from any variant that was common at the time it started spreading.
  3. The omicron variant spike protein exhibited unusually high binding affinity for the mouse cell entry receptor (source)
  4. Demand for humanized mice was absurdly high during the pandemic - researchers were definitely attempting to study coronavirus disease and spread dynamics in mouse models.

The astute reader will object "hey that just sounds like a researcher who couldn't get enough humanized mice decided to induce sars-cov-2 to jump to normal mice, and then study it there. Why do you assume they intentionally induced a jump back to humans rather than accidentally getting sick from their research mice". To which I say "the timing was suspicious, the level of infectiousness was enormously higher in humans which I don’t think I'd expect in the absence of passaging back through humanized mice, and also hey look over there a distraction from my weak arguments".

I have been suspecting for a while that the governments have been so tolerant of crypto currency stuff because it’s actually a great way for intelligence agencies to move serious black money around without getting into Iran contra style problems.

Or - a small part of why governments have been so tolerant of bitcoin and ethereum is because the ledger is public, so it doesn't actually make it harder to trace criminals. Whereas they have cracked down on Tornado Cash, which wasn't as traceable.

I think much more significant reasons are 1) general regulatory apathy and 2) by the time crypto got big, it had a nontrivial and dedicated group of fans, incentivizing some congresspeople to push for crypto.

Yeah, bitcoin is the least-bad form of crypto for state surveillance, and in some ways is much better for governments tracking proceeds of crime than cash. Also, the biggest problem for prosecutors of organized crime in the developed world isn't identifying criminals, they know everybody involved, it's proving the full transaction chain to a judge or jury, and bitcoin makes that process much easier if they can trace wallets.

That fits with Tor being a US Government project originally.

Strong disagree, Tor was more developed by researchers funded by the US government. STEM researchers just like making cool things, and the government funds a lot of 'cool things' in the hopes that a small number will end up being useful. The government, in general, employs millions of people, and only a very small fraction of them are involved in secret plots. https://old.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/anq680/was_tor_created_by_the_us_govt/

Good post! I'm going to make a cholesterol-related post on Wednesday. Is your contention that eating cholesterol doesn't raise cholesterol? Or that high-LDL is not a risk factor for heart disease?

When it comes to schools, I think the more parsimonious explanation is that teachers just don't actually care if our children isn't learning. The pandemic proved that the selfish interests of adults prevailed over the benefit of children. Educators' revealed preference is that vibes matter more than data.

The world population is probably massively overstated

I saw this claim a couple years ago that the population of China is over-reported by 130 million.

teachers just don't actually care if our children isn't learning.

Which is why involved parents who will go out of their way to ensure their kids can rotate shapes and will bribe admissions officers to get into the best school, those kids have better outcomes long-term. Because teacher has 30-odd kids to deal with and the odds that your kid gets the attention they need to excel is basically 1/30 even if you factor out teacher biases.

With teacher biases the odds are worse. Parents who realize that teachers don't give a fuck and are able/willing to make up for that fact will have obviously better outcomes. Of course, if you have dumb parents then the kids will probably be dumb too. But instilling a work ethic in kids by way of parent involvement is a quality all its own. No wonder the high-iq middle class have less kids, if they "get" this fact- the amount of energy and resources required to help one kid get out into a top-10 college and therefore career is insane.

Is your contention that eating cholesterol doesn't raise cholesterol? Or that high-LDL is not a risk factor for heart disease?

My contention is that both of those statements are true to an extent. To clarify, I think a diet consisting entirely of cheese can raise cholesterol, but a normal high cholesterol diet won't unless you follow it to the point of obesity, and high-LDL is much less of a risk factor than it's generally portrayed as with general obesity/metabolic unhealth as the main cause(granted they're linked), and that if you combine the two things it results in the standard health narrative to limit cholesterol intake for heart health being basically misinformation- people at risk need to just lose weight by limiting calories, not worry about fat in particular.

In other words I think that prevailing medical advice is playing up a very minor contributor to heart disease to downplay the role of general obesity mostly caused by high sugar consumption, and that bribery/lobbying by food companies is the cause of that because sugar and canola oil are much, much cheaper than saturated fat but not any healthier(I don't hold to the popular on twitter idea that seed oils are particularly bad for you but do think replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat tends to lead to more sugar in everything, increasing calorie counts, because it tastes worse).

I think the more parsimonious explanation is that teachers just don't actually care if our children isn't learning

I agree that education bureaucrats don't care very much if kids learn, I just have a conspiracy that districts don't want to show overly-rapid improvement because that would raise awkward questions about "so what do you need a budget increase for?", and that there's at least some cooperation among districts.

I saw this claim a couple years ago that the population of China is over-reported by 130 million.

Yeah, that's a piece of evidence I'd point to, and I think countries with worse record keeping than China are probably even worse- would anyone even notice if a few thousand Congolese or Indonesian peasants here and there happened to only exist as a form of budget padding?

There's a good amount of speculative evidence that Nigeria's population is nowhere near what it claims and may possibly be a little as 1/2 the official figure, largely driven by gov't spending being divided among its provinces by headcount.

https://markessien.com/posts/real_population_of_nigeria/

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/589235-nigerias-population-is-a-lot-less-than-220-million-by-tope-fasua.html

The 2nd article is written by the Nigerian President's economic advisor.

I would've thought that Nigeria's population would be under-reported: it seems that everyone I've ever met has some sort of connection to the royal family.

Sugar intake peaked around 2000: https://twitter.com/sguyenet/status/1061362985678049281?lang=en

It's hard to believe that decreasing intake is still driving obesity. It's easy to get a bunch of fat calories in without sugar and they'll make you just as fat (although obviously sugar has other negative metabolic effects).

would anyone even notice if a few thousand Congolese or Indonesian peasants here and there happened to only exist as a form of budget padding?

You're kind of assuming that people know the true number of Indonesians and then bump up the number. It seems more likely that people don't know the number and even after any bumping at least in some cases there are even more people than reported.

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