SCP-1484 / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-1484.

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Author Post

PandoraNuker 16 Aug 2025 19:03

Many thanks to Yossipossi and Wynths for their invaluable crit. I also thank Yossi for writing SCP-8980 and inspiring me to write another SCP after 8 years, and Nagiros for creating Deepwell and Director Graham. And thanks to my high school vector calculus teacher, whose lecture on gauge theory inspired the initial idea of this SCP over a decade ago.

Image credits in the license box. Equations and concepts taken from research papers are cited in-article.

This SCP is both a deconstruction of and a tribute to many of the hardcore technical SCPs I’ve enjoyed on this site (including my own prior ones, the wonderful collection of Series 3 physics skips (many of which are crosslinked in-article), and ADMONITION). It was also inspired by the many real-life organizations which used extremely technical concepts to mask unethical cultures and wrongdoing, often to disastrous or even tragic results: Enron, Lehman Brothers, social media algorithms, Boeing, hedge funds like LTCM and Archegos, FTX, etc. It was a natural angle to write a hard-science SCP in Deepwell, which otherwise focuses on humanoid anomalies. It’s that fear every time you have to trust somebody else (or somecorporation else) to do something for you because it’s too difficult for you to understand, that nagging thought of “is this person really looking out for me…or themself?”, with no way to know until it’s too late.

Re: Author Post

krakentoa 11 Jan 2026 23:37

Thanks for writing this article. My background in physics made me recognise the real science in it, and take the article seriously.
I got goosebumps when ethics interviewed the main researcher, due to the way he kept trying to deflect.
The topic of fraud is very interesting. I’ll have to come back and read on the references you mention (eg. enron).

Uncle Nicolini 16 Aug 2025 20:13

The way this makes me feel was best said by a friend:

i don't want to feel like I'm in class. talk about science and make up as much bullshit as you want as long as you're internally consistent but it has to be interesting. what does it contribute to your story to show me a lagrangian?

this just is very much not the kind of thing im interested in reading, versimilitude be damned. I lost interest pretty quickly because I couldn't understand the math too well.

PandoraNuker 16 Aug 2025 23:00

Thank you for kindly leaving your feedback. I personally think that the technical language is relevant, it's pretty core to the narrative/plot (including how Site-17 covers up its scheme), character motivations, and themes of the rest of the SCP afterwards, with all difficult concepts broken down in-universe in annotations or dialogue by characters.

However, the narrative relevance and explanations are several paragraphs in, so in response to your advice I've made a minor edit to the Ethics Committee banner making the narrative purpose of the technical language clear from the very first sentence.

Last edited on 16 Aug 2025 23:06 by PandoraNuker Show more

Rubrica 16 Aug 2025 23:24

I like the concept here of a deliberately impenetrable article as a lead-in to a coverup of ethical transgressions, but I think there are several flaws with the execution, unfortunately.

+ Show feedback

I'm struggling to put my finger on the exact issue, but I think there's a sort of tonal mismatch going on; it's clear from the technical style of writing and the choices of crosslinks (of which I would argue there are perhaps too many, by the way) that this is intended to be taken fully seriously, but then the actual misconduct itself and the way it's presented feels… not exactly comical, but it feels like you're asking the reader to be a lot more appalled by it than I actually felt. Conducting a gold-smuggling operation large enough to involve the entire site is obviously a pretty major transgression, sure, but it's also so outlandish that one has to really suspend one's disbelief to imagine that (a) they ever thought they'd get away with it, and that (b) they did get away with it for so long. At the same time, you have the occasional moments of genuinely much more serious misconduct, like the ousting of Dr Davis, which then get undermined by being juxtaposed with the sillier stuff. The end of the article feels particularly weak, with the listing of the various expenditures almost coming across like the punchline to a very long joke rather than a demonstration of serious malfeasance. The victim statement tries to end the article on a sombre note, but again it's undermined by its surrounding context, and so moments like the description of Zhang's death, which in another context could be quite unsettling, ends up instead feeling oddly slapstick.

PandoraNuker 17 Aug 2025 03:44

Thank you for leaving this feedback, Rubrica. I do not want to dismiss it, however I am reminded of similar complaints about verisimilitude in my classic-con entry (among other complaints), in which some people found sharing IRL context helpful as they found it difficult to believe, so I will do that publicly this time and hope people find it helpful.

