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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   6058 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for January 2023

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

This month we have another special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality garnered several AAQC nominations throughout the month:

Part 1 – The History of Transgenderism

Part 2 – The Causes and Rationalization of Transgenderism

Part 3 – How Transgenderism Harms Women And Children

Part 4 – How Transgenderism Took Over Institutions And How Some Women Are Fighting Back

Part 5 – Conclusion and Discussion

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@gattsuru:

@Rov_Scam:

@OracleOutlook:

@popocatepetl:

@AmrikeeAkbar:

@urquan:

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@erwgv3g34:

@ymeskhout:

@aiislove:

@faul_sname:

@throwaway20230125:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FiveHourMarathon:

@dr_analog:

Contributions for the week of January 2, 2023

@FiveHourMarathon:

@Rov_Scam:

@JhanicManifold:

@screye:

@problem_redditor:

@veqq:

@daezor:

@LacklustreFriend:

Contributions for the week of January 9, 2023

@naraburns:

@huadpe:

@Stefferi:

@FCfromSSC:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@Dean:

Contributions for the week of January 16, 2023

@Dean:

@ControlsFreak:

@Stefferi:

@DuplexFields:

@ymeskhout:

@strappingfrequent:

@doglatine:

Contributions for the week of January 23, 2023

@gattsuru:

@TracingWoodgrains:

@arjin_ferman:

@vorpa-glavo:

@Amadan:

Contributions for the week of January 30, 2023

@gattsuru:

@TracingWoodgrains:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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Thanks, I just joined (from reddit), and this is a good start to find good posts :)

There's one every month. I highly recommend binging all of them, there's a lot of good content in there.

Good posts. However the whole network state posts are fantasy land.

All these other ideas and good discussions going on, and I get an AAQC for a bit of Star Wars fanfic?

…You know what, considering how weighty and dire all these other things are, I’ll take it.

@aiislove:

This is truely strange to see. Normally its rare for an interesting comment to also get an interesting response, but this is an entire thread thats almost all people bouncing schizo theories off each other.

That post shouldn't be on the list in my opinion. @naraburns Too much of it is objectively wrong. Homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE should not be presented as universal.

Beyond that particular post, the quality of the discussion in that thread is abysmal because too many people, including aiislove, are mixing up the concepts of position, activeness, and dominance, and in other cases using words like "role" with ambiguous meaning. I tried to clear it up here but I don't know if it will help.

Eh. Strongly agree it's mostly wrong, but found it interesting to read as a result - how does someone come to those conclusions? So don't object too much to it being in AAQC

Regarding inclusion on this list, I will simply repeat what I said last year:

All nominated posts go into a single pile. Dozens of posts, often well over a hundred, are nominated every week. The soft goal for each week is to recognize about ten quality posts; sometimes less, sometimes more, but much more would get quite unwieldy. Some nominations are obviously people using the AAQC report to mean "I really agree with this user," but I think a solid majority (so far!) are posts that could plausibly be included in the roundup.

Unfortunately that means the primary goal of the moderator sorting through the pile is to look for reasons to exclude nominees. Posts that receive noticeably more nominations than other posts get more benefit of the doubt. Posts that themselves generated other Quality Contributions get more benefit of the doubt. Beyond that, it's a curation process. Did I learn something from this post? Are others likely to learn something from it? Does it represent a view I don't encounter often? Does it exhibit some measure of expertise? Is it surprising or novel or beautifully-written? Does it display a high degree of self-awareness, effort, and/or epistemic humility? Does it contribute to the health of the community? Is it likely to generate further interesting discussion? On rare occasion I will disqualify a post because the user who wrote it has other, better posts already included in that week's roundup--but sometimes a post seems too good to not include, even if it means that user gets three or four nods in one roundup.

But, sadly, given that it is a winnowing process, probably the single most important question is just--how does this compare with all the other posts I'm reading through right now?

Now, posts that do break other rules are generally discarded first. Some AAQCs do receive negative reports also, and this is shown in the AAQC queue. A negative report does not automatically disqualify an AAQC nomination, but if the post is in fact unnecessarily antagonistic, heated, etc. then it's usually easy for me to throw out. If you are reporting a great many of the posts you see here, and truly nothing you nominate appears in the report, my inclination would be to wonder whether you understand the rules or the purpose of the sub. If I have included something in this roundup that had negative reports, I either concluded that those negative reports were being used as a super-downvote button, or I found that the post's positives greatly outweighed the negatives.

