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I think planting a flag is enemy territory is a noble project. But... is this the right spot for that? Almost no one here believes in the strong stolen election hypothesis.
This feels like going into a Christian church and yelling "it's okay to eat bacon - fight me". Like, yeah, everyone agrees with you, and you are fundamentally misunderstanding your audience.
If you want to debate something more interesting, maybe debate the weak stolen election hypothesis, which I'll define thusly: An election run under 2016 rules would have led to a Trump victory.
I don't know how long you've been around, but in the immediate aftermath of the election there was an entire gaggle of posters who would jump on practically any allegation of fraud as being dispositive, from people claiming that the specific numbers were "Statistically impossible" because they violated some kind of theory, to every video that was purportedly of some guy with a suitcase full of fake ballots. When 2000 Mules came out there were a lot of people who thought this was pretty strong evidence. This is what @Corvos means when he talks about a motte and bailey argument; someone was accusing Yassine of weakmanning a few days ago because nobody really took the 200 Mules arguments seriously. WEll, I remember getting into several heated arguments with people who were insisting that, previous claims aside, this was the strongest evidence available showing that Biden fraudulently won the 2020 election. I was mostly focused on the ridiculous mechanics involved in actually running such a scheme, but now that it's clear that the factual claims were likely fabricated out of whole cloth, that argument is suddenly no longer in vogue.
As far as the Biden v. Missouri stuff is concerned, at a certain point, the alleged misconduct becomes so vague and collateral to the central argument that it should no longer be persuasive to anybody. In baseball, the Mendoza Line is a sort of minimum statistical performance standard. Mario Mendoza was a player from the 1970s who embodied the true spirit of a "replacement level" player, someone who was of similar ability to a fringe major leaguer or minor league call-up. The idea is that players should be evaluated based on how much better they are than the kind of player who a team can get on a moment's notice for practically nothing. Usually the term is used pejoratively, as in "he's batting below the Mendoza Line".
For election fraud claims, I present the Abrams Line. Stacy Abrams famously refused to concede the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to winner Brian Kemp, because she thought that Georgia election policies were rigged in such a way to discourage likely Democratic voters, particularly minority voters. Almost all Republicans waved away these claims as horseshit. I agree that they were, but at least they ostensibly had something to do with the election itself. The idea that "Trump lost because social media companies cracked down on supposed COVID-19 'misinformation'" makes Abrams look like she has them dead to rights by comparison. OR the corollary "Trump lost because social media companies censored the Hunter Biden story", which leaves out the fact that this censorship was only in effect for, at most, a few days, and that the story itself was national news about a day after it broke. These theories also rely on the supposition that social media is so powerful that no one can avoid the grip of the information it conveys... except of course, for the people making these arguments, who are obviously immune to any forms of persuasion. The other side's propaganda is always leading the country down the tubes, be it social media ads or talk radio or whatever, but whenever, for instance, a lefty is asked how much conservative talk radio they'd have to listen to before voting Republican, the obvious answer is that they'd never vote Republican but other people would. I'd like to meet these people some day.
Do you mean me in particular?
I'm quite proud of that. The New York Times posted two data points from ongoing vote tallies, based on their direct access to the data. I said that those two couldn't be consistent with each other, based on nothing more than a priori mathematics. It turned out that I was right and the New York Times was wrong, because one of the updates in their data source was just a typo and a later update reverted it. The conspiracy theorists' explanation for the discrepancy was also wrong, but the final score in that particular round was still New York Times 0, Specific Numbers 0, Conspiracy Theorists 0, TheMotte Statistics 1.
I don't remember who it was, exactly, but what you posted wasn't the kind of thing I was referring to. I'm too lazy to research the specifics here, but there was some kind of law used in auditing that says certain numbers are evidence of fraud because of how the digits are distributed or something along those lines, and they were using that alone as evidence that vote totals from certain counties were fabricated.
