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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I've learned to be distrustful of mainstream conservative commentators, but I still had hope that Dennis Prager was one of the intellectually honest ones. Having read his latest column, my disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.

I understand that accusing someone of intellectual dishonesty without clear evidence that they are lying is frowned upon here and likely anywhere else that meaningful discussion happens. If anyone has a defensible reading of this column, I would greatly appreciate hearing it, because I can only see two possible readings.

  1. The subject of the holocaust hits so close to home for Prager that he suspends all rational thought when discussing it, leaving him incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy or recusing himself to avoid embarassment.

  2. He is consciously trying to enforce a norm that you can't question anything about the holocaust; he is aware that this contradicts his encouragement of vaccine hesitancy and other forms of wrongthink, but he doesn't care, because those are forms of wrongthink he likes, and this is one he doesn't like.

The first possibility fills me with pity. The second one fills me with outrage, not only because I consider that attitude to be morally wrong, but because I consider it to be counter-productive. The best way to encourage holocaust denial, and the anti-Semitism that it so often leads to, is to tell people not to question any details about it. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that Prager does not want people to question any details about it whatsoever. He says so himself.

Yet, some people, including an American named Nick Fuentes, aggressively deny the Holocaust, asserting that a few hundred thousand Jews, not millions, were killed.

Prager does not define the holocaust as "the German government's mass-murder of Jewish citizens," or even "the deliberate attempt by the German government to kill all of the Jews in Europe." He defines the holocaust specifically as the murder of millions of Jews, meaning that if you put the death toll at anything under 7 figures, you are denying the totality of the event in his mind. If Prager was giving a live lecture, I would excuse this implication as an accidental result of speaking off-the-cuff, but this is a written column, which means he had the opportunity to proof-read his words and think about what they mean, and he still thought that this was acceptable.

Based on my conversations with others about holocaust denial and revisionism, I suspect there's an unspoken implication in this column that people who are neurotypical (or just not autistic in the same way I am) are capable of picking up on: that anyone who questions any detail about the holocaust is a bad faith actor trying to Ship of Theseus it out of the historical record. I've had many people, even in ratspace, tell me that this is so obvious a reason to ostracize holocaust revisionists that it doesn't even have to be stated explicitly when condemning them. Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used.

This is not a defense of Nick Fuentes. While I can't read Fuentes's mind, I have inferred based on his tone when speaking about the holocaust that he likely either doesn't believe it happened or wants other people to not believe it happened. The column, however, is not about Nick Fuentes. It's a column about the general subject of holocaust "denial," and it merely uses Fuentes as an example. And while I'm at it..

Second, Holocaust denial is not only a Big Lie; it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism. The proof that it emanates from antisemitism is that no other 20th-century genocide is denied (with the exception of the Turkish government’s denial of the Turks’ mass murder of Armenians during World War I). No one denies Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago or his deliberate starvation of about five million Ukrainians (the Holodomor); or the Cambodian communists’ murder of about one in every four Cambodians; or Mao’s killing of about 60 million Chinese. The only genocide-denial is the genocide of the Jews.

Prager, buddy, do you have any idea how many people on my university campus alone denied "Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago?" I don't, because once you're counting in the dozens, it's impossible to keep track without administering a structured survey. I know that Bob Avakian's group canvassed there every day for years without incident, while right-wing events were met with hostile protests. I was one of the first people to know that Quentin Tarantino spoke at one of their events, but it took Breitbart a month to report on my tip, and not a single other outlet picked up on it because they didn't care.

What world does Prager live in where Stalin apologists are marginalized, but holocaust denial runs free? It's not the world he lived in five years ago, because 3 minutes into this video, he approvingly quotes a professor's statement that denial Stalin's genocide is common. Did Prager's assessment of the culture change over the past five years, or is he just contradicting himself to effectively enforce his preferred censorial norms? I'm inclined to think the latter, and it's a darn shame. I used to be a Ben Shapiro fan until I caught him doing stuff like this, and my search for people who recognized the problems with wokeness without enforcing their own intellectual taboos drove me further right to places like VDare and Unz, because they were less obviously dishonest. Several years later, I don't think those places are particularly honest, but I'm sure they're more honest than Daily Wire, and I expect many people to get stuck at that level of the radicalization rabbit hole without graduating to the general agnosticism and confusion I'm at. Shit, now I'm getting emotional.

Also, whoever chose that headline did a bad job. Prager is Jewish, and his reference to hell in the column was clearly meant to be a figure of speech. Making it the headline makes it sound literal. I wonder if Prager approved it.

The Holocaust killing millions is very well documented. I'm more of a mistake theorist than a conflict theorist, so I wouldn't call people who say the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil, but I would say they're likely mentally ill(like Kanye) and/or have made some very poor decisions in which sources they want to trust.

