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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
Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022
Contributions for the week of January 2, 2023
- "The Penfield Mood Organ and Me: Are We Already Transhuman by Chemistry and Mnemonics Rather than Engineering?"
Contributions for the week of January 9, 2023
Contributions for the week of January 16, 2023
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"Since the war has started, Ukraine has gotten not only increased aid, but increased attention and various oversight mechanisms."
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Notes -
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.
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:
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:
Katyn Forest Massacre: about 8.69 bodies per square meter
Soviet Report on Katyn: 3 bodies per square meter
Cambodia Mass Graves: 1.8 bodies per square meter
Balkans mass graves
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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