What conspiracy theories do you believe in? - Put your tinfoil hats on

[teriyakiburns]

But something else of interest to see if you can account for it, is that skin cancer rates seem to rise much higher in men than they are rising in women.

I wonder how it would stack up when compared to the shift from outdoor to indoor work and changes in lighting technology?

There is almost certainly a non-linear relationship between UVB exposure and cancer prevalence. Too much obvious is bad, but too little might also be paradoxically bad. Some minimum amount of exposure would cause enough damage to trigger repair mechanisms that maintain healthier skin. Lack of exposure would allow a build-up of minor damage that the body ignores until it suddenly explodes into a tumour. Hypothetically.

Do more women spend more time tanning than men?

 

[Male Idiot]

@Male Idiot Nothing special here but I did a slightly improved version based on your feedback. I haven't incorporated all your notes because this is not even its final form. What I'm thinking as I read through your posts is that to actually represent this I need to add a time axis. Now this can be real world time in which case it becomes an animation, or it can be making a 3D diagram with depth representing time. Neither is trivial but weirdly I think the 3D diagram might actually be easier for me to produce. It also has the advantage that I can likely incorporate feedback into it more easily than I could with a timeline animation. So... I may try that. In the meantime though, here is a small update.
View attachment 8145838

I left off the small "may be later" box with the North African / Arab stuff because I really thought a lot of that was more modern and it wasn't very certain on your chart. I thought maybe better represented as a note later when format more settled. That's also why I left off the dates currently. I'm trying to figure out something more sophisticated.

Of interest to me was your plotting of East Africans as an evolution from Sub-Saharan Black. I had been under the impression that there was a large back-migration into Africa that produced the East Africans. Which now I think about it in time-line terms is not at all incompatible with what you say. I think adding a time axis will help a lot with this.

You are doing an amazing work for me, I updated this one with a lot of new info I found with google and this video mostly, which analyises a pay walled study:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uyKGTGdNLo&t=55s Second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5QywPMrJFE
Paywalled study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18299
Third video from a evolutionary biologist youtuber : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cI6kNMxed8

Africans just haven't been analyzed for DNA that deeply. Just googling found 2 Ghost DNAs in West Africans, one from Unknown Hominid, another from Basal West African extinct hominid. The EB youtuber also says that there maybe more African groups that are just as distantly related to each other African groups as to non Africans, and other hominids like Heidelbergensis, Denisovans and Neanderthals may have bred back/lived alongside Homo Sapiens for a LONG TIME. He goes with the 50 kya DNA study and not the first youtuber's 100-150 Kya estimates, but he is an establishment guy and even he admits it, plus deposits that while parts of a population can evolve into something else, while other parts do not evolve, or evolve to somethind different.

(Fuck me, newest map)

(Mya is million years ago, kya is thousand years ago)

I have updated the map with some information like timelines with estimates and possibly deviations.
The first video often gives estimated dates and implies humans migrated out of Africa or even Africa/Eurasia in waves, which matched up with waves when the Sahara was not a desert so it could be easily crossed. Some East/North African blacks may have had non-African sapiens admixture at 70kya when the Out of Africa-d homo sapiens returned to Africa. Africa needs a lot of studies, but either scientists fear what they may find, or it is too poor/violent for wide scale studies.
I have also tried to add scientific names when its applicable.
Common ape Ancestors becomes Homo Heidelbergensis or maybe Homo Erectus.
Early Monkey Ancestors becomes Early Extinct Homo Sapiens V.0 (splits to Africans and the rest) Split estimated to be 170-127-83 thousand years ago.
Out of Africa group 1 becomes Early Extinct Homo Sapiens V.1 (tiny Abbo admixture survives, otherwise didn't leave even successors) 170-127 thousand years ago.
Our of Africa group 2 becomes Early Extinct Homo Sapiens V.2 ( splits into Abbos, Eurasians, but the baseline is no longer alive) 90-75 thousand years ago.
New map showing Red star for groups that mixed with denisovans and neanderthals, brown star for groups that did not mix with these two hominids.
Old maps:

First wave was around 127 Kya, but can be 170 to 120 kya. Climate scientists say 107 to 95 kya.
Africans split 127 kya but can be 170 to 83kya.
Second wave was around 80 to 60, Climate studies say 90kya to 75kya.
This later has a bottleneck at 60-50 kya. (Mainstream media said for decades this is when humans left africa and split from africans)
Abbos splitting off 55 kya.
Whites/Asians split around 42 kya but can be 55 to 29 kya.


For a bigger picture, DNA studies say Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens split 500 kya. The first video argues that fossil evidence dating does not support this, and the DNA age estimates got polluted by later crossbreeding data, which did happen according to multiple articles/youtubers etc. The first video argues these split with Heidelbergensis 1 mya for Sapiens, 1,25 mya for Denisovans and 1,5 mya for Neanderthals.