Here are some examples of IRL organizations knowingly perpetrating fraud (on a larger scale than Site-17, in financial size and number of people involved), thinking they can get away with it and in fact doing so for many years in every case (longer than Site-17), and with ridiculous tonal dissonance (which I deliberately toned down substantially both for tonal reasons and to make Site-17 look more competent, as reality is unrealistic).

Enron:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-feb-04-fi-enron4-story.html
“That set of tapes, in which traders chanted “burn baby burn” and gloated about inflating costs for “Grandma Millie” in California, inflamed the simmering controversy.” (In the context of deliberately causing blackouts in California)

Boeing:
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/795123158/boeing-employees-mocked-faa-in-internal-messages-before-737-max-disasters
"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”
"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, “No."

The laundry list of improper expenditures, besides being inspired by various corporate scandals like the above, was inspired by someone I was very close to IRL (when I was a child) who was convicted of fraud and shouted at his wife “it was for your Chanel bags!” as he was being hauled off to prison. This person inspired the character of Dr. Mažeika generally.

I hope readers find this helpful in putting this SCP in context.

Last edited on 29 Mar 2026 23:56 by PandoraNuker Show more

Galliformes 16 Aug 2025 23:47

Not to demean the work you’ve put in or sound like a fossil, but you should probably separate the scheme in Deepwell into a tale. There are two focuses in this article, the machine and the criminal activities. The article can focus on the machine and acknowledge how the scheme had turned it Keter, so the tale can go into more depth about what exactly the research team did and the resulting investigation. As other users have said, the anomaly is kind of hard to follow and that concept combined with the many characters involved with 1484’s misusage. You can still connect the article with the tale via a crosslink.

Also, some of your tables aren’t showing up as a technical error. Please fix that.

Last edited on 16 Aug 2025 23:48 by Galliformes Show more

Idkwhatnametoput52 17 Aug 2025 04:37

Edit(feedback): I think the very dense math was executed really well, and was my favourite part of the article. However, the part dealing with the consequences of the fraud on people feels a bit underdeveloped.

fixed errors

I think the table in test log B still has place holders.

Addendum 4

my team requires a large compute run to simulate SCP-1484's

Output
Is this supposed to say 'computer'?

Last edited on 18 Aug 2025 03:47 by Idkwhatnametoput52 Show more

PandoraNuker 17 Aug 2025 11:58

Thank you and Galliformes, fixed. There was a really nasty bug where Apple randomly inserted some invisible characters when copy/pasting into the final Wikidot (while sandbox was fine). I think it should be all good now.

"Compute run" is an intentional industry term.

Last edited on 17 Aug 2025 11:59 by PandoraNuker Show more

xexnoncores 17 Aug 2025 12:24

Agreed with Nico on this one. We have math scps which are infinitely more interesting than this, and those are saved not by the raw math but by the stories around them, of which this doesn’t compute. -1

---

nya? (runs headfirst into a wall and explodes)

find my work here: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/xexnoncores-author

+1

Wynths 17 Aug 2025 13:01

i'll be pushing this one for a while; it may not be immediately appealing to the standard SCP reader, but i think that, should enough people see this, the great conception and execution will make themselves known.

whenwerewe 17 Aug 2025 13:09

I was initially going to make the exact opposite of the other complaints (that you should drop the explanations and go full Egan, confusion be damned) but actually amid all the other dour stories of horrific abuse you get on this site this fairly mundane workplace corruption is really funny and I like it more than the hypothetical technical article that could've been.

(+1)

-1 for too much technobabble

GeminidStrix 17 Aug 2025 14:05

I have to agree with others on this one. The hard math is entirely too difficult to grasp and makes me feel like I'm reading a college textbook (even more boring than my high school ones, unfortunately). There are ways to explain mathematical and technical portions of your article without detracting from your overarching narrative. As Heck_Tech once said on a very technical article I wrote, describing how he believes a text on this site based on technologies and concepts beyond normal comprehension and knowledge should be written:

no technobabble for its own sake, every concept is explained and employed in the narrative to accompany the reader, not to hinder their understanding and appreciation.

There needs to be a balance, and it's 100% acheivable.