Ah, Benford's Law. Great in other contexts, but here that one didn't pass the smell test for me; the "law" only applies if you're sampling from distributions spread over orders of magnitude, not voting districts drawn to be nearly equally sized multiplied by vote percentages centered around .5. I later learned there's a clever trick where you can look at later digits' distributions instead of the first digit's, but all the skeptics I saw in 2020 were just misapplying the basic version of the law.
I've seen final vote tallies that were obvious fakes from the numbers alone, but for elections like Saddam's or Putin's, not Trump's or Biden's.
I still heartily approve of trying to check, though. An election isn't just about getting the right result, it's also supposed to be about getting the right result in a transparently trustworthy way.
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You're talking about Benford's Law, which works by counting the leading digits in order to build a distribution, then comparing this distribution to the expected. Perhaps unintuitively, 1 is by far the most common leading number, and 9 the least.
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To be clear, I would classify both of these as malicious election interference, especially the latter. Yes, the news made its way out eventually but it was prevented from going viral. The combination of preventing mainstream outlets from discussing it and wheeling out someone from the FBI to lie about it being fake turned a legitimate and hugely damaging story into a wacko conspiracy theory. It was a close election, I wouldn’t be surprised if that and a couple of other things tipped it.
Different people respond to different forms of media. I know people who are influenced by, say, radio vox pops even though I certainly wouldn’t.
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I feel like this place would have difficulty finding someone to argue the strong election hypothesis of votes changed but also have trouble finding anyone to argue against a Trump victory in 2020 if the election was ran on 2016 rules. Both seem to be very difficult positions to take.
More interesting and entirely difficult to prove would be whether the Democrats could have won in 2020 if they didn’t go full tds. TDS I believe was a root cause of COVID lockdown excesses and the severity of the 2020 “everything is racists” and riots. If the Dems stayed normies and didn’t go full scorched earth and just ran on a milder Trump is unstable type of campaign. If the Dems do mass mail-in voting and avoid the riots they win in a landslide in 2020. If they avoid the riots but have closer to 2016 rules it would be quite interesting. One could also say the same thing about the 2024 lawfare attempts as actually boosting Trump despite it obviously be an election strategy for the left.
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Would you define "strong stolen election" hypothesis as people actually faking actual votes in some way? Cases of fraudulent ballots, directly manipulating vote totals, etc?
I am pretty sure I have seen a number of people here argue for those sorts of hypotheses, both during and immediately after the election, and over the years since.
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Yeah I agree, and it's been one of my frustrations with ymeshkout. I think there's lots of things that are reasonable to believe / valid to discuss without having ironclad evidence one way or the other, but with him everything turns into a trial where you have to prove everything beyond reasonable doubt.
Patently false. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having confidence qualifiers to any of one's beliefs, I myself do this when I express a conclusion I'm unsure about. It's perfectly fine/commendable for someone to acknowledge that they lack ironclad evidence for their belief. The problem is making confident assertions without the ability to back them up.
This is the place for folks to "test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" after all. We could all save a lot of time if people were more transparent about their foundations.
Oh god, you're doing it again.
Yes, I'm sorry for not stating my objection in the form of a 10 page legal document, where all possible caveats are pre-emptively addressed, but that is exactly the problem I'm gesturing at.
Nah, I'm thrilled by the most perfunctory of acknowledgements from anyone holding a position weakly. I rarely even get that much of a morsel.
Right, but now you're just flat out dodging the objection I raised.
Your objection would be valid if it was true, but I already denied that it was based in fact.
But you helpfully demonstrated it in the course of this very conversation.
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IME:
-Weakly justified beliefs resist close examination.
-Loose thinkers dislike rigor taking all the fun out of it. Theory is fun but details are a drag.
True, but if you insist on only discussing strongly justified beliefs, you won't have much to talk about. A fair application of the standard you're bringing up end with abolishing many of the ideas that the functioning of our society rests on.
False. It has nothing to do with the thinkers, but with the ideas. Rigorously justified ideas simply become a matter of fact. The theory of relativity might be mindblowing at first, but becomes rather mundane when you're taking time-dilation into account in your calculations for a living. The ideas that are fun are the ones that still have some mystery about them.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the flat earthers in that documentary who do experiment after experiment to "prove" the earth is flat, fail every time, and still retain their belief. Seriously trying to examine and justify the belief is gauche, that was never the point. The point is to get together with your buddies, talk about how the man is getting you down, and work on some crafts projects with cool toys.
