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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Notes -
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these- what are your small-scale conspiracy theories? Not big stuff(eg jewlluminati secretly controls the world) not culture war par excellence- what small scale conspiracy theories do you hold to on a gut level?
A few of mine-
US schools routinely skip math prerequisites to cover up for poor instructional practices on an institutional basis, allowing a face saving way to have students repeat entire levels in college.
gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain. Damaged wheat crops are harvested with roundup to kill the plant, thus drying out the wheat, and TPTB would rather blame gluten than roundup.
The other possibility is folic acid fortification, which started in 1998.
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Cops know pretty much everything about the drug trade, but don't shut it down because farming is easier than hunting
Most vegetables in the US taste horrible because fitting tasty veggies into the industrial process is too expensive and people wouldn't buy them
Everybody in education gave up on educating anybody decades ago (I mean if you want to learn, or you parents want you to, they won't stop you, but if you don't, they are 100% fine with it and really have no preference either way) and schools are basically warehouses to keep kids relatively unharmed while parents are at work and make them socialized enough they won't resort to cannibalism and serial killing if left unsupervised once graduating.
A lot of people in tech are getting tons of money for furiously doing nothing important or necessary because big tech can afford it, and one of the reasons Musk is hated is because his actions threaten to reveal that fact. The correlation between income and quality of work pretty much doesn't exist.
About 99% of stock analytics explaining daily stock movements by certain events are either vacuously trivial ("stock drops on bad news") or complete bullshit, any nontrivial movements are truly random and nobody can consistently predict it or meaningfully explain it.
Gell-Mann amnesia is the sole reason why "journalist" and "unfunny clown" aren't largely synonymous.
Nobody knows how to do hiring properly. All the interview techniques and trainings are groping in the dark and hoping it'll work out (which it usually does because the ultimate interests are aligned) but it pretty much doesn't matter what happens outside of the extremes (no filtering at all and excessive filtering which just filters out people who aren't desperate enough). Most value hiring agencies and consultants provide is CYA and allowing to blame somebody else if things go wrong.
The entire field of nutrition and dietology is fake. Outside of treating some well-defined deficiency or intolerance diseases (like, if you allergic to X, avoid foods containing X) they can give no useful advice to an average person that would have higher than random chance of succeeding. Once medications like semaglutide become common, the whole field would occupy the niche between tarot reading and feng-shui furniture arrangement.
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Gluten is probably a fall guy for fructans or other difficult-to-digest oligosaccharides that are naturally present in some grains.
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At any given time, the FBI knows about up to a half dozen active serial killers.
I mean serial killers in the classic sense; killing random strangers with whom they do not have a prior relationship, not gang, drug, or domestic violence related.
There's zero public announcement of this fact because the FBI doesn't want to induce any sort of panic or deal with the inevitable media circus. More ominously - more conspiratorially - I also believe the FBI is aware they cannot prosecute the cases. They may even know who the killer is. How does the FBI "know" without proving? Data. Sites like The Murder Accountability Project have identified previously undisclosed "murder clusters." Collect enough details about a crime scene and that's almost a tailor-made problem for a basic classification algorithm. Considering there are always non-public details about crime scenes, the FBI should be able to connect murders over even a wide geography fairly trivially with some basic data science plus manual review.
At the root of this conspiracy is the plain fact that solving a murder between strangers is hard. The overwhelming majority of criminal violence occurs between people who know each other and its always over money (or another "currency" like drugs), conflicts of love and sexual interest, or perceived respect and honor violations. Offenders and victims are 90%+ of the time young males. When none of those factors are present, law enforcement struggles to find all the necessary ingredients for a prosecution: motive, means, opportunity, suspect. Unless you more or less catch a serial killer in the act or with a room full of trophies, it's hard to even begin an investigation.
Compounding the conspiracy, I think the serial killers of today are more aware of both police investigative procedures and evidentiary processes. There's a tidal wave of information available anonymously now because of the digitization of various court records. Finding police process manuals online isn't hard. There are hundreds of online communities that discuss various law enforcement methods and the challenges in dealing with the fourth amendment (among others). If we take as our model serial killer a deliberate and methodical individual, I can see how a little bit of Applied Internet Autism could provide a competitive advantage towards "getting away with it."