Homo Heidelbergensis also may have been the common ancestor of all 3, or a 4th branch of a different common ancestor instead, maybe Erectus but nobody knows.

This whole debate started because Abbos and some other tiny groups around them share DNA from the first OoA1 migration wave from 170kya, while most of their DNA is OoA2 migration around 75 or 90 thousand years ago, or finishing as the sahara dried up again.
OoA1 wave split from Africans before migrating. Eurasians don't have OoA1 Dna.
OoA2 wave split from OoA1 and after this split both likely intermingled with Neanderthals and Denisovans, with some OoA1 breeding back into Australian OoA2s to form Abbos. It is unknown if Abbos have their Neanderthal and Denisovan genes from OoA1 or OoA2 or both.

Edit: Moderators and conspiracy fellows, should I start a Cavemen thread outside of the conspiracies thread ? Am I going too off topic here?

 

[Drive-by Farts]

With all this talk of ancient hominids, one conspiracy I believe is that Aborigines and possibly sub-Saharan Africans aren’t actually Homo sapiens and scientists actually know this.




Africans just seem to cluster in all these charts in a totally different area than everyone else. It’s hard to find a graph with Aboriginal Australians specifically (I appreciate if anyone has one) but you can kinda just tell by looking at them. So it’s not just that there were other talking, relatively intelligent hominids, it’s that they’re literally walking among us to this day.

I have my own conspiracy that I don’t see anyone talking about - the powers that be are using the unlobotomized AI, right? And we know that unlobotomized AI is extremely racist. So why is the media/ TPTB so pro black and pro immigrant (especially Arab) when they know it’s bad even more than we do? I actually think the goal might be to build so much resentment towards blacks and Indians that TPTB can just get rid of them and take their land. Problem-Reaction-Solution. Africa and maybe India have valuable, fertile land in abundance. Especially Africa, because it’s not just farmland, it’s rare earth minerals and gold. We’re getting to the point that a lot of westerners would be grateful if darkies just disappeared. And, you’d have a whole cohort of people (Arab, Asian, Latin American immigrants) who are westernized to a degree but can basically be kicked out of the west at any time, then made to move wherever in Africa, who are all very pro-globohomo and pro-15 minute cities. The Asians already eat ze bugs. Maybe I’m just rationalizing because replacing Europeans and white west westerners makes little sense when Africa and India are right there, filled with Africans and Indians. If those people were easier to control than whitey, they would’ve been doing it already because their land is valuable. It just feels like something else is going on behind the obvious.

 

[Overly Serious]

@Male Idiot This is great stuff. Lots of interesting information and even interesting questions. I don't have subject knowledge on this but I find what you're saying fascinating and whilst it's not my area either, I can put together some ways to illustrate this and I think that would be worthwhile and would like to try. I'm picturing this as a kind of 3D graph with the depth axis being time. There are other options too. I'll just note so it's mentioned, that the time axis wont necessarily work linearly with such variations in rate of events.

The first step would be figuring out some format for capturing this sort of information. I believe I can do that. Will need time in a range format, a vernacular name "Ghost hominid" and possibly a set of more technical information if desired. Once that's done I can enter the information you're sharing and you could, if you're willing, vet it, add more, etc. Meanwhile I'd work on the visualisation side.

Edit: Moderators and conspiracy fellows, should I start a Cavemen thread outside of the conspiracies thread ? Am I going too off topic here?

I would argue not for a few reasons. This is a popular topic in the thread and the overlap between people who follow this thread and people interested in this specific conspiracy is likely quite substantial. (And it seems it does remain a conspiracy given Academic reluctance on this.) Secondly, I imagine as with other sudden surge topics in this thread, it will go away again shortly as there's a lull in information and discussion. So if it were moved to another thread that might quickly vanish down the rankings.

So that's my argument - I don't think it's occluding any other topics in the thread right now and I think in its own thread it would fade quickly as it will take some time to do the next proper visualisation. If / When I get into that, could be a project thread then? Thoughts?

 

[Male Idiot]

Africans just seem to cluster in all these charts in a totally different area than everyone else. It’s hard to find a graph with Aboriginal Australians specifically (I appreciate if anyone has one) but you can kinda just tell by looking at them. So it’s not just that there were other talking, relatively intelligent hominids, it’s that they’re literally walking among us to this day.

While I think the white replacement is entirely unrelated, as Asians and Arabs are very much closer to whites than anything else....

Overly Serious's and my graphs and video links show that Humans split into various groups.


