felipec
unbelief
No bio...
User ID: 1796
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Ukraine as a country isn't particularly important and the population is likely to be hostile to Russia, meaning that to integrate it into Russia proper will be difficult if not impossible.
This is an oversimplification, there's no such thing as the "Ukraine population": different people have different believes. This is like saying the "USA population" believes X. Sure, some do, but not all.
You can say the majority of the population is likely to be hostile to Russia (I have my doubts about that), but some will not.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Overall, not impressed or compelled by the claims. People have already noted the singular anonymous source claiming, in an era where anonymous sourcing has been as disreputable as ever, but there are other elements that raise eyebrows.
Most importan stories are broken out with singular anonymous sources, and mainstream publications mention a single anonymous source all the time.
-The claim it was done by the pure navy, as opposed to special forces, to avoid Congressional oversight really suggests someone who is not familiar with the other forms of oversight- and security vulnerabilities- of American military branches.
It wasn't just the Navy, it was remote corner of the Navy.
There's a reason that the US black projects generally don't operate from the conventional forces, but in separate elements.
Yeah, and the reason may not have anything to do with oversight.
-The mind-reading/framing of motives is projection, or at least certainly not how the western military-security types would view items. I've yet to meet an American in a serious position of government responsibility who frames concerns over Nordstream in terms as abstract as 'threat to western dominance,' as opposed to the more concrete concerns of 'energy blackmail' or 'gas turnoffs.'
As if any politician is transparent about their true motives ever. As Noam Chomsky says: the stated motives of the government are never the true motives, therefore you can pretty much disregard the stated motives.
That being said, Condoleezza Rice did pretty much spell it out in 2014:
"But now we need to have tougher sanctions, and I am afraid at some point this is going to probably have to involve oil and gas. The Russian economy is vulnerable. 80% of the Russian exports are in oil, gas and minerals. People say that the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy. And I understand that it is uncomfortable to have an effect on business ties in this way, but this is one of the few instruments that we have. Over the long run, you want to change the structure of energy dependence. You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we are finding"
The first thing she mentions is the Russian economy was vulnerable, suggesting they did want to attack the Russian economy.
There's also this 2019 Pentagon-funded study from the RAND Corporation: Extending Russia.
"Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Western and Russian sources, this report examines Russia's economic, political, and military vulnerabilities and anxieties."
They want to exploit all Russian vulnerabilities. How much spelled out do you need it to be?
It's clear USA has always been an enemy of Russia.
The proposed plans, as described, don't pass muster in the context of their own paragraph, let alone broader realism. For one, submarines don't "assault". That's the sort of language of someone larping military insight.
Why does the source have to have military insight? He could be part of the CIA, or any number of options.
This is something deserving of /r/credibledefense, but not credibility inspiring.
The fact that you don't see how something is possible doesn't mean it is impossible. That's an argument from incredulity fallacy.
-The argument about no longer being a covert option because of the Biden Administration's public statements on Nordstream are nonsense.
Is it? The exact moment I saw the clip of Joe Biden saying they would put an end to it after it was blown up I put two and two together, and so did many people.
This is a red flag for credibility. Covert options aren't covert because you have a known capability, but rather the secrecy.
But if everyone already suspects the USA did it--as it happened--then the secret would be much harder to keep, because people will not stop investigating--as it happened.
The more eyes, the harder to hide. How is that not obvious? Your desire to not see the obvious seems like motivated reasoning from you.
-The whole Norway angle is just comedic.
Once again this is a fallacy. The fact that you find something comedic doesn't imply that it didn't happen.
The narrative flops between the need for operational and legal secrecy as needed, without actually explaining why informing the Norwegians is necessary to carry out the operation...
It was explained that it wasn't necessary, but it would facilitate the operation. Plain and simple.
-The timeline is also all over the place.
Events unfold that way many times, so what? Things happen and plans change. That happens all the time.
-The argument on Russian mine-detection technology is getting into the military spy-fiction, and not the good kind.
Argument from incredulity fallacy.
This isn't the first part of the article to do this, but it's reocurring enough to note, especially since the 1970s Church hearings drove very significant changes in the American intelligence community... changes that are being implicitly covered over by the appeal to the 70s for narrative continuity.
It wasn't the intelligence community who ordered this, it was the neocon administration. The hatred for Russia runs deep, as anyone familiar with Victoria Nuland knows.
