LessWrong (Curated & Popular) "Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?" by rba
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Jan 27, 2026 They dig into a Cold War stock sleuthing story that linked lithium trades to H-bomb secrets. They introduce the quirky Pentagon Pizza theory and trace its origins. They walk through data-collection hurdles, scraping tweets and building controls. They preregister tests around three military events and report backtest results showing no meaningful pizza signal.
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Alchian's Lithium Detective Story
- Armin Alchian used corporate financial data to infer that lithium was key to early hydrogen bombs during Castle Bravo era.
- His work acted as the first modern event study and drew federal scrutiny for revealing secrets via open data.
Public Data Can Signal Secret Activity
- The Pentagon Pizza theory claims pizzeria traffic near the Pentagon signals intense military work and impending operations.
- This leverages publicly available location data to infer sensitive government activity from mundane consumer behavior.
Scraping Roadblocks And A Selenium Workaround
- The author struggled to access Twitter/X data due to paywalls and API restrictions and used a slow Selenium script to recover tweets.
- This workaround produced 648 clean Pentagon Pizza Report tweets for analysis.