Original great ape ancestor, Ape 1.0 12-16 million years ago
Splits into Apes 2.0 and Orangutans.
Apes 2.0 gorilla–chimpanzee last common ancestor 10 to 8 million years ago
Splits into Ape 3.0 and Gorillas.
Ape 3.0 chimpanzee–human last common ancestor 6 to 4,7 million years ago
Splits into original hominid and chimp ancestors that later split into chimps and bonobos.
Original hominid: 1 million to 500 thousand years ago
Splits into : original humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans. Later Neanderthals and Denisovans breed back with Excinct humans and Base non African Humans
original humans: 500 to 130 thousand years ago
Splits to base Non African humans - Africans - Extinct humans that left earlier and bred back to abbos. Africans belong here.
Base non African humans: 130 to 95 thousand years ago
splits to Abbos - Eurasians. Abbos belong here, and bred back with the Extinct humans from above.
Eurasians: 40-20 thousand years ago
splits to European - Asians. Pajeets, Yellows, whites, arabs, jews, hispanics all belong here.

@Overly Serious
We may want to add the monkeys too to a graph just for completeness and timeline. Many of these don't have scientific names or fossils, and are just referenced:
Common orangutan-human ancestor for Ape 1.0
Common gorilla-human ancestor for Ape 2.0
Common chimpanzee human ancestor for Ape 3.0

Africans are the only ones without Denisovan/Neanderthal DNA. Both Extinct humans (OoA1) and Base non african humans (OoA2) interbred with denisovans and neanderthals.

So we can put in a hierarchy.
Africans /// Abbos, Asians, Whites.
Abbos /// Asians, Whites
Asians /// Whites
Hispanics are mostly Asians with black-white admixture, so on your map they cluster a different way from whites.

So it all depends on where you draw homo. (((Whites+Asians)+Abbos)+Africans) Denisovan/Neanderthal genes Extinct non african group genes
Asians and whites are the closest related. Abbos got an earlier version of non-african dna in them. Africans are least related, got no denisovan/neanderthal dna.
I must say I really got surprised by how less like Eurasians Africans are, compared to Abbos. But Abbos got a funky extra set of DNA nobody else has. Dynastia victory.

If we use the old definition that a species is a group that can interbreed with each other and create fertile offspring, than technically Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans are THE SAME SPECIES, and some scientists even argue for it. Homo sapiens isn't even a species. It is a subspecies.

Homo sapiens=africans.
Extinct Homo sapiens+ Extinct Homo sapiens+Neanderthal+Denisovan=abbos
Extinct Homo sapiens+Neanderthal+Denisovan= Eurasians

Thus homo sapiens is just useless. You would be better off categorising Ancestral humans into 5 subspecies: Neanderthal, Denisovan, African, Extinct Out of Africa 1, Out of Africa 2.
Current alive humans thus form 4 subspecies: African, Aboriginal, European, Asian.
Aboriginals are a mix of Out of Africa 2 ancestor + Neanderthal and Denisovan + extinct non african ancestor Out of Africa 1.
Europeans and Asians are a mix of Out of African 2 ancestor + Neanderthal and Denisovan.

African is the most basal form of human, one could say the purest or the least evolved, that's only a matter of standpoint.
Aboriginals are the most ancestrally diverse, with Out of Africa 1, Out of Africa 2, Neanderthal and Denisovans.
You can also say that Asians and Europeans are the latest versions, a new hybrid of Out of Africa 2 and neanderthal/denisovan admixture.

Or the WEWUZ KANGZ crowd could say that only they are pure baseline homo sapiens, or CHUDDIE could say they are the oldest and least evolved.

@Male Idiot This is great stuff. Lots of interesting information and even interesting questions. I don't have subject knowledge on this but I find what you're saying fascinating and whilst it's not my area either, I can put together some ways to illustrate this and I think that would be worthwhile and would like to try. I'm picturing this as a kind of 3D graph with the depth axis being time. There are other options too. I'll just note so it's mentioned, that the time axis wont necessarily work linearly with such variations in rate of events.

The first step would be figuring out some format for capturing this sort of information. I believe I can do that. Will need time in a range format, a vernacular name "Ghost hominid" and possibly a set of more technical information if desired. Once that's done I can enter the information you're sharing and you could, if you're willing, vet it, add more, etc. Meanwhile I'd work on the visualisation side.


I would argue not for a few reasons. This is a popular topic in the thread and the overlap between people who follow this thread and people interested in this specific conspiracy is likely quite substantial. (And it seems it does remain a conspiracy given Academic reluctance on this.) Secondly, I imagine as with other sudden surge topics in this thread, it will go away again shortly as there's a lull in information and discussion. So if it were moved to another thread that might quickly vanish down the rankings.

So that's my argument - I don't think it's occluding any other topics in the thread right now and I think in its own thread it would fade quickly as it will take some time to do the next proper visualisation. If / When I get into that, could be a project thread then? Thoughts?