The post by @aiislove may well be wrong in some way or other, but it at least appears to be a thoughtful attempt to engage with some ideas most readers know little or nothing about. It was not presented as rigorously factual but rather as introspection and experience. At least, I assume that is why it received so many nominations. It also generated other interesting, wonkish takes on the subject, including your own. Since the foundation of the sub is to encourage discussion between people who substantially disagree, this makes the thread a shining example of exactly the sort of engagement we like to see around here. Hopefully that helps you to understand its place on the AAQC list--the point is not that any of these posts are correct. In most cases I would have no way to know! Rather, the point is that these conversations are the kind of thing this community exists to cultivate.

(Thanks for being one of those contributing!)

I think my post touched some nerves with you and @gattsuru (in this comment). You both have made long responses to my post and I think your replies mostly align with the mainstream position of homosexuals in polite Western society. But my post aligns with my own experiences. I opened it with a disclaimer that I was speaking for myself and if anyone objects then they're free to, which you two have done. I don't have the energy to respond line by line to either of your posts but if you want to talk more my DMs are open.

FWIW I used to buy into a lot of the points that you both make in your posts but the way I describe things in my post reflects the way I see things. I'm not going to walk back any of my opinions but I don't personally see most of the things in either of your posts as being informed by experience but rather as being informed by a more naive worldview that serves to paper over the less comfortable parts of the homosexual experience that many people have to live with.

To assert that my post is objectively wrong when I opened it with a disclaimer stating that it's based on my personal experiences and anecdotes is a bit irritating to me when I don't even assert that my opinions are objectively correct.

Is there anything in my posts that you're willing to admit rings true for you?

And not sure if this is poor form but I want to specifically respond to the last paragraph in your post:

Please just be careful about who you trust and what you believe on the Internet. The parent post sounds insightful but it's really just deep insecurity colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region. I hope that the pseudo-insight isn't what led to this being listed as a Quality Contribution.

I don't think it's really great for you to link to another comment where I'm being honest with my feelings and giving advice to people as evidence that I'm "deeply insecure." My posts and worldview are absolutely not "colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region," I have traveled many places and dated many men and am basing my worldview off of things I've seen that seem to be universally unifying. Rather I think that your framing of the three concepts (position, activeness and dom/sub) as well as the rest of your and @gattsuru's comments are characteristic of being colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region (namely the present day USA/Western Europe or somewhere with massive US/Anglosphere influence) much more than mine are.

Homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE should not be presented as universal.

Fundamentally, I think that homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE, for example, help illuminate homosexual relationships everywhere. And that to not generalize based on homosexual practices in one culture, onto homosexuality in every culture, is small minded and essentially segregating whereas using my experiences from one culture to apply to the concepts of another is precisely how we can learn more about ourselves and each other.

I don't even assert that my opinions are objectively correct

my post reflects the way I see things

I think that this is why no one critically engaged your post for the first week. People objected only after it got listed as a quality contribution. Once that happened things were different. According to naraburns, the top two curation criteria are Did I learn something from this post? and Are others likely to learn something from it? And that was the problem: people were learning things from a post that was based on opinion- a post that had had no critical responses at all to challenge it nor any context setting up your, umm, interesting psychological uniqueness. If someone had said, "Here is an interesting example of how someone with fearful-avoidant attachment orientation views gay relationships" then we would have had a great post. But no such context was given.

I don't personally see most of the things in either of your posts as being informed by experience but rather as being informed by a more naive worldview

I provided something better than experience: I provided evidence in the form of cultural words and phrases like "power bottom" which people have heard that support my point. There are more like "Bossy bottom". You can buy shirts and pillows with that written on them. Those wouldn't exist if your worldview was correct. I also described emergent phenomena in Grindr and Hinge. You must have ignored all of this in order to assert that our posts are informed not by experience but naivete.

(continued from previous sentence) that serves to paper over the less comfortable parts of the homosexual experience that many people have to live with.