The question of when information should be censored is not an easy one in my opinion. Especially because we can never really be sure when information is true or not; even in mathematics "proofs" that are widely accepted can be much later shown to be false. So all information, from the planet being round to evolution to covid policy to the holocaust would be kept open to debate in an ideal society. But in an ideal society then also on the easily answerable questions like the planet being round everyone would quickly come to the right answer, and for even trickier questions like covid policy everyone would quickly dismiss the stupid information like that vaccines are being used to implant microchips.

But we do not live in an ideal society, and if you let debate spread unhindered, you'll get a lot of people believing flat out wrong stuff. And that flat out wrong stuff can have harmful effects. For example, in the 14th century, the belief that Jews were related to the spread of the bubonic plague led to massacres of Jewish communities. I think with the benefit of hindsight, most modern people would agree that if they had the magic power to censor the belief that Jews spread the black plague(and there wouldn't be any butterfly effects through the timeline), they would, since that information was very harmful.

It is actually not well-documented at all. There are no written orders for extermination of millions, likely none ever existed. The "well-documented killings" amounts to historians tallying transports with the assumption that every single person on them was murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, which is not documented (and in fact documents explicitly refer to these alleged extermination camps with non-homicidal functions, like "transit camp" or "labor camp." Historians say this was all "coded language" to get around the fact that documents paint a different picture for the purposes of these camp than their own assertions). But there's never been a single excavation of a single mass grave at any of the alleged killing sites, despite the fact they exist in precisely known locations. There was never a single autopsy of a single person killed by one of these homicidal gas chambers. Excavations are in fact forbidden by Jewish authorities using the same reasoning as is being used to refuse excavations of the alleged Kamloops Indian Reservation mass graves. They say that excavations at Kamloops would "disturb the spirits of the children" which is practically the exact same reasoning given by rabbinical authorities. More likely, they know that excavations would disprove the prevailing narrative in both cases.

In essence, "If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God" is simply the conservative manifestation of the Holocaust dialectic, with the leftist manifestation being Adorno's infamous quote "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz, and with good reason: it was a massive operation with three prominent subcamps, it had the most victims and most survivors, it received mostly western and Balkan Jews as well as POWs and political prisoners. In short, it had a wide range of experiences; which is ideal for someone who wants to chip away at a subject that an individual has a very general and non-specific understanding of.

A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it. They have a vast array of knowledge of all kinds of minutiae about the subject, and the layman does not. They have an endless arsenal of anecdotes or factoids or even legitimately true things that they known and the layman does not. A classic example would go like this: did you know Auschwitz had a swimming pool? It's true! The Germans even let prisoners use it! Boy, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing a death camp would have, now would it? Huh, I wonder why we never learned about that in history class... wonder what else we're not told about.

And then maybe the layman goes and googles it and boy, sure enough it's true. Of course some of the details are fudged: yes, there was a reservoir for firefighting that the German guards would swim in sometimes, and even let certain privileged political prisoners use from time to time. It was a massive operation, with thousands of guards and support staff that along with lodgings and mess halls needed some form of entertainment. And in the bigger picture it doesn't really change anything: somewhere close to a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, swimming pool or no. Someone posted the link to epistemic learned helplessness: this is the exact kind of thing that heuristic is meant to guard against.

So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.

Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz

Holocaust deniers have in previous decades focused on Auschwitz because the historical narrative, and particularly the cultural depiction of the Holocaust in popular culture, was focused on Auschwitz. After all, until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s it was claimed that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz, only to be revised downwards to the still-wildly inflated 1.5 million. Auschwitz is also the only "extermination camp" which claimed to have an intact gas chamber, the "gas chamber" which you will see frequently posted to the front-page of Reddit and has been visited by millions of unwitting tourists.

It was the Revisionists who visited the archives and procured the blueprints which label this room a morgue (Leichenkeller) during the period it was allegedly a gas chamber. It was Revisionists who exposed in an undercover interview the head of the Auschwitz Museum admitting that the "Zyklon introductory chimneys" in that room were in fact "reconstructions" built post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland, whereas previously all were told that they were original structures attesting to the homicidal function of the room.

If you talk to a smart anti-denier, he will downplay the importance of Auschwitz and in particular the importance of that famous gas chamber on the Auschwitz tour (the only one left standing at any of the extermination camps!). But that's only because Revisionists have forced a retreat.

So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews.

Gee, I guess these American photographers who took pictures like this were all lying and faking too, then, SecureSignals?

April 14, 1945 - Pile of ashes and bones found by U.S. soldiers at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

Or this one:

April 12, 1945 - Bodies of prisoners of Ohrdruf concentration camp stacked like cord-wood

Who are the actors playing Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower in this one?

April 12, 1945 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton are given a tour of Ohrdruf concentration camp. Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.

Plainly the Eisenhower presidential library is just unreliable source!

The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war. It is no longer claimed that Buchenwald or its sub-camp Ohrdruf were extermination camps with gas chambers. The high death toll is what initially caused the gas chamber story to center on Western camps. Images can also be deceiving in several ways. For example, one of your images is captioned:

Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.