I have thought about the fact that digital technology does make it fundamentally easier to track movements. If law enforcement can narrow a time of murder down to a few hours and know the place of murder (not necessarily the same place where a body was recovered), they could potentially piece through CCTV footage etc to at least scan for a suspect, right? Surely, with cell phones, they could just see who was in the area?
Well, the latter is an obvious fourth amendment issue. I don't see the FBI trying to get a court to give them a subpoena for cell location data for every human within given coordinates over an hours long timeframe. Certainly not for a single "basic" murder. If the circumstances pointed to a serial killer, I still think a judge is dubious. The FBI appears to be willing to bend and break the rules for highly political cases, but your run of the middle blood-and-guts may not meet the bar for officially sanctioned dirty tricks. The former (CCTV streaming) is a law enforcement ROI problem. Is a detective / FBI agent really going to sit through hours and hours of random footage trying to find some guy going into a park at 9:15 with a hooker and coming out at 10:30 alone? Even if they have a sincere desire to do so, I have a hunch the general case load is so high they can't actually devote a full day to doing it without getting severely behind on their other work. Instead, you're looking for quick access "smoking guns." DNA or fingerprints that get hits own known previous offenders. Cell phone data of the victim that literally says something like "I'm meeting this guy at the park at 9:15" combined with a call log to a dozen numbers the police can easily screen against. If these "level one" pieces of evidence are not present, I don't think the cops throw up their hands and go "it can never be solved!" I think they pause for a moment and think, "how much do we want to sink into this to solve a murder that could be extremely difficult to try in court?"
So, law enforcement and the FBI in particular know about these likely offenders and do not pursue them both because of some very serious difficulty in actually building the case combined with questionable "return" (pardon that indelicate analogy) on a high level of investment of time and effort. This is why I like it for a low grade conspiracy. No grand plots or narratives. No massive coordinate coverups. Just garden variety bureaucracy, poor organizational management and orientation, and difficult problem constraints that all combine to form an abysmal outcome.
I think most serial killer cases today will solve themselves, in that they will eventually turn into pretty open and shut style murders. Serial killers, according to the literature, eventually get kind of sloppy or they escalate and get more brazen, thereby taking on more risk. Eventually, you have a crime scene with a ton of physical evidence, some eyeball witnesses, and a zeroed-in timeline.
(Closing tangent) I've written about some of the basic philosophy of policing before. Leaving how fucked up the execution of law enforcement currently is, I think the philosophy ought to be oriented around crime prevention and fast interdiction of immediate crime. The investigation of already committed crime is always disproportionately resource intensive. Two cops in a squad car rolling through a rough neighborhood regularly might effectively prevent one gang member from shooting another. And that's done at some fraction of the cost of those two cops' salaries plus the cost of procuring their cruiser and the training pipeline it took to get them on the street. The detective work and court work for the prosecution of that same hypothetical shooter - should he actually pull out the gun and shoot - easily gets into the millions of municipal dollars.
Often a victim gets away or kills the killer. It goes down as burglary or attempted rape, since it's generally not clear that the killer was planning to kill them.
I hadn't thought of that, but it tracks.
There's something profoundly destitute about that. A living monster is never investigated because it looks like he was some lower level hoodlum who fucked up an attack. Life goes on.
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This is perhaps more merited impossibility or celebration parallax than a conspiracy theory: We're not lowering standards in the name of equity, but it's a good thing that we are in helping non-Asian minorities.
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At least in bread, I've always assumed the "gluten" problem was related to moving from relatively long ferments with high levels of wild yeast and bacteria (ie: sourdough) to the now-ubiquitous Chorleywood process.
Those strains do a lot of interesting stuff to the resultant product. I can leave sourdough sitting on my counter for days at a time without it molding, unlike store bread. The fermentation process also lowers phytic acid levels.
Humans have fairly simple guts compared to even other omnivores. Maybe we're better suited to eating something that's been partially broken down already, and acidic enough to keep out more harmful microbiota?
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I'm trying to think of new ones I haven't done before.