Aircraft are easily observable on a number of sensors or by regional naval traffic.
So? You just pick an aircraft that is going to travel that route anyway for whatever reason.
Once again: argument from incredulity fallacy.
All told, I do not find it credible, and would lower my judgement of someone who found it compelling.
I find all your arguments weak and relying precisely on what you accuse Seymour Hersh of doing: preying on the laziness of the reader. Many of your arguments boil down to "I don't see how this is possible", as if you were an semi-omniscient being. You may not see how X is possible, but I do. So what?
It's also a clear Gish gallop strategy: overwhelming an interlocutor with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. It's no surprise that your comment received zero replies. Who would sit down and read the entire thing, think about critically, and then reply. Well, I just did.
If you are trying to analyze this critically and actually give the article a fair shot, I would pick a single argument against it, your strongest argument, and defend it at depth, not throw dozens which in my opinion are weak.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Your work would probably be received better if you stopped referencing previous slights.
Everyone's a critic.
You can't tell my intuition what it should have generated. It generated what it generated.
Should it have generated something "better"? Sure, maybe, but I can only work with the intuition that I've got, which can't be not influenced by experiences in the past.
The good thing about this challenge is that if you think you could have written something better than what I wrote, well, you had the chance.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I’m throwing in all these links not (just) because I expect it to annoy you, but because I find it amusing that you’ve done all this work to agree with some blog posts from 2008.
Who cares if you find it amusing?
It has not been established that I did agree with that litany of articles you linked, you just stated that. And how is anyone supposed to refute your claim? Presumably they would need to spend around 8 hours to read all that information, and then refute it, which you know nobody is going to do.
So you intentionally raised the bar so high as to make your claim virtually irrefutable. Congratulations, you "win".
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
You would probably be rightly frustrated because you'd feel that you addressed that point, but my summary simplified your explanation away.
Because it's too simple. But if you try to do it in say two paragraphs you might be able to extract the gist of it.
I notice this with Scott Alexander's writings pretty often, where I think 'I don't need all this extra stuff', but then see comments from people that didn't closely read the piece. They object in a way that was answered by the thing I thought was unnecessary
I'm pretty sure I can come up with better versions of at least some of Scott Alexander's writings that are in fact simpler. I wouldn't be making the same points as him though.
People have too much ego though and think that their ideas cannot be explained better by other people, or even find it offensive for example if I claim I can explain something better than Scott Alexander. Why?
In open source projects programmers have to get rid of that ego, and other people constantly suggest ways to simply the code, sometimes rewrite it completely, and guess what the original author says... Thanks. I've made better versions of some big wig programmers and nobody finds it impossible or offensive. We all think differently and some people think of thinks we just don't. Why would that hurt anybody's ego?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
And I did not claim that they said that I did. But if I'm not following Russian sources it means I got the information from a non-Russian source, and I can tell you they are generally reliable.
It's possible that my source is right. Just because something happens to be used in Russian propaganda doesn't mean it's wrong.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Some of them may be calling themselves "rationalists", some of them may even try and become less easy to get caught - but they are imperfect humans, so they'll get caught anyway.
But the point is not that they get caught, all humans indeed have the potential to get caught at some point in their life, the point is why. Why do people get burnt touching a pan?
OK. I'm not a mathematician, I'm a programmer, but from what I can see the set {0,1,2,3} is isomorphic to ℤ/4ℤ that means one can be mapped to the other and vice versa. The first element of ℤ/4ℤ is isomorphic to 0, but not 0, it's a coset. But the multiplicative group of integers modulo 4 (ℤ/4ℤ)* is this isomorphic set, so it is {0,1,2,3} with integers being the members of the set. Correct?
Either way 2+2=0 can be true.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Do you believe people here pretend to be smarter than they are?
I've seen many people in The Motte claim something along the lines of "that's basic" as if only high-brow discussions were interesting, or as if they were the arbiters of what's "basic" and what's "advanced", or even as if they completely understood the "basic" notion.
It's almost as if the opposite of bike-shedding was sought: everyone claims they want to discuss about the plans for a nuclear power plant (very complex), not the bicycle shed materials which are way too simple.
So everyone who aims to discuss about the nuclear power plant plans is rewarded (even if nobody really understands them), and everyone who wants to talk about something everyone can understand is punished (nobody wants to talk about what they can easily understand).
