faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed?
Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.
If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group.
I don't think effective altruism is particularly effective PR. Effective PR techniques are pretty well known, and they don't particularly look like "spend your PR budget on a few particular cause areas that aren't even agreed upon to be important and don't substantially help anyone with power or influence".
The funny thing is that PR maximizing would probably make effective altruism more effective than it currently is, but people in the EA community (myself included) are put off by things that look like advertising and don't actually do it.
Your explanation about how AlphaGo works is deeply counter-intuitive to me
Me too! I still don't understand why you can't just run the value model on all legal next moves, and then pick the top N among those or some equivalent heuristic. One of these days I need to sit down with KataGo (open source version of AlphaGo) and figure out exactly what's happening in the cases where the policy network predicts a different move than the top scoring move according to the value network. I have a suspicion that the difference happens specifically in cases where the value network is overestimating the win fraction of the current position due to an inability to see that far ahead in the game, and the moves chosen by the policy network expose the weakness in the current position but do not actually cause the position to be weaker (whereas the moves rated most highly by the value network will be ones where the weakness of the position is still not evident to the value network even after the move is made). That suspicion is based on approximately no evidence though. Still, having a working hypothesis going in will be helpful for coming up with experiments, during which I can notice whatever weird thing actually underlies the phenomenon.
What about more prosaic benefits like avoiding being Dutch booked? I believe that's one of the biggest benefits of consistency.
I expect that the benefits of avoiding being Dutch booked are pretty minimal in practice. If you start out with 100 A there's some cycle 100 A < 1000 B < 9 C < 99 A where some adversary can route you along that path and leave you with 99 A and the same amount of B and C that you started with, the likely result of that is that you go "haha nice" and adjust your strategy such that you don't end up in that trade cycle again. I expect that the costs of ensuring that you're immune to Dutch booking exceed the costs of occasionally being Dutch booked at some fairly minimal level of robustness. Worse is better etc etc. Note that this opinion of mine is, again, based on approximately no evidence, so take it for what it's worth (i.e. approximately nothing).
wastewater monitoring
Yeah I think this is great and jefftk and friends should receive lots of funding. Speaking of which I have just bugged him about how to throw money at NAO, because I believe they should receive lots of funding and have just realized that I have done exactly nothing about that belief.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
I don't want monopolies (i.e. I think that people should be prohibited by law from colluding with other providers to increase the market prices) of goods that I buy, but for I want other people selling the same thing I sell (labor) to be forced by law to collude with me to raise the market prices.
Fair markets for thee but not for me.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
This is an excellent answer. One small quibble:
Control of an aligned Superintelligent AGI is equivalent to having the keys to the lightcone, if you make it through the gauntlet of it not killing you and it listens to what you tell it, then you have the means to dominate everyone else, including others who make misaligned AGI, if yours is capable of squashing them at birth, or at the very least capable of panopticon surveillance to prevent anyone from building one in the first place.
For the record I think Yudkowsky and friends are wrong about this one. Control of the only superintelligent AGI, if that AGI is a single coherent entity, might be the keys to the lightcone, but so far it looks to me like AGI scales horizontally much better than it scales vertically.
This, if anything, makes things more dangerous rather than less, because it means there is no permanent win condition, only the deferral of the failure condition for a bit longer.
Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence?
Rhymes with "Yahtzee". The last notable time white nationalists gained power did not go so well, and it is generally agreed that it did not go so well, so people with opinions that resemble that generally want to clarify that their viewpoints do not end up in that generally-agreed-to-be-bad place.
As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists? Honestly I have no clue, but I think that indicates a problem with the communists.
Intelligence isn't caused by a few genes, but by thousands of genes that individually have a minuscule contribution but, when added up, cause >50% of existing variation in intelligence
I would bet good money that taking a genome, and then editing it until it had every gene which is correlated with higher intelligence, would not get you a baby that was even a single standard deviation above what you would naively predict based on the parents.
Consider a simple toy model, where
- Human intelligence is modulated by the production of a magical protein Inteliquotin (IQN), which causes brains to wrinkle.
- Human intelligence is a direct but nonlinear function of IQN concentration -- if IQN concentration is too low, it results in smooth brains (and thus lower intelligence), while if the concentration is too high, it interferes with metabolic processes in the neurons (and thus also results in lower intelligence). Let's say the average concentration is 1.0µg/mL.