-- The Hur report by the special counsel who described Biden presenting as "as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" was actually just using bitchy language to get back at Biden for using standard answers. The classic way to respond to a politically motivated investigation deposition is to say "I don't recall." "I can't confirm that, I don't remember." "I don't know which day that was, or who was in the room, or what was said." Refuse to confirm anything, don't give them anything. This is a cliche. Biden did that, and then Hur turned around and used it against him passive aggressively. Biden couldn't exactly argue against it and say "No I can totally remember all that, I was LYING in the interview!" Which, fair play to Hur.
-- Musk's Twitter adventure all started with him intending to buy enough shares to get on the board and annoy people and pressure policy, but he quickly found himself in a mess because he purchased the shares without disclosing the purchase properly and under SEC investigation. Twitter corporate management, knowing that Musk wanted to use his power to oppose, harm, and maybe fire them, got in touch with Musk after his purchase telling him that he would have to act in the best interest of the company if he were on the board, essentially telling him all the things he couldn't say without being subject to a lawsuit for betraying the company, which were all things he was saying all the time constantly. Musk, between the SEC and the reality of getting a board seat, decided that the best way out was through and put in an offer for the whole company, figuring there was a good chance that in negotiations he could get out of the whole thing and maybe get Twitter to buy him out. Then the social media downturn hit, and Twitter wasn't going to let him out of it at all, and now he's stuck with it.
-- European universities that are haughty about open American legacy admits do the same thing, just in secret. Too many obvious examples of social immobility to otherwise explain. This isn't actually a bad policy, I think all affirmative action/DEI type stuff would be better if done in secret, but I roll my eyes when Brits lecture us about Legacy admissions in American universities. Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.
-- The entire car industry is secretly confused by the fact that the car is close to being a solved engineering problem. We've converged on solutions that answer basically every question that car companies competed on from 1980 to 2010. Essentially any small AWD CUV with a 2.0 liter turbo four is basically better than 90+% of cars made during that period on acceleration, handling, fuel economy, comfort, convenience, reliability. They all kind of look the same because they've converged on the optimal layout for most users and wind resistance. But nobody can admit this because the whole industry is based on planned obsolescence, brand loyalty and distinction, constant improvement. Car company execs are increasingly concerned with a future in which cars are a commodity product not purchased for any particular reason, but most often on price. Cars are going from deeply personal purchases, like homes, to impersonal and random purchases, like microwaves or non-stick pans or men's undershirts. The flailing around by so many brands that we see today reflects the reality, occasionally acknowledged by Akio Toyoda and Bob Lutz, that the car as we understood it is dead, because it has been perfected. The urge to electrification is both an effort to produce actually-noticeable improvements in acceleration and economy, but doomed to make the problem worse as electrification flattens all those properties.
-- The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!
-- Celebrity romances aren't real or fake, they exist in a kind of human interaction that is completely foreign to non-celebrities, where the human and the economic mingle to a great degree.
Blacks physically mature a bit more quickly than whites, and there is a real bias against white players at the high school level. Tall white kids tend not to get court time on the high school teams and often go over to baseball where being a tall pitcher is a plus.
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Who are these old Oxbridge families?
The royals themselves are split between St Andrews, Exeter, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Cambridge. Hugh Grosvenor, the archetypical old money aristocrat, went to Newcastle.
But that's besides the point, the fact is that university admissions in the UK are handled by either:
a) disinterested bureaucrats who don't care who your father is and are only looking at your grades
b) academics who care intensely about how smart next year's undergraduate class is going to be
The main reason US universities engage in legacy admissions is to ensure donations from wealthy families. UK universities really only started chasing after donors the way American universities do about ten years ago. There aren't any legacy children to admit because the whole thing of children going to their parents Alma Mater just isn't a thing here.
Oxbridge are in fact more meritocratic than most UK universities, because they interview as well as relying on how well you did in school.
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IIRC USSR had good basketball teams, many great player were from Baltics. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvydas_Sabonis
I don't think basketball correlates with race in any meaningful way, it's more a social phenomenon in the US. Without racism, in the US you'd still expect more black top players than white because sports as venue for prosperity for black players is culturally supported now and also because other venues are less accessible, but you certainly don't expect homogeneity like there is now. And of course among 300+ million people there would be great white basketball players. Just right now they probably would rather do something else then get into the whole racial issue.
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It’s not Slavs qua Slavs that overperform- it’s specifically south-west Slavs. I’m not sure there’s as many people from the former Yugoslavia in the US as you think.