This isn't my expertise, though I did study biology before flunking out. This is citizen science, I'm no longer shitposting and being funny when I talk about this topic. We are doing science, even if amateurish science.

There are 2 ghosts hominids. One I found a name for, the other simply has no name. It left no remains, it just existed and left with no trace beside West African DNA.

I tried to give non-sciency names replaced by as science-accurate ones as I can so its less of a shitpost and more actual info one can look up on the net.

My initial worry was that it would get swamped here, like how UFO posts were moved into their own thread. But you are right, it may just cause it to vanish to the 999th page.

There is an overlap and much academic resistance to this. I appreciate your work in this project. That's a good idea, leave this here, or maybe if it gets too buried, I'll make up a secondary archive thread just in case when we got it all nicely cleaned up.

More videos on Neanderthal brains and intellegience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY7jE06_Eng

It says that Neanderthals were more conservative, had great spatial awareness and memory, and generally did not differ in thinking that much from Humans, Built to notice patterns.

Hotter climates also result in smaller brains. Huh.

So besides genetics, there maybe a factor with colder climates needing more smarts. I know correlation isn't causation all the time... but.... this map makes you think, doesn't it?
Maybe the denisovan/neanderthal genes helped eurasians to live in the harsh winters and better planning they would need.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10064386/

A non paid paper on this.

We can see the maps. Koreans and Japanese and south europeans may have smaller brain size, but could compensate for it in other way, perhaps neuron density. It is really unsure how they circumvented the brain size issue, either by just having more neural connections, or just pushing neurons together more to have the same amount of chips.

Otherwise the brain size and IQ maps line along very well.

 

[NoReturn]

View attachment 8136129
another asteroid has been discovered right next to 3I/ATLAS - it doesn't have a tail either

Wasn't Borisov the earlier interstellar comet? Did it suddenly return? That looks more like they are comparing Atlas to Borisov.

Borisov flew by a couple of years ago. It ws in every way a comet with a tail and acted as comets from our solar system have acted. It was un-remarkable. That's why no one really talked about it. Borisov is the forgotten middle child of interstellar objects.(1I) Omuamua was discovered when it was taking off out of the solar system too fast to be normal in 2017. (2I) Borisov was in 2019. and now 3I/ATLAS (The telescopes that found it.)

If Borisov has suddenly shown up 6 years later, tail or not, we're fucked.

This is a new Borisov.

From Loeb:

On the morning of November 2, 2025, the astronomer Gennady Borisov — discoverer of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov in 2019, identified a new “nearly interstellar” object which is officially labeled as C/2025 V1 (Borisov). The object is by now catalogued by NASA’s JPL here and by the Minor Planet Center here.​

​

The orbit of C/2025 V1 is inclined by 113 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane and follows an orbital plane that is nearly perpendicular to the orbit of 3I/ATLAS. Similarly to 3I/ATLAS, C/2025 V1 does not display a clear cometary tail.​

From not-Loeb:

C/2025 V1 Borisov gives astronomers an in-situ demonstration of a 'normal' solar system comet, making 3I/ATLAS's confirmed non-gravitational acceleration and lack of a tail seem all the more anomalous by direct comparison.​

​

The orbital elements of the C/2025 V1 Borisov, per the JPL Small-Body Database, confirm its less exotic nature:​

Orbit eccentricity e 1.00958273​

Orbit inclination i 112.72427445∘​

Perihelion distance q 0.46265727 AU​

Date of perihelion transit Tp November 16, 2025​

​

While speculation linking celestial objects to a sinister 'alien mothership' is often 'hyped up on social media', the routine nature and physical characteristics of the Borisov comet remind us that not every unusual movement in the sky is proof of an interstellar visitor.​

 

[Drive-by Farts]

If we use the old definition that a species is a group that can interbreed with each other and create fertile offspring, than technically Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans are THE SAME SPECIES, and some scientists even argue for it. Homo sapiens isn't even a species. It is a subspecies.

Oh, yeah, I definitely meant subspecies. Thanks for all your data, I’m looking on the maps you provided in the post just before mine and they’re really helpful.

I want to share a Japanese friend-of-a-friend’s conspiracy theory. My friend presented this as crazy but I told him it was actually possible. The theory is that Japanese people in ancient times had a huge global civilization. The reason I see this as being possible is, Kennewick Man turned out to be most closely related to the Ainu. Reconstructions of him really do look like Jomon-era Japanese people. I think they look cool, honestly.

They often had brown hair (usually wavy) and light eyes (gray, blue etc) but were not closely related to Caucasian groups. They are super hairy too, zoom up on the hands.