I do not think it is novel, I specifically said a lot of people don't have any problem seeing this distinction, and I would expect most rationalists to see this distinction.
But it's a fact that a lot of people do not see this distinction, not dull people, a lot intelligent people. I've debated many of them, and it's a chore to explain again and again how the burden of proof actually works and why not-guilty ≠ innocent. Next time I'm in a debate with such people I can simply link to this article, and presumably so can other people in similar debates.
Moreover, you seem to be overlooking the fact that what is obvious to you (and many rationalists), may not be so obvious to everyone. This bias is called the curse of knowledge. People have a tendency to fake humility, because people don't like arrogance, they like humility, but the fact is assuming everyone is as intelligent and/or knowledgeable as you is not always productive.
In fact, the whole motivation behind the article is that someone I know refused to accept there's a genuine difference. He is not unintelligent.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Cognitive biases are not priors. They make you misjudge your priors, and update the probability in a skewed way.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
The 'evidence' in this report is a series of claim made by an alleged anonymous source with access.
That is evidence.
contradicted by available evidence (flight data that doesn't match the claimed trigger mechanism).
Prove it.
No, you could certainly identify your age and the depth of your checking to Chomsky's more contentious claims which have been critiqued over time.
I am 40. And you pick a controversial Chomsky "claim".
Misuse of converse fallacy.
No, it's not a misuse. You are literally saying because I appear to have done something, therefore I did it. If it glitters, then it's gold. That's a fallacy.
my viewpoint is that you're abandoning weak positions that your deflections could not resolve.
Your viewpoint is wrong. If you want me to address your "strongest" positions, then only mention those.
True. This is and remains my argument.
Simply saying "true" does nothing, you have to substantiate your claim, which you haven't done so far. Therefore your claim is dismissed.
With access to covert operations planning at the White House level for black operations specifically designed to avoid oversight?
This is a probabilistic fallacy. You are talking about P(X), we are talking about P(X|O). Yet another example of motivated reasoning.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
And we generally agree mainstream publications are bad in quality,
Yes, but not because of that.
and that a good indication of trash articles is when massive claims rest on singular anonymous sources.
I don't think you do understand how journalism works.
The story is the story. If the story has a single source, that's the story. What is a journalist supposed to do in that case? Extort a source? Betray him? If nobody wants to talk, then nobody wants to talk. A journalist reports on what can be reported.
If Noam Chomsky is your guiding star on objectivity or insight into government thinking
He has been right since I have been alive, and everything historical I've checked.
Or do you honestly believe USA went into Iraq to liberate the country and fight terrorism?
Only if you want to project a specific interpretation of 'attack' to fit a quote approaching a decade ago well outside of the context of an alleged Nordstream attack.
You are throwing a smokescreen. You said you haven't met an American in government framing the concern in terms of "threat to western dominance", and I showed you one. If USA wasn't worried about Russian influence in Europe, why would they want to attack Russia economically?
I'm not talking about the explosion, I'm talking about your claim about the motive. No mind-reading is necessary to show that USA has always been an enemy of Russia. I can give you many more examples.
And BTW, in 2014 Nord Stream 2 already had 3 years in the making.
People studying Russian vulnerabilities does not mean they are responsible for any perceived attack on a Russian vulnerability.
Straw man.
This is also where I'll note that this actually is an example of the incredulity fallacy. That you cannot see how others would interpret does not mean that others would not do it differently.
Another straw man. I never said I don't see how others could interpret this.
It's clear USA has always been an enemy of Russia.
Not really. Also, consensus building.
How many examples do you need of American bureaucrats interested in hurting Russia do you need? Would 10 do the trick?
Or are you going to dismiss every one of them? Then the claim is falsifiable, isn't it?
Thus diminishing the credibility of the source, whose claimed insight into the military operational dynamic is the crux of the article.
False. The article never stated that.
Only if I was arguing on the basis that I don't see how something is possible, as opposed to arguing on the basis of something not being possible on grounds X, Y, Z.
No. The fallacy applies regardless of how many grounds you have.
Yes, because many people are inclined to blame the US no matter who does something.
Hasty generalization fallacy. The fact that many people did that doesn't mean that all people did that, and in particular doesn't mean that I did that.
The fact that you treat the Biden statement is a causal link
Straw man. I never said I treated it as a causal link.