Turkey once in a while ends up with pretty good male basketball teams and they are always almost entirely manned by people who (themselves or their families) emigrated sometime in the last ~150 years from western balkans.
Yugoslavia had a very good basketball tradition as well so maybe some of this is simply good sports education. But comparing the physical attributes of your average Anatolian to Bosniak immigrant, it’s not difficult to draw some conclusions.
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We also see current NBA stars from Lithuania and Poland. There are more Polish americans than there are Serbians or Lithuanians. There's enough genetic timber that we ought to be developing it, and we clearly aren't.
Balts aren't Slavic.
The two groups that reliably produce an outsized portion of basketball players are balts (specifically Latvians and Lithuanians) and Dinaric Slavs, which both are among the tallest European subgroups, with the latter being literally the tallest group on earth.
You say we see current NBA stars from Poland, there is literally one player. There are more players from Montenegro (a country of some 600k) than Poland.
We see more current NBA stars from either than we see from the white portion of America. There are literally currently none, haven't been in years.
Is this when I note that the one "polish" player in the NBA was born in America, is half black and is not a star?
No this is the part where I admit I got Porzingis' nationality wrong.
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Blacks in America are also willing to min/max for athletics. You're right, though, we don't hear slavic names in professional sports in the USA even compared to other whites, which points to a talent pipeline that doesn't cover parts of the population.
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Definitely true in the UK, definitely not true in Ireland.
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This is a misunderstanding of how British college admissions work. Unlike in the US, in the UK you apply not only to a college, but to a degree. If you apply to an Oxford college for English, you are competing with the other people who applied to that Oxford college for english literature, and to some extent to other Oxford colleges for english literature (afaik at undergraduate level the college choice is a preference thing). You are not competing with people who applied to Oxford for physics, or math, or medicine.
The failsons and daughters of the upper classes simply know to apply to degrees that either cover subjects the plebs never even learn or develop an interest in (like classics), subjects that don’t lead to a good living (like drama, literature, and theology), subjects designed for rich estate-owning aristocrats and nobody else (land management and agricultural studies) or extremely obscure subjects that only a rich dilettante would care for (niche sub-categories of art like oriental/asian/middle eastern religious iconography or whatever, for example).
If someone says they went to Oxford or Cambridge, it’s not the same thing as saying they went to Harvard or Stanford. Getting into one of the least-subscribed courses at Oxbridge is easier than getting into many degrees at even third-tier British universities. If they did math or medicine it is fair to say they are probably pretty smart.
There are other explanations besides racism even if there is no ethnic difference in propensity to be skilled at basketball.
This is a stretch. I'm not aware of any Oxbridge course that will let you in without a minimum of AAA at A-level, while maths at UEA will consider you with ABB if they're the right subjects (and UEA isn't third-tier). You're right about medicine, but that's a bit of a special case.
‘The right subjects’ is doing a lot here. An A* in History is easier than a C in Further Math. And by third tier I meant still within the top grouping of UK universities, where Oxbridge is tier one, the next rung down is like Durham, tier 3 is like Bristol or Exeter or something.
A-level results in 2024:
Percentage of A* grades in History: 5.7%
Percentage of C grades (or above) in Further Maths: 89.8%
There could of course be a selection effect, whereby brighter students take FM than take History (which could explain why 28.7% of FM students get an A*). Still, I don't think that alone is enough to make the argument that History really is that much easier than FM, given the massive difference in grade attainment.
For what it's worth, Oxbridge students are generally very smart IME, regardless of what they study.
Fair.
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You apply for a degree in the usa as well.
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Have you read Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons”? He gets into the basketball talent pipeline in some detail.
I haven't, but I love his work so I'll have to check it out!
I should clarify that it discusses college level and below. It is worth reading for its own sake, though.
Very underrated book. Wolfe is so good I remember enjoying Charlotte Simmons immensely.
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Regular, extremely intensive exercise in early middle age increases the chance of an early death compared to being healthy, skinny, but doing only limited exercise.
Who's the conspirator here? Big Gym?
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Do you think that this effect mostly comes from the relative increase in calorie intake to compensate for the exercise?
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What range is "early middle age"?
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There is no coverup of poor institutional practices in math. They’re in plain sight, and often equally screwed up at the college level.
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