Seeing as the context here isn't conservative countries, I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Based on your other post I assume that you mean bottoming and being submissive. I also don't know what "many people" is. With respect, this is pretty strongly reading as internalized homophobia. You've already hit a few of the things on that list and I don't know you very well.

I think that your framing of the three concepts (position, activeness and dom/sub) as well as the rest of your and @gattsuru's comments are characteristic of being colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region (namely the present day USA/Western Europe or somewhere with massive US/Anglosphere influence) much more than mine are.

Except for the last five words of that sentence I absolutely agree! Both of our worldviews are common in particular places and times on Earth. So the important question is Is someone right? And if so, who is right? First we need to know the question. @curiousagain's post here uses some particular words like root cause, parasites, genetic birth order, thirst, testosterone, beards, body hair, muscle mass, aggressive, and violent. It is obvious that the context of the question is innate human characteristics devoid of as much outside societal influence as possible. So where should we look in order to see how gay people live when left to their own devices? When they are free to live as they want and let their culture develop free of outside pressure and influence as much as currently possible? The answer to that is obvious: the anglosphere.

What if we completely ignore the context of the question and say, 'In any context or location, how do gays want to live?' The answer to that, too, is closer to the way gays live in the anglosphere than the way they live outside of it. The way gays in the U.S. live today certainly isn't the 'final form' but it is closer to it than in the UAE. I strongly believe that the only reason to feel involuntarily "degraded" by bottoming is if you are taught to feel that way. It isn't the default. That means that as middle eastern and other cultures become more accepting of gays, they'll eventually start viewing position, activeness, and dominance with my nuance rather than as one concept with your lack of nuance.

I think that homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE, for example, help illuminate homosexual relationships everywhere.

I'm all ears. Also the goalposts seem to be on the move.

I'm really flattered my post got AAQC'd. I had no idea how it would be received but I'm glad I could spark some interesting conversation. It's all really informed by years of lurking on the motte and applying lots of logic and lessons from other topics to my own experiences with sex and relationships

Thank you for your service.

Another month with some great posts.

I missed quite a few of those that were buried deeper in the threads. In particular, I'm impressed by @faul_sname for his incredibly patient response regarding Holocaust records. His presentation of the evidence is exactly what this community is supposed to be about.

In turn, I am saddened by the fact that a yet another round of pretty diverse AAQCs devolves into a Holocaust debate. But oh well, collapse@ignore.

While we're metadiscussing. @naraburns, the last entry (my post) is linked with the quote from @greyenlightenment's blog, I apologize for my relative ineptitude at writing concise punchlines but think that's a tad unfair to both of us. Just a nitpick.

I feel quite foolish for not realizing what I would unleash upon these comments.

I apologize for my relative ineptitude at writing concise punchlines but think that's a tad unfair to both of us. Just a nitpick.

It was not clear to me why you had offset that with quotes, sorry. I'm happy to change the tag to whatever you like.

No, sorry about making that unclear.

I'd suggest: «Media is being honest and good to have you believe it's honest and good when it's actually deceptive and bad – and those few issues are central to its mission.»

Done!

but his main contention seems to be that the burden of proof is being improperly shifted

That's a facade, though. I mean, there are legitimate questions to ask about any historical event, but an ideologue isn't really just disputing one specific thing for the purpose of correcting the historical record.

I will ever return to creationists, because the analogies are so apt. Well-rehearsed creationists will point out missing intermediate fossil records, nitpick theories like punctuated equilibrium, and shift the argument to abiogenesis, and claim that they are just trying to get the science right and expose flaws in evolutionary theory. The problem is that no amount of proof, no discovery of missing links, no falsifiable claims or application of Bayesian reasoning, would ever sway them, because their actual position is that God created life and evolution is an atheistic lie. Likewise, the actual position of "revisionists" is that Jews are a tribal enemy and that the Holocaust is a weapon that needs to be neutralized.

Ask a creationist or a Holocaust denier what evidence would convince them they are wrong, and they'll describe something they know is impossible to produce. The only reason for debating them is because without opposition they could take in the credulous and ill-informed. But one shouldn't make the mistake of thinking you're engaged in actual, honest intellectual debate with someone who is immutably motivated by belief in Biblical inerrancy or anti-Semitism, respectively.

