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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Some follow-ups on past stories

Southport stabbing suspect accused of murder of three girls charged with owning Al Qaeda training manual

The teenager accused of the fatal stabbing of three girls at a dance class in Southport has been charged with production of a deadly poison and a terror offence, the chief constable of Merseyside Police has said.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court by videolink on Wednesday charged with production of a biological toxin, Ricin, and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism.

The charges come after searches of his home in Banks, Lancashire, Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The terror offence relates to a PDF file entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual, Ms Kennedy said.

Previous discussion here, and here.

Part of the controversy was about how the right wing assumed the attacker was a boat-refugee and/or a recent immigrant, and while that part remains false, another part of it was about his religion, (see Al-Jazeera, Wikipedia, BBC, or even our own discussion) and how it was wrong / islamophobic to jump to conclusions this way. It now turns out that he was indeed radicalized by Islamists.

Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif Has XY Chromosomes And “Testicles” : French-Algerian Medical Report Admits

A shocking new development has emerged in the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after a French journalist reportedly gained access to a damning medical report revealing Khelif has “testicles.” The news comes months after Khelif seized a gold medal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics.

The report was drafted in June of 2023 via a collaboration between the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris, France, and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, Algeria. Drafted by expert endocrinologists Soumaya Fedala and Jacques Young, the report reveals that Khelif is impacted by 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a disorder of sexual development that is only found in biological males.

(...) The report concludes by recommending Khelif be referred for “surgical correction and hormone therapy,” to help him physically align with his self-perceived gender identity, and adds that psychological support would be required because the results had caused a “very significant neuropsychiatric impact.”

Previous discussion here and here, and here.

More than the object level of either of those stories, what I want to know is: what do?

I've had this discussion with @Hoffmeister25 about assuming the worst about your outgroup without any evidence. While I maintain that it's plenty of fun when your unproven stereotype-based claims are vindicated, I'm going to agree with him that this way lies madness, and that's no way to have a conversation on controversial political issues. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this sort of recommendation for caution is asymmetrical. When mainstream institutions make a claim, that claim is itself treated as evidence, any caution goes out the window, and requests for evidence are met with ridicule. So how should we be approaching these controversies, given that bombshells like these hardly raise an eyebrow anymore?

As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media. Vibe Analysis has been the subject of some ridicule, but I think there should be some space to say "I don't have evidence for this, but my gut says there is something off here" and Reddit-tier "source?!" responses to that should not be accepted. At the end of the day we're only people, and our guts will influence us, no matter how much pretense of objectivity and evidence-baseness we'll put on top of that.

Just because one owns an Al Qaeda training manual does not mean that one has been radicalized by Islamists. Al Qaeda knows a lot about terrorism, so if you want to do terrorism it might be a good idea to read their manual even if one's political ideology has nothing to do with Islamism.

Agreed, but the BBC was reporting there were 'no known links to Islam', presumably after police had searched the guy's house and found the ricin and Al Qaeda manual. At the same time, police had said they weren't currently treating it as a terrorist incident.

There was a huge loss in trust of the government to accurately report what they knew about the attack when they knew it. The latest excuse seems to be that reporting information about motives early 'might impact the legal case against the attacker', with no same standard being held to the Prime Minister quickly painting rioters as 'Far Right Extremists' with a sweeping broad brush prior to their trials.

In an attempt to mitigate ethnic tension in the short term via narrative control, the UK government has lost long term credibility in their reporting of future incidents.

Anyone that wants more information on this topic should check out the /r/unitedkingdom subreddit and search for 'southport stabbings'. Huge culture-war flareup over the last few days with some accounts seemingly doing damage control for the govt's early narrative.

The problem with this is that there is a very clear record of condemning people for their thought crimes on this exact basis.

You can't kick a non-white person and call them a slur without making the attack racially motivated.

You can't create a right wing political movement whilst owning ethno-based political material without being labeled a neo nazi terrorist organization.

By the very same token, you can't stab children in the face whilst owning an Al Qaeda training manual without being labeled a muslim terrorist.

So would you say it is unlikely that the dude got radicalized by Islamists, or are you just pointing out this is not a smoking gun? The latter claim is not interesting, as it's only a matter of time until it gets resolved now that there's a full-blown terrorism investigation. But I don't think this should be an argument that allows people to throw a wet blanket on the conversation around immigration and Islam.