That's as far as I go. I'm not going to chase hundreds of week arguments on top of dozens of weak arguments.
If you wanted to seriously defend your position you would have picked your strongest argument and defend that instead of keeping up this Gish gallop strategy.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
It's a badly posed question because it's not fully specified, namely, you're not stating where (2+2=4) lives.
Really? Wasn't your entire argument relying on the fact that if the arithmetic wasn't specifically specified, then certain arithmetic was always assumed?
Your question is ambiguously stated.
Which was my entire point.
Normally it wouldn't be
So you are accepting it: normally 2+2 is not 0, but I didn't ask if normally that was the case, I asked if it was always the case.
For the record, when I ask ChatGPT if it's always necessarily the case, it answers "no". It says that's not the case in other arithmetics. Weird that it interprets math like me, not like you.
Define whether (2+2=4) in your question is integer arithmetics or (mod 4) (or something else) and I'll answer your question.
It's not any modular arithmetic, it's standard arithmetic (the one you claimed should always be assumed).
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
No, it's not. A person can gain knowledge with zero education. They are independent.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
It's a yes-or-no question:
Do you believe that (2+2=4) and (2+2=0 (mod 4)) are "the same statement"?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
(2+2=4 (mod 4)) and (2+2=0 (mod 4)) is the same statement.
That is not what I asked.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
You don't need to trust anyone to make a decision. Nor do you need to believe anything.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Fair enough. I think article 1 would be trashed and article 2 praised, but that might be just my experience.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Whom to believe? I wouldn't know unless I had spent really long time studying dynamics of bridge safety.
If you don't know who to believe, then don't believe anyone. Why must people trust anybody?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted
But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.
The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.
Yes, but this presumes that there is a formal logic, when in fact there's many formal logics. One user might say question X is trivial, but that's only in classical first-order logic, in other logics it might not be so trivial. See for example this entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Classical Logic, I would say it's anything but simple. And of course it has an entire section explaining this isn't the "one right logic", there's many critics and alternatives:
However, as noted, the main meta-theoretic properties of classical, first-order logic lead to expressive limitations of the formal languages and model-theoretic semantics. Key notions, like finitude, countability, minimal closure, natural number, and the like cannot be expressed.
I think it's clearly a fallacy to think that X is trivial because under a particular view (classical first-order logic) it is trivial. Just because something appears trivial doesn't mean that it is.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Yeah, honestly.
No, that's your opinion. Two opinions do not make a fact.
I have done this countless times. I challenge you to find a statement of mine in an article that in your opinion has a "smug" tone, and I'll show you why that's not the (likely) case. Either you misinterpreted something, or you are committing a fallacy, or something. What usually happens when I challenge somebody this way is that they eventually give up.
From a recent ACX post:
ACX is not an arbiter of truth. As shocking as it may be to some people to hear: Scott Alexander is not infallible.
What he is essentially saying in his post is that there's absolutely nothing he can say, he cannot be wrong. If he says "X is true", and later it turns out that "X is false", he is not wrong.
I do strongly encourage people to couch their words as opinions
I do not have a problem with /u/magic9mushroom not couching his opinion, he didn't couch his opinion, Scott Alexander didn't couch his opinion, that's fine. What I have a problem with is continuing the discussion as if X is indeed true: it is smuggling an opinion.
There's a rule that says "don't attempt to build consensus", what he is doing is essentially silently building consensus, now people are primed to believe that his opinion ("the tone was rather smug") is a fact. I replied "I was not smug, you believed I was smug", but the "fact" has already been established, so now I'm downvoted for challenging a "fact".
You can say it doesn't matter because this "isn't sensitive", but the other claim that my articles "made catastrophic mistakes in understanding the topic" is also elevating an opinion to a fact, and I believe that is important. It's another smuggled "fact" that now everyone believes. No, it's not a fact my articles made "catastrophic mistakes", it's only his opinion.
This is 100% attempting to poison the well, not only for this post, but for every other article that I write, and every comment that I write, because I am generally "smugly wrong" (I am not). He is claiming that I have been generally "smugly wrong", but I'm the bad guy for challenging that "fact" and claiming that's not necessarily true.
It didn't shift my belief much. But it's clear who was the one who benefited the most, and who has being against it, sanctioned, and threatened to shut it down over and over.
I've put more information here.
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