Amadan explicitly picked out creationists, not evolution skeptics. The motive is in the name, they explicitly believe that evolution is a complete lie, but pick holes to claim they are just skeptics.

Secure Signals is applying the standards of a modern criminal investigation rather than of history. In particular, the level of evidence that is required to convict someone. A person who goes missing under suspicious circumstances is sufficient to consider the possibility of homicide, and if you do have a body, you can absolutely say that a murder likely took place even if you can't prove the specific sequence of events leading to it to the standard that a court would require in order to convict a suspect.

In contrast, in the study of history, we often are required to use slim evidence in order to conclude anything at all, and the further you go back, the less evidence. For example, I've read that Hannibal is not referenced by any primary source, nor by any known source at all until at least several decades after he died. (This is sometimes given as a contrast to Jesus, for whom we have several different records within a few decades of death, by people who allegedly knew him personally, which is fairly unheard of for a regular person from 2000 years ago, and so by historical standards, it is considered quite likely that a historical Jesus did exist. You can object to this standard--but then you should probably be rejecting everything we allegedly know about history prior to the year 2000 or so, rather than quibbling over the details of one particular event).

For example, they write:

The Holocaust is the only controversy where you can just list a name, Date of Birth, "some sort of police document" and then claim that she was murdered without any factual basis.

This is probably more evidence than we have for the existence of victims of most historical atrocities, including the Holodomor, Rwandan Armenian Genocide (not sure how I made that mistake), Rape of Nanking, the Belgian Congo, deaths of slaves in the Western Hemisphere, murder and invasion of Native Americans, Gengis Khan's pillaging, etc. Maybe they think we shouldn't believe any of those happened either, but it certainly is not the case that the Holocaust is being held to unusual standards.

I think this is a great instance where Bayesian reasoning is helpful: If the Holocaust happened pretty much as claimed by most historians, then what evidence would you expect to still exist and have been found? Would you expect lots of detailed records to have ever existed for most people in that time period? Would you expect them to survive the war? On the flip side, if it didn't happen, would you expect any of the evidence that faul_sname points out in his comments? Standards for scientific journals or criminal trials exist for a reason, but that doesn't mean that those standards have to apply to every question.

I think the "Christ myth" example is a good analogy. People who maintain that Jesus never existed require a level of evidence that would also disqualify them believing in the vast majority of figures of Classical antiquity; yet for some reason they never extend that skepticism to Alexander or Hannibal (or my namesake, Fabius Maximus).

Originally much of the arguments against Jesus' existence centered on Pontius Pilate, who as a Roman governor would be the type of person you would expect to show up in the historical record regardless, and yet when he subsequently did so it was only in the context of his relation to Jesus. Therefore if no Pilate, no Jesus. Again, nevermind that it wasn't exactly uncommon for Roman officials to slip through the cracks of history, and if one were to require multiple independent mentions to justify the belief that a given Roman official existed you'd start running out of them fairly quickly. Luckily though a series of archaeological finds in the 1940s-60s unearthed various other contemporaneous evidence of Pilate's role as Roman governor of Judaea and that particular argument got put to rest.

Of course to this only shifted higher the burden of proof for Jesus' existence, because the root of the argument is based in its rhetorical utility against organized religion, not its factual merit.

I think the "Christ myth" example is a good analogy. People who maintain that Jesus never existed require a level of evidence that would also disqualify them believing in the vast majority of figures of Classical antiquity; yet for some reason they never extend that skepticism to Alexander or Hannibal (or my namesake, Fabius Maximus).

This is what rank and file Reddit atheists might say, but arguments of top Christ mythers are more substantial.

You are right they are rejected by mainstream ancient historians as strongly as Holocaust revisionist takes are rejected by mainstream WWII historians or "ancient Egyptians invented light bulbs and airplanes" takes are rejected by professional Egyptologists.

Most "respectable" Christ myther today is Richard Carrier (genuine ancient history PHD, as he never forgets to introduce himself).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier#Celestial_Jesus

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55723528

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21964522

TL;DR of his basic argument is

I think it is more likely that Jesus began in the Christian mind as a celestial being (like an archangel), believed or claimed to be revealing divine truths through revelations (and, by bending the ear of prophets in previous eras, through hidden messages planted in scripture). Christianity thus began the same way Islam and Mormonism did: by their principal apostles (Mohammed and Joseph Smith) claiming to have received visions from their religion’s “actual” teacher and founder, in each case an angel (Gabriel dictated the Koran, Moroni provided the Book of Mormon).