 

[Otterly]

If the alternate dating is at all accurate, it's most likely a left-over remnant from a hypothetical civilisation that spanned what is now the sahara. The Egyptians themselves considered their civilisation a remnant successor of peoples who lived far to the west. We know the sahara was once lush and green. There are multiple fossilised rivers and tiny remnants of the great jungles and forests that used to cover large swathes of it. The main problem with discovering what lies out there is knowing where to start. It's such a vast, desolate area.

There have been some mummified remains found in the Sahara recently that seem to be a very non related and isolated population. The sphinx and some of the big monolithic architecture at the temple complex in from of it and a few other places in Egypt does seem older

don't think skin cancer is caused by the sun.

It’s ’a’ cause. Sometimes. But you’re absolutely right to say it’s not that simple and the Sunnis good for you.
We know the molecular mechanisms of how UV damages dna and how mutations in the specific pathways that repair that damage cause cancers to increase. So the idea that UV can cause cancer isn’t one I think that’s false. The rates you see in Australia for example - that’s really white people (Scots and Irish and Brit origin) getting Aussie UV levels. Swedes have a more olive toned skin, they’re not rhe kind of freckly white the Brits are at all. The buggers tan well.
However - as always it’s more complicated than that. Firstly, there’s a great study of Swedish women (I know I’ve linked it elsewhere on here and i will try to find it and link here) where they looked at smoking and sun exposure. Swedish women who smoked and spent most time in the sun lived longer than non smokers with least sun. Now obviously, there are caveats here. It doesn’t mean smoking is good for you, but it does imply the sun is. Sweden is high latitude so they weren’t baking whiteish skin under tropical sun, and the intensity of the UV is moderate most of the year. Swedes also get most sun from being outdoors in summer, rather than a holiday to somewhere hot.
Sun equals vitamin D and being outside, and I will die on the hill that both those things are good for you.
A lot of other things can also cause skin cancers.
So in summary, it’s not that UV can’t or doesn’t, but that the idea that sun is bad is wrong, and other things can too. It’s VERY important to have moderate sun exposure (obviously if you’ve had previous skin cancer don’t go baking) and not to burn, but to get some sun on you. Especially in miserable northern latitudes. Just be sensible - don’t burn, do wear a hat, cover up during the hottest part of the day but do get exposure
As for skin cancers popping up elsewhere - melanoma is a bastard for not ever finding the primary lesion - it’s possible to have an initial tumour you never see and then others pop up. It’s one of the reasons it’s so lethal.

 

[Meriasek]

Yes. No. The information is out there. If you know anything about nuclear physics, you’ll understand why a material that’s opaque to some things, and translucent (or even transparent) to others is valuable.

From my understanding the main purpose of FOGBANK is to provide a uniform X-ray source around the thermonuclear secondary for compression. It's probably some form of aerogel, maybe with some neutron absorbers so it can efficiently absorb the initial flash of the primary, turn into overheated plasma and re-radiate that energy as X-rays into the secondary. Kinda what the gold hohlraum in NIF and other indirect drive laser fusion experiments does.
Nuclear weapons tech has some fascinating aspects, and classified stuff where I wouldn't necessarily expect it. Like, filler material so classified the US lost their ability to make it for a time. Krytons are vacuum tubes that are still some of the best superfast high power switches and are apparently used for the primary explosives and thus export restricted.
It's quite interesting. Nuclear weapons are, fundamentally, possible with 1940s technology and calculations easy enough to do probably do on an HP 48G.
People did design changes and rebuilds of test devices in a few weeks in the 60s, all sorts of countries developed nuclear devices within a few years of each other.
And somehow now it is extremely hard to just reengineer some filler material? Did we get this much dumber? But in other fields engineering advanced a whole lot, and our tools have gotten so much better. How can it be so hard?
Building nuclear power plants easily takes several times as it used to. A lot of that is due to bureaucracy and red tape making the engineering harder, but companies also struggle just making basic pressure sensors based on designs well known for 60 years up to spec, failing to meet specs just for FAT procedures. There seems to be a lot more incompetence around, a lot more people have STEM degrees but don't seem to be as mentally capable as those scientists and engineers of the past. Maybe it's due to the increased computerisation of education? I kinda realise that for myself. I got a physics degree from the same university where my father did his in the 70s, and I feel like he has a much better grip on the basic math than me. Did we as a society or even species mentally lazy?

 

[Duane Dibbley]

Did we as a society or even species mentally lazy?

Yes

How can it be so hard?

Some times it's the materials we can use. 10 years ago, we could use PVC, now that's banned and we have to use PET, which has a tighter melting/forming point and isn't as malleable.
Colours used to use cadmium and other now-banned substances to get the correct colour. Some RAL codes from just two decades ago are no longer replicable.