Cute, but then how many ideas we've been fighting over can be described as "strongly justified"? Is mass immigration good or bad for a country? Are differences in performance between groups down to genetics or systemic oppression? Will AI be our doom, and what steps should we take to prevent it?
Take either position you want on these, and neither one will be "strongly justified. You could argue that the proper approach to that would be to say "we just don't know", and I suppose I agree, but there still decisions to be made on these issues. Rationalists have their Bayesian schtick, but as far as I've seen it's just a mathematical expression of whatever opinion they wanted to hold anyway.
My conclusion is that there are issues that aren't going to be proven rigorously, and in these cases it's fine to have strongly held beliefs without strong justification. The best way to get at the truth in these cases is to create an environment where people with strongly held opposing beliefs are forced to interact with each other. You're not going to get a particularly accurate answer, and half the time might not even be directionally correct, but it blows "rigor" out of the water.
Most of your examples are either claims about the future (AI) or questions about values (democracy, immigration) where there is no "right" answer, at least right now. It's unusual to find questions about objective, observable facts of the near past or present like "did event X factually happen?" or "what is the objective shape of the planet?" where either position can be strongly justified.
Where people do retreat away from the bailey of agreements and factual claims to the motte of "it's fine to hold my belief!" it reflects a deep detachment from reality, to an extent that there's nothing that could bring them back. The arguments are just window dressing, they are not the point, trying to address them is just bad form.
I don't think I ever heard anyone say "I would be for mass immigration even if it was caused a massive spike in crime!", so taking people at their word, I don't think these are purely questions of about values. You might say we shouldn't take people at their word, but given how we went from "there is no immigration crisis" to "the republicans are the ones preventing us from fixing the immigration crisis", it feels like people's opinions on the issue are connected to some consequences, and aren't just an expression of their values.
That could be a different phrasing of exactly what I'm getting at. I would say that there is a right answer, but we have no way of knowing it. In these cases the best way to find it's approximation is creating a contested territory, and letting people fight it out.
I disagree. For years claims about Epstein were "detached from reality" "conspiracy theories" right up until they were proven right. It would have been wrong to rely on the "rigorous" approach here, as it would result in the issue being dropped, and hard evidence never being found. Same applies to things like election fraud, barring a dumb stroke of luck, or an outright confession (though I think even a confession could be dismissed), we are never going to get hard evidence on this question, and it's disingenuous to act like if the claim was true evidence for it should be accessible.
I'm someone in favor of open borders and would bite this bullet. It's fair to say my position is primarily (but not exclusively) based on valuing freedom of movement over a consequential analysis. It's hard to cleanly break the two however, because a significant objection I have against immigration restrictions is that they're insufficiently narrow. If I had to pick a restriction, I would always pick something like "anyone with IQ >150 is allowed in" over something like "only 10,000 Cambodians per year".
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“Was there significant fraud in the 2020 US election” is a different kind of question than “will AI pose a threat to humanity” or the effects of immigration or group differences.
Some people confidently assert there was significant election fraud, in stark contrast to available evidence.
Reasonable people can disagree on say nature vs. nurture (though not blank slatism), but it doesn’t seem reasonable to assert significant election fraud, given the dearth of evidence and abundance of bad evidence.
"AI will pose a threat to humanity" is different in because it's about the future, and the only way to verify it is to wait and see, so I can agree it's not the best example. Still, despite there being no evidence that it will, some of the most prominent figures of the rationalist movement confidently assert that claim, to the point they will argue for bombing countries that would defy their proposed policies.
The question of group differences or immigration is not a different type of question. In theory they can both be resolved factually, the same way the question of election fraud could. The biggest difference is that these questions don't have the destruction of evidence baked into them like elections necessarily do, as a result of the secret ballot.