Re: -1 for too much technobabble

PandoraNuker 17 Aug 2025 19:39

Thanks for taking the time to leave feedback. This is perfectly sound advice generally, I don’t actually disagree for the most part!

I just find this part (“not to hinder their understanding and appreciation”) strange in the context of an SCP premised on someone trying to hinder understanding in-universe, as mentioned multiple times in-article, especially when other parts like annotations and character interactions re-explain in simpler terms to the reader directly so understanding is not lost. If the difficult parts were not difficult, that would make the Ethics Committee and Foundation look inexcusably incompetent. The IRL regulators, companies, and customers who fell for weather derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, and sleazy aerospace engineering were not dumb, they were some of the smartest people in the world, who were bamboozled by even more difficult concepts (when they weren't just corrupted). I wanted to show people through the SCP format how these tragedies are allowed to happen (and to be honest, I think the meta reaction to this piece continues demonstrating that).

You’re not intended to understand every last word of the mathy parts, they are almost like CSS decoration with a narrative purpose of “this is confusing and the in-universe author doesn’t want you to understand it” which is then elaborated on in the rest of the skip (with some specific concepts resurfacing and then getting re-explained more simply when plot-relevant).

I do take responsibility that the piece needs to speak for itself. The reader’s ultimate reaction is the responsibility of the writer, not the reader. If there is IRL context (like in discussions on SCP-8008), it should be conveyed adequately somehow in the piece, and if there is a theme or narrative that didn’t come across, that (and not necessarily the technobabble itself) should have been clearer.

Last edited on 17 Aug 2025 19:47 by PandoraNuker Show more

Re: -1 for too much technobabble

Rubrica 17 Aug 2025 21:35

For what it's worth, as somebody who has criticised other parts of this article (and I appreciate your response to my criticism, by the way, even if I didn't get round to responding to it), I am personally of the opinion that the 'technobabble as deliberate obfuscation of wrongdoing' part of it is by far the best-executed aspect, and I'm genuinely surprised that that's the part that's not clicking for so many people. If readers are bouncing off the article because they don't realise they're not supposed to understand the physics, I wonder at this point whether it might be worth just being really obvious about it - e.g., perhaps changing the Ethics Committee header at the top to be something like:

This file is undergoing review and revision related to multiple ethics violations. Portions of this file are suspected to have been written as deliberately obtuse for the purpose of concealing misconduct; these portions have been highlighted in red and annotated for clarity where appropriate.

And then hopefully seeing massive blocks of red text might be enough to clue people in that something's up / give them an indicator of the bits they're fully expected to just skim? I admit this is a rather heavy-handed solution.

Re: -1 for too much technobabble

GeminidStrix 21 Aug 2025 15:37

I actually don't think that's a bad solution. Perhaps in-universe, it is. But for the reader's sake, I don't know what I'm supposed to understand and what I'm not supposed to understand. It's a slog to read through a dozen explanations of equations that I'm not supposed to understand, but then again, I don't know if I'm supposed to actually digest those portions or not. Perhaps giving the reader an indicator that "Hey, this part's actually not that important" could help them get through the meat of this article a little easier. Right now, it's like navigating a maze. I just don't think a lot of people are going to commit to navigating it because of how intimidating the math portions are.

-1

Intercedent 17 Aug 2025 21:53

i dont really have an issue with the execution, i think this is actually one of the better hard-science articles on the site

the pairing of quantumn mechanics shit with the EC annotations is a great meta way to explain what's happening to readers, and the actual anomaly is pretty interesting

the main thing i dislike about it is the fact that it's a story about fraud that never illustrates the human cost of said fraud

there's a reason why a lot of articles about the FTX collapse or Enron scandal open with descriptions of the victims involved and the human cost, the reason why financial fraud is awful is because of the victims. And there's really no mention of victims here in anything beyond an abstract sense, and a singular story at the very end. there's no pathos involved at all, none of the characters are very fleshed out, i fail to see why I should really care about this issue as anything more than a wikipedia article. it's a technobabble article without the grand scope and furious insanity of ADMONITION, it's a technical after-action analysis with just a shadow of the pathos of BETHLEHEM STEEL: it's clever, and thoughtful, and the science is interesting but it's not fun to read at all.

Unfortunately downvoted.

Last edited on 17 Aug 2025 21:58 by Intercedent Show more

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