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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.

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 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.

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

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