Negatory
2yr ago
As someone who spent a little time in high school debate I assure you this is not true by default.
We, as an audience, are not typical. Just look at the numerous essays worrying about lawyerly superpowers in painfully intricate details.
Negatory
2yr ago
We can prove with the benefit of hindsight a coverup was successful for some amount of time.
Sometimes, extremely successful intelligence operations get declassified after some decades and we get to look at what success looks like.
Epstein has had a lot of theories floating around him for a while. Other commenters here have described why suicide is still a very plausible explanation and so you can read them for counter theories.
But I’ll reemphasize that the framework I was describing about cover ups and maintained secrecy applies mainly to large plots, not necessarily the death of a single guy in prison where at least theoretically a small group of rogue actors could have taken action.
Negatory
2yr ago
Scientific materialism is dominant because even the religious use it instrumentally to figure things out.
You could prove materialism false with one good demon.
“Not reproducible on demand” ah well so it’s not quite like a lion I can go observe in 30 minutes at the local zoo if I wanted to is it?
It’s more like Sagan’s garage dragon I guess. So real, so very hard to detect. Very reproducible, but very shy about observation.
Negatory
2yr ago
scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims."
Look I just want levels of evidence to match levels of claims.
If any belief system says “we have the power to meaningfully affect material reality” then let’s see the evidence.
For example, where’s the indisputable evidence faith healing works? Plenty of religions claim that one still today. Also the power of prayer to affect outcomes is very common.
Those are very testable propositions.
And yet.
Or, what exactly is a soul anyway? Not material, not energy, some strange third thing. Can’t quite measure it, but it’s definitely there because the scriptures tell us so.
How much of a given holy book is literal vs. figurative? How do we know? Who’s in charge anyway?
Not even the believers come to some strong consensus about the particulars of theology, let alone present sufficient evidence for an actual skeptic.
I’m not going to trust any ideology about “meaning and purpose” if it can’t address basic epistemological issues any small child should be able to point out. We can sort out our emotional issues without resorting to what sounds good.
I’ve been a devout believer and was told we had the Truth and that it could obviously withstand scrutiny. But really it relied upon strong emotions, group ties and peer pressure, motivated reasoning, and just so stories to protect faith from scrutiny.
If there is some higher power, it ought to have higher standards than the religions I’ve seen.
What’s really funny is plenty of Christians will take the opposite line you have and claim credit for the Enlightenment. And plenty of us will call secular ideologies we don’t like—say communism and wokeism—political religions.
Negatory
2yr ago
This is obviously wrong in at least the pretty clear case of the Ashkenazim.
It’s also wrong because we observe average differences between populations on polygenic traits like height, and evolution didn’t stop at the neck.
Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid.
What an embarrassing statement to make about what is the single strongest predictor social science has.
IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.
Wait until you learn about IQ proxies and how often they’re used in studies of all kinds. Also, this writer doesn’t know enough to know to separate psychometrics from psychology.
You can and maybe even should ignore all the studies done by these HBD types. There’s immense bodies of evidence in just normal science if you care to pay attention.
Negatory
2yr ago
Holy shit man.
Pence literally said “decide.”
i said “determine.”
Those are synonyms.
I cannot make you employ basic reading comprehension, let alone any other reasoning, so I’m done here.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think classical liberalism was a pretty good compromise. It’s not like the Founding Fathers literally believed “all men are created equal.”
Equal rights under the law is a compromise.
So this Jim fellow might have some good criticisms of equity and leftism but he’s willfully misreading the Founding Fathers.
Negatory
2yr ago
Richard Hanania writes we need to shut up about HBD.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq
He defines HBD as believing:
-
Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)
-
Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)
-
People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)
-
Individuals should favor their own ingroup, whether that is their race or their co-nationals. (normative tribalism)
And he goes on to criticize 2-4. I tend to agree with those criticisms, but I think it’s fairly common in these kinds of circles to believe a version of 2 focused on ideological competition, not between racial groups, where the social justice left and its preferred policies to rectify group differences can only be defeated by using the facts to explain group differences that won’t be rectified through policy.
While I accept Hanania’s point that the facts frequently don’t matter in which political ideas rise to the top, I still feel like Cofnas has a point (whom Hanania is responding to).
I’m quite philosemetic, for example. The best argument against antisemitism based on observing Jewish overperformance and concluding it’s due to some kind of plot is explaining that intelligence matters and the Ashkenazim underwent a particular history and we now observe them having very high average test scores.
Hanania himself wrote not so long ago about how Jewish personality traits might be needed to fully explain their political interest and influence, beyond just intelligence.
Using biology to explain overperformance but not underperformance seems like a strange compromise.
In much of today’s polite society, if one points out the achievement gap among groups, you’re a racist.
But if one doesn’t acknowledge the achievement gap between groups to justify affirmative action, you’re a racist.