- The optimal IQN concentration for inclusive fitness in the ancestral environment, and the average among the human population is 1.0µg/mL. However, the optimal concentration for intelligence specifically is 10% higher, at 1.1µg/mL (between those concentrations, improved fitness due to increased intelligence is more than offset to decreased fitness due to, let's say, "increased propensity for Oculoumbilical Tendency leading to elevated predation rates")
- The production of IQN is modulated by 1000 different genes IQN000 - IQN999, with the high-IQN variant of each gene occuring in 10% of the population, and where each gene independently causes IQN to increase by 0.01µg/mL.
If you have this scenario, each gene IQN000...IQN999 will explain about 0.1% of the variance in IQ, and yet using CRISPR to force just 5% more of the IQN genes to the "good" variant will lead to poorer outcomes than just leaving the system alone.
All that being said, you should be able to squeeze some results out of that technique. Just not multiple SD of improvement, at least not by doing the naive linear extrapolation thing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Do you think that the root cause of increased obesity today vs in 1970 is primarily due to people in 1970 being more persistent in sticking to a diet where they are hungry sometimes? If so, do you think that's due to a general decline in willingness to stick with unpleasant things in general between the 1970s and now, or something specific to dietary habits (e.g. "feeling slightly hungry" was a feeling with ~neutral valence in 1970, but is a feeling with negative valence now)?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps."
Is that really your only claim? In this comment, you said
One thing that has impressed me in the Revisionist space, unlike a lot of heterodox spaces where everyone has their own cockamamie theory, is that there's 100% consensus on the core claims. The claims are:
- There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
- There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to exterminate millions of Jews
- The "six million" number is a propaganda/symbolic figure that has no relation to actual Jewish population losses
Is your claim that revisionist spaces believe all of those things, but you explicitly don't believe all of those things, only the "there were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" one? If that's the case, then when people keep steering the topic away from gas chambers towards "ok, but where did the Jews go" you can say "they died in the genocide, but mostly from disease and bullets, not gas chambers". And then explain why you think that the way they died is central or important.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims.
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were? Playing the "I will say that specific claims are not well enough supported without explicitly saying that I think those claims are wrong" game is not exactly making a strong case for your position.
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination."
I have not seen that claim, no. I am also not clear on how it's relevant to the question of what happened to the majority of the people who were in the Łódź Ghetto.
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
Is your assertion that no people, or extremely few people, were murdered at Chelmno? Because I think if I got together with my buddies and we did a mass murder, and then we covered up as much evidence as we could, then saying "we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most" would not in fact lead to a better outcome for me at my trial.
So here are some concrete questions for you:
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Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
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Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them? If not, then where did the 20,000 children and elderly people referenced in the September 4, 1942 "give me your children" speech go instead? (content warning: this is the "worse than I had imagined" bit from my previous comment)
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Do you think that the fate of the Jews of the Lodz ghetto was unusual? If so, would you be willing to bet money, at even odds, that at least half of the Jews at a ghetto randomly selected from this list of 278 Jewish ghettos in Poland survived the Holocaust? If not, why not? If so, how much are you willing to stake?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Yes, environmental stuff would be the rest. Controlling for environmental stuff is actually very very hard - that's why for science where we actually try to be correct instead of trying to appear to try to be correct (e.g. medicine), the gold standard is randomized controlled trials rather than observational studies.
That's not to say it's always impossible to get useful information from observational data. For example, there's clever stuff like this. Still, if you take the social science approach of "lol just control for a couple things, if it's good enough to get published it's definitely correct" your results will not be very robust.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
So literally some takes from 5 years ago and a different account, which, if I'm correct about which name you're implying guesswho used to post as, are more saying "in practice sexual assault accusations aren't being used in every political fight, so let's maybe hold off on trying drastic solutions to that problem until it's demonstrated that your proposed cure isn't worse than the disease".
Let he who has never posted a take that some people find objectionable cast the first stone.
I assume you have some reason you think it matters that we can't use mathematics to come up with a specific objective prior probability that each model is accurate?
Edit: also, I note that I am doing a lot of internal translation of stuff like "the theory is true" into "the model makes accurate predictions of future observations" to fit into my ontology. Is this a valid translation, or is there some situation where someone might believe a true theory that would nevertheless lead them to make less accurate predictions about their future observations?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
Other threats have come (nuclear weapons) and we've always come through them
I would actually really like to see a rebuttal of this one, because the doomer logic (which looks correct to me) implies that we should all have died decades ago in nuclear fire. Or, failing that, that we should all be dead of an engineered plague.