On this model, Christianity, as a Jewish sect, began when someone (most likely Cephas, perhaps backed by his closest devotees) claimed this “Jesus” had at last revealed that he had tricked the Devil by becoming incarnate and being crucified by the Devil (in the region of the heavens ruled by Devil), thereby atoning for all of Israel’s sins, so the Jerusalem temple cult no longer mattered, the sins of Israel could no longer hold back God’s promise, and the end of the world could soon begin. On this theory, Christians did not go looking for proof-texts after their charismatic leader died, but actually conjured this angelic being’s salvific story from a pesher-like reading of scripture, finding clues to the whole thing especially in the conjunction of Daniel 9, Jeremiah 23 & 25, Isaiah 52-53, and Zechariah 3 & 6. Because it solved a major theological and political problem of the time: how the world could be saved when God’s temple (and thus atonement for Israel’s sins) remained in the hands of a corrupt elite “obviously” rejected by God.

It would be several decades later when subsequent members of this cult, after the world had not yet ended as claimed, started allegorizing the gospel of this angelic being by placing him in earth history as a divine man, as a commentary on the gospel and its relation to society and the Christian mission. The same had already been done to other celestial gods and heroes, who were being transported into earth history all over the Greco-Roman world, a process now called Euhemerization, after the author Euhemerus, who began the trend in the 4th century B.C. by converting the celestial Zeus and Uranus into ordinary human kings and placing them in past earth history, claiming they were “later” deified (in a book ironically titled Sacred Scripture). Other gods then underwent the same transformation, from Romulus (originally the celestial deity Quirinus) to Osiris (originally the heavenly lord whom pharaohs claimed to resemble, he was eventually transformed into a historical pharaoh himself).

.......

Originally much of the arguments against Jesus' existence centered on Pontius Pilate, who as a Roman governor would be the type of person you would expect to show up in the historical record regardless

No, he would not.

Few people are aware how sketchy are our sources from ancient world, how big gaps are in our knowledge, and how well is history of province of Judea documented compared to the rest of Roman Empire.

For example, do you know who exactly was governor of Sicily (far more important and influential part of Roman Empire than some eastern desert shithole) at the time?

You do not, and neither do ancient historians, at least until some lucky find brings new dated inscription.

Few people are aware how sketchy are our sources from ancient world, how big gaps are in our knowledge, and how well is history of province of Judea documented compared to the rest of Roman Empire.

I was paraphrasing the argument of Christ mythers. I'm well aware of the kind of knowledge gaps that exist in the Classical/Medieval period.

That is, he believes that mainstream historians are the ones who should be obligated to produce physical (or other equally compelling forms of) evidence in support of the claim that approximately 3,000,000 Jews were murdered in extermination camps. I'd like to see someone with the commensurate knowledge engage him on that specific claim.

One of the problems here is, though, that when you look at the demographical aspect of this theory - as we've done in the previous Quality Contributions Thread discussion on this (are we just going to have an ongoing Holocaust revisionism discussion in quality contribution threads? Shouldn't there be a separate thread for this?), it turns out that a large part of the revisionist answer on the "Where did the Jews go?" question is the supposition that there was another Jewish genocide - one conducted by Soviets, who trucked the Polish Jews falling on their territory or escaping there to Siberian labor camps, where they then weren't heard from again.

However, the revisionists do not seem to feel compelled to prove any particular proof of this genocide, whether we're talking about similar proofs offered by non-revisionist Holocaust scholars or other proofs. Where are these camps? Are there testimonies from Gulag system guards, administrators and workers (a number of whom would probably be Jewish themselves, still, at this point) that a particular number of Jews suddenly reached them around this? Train records showing this? When presented with NKVD internal records showing other numbers than those claimed, it's summarily dismissed with "Soviets lie, NKVD lies". The proof of this momentous event happening is basically anecdotes, hearsay and conjuncture.

It's not a question of burden of proof being shifted, it's that revisionists don't seem to acknowledge that their job is not just to revise - provide commentary on the non-revisionist view - but to offer a lofical, credible history of what actually happened here, and that does involve things where one would expect the burden of proof to fall on them, such as, say, this particular question.

