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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4247 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.

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.

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?

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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