And yet here we are.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Surrogates exist.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
17d ago
The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?
Containment thread? It worked pretty well for covid, when covid stuff was sucking all the air out of the room.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Morality has nothing to do with game theory
I disagree pretty strongly with that -- I think that "Bob is a moral person" and "people who are affected by Bob's actions generally would have been worse off if Bob's actions didn't affect them" are, if not quite synonymous, at least rhyming. The golden rule works pretty alright in simple cases without resorting to game theory, but I think game theory can definitely help in terms of setting up incentives such that people are not punished for doing the moral thing / incentivized to do the immoral thing, and that properly setting up such incentives is itself a moral good.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
I mean in this case given the relative military strength I think it's more like the horse and the weasel voting on what's for dinner. I think the horse will be just fine.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
There's probably even a few people doing that! But it's not the bulk of what we're seeing.
What you're seeing is driven largely by what is most outrageous to see, and thus most likely to be shared and appear on your feeds and in the news. The people saying "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution" are not having their opinions amplified to the whole world.
Maybe I just have an unusually levelheaded community, but most of the takes I've heard from people I actually know in real life look more like "damn this sucks, I hope it doesn't get too much worse" than for cheering for the deaths of Israeli or Palestinian civilians.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8mo ago
Can this changeless, fully actual thing have downstream causal effects? If not, I don't think "we call this changeless, fully actual thing God, and God is the reason the universe exists" works as an argument for the existence of God-as-the-thing-that-caused-the-universe-to-exist.
If the changeless thing is allowed to causally affect things, the question becomes "but where did the system that contains the changeless thing and also the changeable universe come from, since the changing universe can't be a part of the changeless thing".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
In my experience the typical woke, progressive, or liberal has an attitude of "my opinions are so obviously at least directionally good for humanity, and my political opponents are so obviously vile reactionaries whose opinions are beneath contempt..."
This is my experience of the most vocal woke/progressive/liberal people. My experience of the typical person who puts their pronouns on their slack profile without protest when HR asks, votes for whoever has a (D) next to their name if they bother to vote, and has a vaguely positive affect towards the idea of minorities is that they want to be on the "right side of history" but they don't want to have to think about it or make any decisions.
Which, IMO, is super valid. Getting into twitter flamewars about politics is bad for the world and bad for your mental health, so people who make the decision that instead of doing that they just want to grill are making a good choice.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying
Immediate perception is our direct, unreflective perceptions of the world. By contrast, intellectual perception is a higher form of knowledge that involves recognizing the unity and interconnectedness of self-consciousness and the fundamental essence of reality. Through intellectual perception, we can understand that the absolute meaning (content) of something is the same as its absolute structure or appearance (form).
Self-consciousness can be understood in three stages:
1: As a negative relation: Someone who is self-conscious can identify the part of the world that is not themselves as "other," and then define their "self" as everything that is not "other."
2: As a positive relation: Someone who is self-conscious can recognize that they exist in relation to the outside world and understand what that relationship is.
3: As a synthesis of these positive and negative relations, called "intellectual perception": Someone who is self-conscious can see that their thoughts and self-identity are both connected to and separate from the outside world. This synthesis allows them to recognize the unity of content and form, and achieve a deeper understanding of reality.
True intellectual perception goes beyond immediate knowledge derived purely from thoughts and sensory experience. It is a type of absolute knowledge.
A possible critique might look like
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Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.
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Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I for one would be ecstatic to have my parents around for longer, along with the rest of their generation, even if it robs my generation of its due.
I agree that greatly extending the human lifespan would cause massive societal problems. I am willing to struggle with those massive societal problems for as many centuries as it takes.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Crystallizing this further, I think particularly in the case of depression / anxiety / ADHD, what happens is that a cultural meme develops that some common facet of the human experience is caused by some specific disease, and that the appropriate way to fix this is to obtain treatment.
Examples:
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Alice notices that she does not enjoy things that she's "supposed" to enjoy. She's heard that this can be a symptom of depression. She looks up "how to tell if you have depression", and reads that common symptoms include apathy, lack of interest, excessive sleepiness, and insomnia. Now, every time she has trouble falling asleep, she thinks "wow, this depression sucks" and not "I am having trouble falling asleep". She looks up "what to do if you have depression", and sees the usual suggestions about sunlight / therapy / medication. She thinks "well, they were definitely right about my symptoms, so they're probably right about the treatment as well", and gets a therapist and a sunlamp.