I have yet to come across a Holocaust "revisionist" who is not also antagonistic towards Jews as a group.

It's ipso-facto antagonistic towards Jews to engage in revisionism on this question. At least that is the framing they have established.

I do not doubt that the Yad Vashem Database is an accurate accounting of people murdered in the Holocaust

You should doubt it, because the methodology by which they determine a person was murdered is extremely flimsy- such as testimony over 50 years after the fact, from some friend or acquaintance who lost contact with so-and-so all those years ago.

It's also based on assumptions surrounding the use of code words in documents. So when a document describes a transport as "leaving the ghetto for work", the Holocaust historians assume that this was coded language for "murdered in gas chambers" and everyone on the transport is assumed as murdered. Revisionists have already shown many cases of duplicated entries, survivors listed as "murdered", and many people changed names after the war and lost contact with friends and even extended family.

There is no investigation whatsoever that these people were actually murdered. It is not a scientific source by any means. Why would a passport application be evidence that a person was murdered?

That is, he believes that mainstream historians are the ones who should be obligated to produce physical (or other equally compelling forms of) evidence in support of the claim that approximately 3,000,000 Jews were murdered in extermination camps.

The reason I'm a denier is because I find it completely unbelievable that anyone would believe this claim without extremely strong physical evidence. It's even harder to believe the antagonism of the mainstream position towards minimum standards of investigation that would be expected for the most cut-and-dry murder case of a single victim.

You won't get a good answer, you will get things like "Look at this name and this passport application", and people will find that compelling- even people here who are otherwise skeptical of highly unlikely claims.

You will notice that the closer they get with specificity, the more they can't justify their claims. @netstack was clearly moved by @faul_sname listing a few names from a database, he probably didn't even notice that @faul_sname never provided any evidence for his claim that 70,000 Lodz Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz in 1944, and never engaged with the Revisionist research that disproved the assertion.

For example, mainstream historiography makes the claim that at least 700,000 people were buried* in a precisely-known area of a small camp of less than 5 acres (or less than 5 football fields!). Why would anybody believe such nonsense without physical evidence? No number of passport applications in the Yad Vashem database is going to convince me of that assertion.

Er. I think I may not have explained clearly enough what I was doing there.

My purpose in listing those 5 names was not "make the account more moving by providing names instead of inhuman numbers". My purpose was to determine whether it was likely that those names corresponded to (1) real people who were (2) from a plausible area to be on that transport and (3) not obviously still alive after WWII.

If those names didn't correspond to anyone I could find details about pre-1940, that would have been evidence against that list of 4.8 million names corresponding to 4.8 million people. Likewise if the names and birth dates were repeated dozens of times, or if the documents looked like forgeries, or if there was an obituary from a 1976 newspaper about one of the 5 people and another two had gone on to have children in the 1950s. Those are ways the world could have looked.

In fact I got the outcome I pretty much expected. Which rules out a whole bunch of the specific ways "those 4.8 million names do not belong to Jews who died in Nazi custody during WWII" could be true.

As a note: you should not just believe me. I could have cherry-picked my random numbers. You should instead choose your own random numbers, and then test whether those random numbers appear to you to be people who did not exist / duplicated records / people who have a suspicious obituary in 1976, by looking at the world with your own eyes, which is a thing you are allowed to do.

Are you an auditor? What you did with the names would be referred to as "vouching": taking a sample from your population and finding the source documents for those in the sample, to verify management's assertion that those transactions actually exist.

I am not. We call it "random sampling" or "spot checking" in the professional context I inhabit (my role is dev / analyst (/ product manager / customer support / designer / qa / etc... can you tell I work at a small company?))

I do, in fact, do some fraud detection as part of my nebulously defined job responsibilities, though. For that my favorite heuristic is actually

  1. Pick a metric. Any metric. The stupider the metric sounds, the better. If you're running a marketplace, "fraction of orders with a positive subsequent review from the customer" is a good metric, but "average time from order to shipping label printed" might actually be better by virtue of not particularly sounding like it points at anything valuable.