And that’s without even mentioning biology! Watching lefties like Kathryn Paige Harden and Freddie deBoer try to (admirably) describe these kinds of issues while trying to remain in the good graces of polite society is enlightening.
Now, if you could guarantee me a return to a more race-blind culture and legal system if we shut up about genetics then I would take that. But we are on a path towards learning the murky details of (and being able to influence) genetics of both groups and individuals. I don’t think the elephant in the room will stay quiet.
It’s a bit remarkable to read Hanania write:
Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss. The idea of sleeping with very short men fills many women with revulsion. The severely handicapped are a drain on society’s resources. And so on.
I think he means, “talk about something publicly” as opposed to at all, but actually I’ll easily bite those bullets and say we ought to understand the disadvantages short men face due to female preferences and that we ought to know just how much we expend society’s resources on the severely handicapped.
Social desirability bias is incredibly powerful and one should choose one’s battles. Polite society in the West went from being quite racist, in ways that didn’t always align with the facts, to correcting hard (thanks, Hitler) to race is only skin deep, which also doesn’t align. And then we got the influence of Kendiism.
Even ignoring immigration (where he doesn’t cover the Garret Jones stance), a lot of US politics comes down to this issue, and HBD was mostly in a quietist tradition the last few decades with little influence for being outside the Overton Window.
I know Trace doesn’t like HBD much, but wow is that like the whole story of his FAA traffic controller storyline. If you listen to the Blocked and Reported episode, he and Jesse aren’t shy about pointing out it was an insane policy to completely jettison meritocracy, but they dance around the general point that if you set a fairly high intellectual bar for a job, it’s going to look like the racists are right. If you allow self-selection, you also very well might make it look like the sexists are right.
The elephant in the room is only growing larger for anyone following the facts. Conceding the present Overton Window is unassailable is I think conceding defeat to the social justice left.
Negatory
2yr ago
You’re conflating difference senses of the word “stop” here I think.
There’s “stopping it from being hidden” and there’s “stopping it from continuing” and there’s “stopping it from being effective” at a minimum.
The quote you cite is focusing on the “hidden” aspect.
Negatory
2yr ago
I really need you to slow down and actually read the words I wrote.
Let me repeat directly quoting Pence:
Vesting the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide presidential contests would be entirely antithetical to that [constitutional] design.
So you’re wrong twice here, once on what Pence and Trump described (matching my own words very closely), and again when you say:
Well, clearly there's a big gap between returning disputed electors to the state legislatures, and radically resolving the dispute with the sole authority of VP.
Because the former leads directly to the latter, which was the whole point, and publicly acknowledged by a wide range of figures in the right.
So I’m not making it up and a wide range of legal experts have called the idea some synonym of ridiculous because it so plainly is in both term of history and game theory.
Negatory
2yr ago
It’s more about tweaking one’s priors a bit than making any definitive conclusions.
Things we haven’t heard of that at least someone would find controversial certainly exist in the shadows. But the really sensational stuff like QAnon had going is just incredibly unlikely in today’s more politically correct, partisan, and digital US environment.
Though I will say this method won me a good chunk of change with a smart guy willing to put money on the line that Trump was going to expose a number of plots along QAnon and RussiaGate lines.
Or look at this modern plot from Taibbi about some supposed binder of CIA misdeeds about Trump. Why the hell is this binder allowed to exist by the Deep State, or, why wasn’t this dealt with when Trump was in office? In the opening paras of the actual Substack article he says his sources say Trump ordered it declassified at the end of his term. So why didn’t that happen? Why is this breaking news three years later?
The most likely story is Taibbi is listening to dumb people describe things they don’t understand.
Negatory
2yr ago
I don’t get the sense that there’s anything I could say to get you to stop pretending like you can mind read my epistemology and consistently misrepresent it.
Which is really ironic because my underlying philosophy and approach is identical to Scott’s. I’m not innovating.
Your whole paragraph about libertarians is baffling. But then you bringing in “democracy” as a comparison point was inappropriate and unhelpful from the start.
You are being pretty damn obtuse when you write:
Exactly, and given that none of us can be expected to have access to evidence proving it happened, or to be allowed to conduct an investigation where any such evidence could be revealed, it is disingenious to demand we concede election fraud did not happen
This is not a good faith take in a conversation branching off from the fact TTV (among others) claims there is evidence they have for the courts and that we in the public could see, and where one of the strongest arguments against any meaningful election fraud is that the claims were investigated.
Forget “proving” it happened. We’re pretty far from actual evidence suggesting meaningful election fraud took place because the many claims did not survive scrutiny.
You’re doing an election fraud version of Sagan’s garage dragon and it’s tiresome to have to address your apples to orange comparisons with e.g. police and crime.
And now on the new thread you’re also responding in a way that isn’t even wrong because you can’t seem to grasp the actual point I was making. I might be wrong but it’s not because you refuted my points.