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Bob notices that he's having a lot of trouble focusing on his job as Senior Manipulator of Boring Numbers. He has heard that trouble focusing can be indicative of ADHD. He looks up "symptoms of ADHD", sees fidgeting, absent-mindedness, difficulty focusing, and forgetfulness. Now, the next time he is introduced to a room full of people and has trouble remembering their names, he thinks "wow, ADHD sucks" and not "wow, I'm bad at names". He obtains some amphetamines, which is what you do when you have ADHD.
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Carol notices that her heart rate is elevated and her muscles are tense before her board meeting. This has happened before the last three board meetings too. She googles "elevated heart rate tense muscles" and sees that, according to WebMD, she either has anxiety or lupus. She knows that WebMD is strangely likely to say that people have lupus, but the description of anxiety is on-point. Additionally, there are some new ones on there, like "difficulty concentrating", which she didn't think were caused by the same thing as the thing where she gets way too nervous before important meetings, but maybe it is after all. She talks to a therapist, and learns that indeed, all of her problems are because she has a disease called "Anxiety", but with the proper therapy schedule and medications, she can probably live some semblance of a normal life.
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Dan notices that he's been having trouble with his sexual performance. He goes to the friendly neighborhood elder, who informs him that this is a common symptom of being cursed by witches. When you are cursed by witches, lots of bad things can happen, including livestock death, sudden inexplicable vomiting, and impotence, and in extreme cases, your penis sometimes even disappears! The next day, one of Dan's chickens keels over and dies for no apparent reason, and what's worse, he starts violently vomiting after eating the dead chicken. And oddly his penis feels smaller than usual. What was it that elder said he should hang above his door again?
Hypothesis if this is a usefully predictive model of the world: People who read their horoscope on a daily basis are more likely to experience chronic pain than those who don't, even when controlling for all of the obvious confounding factors. I expect that this would be the case because I expect "reads the horoscope daily" to be a reasonably good proxy for both "is searching for an overarching narrative of why things are they way things are" and also "is prone to confirmation bias", and I expect that "you have chronic pain" is one of those things you're more likely to believe if you're searching for an overarching explanation and tend to look for evidence under streetlamps.
Crackpot theory time: It would be possible to significantly reduce the burden on chronic pain by doing something like the following:
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Experienced debilitating, chronic pain for some period of time
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Changed something plausible about their lives
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Immediately after making the change, noticed something that was an obvious consequence of making the change
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Now mostly find that, while they do sometimes experience pain, the pain is no longer continuous, is usually telling them something specific, and usually does not interfere with their ability to function
and then loudly broadcast the existence of this group of people at people who have chronic pain. I expect that this intervention would work even if people knew you were doing it, as long as you (correctly, I think) pointed out that your narrative is more plausible than the narrative of "sometime in the recent past, a phenomenon started happening where otherwise-healthy people started experiencing significant pain for no apparent reason, and found themselves unable to live their lives normally due to that pain, and found that, though the pain might sometimes temporarily improve, it always comes back". Because "I do sometimes experience pain, but it's not continuous" and "I sometimes experience a reduction in pain to the point where it's not noticeable, but the pain always comes back" in fact describe exactly the same set of experiences.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
The phrase "for example" was included in the GP comment, but I have bolded it this time because apparently you missed it last time. There were additional victims of the Nazi regime besides 6 million Jews and 3 million Soviet POWs - some more examples are
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13 millionSoviet civilians, which is in turn estimated to be 7 million deaths directly due to violence (bombings, etc),4 million deaths due to famine and disease in occupied regions, and2 million who died as forced laborers (though the "forced laborer" number does not seem to me to be backed by anything in particular) -
1 - 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians
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Hundreds of thousands of Romani people (credible estimates vary widely but at least 130,000 total)
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Hundreds of thousands of disabled people (estimates here vary less, wikipedia says 275,000 to 300,000)
I do agree, though, that the specific "12 million" number does not seem to correspond to a specific subset of the people who died outside of combat as a result of Nazi actions during WWII - the total number seems to be much higher than 12 million, and the number specifically killed by ethnic cleansing related activities as opposed to more generic "stuff that would retroactively be classified as a war crime" seems to be quite a bit lower (though note that the treatment of Soviet POWs was already considered a war crime). It makes sense to me now why modern-day historians limit "the Holocaust" to refer specifically to the attempted extermination of European Jews.