  2. Rank all users by that metric.

  3. Take the bottom and top 5 users (with a substantial amount of account activity) by that metric.

  4. Most of those 10 users are probably trying to defraud you.

Ah, very cool. Sampling is a big part of auditing, as is directionality: vouching, for example, goes from final answer back to source documents, while tracing works the other way, from source to final, in order to verify existence and completeness respectively.

General auditing is directed more toward finding error than fraud, but forensic stuff interests me quite a bit.

I too would enjoy seeing someone engage on that specific claim, though it is not going to be me since I am a bit burnt both on the topic in general[1] and also with that style of engagement in particular[2].

Honestly, I am not all that happy with how that discussion went -- I was trying to impart the mental motion of "notice that you are making claims about the physical world, and that the natural thing to do when you have a claim about the physical world is to make an advance prediction that would be surprising if your claim was false and unsurprising if it were true, and then go out and look at the world". And I don't think I succeeded in imparting that mental motion.

[1] I had heard the term "the banality of evil" before starting that thread. I had thought I understood it as being along the lines of "people will do terrible things because they were specifically ordered to do them, and they just unquestioningly went with the order". I had not counted on "people will commit atrocities that require considerable creativity and ingenuity in order to avoid having to make an awkward status report to their superiors". In retrospect it should not have surprised me so much, but consistent exposure to it is still not great for my mental health.

[2] It felt very much like the discussion was about "evidence" as in "courtroom" rather than "evidence" as in "Bayes". I enjoy arguments where someone makes a surprising (to me) statement about the world that comes from them having a very different model of the world than I do. I particularly enjoy the bit where we can figure out something that is at least in principle testable where we have radically different expectations of what the result of that test would be. And then we run the test, and one (or both) of us learns something new and surprising about the world. By contrast, I don't particularly enjoy arguments about who is or is not reputable, what secondary-source evidence is credible vs not, what arguments are admissible -- sometimes those arguments are necessary, if it's not possible to look at the physical world, but I don't enjoy them, and I particularly don't enjoy them in places where it feels like it should be possible to look at the physical world instead.

I was trying to impart the mental motion of "notice that you are making claims about the physical world, and that the natural thing to do when you have a claim about the physical world is to make an advance prediction that would be surprising if your claim was false and unsurprising if it were true, and then go out and look at the world". And I don't think I succeeded in imparting that mental motion.

This is the Revisionist methodology. The mainstream posture is "believe witnesses", but Revisionists are the ones most critical of the likelihood of the claims having physically happened in the real world. Revisionists are the ones who engage the evidence in a Bayesian sense. Let's give an example.

It's claimed in mainstream historiography that about 800,000 Jews (with estimates up to a million) were killed and buried in the alleged extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland. So this one small camp constituted about 25% of all extermination camp murders during the short period it was in operation.

If we take a step back, before we even consider any evidence for that claim, you would have to agree that the prior likelihood of such a thing happening is extremely low. Even in wartime, where massacres and atrocities do indeed happen, the sheer scale and industrialized processes claimed are unlike anything else in human history. Yet you are quite confident that this actually happened. Is your confidence informed by your interpretation of the evidence, or do you think it's been formed by consensus-building institutions and popular culture?

The first step for anybody who becomes a denier is to recognize that his previous certainty in the truth of these events was purely driven the same forces that drive the confidence of adherents to any other cult or religion. So if you want to take a Bayesian approach you would need to:

  • Understand what mainstream historiography claims specifically

  • Assess the prior likelihood of that claim being true

  • Decide for yourself if the evidence for the claim is commensurate with the gravity and unprecedented nature of the accusation

Let's do these steps in consideration with a single problem in the mainstream historiography on Treblinka: burial space.

What does mainstream historiography claim?

There are many minor variations on the orthodox narrative, but I'll rely on the most important one which is Yitzhak Arad's, who was director of Yad Vashem for over 20 years. The claim goes essentially like this, in short summary:

The Treblinka extermination camp was opened at the end of July 1942. It was staffed by about "twenty to thirty SS-men" plus a Ukrainian auxiliary guard and Jewish prisoner-workforce. Every day thousands of Jews were brought to that camp by train and murdered in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, using exhaust from a motor which was captured from a Soviet tank. Arad states the murder weapon was the exhaust from a diesel engine, but since then Revisionists have disproved the feasibility of the use of diesel exhaust for mass murder and so the mainstream orthodoxy has recently switched the alleged murder weapon to an internal combustion engine.