Take a breath and read slower.
Negatory
2yr ago
One guy dying, very possibly due to foul play and government involvement is not a major plot, and obviously, it was an extremely poorly done cover up because here you are talking about it.
The more scrutiny there is and the longer it goes without conclusive evidence emerging, the more I would adjust to “not a plot.”
Negatory
2yr ago
You can’t call my theory about hypothetical modern day plots being far more unlikely false by citing an ancient one as you have because you aren’t addressing any of the points I made about why the past was different.
You’re simply not engaging the points I made by describing the particulars of MKUltra.
Negatory
2yr ago
Wait, you think we have an asset bubble for housing? Where?
Who is engineering the high inflation for specifically food/energy/shelter to drive class warfare and how are they doing that?
I do not follow your last paragraph because I don’t know who these people are or what you mean about what they’re doing and what it costs.
Negatory
2yr ago
The “we should do better” bit was attempting to agree with his overall point that we should do elections better, not telling him to do better.
I could have made that clearer, but perhaps consider you’re misreading me worse than you think I’m misreading him.
Let’s also not accuse me of “jumping to the meta” in a convo that was already a couple of rounds deep. I agree with the substance of his points on the object level. Where we seem to disagree is on the meta issue of framing, and perhaps attributing how much distrust even came from real vs. imagined issues.
And, for the record, I don’t actually place him on the “other side” in that he and I agree far more than we disagree and he seems highly reasonable.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think you bring up a good point but you could afford a bit more charity to @ymeskhout, even if he is a lawyer.
Negatory
2yr ago
I’ll take issue with this bit because I encounter it a lot:
There's an oft-utilized but facile heuristic that claims that if there was a cover-up, then someone would've leaked it, and so therefore no leak = no cover-up. This is unreliable because there plenty of government cover-ups that were successful, at least for a while.
This is actually a very reliable heuristic regarding supposed US government plots in more recent times. The examples you cite regarding the CIA/IC/DoD are the classics in the genre. But the key context to keep in mind is that the Cold War was a very different time, with very different norms and processes. Significant changes for oversight were made in the 1970s and the Overton Window for acceptable behavior shifted a fair bit the last few decades. So when evaluating present claims of a plot you can’t over index on what took place so long ago. (The same dynamic goes for the medical study example you cite; it was a different era and if anything we’ve overcorrected on medical ethics.)
In other words, the half life of cover ups is shorter and the big crazy stuff is just not going to fly. Things like the Bush torture and warrantless wiretapping programs come to mind. Or the cover up around Pat Tillman’s death. Or the shoddy justification for the invasion of Iraq (the IC takes major efforts to avoid repeating the mistake of politically influenced/misused assessments after that). We had multiple broad, sensitive leaks under the Obama administration and the Trump administration was chock full of leaks and tell alls. And investigations of investigations.
If there are public allegations of some plot, then it’s already past the point where the plot, if true, managed to avoid being detected.
Everybody knows how easy it is for a leak or an investigation to happen and intelligence bureaucrats are strongly incentivized to avoid the very appearance of evil, or anything sensational.
The IC is a big place and mistakes and shenanigans happen, but it’s very different from the Wild West days of the earlier part of the Cold War and grand plots and cover ups are very, very hard.
Negatory
2yr ago
Ehh I’m not sure I’d call it “bad faith” but you’re not wrong that it’s not the most productive conversation.
The path we’ve gone down about the VP election theory is frankly cracking me up.
You said:
Nobody proposed this theory. This does not resemble what was debated in 2020 in the slightest.
Based on the direct quotation of Pence I’ve provided that closely matches my description you took issue with, are you able to acknowledge you were wrong?
Negatory
2yr ago
I’m using plain English that matches statements by both Trump and Pence while you seem intent on pointless nitpicking.
Negatory
2yr ago
So what’s the theory on how to get people who demonstrably don’t care about evidence to become open to being convinced by evidence?
Conspiratorial thinking is famously hard to deal with.
Let’s pretend Dems had done an admirable job of running elections to whatever standard you consider reasonable, but Trump still narrowly lost.
How different would Trump and MAGA types have behaved in your view?
I don’t think you’re engaging with the issues I raised.
I don’t disagree that a lot of HBD types are dumb and selected for disagreeability and/or liking racism, not better traits. But that’s what you get when social desirability bias really punishes witches or anything close to it.
“We deserve it really”
I mean yeah, inasmuch as anyone deserves the fruits of their labor and natural abilities. Believing foul play is involved instead seems well-proven to lead to bad outcome for the Jews. Open competition, markets, and meritocracy are going to let talent rise and we plainly see group imbalances all over, like in sports.
Ultimately, in the West at least, individualism and equality under the law seem like the best option, but denying reality seems unlikely to help.
(Also, it is socially acceptable to punch down at incels so maybe the status quo there isn’t great.)
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