Forgive me if this question has already been asked. What would this medical report imply for Khelif's lawsuit against JK Rowling and Elon Musk, if anything? If Khelif has testicles (and is hence a man/male by any reasonable definition of either term), how can Khelif claim JK Rowling defamed Khelif by describing Khelif as such?

I've only seen other people ask this question, but haven't seen an answer. I'd imagine you're right, but I'm not a lawyer.

That is not the definition of woman the courts will use. In the UK especially, truth is not a defense against libel.

I thought Khelif filed the suit in France.

rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence"

Does it? I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "without evidence" used sloppily by anyone whose definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".

definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".

Wouldn’t the definition of “A is Bayesian evidence of B” be “P(B|A) > P(B)”

I typed >0 when I meant to type >1, yes. That's very embarrassing.

It's not being sloppy with the phrase "without evidence", as @RenOS pointed it's more about elevating your position to the null hypothesis.

The whole Bayesian reasoning thing always felt like a gimmick to me anyway. You can claim to be a good Bayesian no matter the outcome of any particular case.

it's more about elevating your position to the null hypothesis.

One of the key differences between Bayesian and frequentist statistics is that the latter has a "null hypothesis" and the former does not. Priors aren't the same thing; in Bayesian-speak an experiment leads to an update that's a real number, not a binary acceptance/rejection.

You can claim to be a good Bayesian no matter the outcome of any particular case.

Yeah, but you can also claim to be a good non-Bayesian pundit regardless. The biggest difference from my point of view is that I've seen the best rationalists publish graphs of how well their past predictions, as declared in advance, turned out to be calibrated. I've never seen anybody more mainstream than Nate Silver do the same, even though "my punditry is my profession and public service and livelihood" would seem to entail a much stronger case for doing so than "I like blogging", so I'm going to doubt that rationalism has led to much of anything in the mainstream media.

... which is a shame, because an admission of "that's evidence but not enough to budge my priors" really is a big step up from a declaration of "without evidence". When not moving far from your priors is a good idea (which it often is - I've seen legitimate evidence for Flat Earth Theory!) you at least gain a little humility from having to openly admit what you're doing. And when your conclusions resembling your priors is a bad idea, you're more likely to notice that eventually if you have to acknowledge every time when you're dismissing Not Enough Evidence rather than Not Real Evidence.

People can claim to be good anything regardless of facts on the ground. Talk and unfounded claims are cheap and may even be free (ignoring opportunity costs).

I'd expect anyone who outright calls themselves a Bayesian to do better on that front.*

*Going off Bayesian priors about what the kind of people nerdy enough to have even heard of the idea are like, let alone self professed ones

I mean that the whole framework is designed so that you never end up having to eat crow. "My priors for this are very low. Oh, it happened anyway? Oh well, I promise to bump up my priors somewhat for the next time this non-repeatable event happens!".

Uh.. That's the worst way of reasoning from evidence that's ever been tried, barring all the others.

Absent logical omniscience, you are occasionally going to be wrong, and then you try to be less wrong. Taken deeply enough, no macroscopic events in the history of the universe are likely to ever be truly alike or repeatable, so sorting out reference classes is unavoidably important.

"I was wrong about World War 3 not happening. Well, we can't have a World War 3 2.0 happen for me to be right about, but at least I can adjust my priors for massive wars happening in the future".

Besides. You can very much eat crow when you are confidently wrong. It just takes intellectual honesty, and Bayesians at least pay lip service to the notion we learn from our mistakes. Keep being bad at updating, and people will stop considering what you say to be informative (and that's not unique to self-professed Bayesians, because in practise most humans apply the concepts implicitly, some are more disciplined and explicit than others).

It's curious how eager some people are to deny that the Southport killer as an off-the-boat refugee. Surely, that he was a second generation immigrant makes the whole situation worse! What it means is that even when you're not importing terrorists, you're importing people with with a high propensity to become terrorists. There could hardly be anything more damning of British immigration policy, and yet somehow that he was not "off-the-boat" is seen as pro-immigrant.

If stopping people arriving on boats is at the edge of the Overton window then removing people whose parents came on boats is well outside it. If you can rule out the first solution by saying it wouldn’t have solved the problem anyway then you don’t even need to refute the second, most people won’t dare discuss the implications you’ve drawn out in public so the public battle is already won for the pro-immigration side.