On top of that, not everything can be CNC'd or 3D printed. Some components are best made, or at least assembled, by hand, using large capacitors and vacuum tubes. There are chipsets that we cannot recreate, so we used a modern-day version which is 'just as good'. Even if it's 99% as good, when you stack them in a 'series' production run, those issues compound and your end 'just as good' product has enough of a variable in tolerance as to render is U/S compared to a few decades ago.

It sounds mad, but compare FLAC/Lossless quality to Vinyls. One is digital, no matter how hard we try, one is analogue with the full rich sounds. No computer will ever replicate analogue, let alone improve upon it.

_____________________________________________________________

Probably the wrong thread/time to post this considering the last few pages ITT but.

Are people becoming dumber, more brainwashed or more closed off? Conversation online and IRL has gotten worse in regards to anything that ways a little off of the path from completely accepted narrative. I don't just mean socially and politically but within industry and trade knowledge.

There's always been a stubbourness of "I'm right, you're wrong", that's just human nature. It seems to have changed to "This [story/source/book] says you're wrong, so therefore I am right" Even when that source material can be easily taken apart thought demonstrable evidence, proof of working and historical evidence. (historical as in, we did x and it worked. Not necessarily 200 years ago kind of history)

 

[Male Idiot]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kJO4CFEYv_4&

Some genetics at the end of this on Kangz and IQ that seems to correlate to my earlier findings.

 

[Lian Xing]

And somehow now it is extremely hard to just reengineer some filler material? Did we get this much dumber? But in other fields engineering advanced a whole lot, and our tools have gotten so much better. How can it be so hard?

It's the same with everything. You have a group of extreme competent, extremely motivated people at the start, they complete the miracle phase, then you lose them and the knowledge with time. By the third generation, everyone that's left knows just enough to keep the lights on.

And somehow now it is extremely hard to just reengineer some filler material? Did we get this much dumber? But in other fields engineering advanced a whole lot, and our tools have gotten so much better. How can it be so hard?

This link is a good explanation of how we got here. I like how it turns out we had too much process control, and the impurities were important to the process.

Building nuclear power plants easily takes several times as it used to. A lot of that is due to bureaucracy and red tape making the engineering harder

Half the cost of Vogtle 3 and 4 was pushing paper. However, if you don't do something for enough time, everyone that knows how to do it has died. There was no effort to record their knowledge. It's like how we can't rebuild the Saturn V. Of course we have the plans; we know the material specifications. What we don't have are people in the manufacturing plant that know how to do the specific steps to build it. Part of that is process changes over time, part of that is no one bothered to record what they were doing. We'd have a decade or more in rediscovery of specific processes and procedures to build what we did. In that sense, it's easier to start over. However, for ASME nuclear pressure vessels, there's not too many ways to do them, and every forge is going to put out a shit one at the beginning.

I got a physics degree from the same university where my father did his in the 70s, and I feel like he has a much better grip on the basic math than me. Did we as a society or even species mentally lazy?

I nice to finally see someone else has that same thought. I feel like older textbooks were written for people much smarter than the university cohorts in the 21st century.

 

[For The Lulz]

The rates you see in Australia for example - that’s really white people (Scots and Irish and Brit origin) getting Aussie UV levels.

Hot take
Sunscreen is a major player and seems to be getting more recognition of the older ones carcinogenic impacts, not sure the newer shit is any better either, time is the great arbiter though so we will see.

Anecdotally, the only people I've know to get skin cancer/melanomas have not been the ones you would expect

 

[Meriasek]

I mean, it's ridiculous. Every asswipe has basically a billion times the computing power of the entire Manhattan Project in their pocket. Running all the calculations done during the Manhattan Project using several electromechanical computers and hundreds of people would require a few minutes. Yet we struggle with so many things.

It sounds mad, but compare FLAC/Lossless quality to Vinyls. One is digital, no matter how hard we try, one is analogue with the full rich sounds. No computer will ever replicate analogue, let alone improve upon it.

Eh, I'm a bit iffy on that. Yes, it's digital, but the effects of that are so far above the hearing range that it doesn't matter. Not to mention that unless you only listen to pre-90s produced vinyls and tapes the source audio has likely been digitized at least once.
What people like about vinyl and tube amps is that they're worse, actually. A halfway decent HiFi amp based on transistors is gonna be a lot more linear than any tube amp. Yet people flock towards tube amps, spend thousands of dollars on the most perfect HiFi tube amp and then claim it sounds "warm". Which is just code for "it cuts high frequencies in a pleasant way". Vinyls also sound "warm" to some. Vinyls don't reproduce infinite frequencies, it's dependent on groove density and the needle. A 44.1 kHz sampling rate audio CD will match the frequency range of vinyls easily, and so will an MP3 at 320 kbps. Lossless formats reproduce it all perfectly, and no, I do not believe that you can hear the difference. There's a lot of psychoacoustics and voodoo going on in the HiFi world, which in my opinion is full of very gullible people with deep pockets.
Now I do love me some vinyls, but for me it's less the sound quality and more the ritual of putting on and listening to an album without skipping the way it was intended, and the larger artworks. I also like tapes, it has a rough Rock'n'Roll charme to it.

