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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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This seems to be boiling down a disagreement on our priors on election fraud likelihood, like with many other people replying. I do not agree with that analogy of what it was like before the election. Adjusting the analogy, I would say it would be like the weather man saying "Firefighting helicopters are continuing to fly over area A to get to the forest fire, but lucky for us in area B, we won't have to deal with them flying over us (analogous to there being fraud, but not significant fraud). Expect scattered sun showers (analogous to setting expectations for the 'red mirage') and low visibility from all the ash in the air (analogous to the info environment making it hard to tell what it true or not in the moment and afterwards).

then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event

responding to this specifically since I see it brought up a lot. I can't interpret this fact without also knowing how normal it is to do such a thing. Is it a normal practice? What is the reason for not storing it? Maybe there's a good reason, maybe not. Maybe it's best practice and storing data has been tried but they changed it for a good reason. Who knows. Without context, I can't really interact with that info. It's like if you told me "Bob doesn't save his receipts when he goes the grocery store! Something fishy is happening", then we obviously know that it is no big deal. But, the only reason we know that is that we have the context of it being extremely common for people to not save their receipts, so Bob not saving them as well isn't notable.