As I said before, consider me corrected on my earlier vague impression that "about 12 million people were murdered in the Holocaust" -- upon reflection both the "murdered", and "in the Holocaust" parts were underspecified to the point that they did not correspond to falsifiable beliefs about the world as it is.
For the "in the Holocaust" part, I was just plainly wrong about how the term is used. For the "murder" part, I had never actually considered the following questions:
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Does it count as "murder" if you invade someone's country and then steal their food such that they starve to death? Does the answer change if the "and then they starve to death" was explicitly called out in your plans before you actually went and did it?
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How about if you abduct them and use them for forced labor, with poor safety practices, on starvation rations, and then they die on the job? If a factory full of forced laborers is bombed, and you don't let the laborers use the bomb shelters, is that murder? Maybe it counts as murder for the other side?
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Or maybe you relocate them from one slave labor camp to another, in the dead of winter, again on starvation rations, on foot, and then they die during the march?
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Okay, how about if the people you murder are people who might hypothetically be able to organize resistance to your invasion?
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If you say "We are invading your country now. For every German killed in the invasion, we will round up 50-100 of your citizens and execute them," and there is resistance, and you follow through on your threats and do the mass executions, is that murder?
Depending on your answers to the above questions, two people can look at the exact same set of people killed in exactly the same circumstances, not disagree about any of the material facts, and come to quite a wide range of estimates of how many of those people were "murdered".
But I don't get the impression that's what your argument is. In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that you don't have any specific affirmative beliefs about what happened during WWII, and instead you're operating by looking at what claims other people make about WWII, and saying "that one does not seem particularly well-supported, I will request clarification on that point, and if it turns out that point is correct I will not change my mind but instead just move on to the next point and never mention it again".
And on the topic of specific claims
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city.
No, it records 78,000 as "number of murder victims of the Chelmno camp in that city". Which makes sense, as the ~70,000 inmates of the Lodz ghetto at the time the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944 were instead sent to Auschwitz.
This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to this point of view if the Nazi regime had not specifically made significant efforts to destroy evidence. The man in charge of that initiative was Paul Blobel. Here is his affidavit on the topic of the burning of bodies and the destruction of evidence:
I, Paul Blobel, swear, declare and state in evidence:
- I was born in Potsdam on August 13, 1894. From June 1941 to January 1942 I was the commander of Sonderkommando 4A.
- After I had been released from this command, I was to report to Berlin to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich and Gruppenfuhrer Muller, and in June 1942 I was entrusted by Gruppenfuhrer Muller with the task of obliterating traces of executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. My orders were that I should report in person to the commanders of the Security Police and SD, pass on Muller's orders verbally and supervise their implementation. This order was top secret and Gruppenfuhrer Muller had given orders that owing to the need for strictest secrecy there was to be no correspondence in connection with this task. In September 1942 I reported to Dr. Thomas in Kiev and passed the order to him. The order could not be carried out immediately partly because Dr. Thomas was disinclined to carry it out, and also because the materials required for the burning of the bodies was not available. [...snip due to character limit, full text available here ...]
- According to my orders I should have extended my duties over the entire area occupied by the Einsatzgruppen, but owing to the retreat from Russia I could not carry out my orders completely....
Blobel's last words were
Whatever I have done, I did as a soldier who obeyed orders. I have committed no crime. I will be vindicated by God and history. God have mercy on those who murder me.
That does not sound like "there is no evidence of bodies because there were no bodies", that sounds like "there is no evidence of bodies because the evidence was deliberately destroyed". Claims about how there's no physical evidence ring a bit hollow when there were specific, documented efforts to destroy the physical evidence.
Yad Vashem has a database of 4.8 million known holocaust victims. You can search that database by name, or by place of birth. Each entry says where and when that person was born, and what their name was, and how they died (or, in rare cases, that they survived). In that database, there are 139,692 people who were born in Lodz. I will ask, one last time before I give up and conclude that you're either a troll or just not someone who agrees that there is a physical underlying reality, and it is important to have accurate beliefs about what that physical reality looks like:
Do you think those 139,692 people are just fictitious people? Do you think they survived somewhere else? Do you have any beliefs at all about the physical world beyond "historians are lying about the Holocaust?
Edit 2023-01-24T08:08:03Z: character limit bug showed I was under 10k chars, but I was actually just barely over
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Why would you assume "aliens" not "previous Earth civilization" in that case?
The 100th anniversary of his 34th birthday
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