The internet is filled with stories that purport to teach us a valuable lesson or something about how the world works, and they’re really important because they really happened. NASA spent millions of dollars designing a space pen, which was really foolish when they could have just used a pencil like the Russians. I think not as many people believe that anymore, but it’s still floating around out there.

Here are three more stories which will never decompose, because it’s more fun to retell the tale than question why.

third burgers

In the mid 80s, restaurant chain A&W launched a third pound burger to compete with McDonald’s, but the initiative failed because Americans are too stupid to understand fractions and thought 4 is bigger than 3. I think people like this story because they know fractions, so if everyone else gets it wrong, that affirms they’re smarter than everybody else.

The source for the story is a paragraph or two in Taubman’s 2007 autobiography, written more than 20 years after the events in question. He was the owner at the time (and inventor of the shopping mall). He was also convicted of price fixing in a separate incident, which is one part ad hominem and one part billionaire will say or do anything to be right. It’s not the product which sucks. It’s the customer who’s stupid.

For context, A&W had been not just declining, but dying when Taubman took over the business. By the time customers allegedly had to do fraction math, most of them probably had their own opinions. I also question the business acumen of only doing focus group testing after rolling out this all in sales strategy. Wouldn’t you first do some local testing before going nation wide? The biggest question I have is, given your recent discovery of Americans’ innumeracy, how do you not pivot to selling fifth pound burgers?

I can totally believe they did a focus group, and one dumb dumb said the burgers sounded too small. It’s a funny anecdote, and might have bubbled up to the CEO. But what did the other 99 people in the survey say?

target dad

Target ran an ad program so detailed they would know you’re pregnant before you do. An outraged dad storms into the store manager’s office, demanding to know why they’re trying to hypnotize his high school daughter into getting pregnant with diaper ads. Then a few days later he apologizes. Target was right. She was pregnant.

What sets me off is the Disney perfection of the story. Dude comes into the store to complain, happens every day. But the story would be meaningless without the followup apology to confirm the truth. And then the mouse pulled the thorn from the lion’s paw.

The story source wasn’t the manager, however. It was the assistant to the regional manager, or something, who somehow happened to be hanging out in the manager’s office for both events. Don’t they have their own job to do? And recorded the conversations to provide verbatim quotes to the reporter.

I wouldn’t expect a flyer from Target to have been preserved, but the article is pretty vague on the dates when this super specific ad program was running or when the dad got mad. Did the assistant to the regional manager effect the program change? It’s supposed to be a cautionary tale, but who cancelled the program before the tale was told?

This seems more like one more hypothetical in an article filled with hypotheticals that got lost in the telling. The whole article is built up on tales of the dark secrets of advertising, but when it comes to verifying, there’s no confirmation of anything. Even the author’s original source has gone silent, after feeding him a bunch of stories.

There’s also what I’ll call the null hypothesis story. This incident could have happened even without any tracking. Mail coupons entirely at random, you’re going to mail some diaper coupons to teenage girls. We should therefore expect some mad dads regardless, but this one anecdote doesn’t tell us if we’ve exceeded the mad dad base rate. So that’s another reason I think it’s made up. If you researched complaints received by Target managers, you’d unearth so much insane crap this story would never register.

brown candy

Bury some small detail in your contract, then check if the vendor did it, and you’ll know if they did the rest. People really, really love this story. But did it happen? Well, of course, look, here’s a photocopy of the contract!

But did it work? I’m supposed to believe that upon discovering a brown candy, Van Halen went out and double checked all the pyrotechnics and whatnot. When? How much time is there between arriving at the backstage ready room and their performance? Isn’t the opening act already out there? How long did they delay the show? If the check was that fast, why not just always perform it?

Why would anyone assume that the snacks subcontractor has any relation to the munitions subcontractor? This is like the age old advice that you should never buy a lawnmower from a salesman with a crooked tie.

The primary source is David Lee Roth’s autobiography. Do we consider Roth, writing in 1995, to be a reliable narrator of events that occurred in 1980? Did you read any of the rest of the book?

From what I’ve been able to piece together, the entire story comes down to a single incident at Colorado State Pueblo. Van Halen played a show, and both trashed the dressing room and caused extensive damage to the arena floor, typically used for basketball. Again, the cause and effect doesn’t really align. They played the show anyway. They damaged the floor despite the rider. And how, exactly, does trashing the dressing room result in a safer stage experience?

There’s another version of the story that when Van Halen shows up with their trucks of gear, the local facilities staff say that looks heavy, let’s put some additional plywood underneath to distribute the weight. The road crew says no, we’re Van Halen, we’re the experts, we only do things our way, with our equipment, contract, contract, contract. And sure enough, the stage was too heavy, and the supports dug into the floor. Know it all expert ignores local wisdom and disaster ensues. Have you heard that one before? But maybe the editor of the big book of fables decided we had enough examples, so this time the story got changed up.

I can believe that Van Halen put a no brown M&M’s clause in their contract, for the simple reason that they can. It’s fun to imagine some peon having to dig them out of the candy bowl. I can believe they trashed a dressing room, because why not. But I will never make the leap that some idiosyncratic requirement in a contract can be used as a shortcut for evaluating adherence, or that Van Halen had the foresight to do so.

recency

What all these stories have in common is they came to light to explain something that happened long ago. By the time the story was out, the sources were hard to find, and who really cares?

But did you hear about the Air Force AI drone that turned around and killed its operator? Which turned into a simulation, and then it was a thought experiment, and then it was just a made up story. Or the botnet of bluetooth toothbrushes that destroyed a bank? That was pretty quickly clarified into a hypothetical of a mistranslation of a miscommunication.

What’s different is that these events allegedly occurred now, and people asked questions. If either of those examples appeared in a book published twenty years from now, they’d be accepted without question. “Oh, yeah, cybersecurity was wild back in the 20s, I remember that toothbrush botnet. Took down a lot of our services.” Instead we’ll be reading a book about a refrigerator botnet in twenty years, and somebody will question if it really happened, and the internet will tell them of course it happened, that’s where Silicon Valley got the inspiration from.

honorable mention

Low background steel.