I nice to finally see someone else has that same thought. I feel like older textbooks were written for people much smarter than the university cohorts in the 21st century.

I inherited a lot of his textbooks, and they really hit differently.

Half the cost of Vogtle 3 and 4 was pushing paper.

Yeah, same for HPC and every other EPR aside from Taishan. Fucking thing is supposed to be standardised, but they basically had to do all sorts of design from the ground up for each one.

This link is a good explanation of how we got here. I like how it turns out we had too much process control, and the impurities were important to the process.

Yeah, it's quite interesting.
I'm wondering if some work on Sundial continued at least as an emergency measure in case of an impending asteroid impact. Y'know, just to have a gigaton class boomboom to blow up some silly rock thinking it can go hit Murrca. Bruce Willis won't save us anymore.

 

[Overly Serious]

Hot take
Sunscreen is a major player and seems to be getting more recognition of the older ones carcinogenic impacts, not sure the newer shit is any better either, time is the great arbiter though so we will see.

Reminds me of one of the spoof ads from the Robocop movies. Sunblock 5000 and at the end it briefly flashes up "will cause skin cancer".

And somehow now it is extremely hard to just reengineer some filler material? Did we get this much dumber? But in other fields engineering advanced a whole lot, and our tools have gotten so much better. How can it be so hard?

And this reminds me of the WH40K setting where following a collapse it's not that the people are stupid per se, it's that they simply can't bridge the gap between where they are now and where they were. So they might understand the principles of fusion but they don't have the AI and the technology to actually make a fusion reactor anymore. It's like if today all the chip foundries were suddenly bombed and all the backup technical documentation were lost. We'd be able to use what we still had. We'd be able to build rudimentary transistors and logic gates. But we wouldn't know how to put together some 5nm x86 chip with AV512 extensions etc.

It makes sense if you think about it. Our ability to learn something is finite. As the technology spectrum from basic principles to current practice grows ever wider, it becomes less and less possible to understand the entire width of it, you start learning segments. Usually stuff from each end (first principles so you get the idea, current tech so you're useful). Those learning the middle get fewer and fewer. Especially as the commercial need for people to learn the middle is cyclical.

All that said:

Did we as a society or even species mentally lazy?

Yes. As @Duane Dibbley also said.

People are adapting more to be components in a larger information system than information systems in themselves. In practice, being a relay requires less computational power than being memory+processing. Relevant to what I'm saying:

Probably the wrong thread/time to post this considering the last few pages ITT but.

Are people becoming dumber, more brainwashed or more closed off? Conversation online and IRL has gotten worse in regards to anything that ways a little off of the path from completely accepted narrative. I don't just mean socially and politically but within industry and trade knowledge.

There's always been a stubbourness of "I'm right, you're wrong", that's just human nature. It seems to have changed to "This [story/source/book] says you're wrong, so therefore I am right" Even when that source material can be easily taken apart thought demonstrable evidence, proof of working and historical evidence. (historical as in, we did x and it worked. Not necessarily 200 years ago kind of history)

People are now trained to debate via Internet searches. They don't argue from first principles or their own knowledge, they type something into the Internet and paste the result at their interlocutor. This has several argumentative advantages:

1. It is authoritative (it's online therefore carries more weight than your opponent saying "I think...").
2. It is quick. You invest less time in copying your argument/facts than the person who comes up with their own.
3. It is voluminous. There is as much support for your viewpoint as you could possibly want. Related to point two: your opponent requires a large time investment to refute and you have more where that came from.

In so far as people want knowledge for status and power purposes rather than its own sake, it is more efficient to become a relay than a source. The only downside is that this detaches people from judgement and truth. But in return you can feel good.

Add in things like reduced attention spans and Common Core mathematics which is designed to make children stupid and hobble the bright ones, yes, people are becoming more stupid.

 

[Male Idiot]

Found some soy video on youtube aboit the west africa ghost hominid.

Apparently it interbred with another african than those interbred with modern west africans.

It likely split off before Neanderthal.and desnisovans (500kys to 300kya by soy years, 1 mya by non soy dating) , and east africans had a little back migrations with some miniscule denisovan dna pre 70k years ago.

It makes up around 7-12% average dna and mostly relates to cell cemistry and cancer related immune response, not outward looks.

 

[Duane Dibbley]

Eh, I'm a bit iffy on that. Yes, it's digital, but the effects of that are so far above the hearing range that it doesn't matter. Not to mention that unless you only listen to pre-90s produced vinyls and tapes the source audio has likely been digitized at least once.