The Treblinka extermination camp did not have a crematorium- the victims were buried on-site in large mass graves until March 1943. In March 1943 Himmler visited the death camps and ordered the cremation of all the victims:

The dismantlement of Treblinka began after Himmler's visit to the headquarters of Operation Reinhard and to the death camps at the end of February- beginning of March 1943. Prior to that 800,000 victims still had to be exhumed and incinerated and also other work still needed to be done in order to obliterate all traces.

So starting in March 1943, 800,000 corpses were exhumed and cremated on open-air pyres (again- no crematorium), along with the corpses of some new victims. There was a camp revolt on August 2nd, 1943. In total, Arad estimates 850,000 people were murdered and cremated in the 150 days of cremation operations.

Prior likelihood?

The claims above are truly unbelievable- literally. If you were starting from an objective viewpoint, you would have to agree that this is an extraordinary claim and you ought to require strong evidence to believe it. We'll only consider burial space here as an example, even though it isn't even the biggest problem with the orthodox narrative. But we can still approach the claim by simply quantifying what is claimed by Arad:

Arad states 800,000 people were murdered and buried before the order for exhumation and cremation. I'll emphasize that these people were buried in a precisely known location within the Treblinka camp, so we can simply measure the possible areas where these people could have been buried if they had been buried. The maximum estimate for burial space in this area of the camp is 2 hectares / about 5 acres.

This is a picture of the Rose Bowl stadium, with a capacity of about 91,000 people. Some Revisionist super-imposed the Rose Bowl stadium to scale with the Treblinka extermination area, with "possible mass graves" identified by GPR results in yellow.

So those yellow areas are supposed to account for the burial of over 8 and a half Rose Bowl stadiums full of people. The GPR results are complicated by the fact that, in 1955, a monument was constructed that covers about half of the alleged extermination area in concrete. Revisionists claim that this is spoliation of evidence, and the decision to cover the alleged mass graves with concrete was motivated by an intent to impede scientific investigation, as no mass graves have ever been exhumed on this site to this very day.

I'll note that I am granting for the sake of argument that this 1.6 hectares covered by concrete could feasibly serve as mass grave area, even though 0% of this area has been shown to cover mass graves, and the decision to cover the area in concrete should be interpreted as evidence against the conclusion. But for sake of argument, those 1.6 hectares comprises the vast majority of burial space since the more recent GPR results (above in yellow) did not find mass graves of the quantity or size alleged.

Even granting a "possible mass grave area" of 2 hectares, we can also consider the prior probability of this claim by comparing the alleged burial density of this theoretical site to other known mass graves. Some Revisionists have collected some data I'll add below:

Arad's claim of 800,000 victims murdered in the ~2 hectares (maximum) area of the camp would come out to 40 bodies per square meter. And again, that's assuming that every square inch of the area covered in concrete was used as a mass grave. Alarm bells should be going off if you aspire to approach the question from the perspective of Bayes.

Evidence?

There's the least to talk about here, because the simple fact is that not one single mass grave has ever been excavated in the camp. There was a 1945 excavation that claimed to find some human remains, but concluded that the investigation found no mass graves and that none likely remained in the camp. Then we have the GPR results I considered above which also failed to identify any alleged graves of the size claimed. Of the about 2 hectares which are claimed to have held 800,000 corpses, 0% of this area has been shown to contain mass graves.

So, I don't believe the claim. Not even close. There is witness testimony and court verdicts, but the evidentiary value of those things does not even come close to bringing these claims within the realm of possibility. It did not happen, period. If witnesses and courts claim it happened, that should be interpreted as evidence for a large-scale propaganda hoax because the physical evidence doesn't bring those claims remotely within the realm of reality.

Like I said, this is only considering the problem of burial space. There are even bigger problems, like the cremation claims, in which the orthodox claims are likewise completely demolished by Revisionist claims about the physical world.

It's the orthodox narrative that prefers to live in the world of forms rather than answer hard questions about the scientific feasibility of what they claim. Anybody who endeavors to approach these claims using a Bayesian perspective should come to strong Revisionist conclusions.

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