Ivy League students used to be forced to pose nude for photos upon being admitte | Hacker News Reader

Ivy League students used to be forced to pose nude for photos upon being admitte

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Now you don't even have to take it off to be in 25 Hottest People At Yale, smh...

When r/conspiracy is true

Happens more often than most are willing to admit, especially lately.

There are many more conspiracies in plain sight.

Many of the discussion on those forums are about plain sight conspiracies. Where it goes off the rails is when discussion turns into baseless speculation.

To put it in crass words, it’s been amusing to see discussions on “sensitive” topics on HN always use the same formulaic modes of thinking because people are either conditioned or explicitly withholding controversial viewpoints because they think they’ll be punished for it, all the while there’s ego-stroking around the supposed high quality of discussion. It’s like Groundhog Day.

Yes, r/conspiracy is true, as are 4chan and a number of websites that have been banned/taken offline over the years. You’re basically not allowed to question whether or not any of their members’ posts had valid points, lest you become an outcast like them.

The boogeyman for us all is that if we allow all modes of thinking, then the clever trolls will usurp the discussion and drive their own narrative. So we wink and look the other way, unaware that the same outcome has occurred regardless.

This is basically "beatings will continue until morale improves", only when it comes to thinking, rather than physical abuse.

My understanding is that they were destroyed, but I’m guessing there’s hundreds of copies made by sysadmins over the years as thousands of nudes of every student is unlikely data to stay squirreled away. I’m guess they didn’t have any data audit controls back then so they would not have a way to monitor who made copies and where they are.

Sysadmins? These were photographs. Film and paper.

You don’t think anyone digitized them in the decades of their existence? Salacious information wants to be spread. If there were folders full of nude students, I think that would be of interests to people who like nude pictures and they would circumvent whatever controls were in place. Just by existing.

Obviously a few have, as they are available online. I would guess the vast majority have not. One of the linked stories in that Reddit post describes how many of them were burned or shredded in the 1990s. Nobody was mass-digitizing old paper records back then, storage was too scarce and too expensive. There was no S3.

Could someone add a date to the headline? The linked article is from 95, the experiments from 1940s-1970s.

Sounds like perfect blackmail material?

No more so than any medical information in the possession of an employer or school.

Yeah my medical info doesn't include nudes to my knowledge. It just says I have low cholesterol.

Your medical info. Other people's medical information at universities during these years might indicate pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, TB, genealogy and an number of things more embarrassing than a simple nude photograph.

This. These aren't secret photos of lewd indiscretions. If some villian made them public at worst it would be mildly embarrassing. Hardly blackmail material.

Exposing that someone went to an Ivy League university and did what authority figures told them to do is bad blackmail material.

What in the hell?

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