While there's not enough evidence to conclusively prove election fraud, there has been enough suspicious behavior that I cannot blame anyone for coming to the conclusion that there was. The issue is a lot closer to nature vs. nurture, where both sides are floating in a sea of unknowns, than to blank slatism, where one side has been conclusively BTFO'd.
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It’s fine to discuss any kind of belief. What’s problematic is having an imbalance between the strength of the belief and the strength of the evidence.
There’s a type of person who relishes gray areas and loose approaches towards grand theories. This type of person does not like systemic approaches to truth. Perhaps the classic example of this is when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson tried to hash things out in multiple podcasts.
On a Motte podcast re: Jan 6, at some point toward the end Yassine’s counterpart said something to the effect of “you know I’m not following the exact details on that; I’m more of a big picture guy.” Same dynamic.
I don't think that's the case. Our entire society rests on very weak evidence. Is "abolish the police" a good idea? Is democracy the best way to organize society? We're no way near to rigorously answering those questions, but dicking around with them would most likely end in disaster.
I notice that your arguments rely a lot on psychologizing your opponents, and don't really contain much of a case for your approach to truth.
“Abolish the police” is a horrifically bad idea! I’m a bit flabbergasted you would propose that as an area with weak evidence.
“Democracy” empirically outperforms anything else we’ve tried at scale. Plenty of debate to be had over what “democracy” even means or if an even better system is possible.
My approach to truth is bog standard rationality(TM).
The dynamic of “loose vs. tight” thinking is issue-agnostic, by the way. On this issue, I’m psychologizing some posters who seem allergic to the lawyerly approach overall.
“Democracy outperforms” actually feels weakly proven to me. Lots of great empires and golden ages were not Democracies. A lot of Englands peak was hybrid. Augustus period of Rome wasn’t Democracy.
Singapore wasn’t a Democracy.
Peter Thiel of course believes in Monarchy.
Democracy also seems to work very poorly in low IQ countries. Even if you could make a strong argument that Democracy works best for Western European people you would still struggle with Democracy is best in sub-Saharan Africa. Saudi Arabia I feel like would be worse if Democracy between the historical religious and a likely fight over oil spoils.
It seems as though the key thing to government is having a great deal of individual agency below the government and buy in by the people.
Oh it is weakly proven without qualifiers.
Gotta limit it to the last few hundred years of history to start.
And I completely agree it’s “hard mode” that simply can’t be pulled off well in many parts of the world. (I don’t think IQ is the issue in say Russia or Iran, but culture and ideology matter.)
Bur after the USSR’s collapse, the ChiComms have the only real rival system in the running and it’s not a model that anyone is copying (unlike the Soviet model).
Western democracy/market capitalism/liberalism has worked in enough places over enough time, and defeated or outlasted several strong competitors, such that using the short hand of “it’s the best system” is something I believe is well justified by the historical record since 1776.
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It wasn't tested very often, and definitely not under controlled conditions. If you think it has strong evidence, your standards are pretty low.
Historically "democracy" has been a spit in the bucket, and in pre-democratic times, it's rarity as a system of government was used as proof that it cannot work, the same way you are currently trying to claim it is clearly superior. I will also note the lack of controlled conditions. If this is your idea of rigor, you're using the word differently then I am.
Yeah, rationality(TM) isn't a great approach to truth for many issues.
Right, and you are not engaging with their arguments against the lawyerly approach, and not providing your own arguments for it.
It’s incredible to me that you assert here that we do not have sufficient evidence regarding policing or democracy to make reasonably confident assertions, at a broad level at least…
…but that there’s room to believe there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
Whatever system of epistemology you’re using is alien to me.
“Controlled conditions” is a red herring because it’s a laughably impossible standard for say the type and level of policing and its effect on crime. The best we can do is observe natural experiments and adjust accordingly. We can also use available evidence and a bit of extrapolation to judge the proposals to defund the police to be a very bad idea for improving crime rates.
Also, I have directly engaged with several arguments against the lawyerly approach. You might think I’m wrong, but please don’t accuse me of not engaging them.
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