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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5096 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.

It's aesthetic for the ads, not to change user behavior. This is obvious because (a) the instructions on the tube suggest a 'pea size amount', ie. much less, and (b) because the amount used in the ads would probably be unpleasant to brush with (at least ime).

Consider that almost everyone occasionally squeezes out too much toothpaste because there's an air pocket in the tube or they're overzealous with a fresh tube or trying to force out a hardened layer on top because they forgot to put the top back on or whatever. This means that everybody gets the experience of using an ad-sized amount of toothpaste occasionally. And it's usually pretty unpleasant, at least for me. It doesn't happen that you accidentally use 3x the toothpaste volume and think "wow this is pretty great". For conditioner, this is absolutely true I think, but not for toothpaste.

In other words, if they wanted to make you use more, they'd make it taste better.

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