The pro-immigrationists know that claiming different ethnic groups have different propensities to violence is still mostly beyond the pale, even for anti-immigrationists. Therefore, they can dissimulate by claiming that anyone born in the UK is 'British' and therefore any crimes ethnic minorities commit cannot be blamed on immigration. They can be safe in the knowledge that the obvious counter-argument to this won't be made publicly, even if it is true.

There's a good chance that many of the pro-immigrationists have secretly noticed who commits most of the crime though. From there, I can see two approaches. Either blame racism for minority crime rates, or secretly read Steve Sailer while keeping quiet for the greater good. I'm sure the latter is pretty rare though.

How do we want to call the social manipulation technique at work here? I'm voting for "the social scientists gambit", since it's especially widespread there. It goes like this:

Adam: I'm 6.2.

Bob: No way, you look more like 5.6.

Adam: You have no evidence for this statement, so you should default to trust me.

Bob: Actually, I have measuring tape, let's just see.

Adam: I'm calling HR, this is beyond rude!

Or in more general terms you a) control the null hypothesis and then b) either claim that even testing the null hypothesis is offensive, or you allow it to be "tested" as long as the procedure is designed to get the correct results. Just see the frontpage of /r/science and try reading up on the actual definitions of terms like "racial resentment" or "hostile sexism" for practical examples of the latter.

Imo one big problem is the frequentist / null-hypothesis framework to begin with. You can't have a reasonable opinion about anything if you by-default assume 95% hypothesis A (which just-so happens to be the one you favor) 5% everything else. The appropriate attitude is bayesian priors, which are difficult to do perfectly but in rough terms are actually quite simple: You assume relevant stats of the general category (say, murder rates per ethnicity or religion) and then slightly or strongly adjust based on how much you know of the case (say, a witness explicitly states an assailant screamed "allahu akbar!"). Of course, this makes the next problem obvious, which is abusing incorrect stats, such as claiming that we're not allowed to use the murder rates per [category], but only population percentages.

The other obvious problem is harder to manage: Manipulated/plainly wrong stats. Tbh, I've yet to find a good approach that scales for this one. Sometimes they cook the numbers in obvious ways that are even openly stated in the manual which is easy to adjust for, but more common seems to be the situation as with the recent californian retail thefts, where technically speaking everything is done correctly, but one step in the pipeline completely fails in an undocumented manner.

At least attempting something like this seems better than just going by your guts. And if this is too involved to always do for everything - which I consider understandable - hard scepticism is also always an option as well.

Okay, but that example is actually rude, no? Demanding someone’s measurements is not normal. Neither is insisting someone recant. Calling someone a liar is almost always picking a fight.

An observer would come away from this conversation thinking both participants are assholes and possibly stupid.

Sure, that's how it works. If an observer does not consider it rude, the the tactic falls flat. The trick is to make a claim that makes you look good in such a way that there is no way to call it into question without looking like a douchebag. So I chose an example that would be plausibly considered rude by an average reader here.

But keep in mind that many liberal readers have the same instinctual reaction you have, but to the insinuation that different ethnicities might have different murder rates. Likewise, a honor-virtue ethics society might simply consider Adam pathetic, and Bob virtuous and brave.

Edit: Also, feel free to adjust the example if you think you understand roughly what I'm getting at! I try to find a middle ground between brevity and fidelity in these kind of examples, so it's hardly perfect.

I’m inclined to call it “normal social maneuvering” instead of anything about social science!

make a claim that makes you look good in such a way that there is no way to call it into question

That’s definitely the crux of it. Some claims can’t be made to some audiences. Some questions can’t be asked to others. I don’t know if I can come up with a better example.

Regarding the edit—yeah, I feel that. I have a hard time going for brevity.

I can see the argument that it's part of the repertoire of normal social maneuvering, but it's still a particular manipulative technique that imo deserves some snappy name. "just a joke bro" is also part of normal (male) social maneuvering, but obviously a very different kind.

As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media.

Reject Rationalism, embrace rationalism.

That is to say, movements will be corrupted by status games and politics, but ideas remain true or false regardless. It is rational to observe the degree to which the mainstream media is attempting to manipulate public opinion with both carefully-crafted deceptions, repetition of lies, and aggression towards alternate sources of info, and write them off. It is rational to note how science with the wrong conclusion is buried or never even attempted and to see how the universities have purged themselves of wrongthinkers, and write them off as well.

It is rational to recognize that the words of a liar are very poor evidence. And it is not rational to deny that a liar is a liar and call it charity.