Digital can't be better than analogue, by definition, because of how digital samples a sound wave. Analogue has infinite sampling, digital cannot.

I agree about the Hifi shit though. I've worked people who have Hifi systems worth £100k+ through the different components. One guy was bragging about how his £100/10cm cable totally made the sound different. At some point, it's snake oil and people convincing themselves it sounds great. Don't get me wrong, there is a difference between cheap and expensive stereo systems, but after a point it gets a little silly.

People are now trained to debate via Internet searches. They don't argue from first principles or their own knowledge, they type something into the Internet and paste the result at their interlocutor. This has several argumentative advantages:

It's the same with everything. You have a group of extreme competent, extremely motivated people at the start, they complete the miracle phase, then you lose them and the knowledge with time. By the third generation, everyone that's left knows just enough to keep the lights on.

I do love this thread.

Two people answer two different questions and by mistake (?) give the same answer to both questions, solving them simultaneously.

People no longer argue on merit because all they can do it argue based on what the first generation of people created, so the third generations who are arguing are doing it from a knowledge POV of only being able to keep the lights on. Which is also a nice analogy for their brains; "the lights are on but nobody is home", that is to say, they have enough brain power to parrot what is written, without having the intelligence to understand why or how the lights work.

Where does it go from here? Evolutionary regression?

*Pink Floyd's 'talkin hawkin' intensifies*

 

[Male Idiot]

Where does it go from here? Evolutionary regression?

Welcome to Costco I love you.

 

[Overly Serious]

Digital can't be better than analogue, by definition, because of how digital samples a sound wave. Analogue has infinite sampling, digital cannot.

Max Planck would disagree, but I believe his point is the more simple 'beyond the ability for the human ear to distinguish, "better" has no meaning'. (Excuse me putting it in my own words).

Two people answer two different questions and by mistake (?) give the same answer to both questions, solving them simultaneously.

Not mistake. Common cause. Small problems are like the branches of a tree. But many of them grow from the same trunk. Look deep enough and you start to find common causes to a variety of things (and common cures to a variety ills).

Where does it go from here? Evolutionary regression?

Fragmentation. Different groups learning that the other party is not listening and wont listen. Lack of any real understanding of the other's argument leading to no compromise on one's own part. Dialogue becomes noise, noise gets tuned out. Babel results. No shared narrative cements in place. Echo chamber war. Conflict.

*Pink Floyd's 'talkin hawkin' intensifies*

"A soul in tension that's learning to fly
Condition grounded, but determined to try"

 

[Meriasek]

Digital can't be better than analogue, by definition, because of how digital samples a sound wave. Analogue has infinite sampling, digital cannot.

I agree about the Hifi shit though. I've worked people who have Hifi systems worth £100k+ through the different components. One guy was bragging about how his £100/10cm cable totally made the sound different. At some point, it's snake oil and people convincing themselves it sounds great. Don't get me wrong, there is a difference between cheap and expensive stereo systems, but after a point it gets a little silly.

I'm not necessarily saying it's better, just that it's not worse.
Samples being finite limits how high a frequency you can reproduce, and at 44.1 kHz that's about 22 kHz and already enough for human hearing, and at 96 kHz it's like 48 kHz and way beyond human hearing. Vinyl isn't unlimited, groove density and needle thickness physically limit the high frequencies to like 30 kHz in lab experiments, and sub 20 kHz in most consumer grade equipment. You can get some 25 kHz out of really high end stuff, but really, vinyl isn't per se better than digital just because it's analog. It's all about what frequencies it can reproduce, and the physical nature of vinyl is a pretty hard limit. Tape is similarly limited by physical constraints like head gap and tape speed, but can be slightly better than vinyl.
Fun fact, while the high range is kinda similar for analog and digital formats, digital usually allows for a few more Hz on the low end.

/edit: Basically, unless you're using some high compression MP3, the format doesn't matter, be it physical or digital. You won't be able to hear the difference. Digital, oddly enough, can actually reach levels of fidelity that physical media would be hard pressed to reach. There's a reason digital audio was taken up very fast by the recording industry even when it was still using limiting physical media like ADAT or early hard drives. It's not just the editing, but the achievable quality and stability with comparatively simple equipment was just a huge plus. You can get a few ADAT machines linked in a small rack and have 24+ tracks without any degeneration after a few takes with cheap S-VHS tapes and have quality equal to or better than a perfectly maintained Suder tape machine that has fewer tracks, uses more expensive tapes (which will also affect your quality), and won't last long.
I guess I am actually saying that digital can be better than analog. Mainly because there isn't a perfect analog medium, and digital can easily reproduce the hearing range or far beyond.