But it's far more likely that this was a makeshift cremation of people who had died from other causes, like epidemic typhus. There are no credible accusations that I am aware of describing the Germans burning prisoners alive, and it is not maintained by official historiography that this took place (although Elie Wiesel claimed to witness this at Auschwitz in his memoir). On the other hand, the cremation of prisoners that had died was standard operating procedure in order to reduce the spread of disease and epidemic typhus.

Another example of a notoriously deceptive image is found in your link to the Eisenhower presidential library. There is an infamous image of the dead prisoners at the Nordhausen camp, captioned "April 12, 1945 - A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany." But it is well-known that this camp was bombed by the RAF. You can even see the mass destruction in all the buildings surrounding the bodies which have been used as a prop for propaganda. CODOH has an article on the Nordhausen film and image propaganda:

On April 3 1945, 247 Lancaster bombers and 8 Mosquitos of Group Nos 1 and 8 of British Royal Air Force bombed and strafed the Nordhausen Camp hospital, killing thousands of inmates. The hospital doctors, nurses, and caregivers, (both German and detainee) fled the smashed hospital leaving the sick and wounded in a desperate situation.

The next day, the British attacked again; this time sending 243 Lancasters, 1 Mosquito of No 5 Group, and 8 Pathfinder Mosquitos to bomb the town of Nordhausen and bomb the barracks. Thousands of German civilians and more inmates were killed in the second attack.

Altogether, 490 bombers, each carrying 12,000 lbs. of bombs or almost 6,000,000 pounds of explosives, hit Nordhausen. The hospital was smashed, the doctors and staff scattered, the surrounding area devastated. The already difficult situation in the crowded hospital turned into a disaster. The death toll of hospital inmates and workers was approximately 3,500. The number of dead civilians has been given as approximately 8,000.

On April 11 elements of the US 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions reached Nordhausen. The bodies of those who died in the bombing and its aftermath were pulled from the rubble and lined up for a "photo opportunity. " No mention was made that the "props" were provided courtesy of the British air force.

Cameramen A. Statt and Rosenmann had a keen eye for filming the horrors, focusing on details of the dead and sick. The filming was supervised by Major Frank Gleason of the JAGD 89th

Their work was packaged into numerous propaganda films and Nordhausen achieved a brief notoriety. An example of the propaganda use Gleason's work was put to can be seen at; Universal Newsreel's Nazi Murder Mills, an Official NewsReel. We are informed that, "The vile inhuman beasts took pride in their concentration camp at Nordhausen;" that the deaths were the result of "Germany's organized carnage", and "For the first time, America can believe what they thought was impossible propaganda. Here is documentary evidence of sheer mass murder. Murder that will blacken the name of Germany for the rest of recorded history."

The true history of the bombing and devastation of Nordhausen was known when the Nuremberg Trial started but the film images were "too good" not to be used by the prosecution. The film footage was shown early in the Trial, on November 29, 1945, as a segment of a longer motion picture described as A Documentary Motion Picture / Document No. 2430-PS / Submitted on behalf of U.S. Chief Counsel as exhibit USA 79. In the film it was stated that, "at least 3,000 political prisoners died here [the Boelcke Kaserne] at the brutal hands of SS troops..." The camp hospital was described only as "a depository for slaves found unfit for work."

No mention was made of the British bombings.

To summarize, the mass death and destruction at Nordhausen concentration camp was caused by RAF bombings of the camp and civilian areas. The United States arrived and produced propaganda films of the aftermath which was submitted as evidence of German brutality at the Nuremberg trial, with no mention that these were victims of Allied bombing. Likewise, the caption of that photograph in the Eisenhower library "A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany" makes no mention that these people were killed by Allied bombings. In fact, the Nordhausen camp population was minority Jewish. So this is a picture of mostly non-Jewish victims of RAF bombings being posed and passed off as Holocaust victims of a German extermination policy.

The image is real, the context and its use in Holocaust propaganda is highly deceptive.

Speaking of deception, Eisenhower was in command of the Psychological War Division (PWD/SCHAEF) which was the unit which conducted the "investigation" of Buchenwald after its liberation. There's the infamous propaganda film of the forced march of the civilians of Weimar through Buchenwald, which culminates in a table display of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads allegedly created by the Germans. The shrunken heads were disappeared after they were dramatically presented on the first day of the Nuremberg trial, and the human-skin lampshade was also conveniently disappeared. Historians have also dropped the famous human-skin lampshade story.

Not surprisingly, the famous images of the shrunken heads and human-skin lampshade at Buchenwald did not make it into the album you posted.

The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war.

What you then claim what happened with Polish Jewish pre-war population? Are you also claiming that forcing Jews into ghettos by Germans was fake? Executing people across conquered territories?

I bet that there is plenty of propaganda (add "soap made from human fat" to that) but presenting in a way that claims "Germans have not mass-murdered millions" is even more misleading.

Also, is it intentional that your username in short is SS?

I think the whole demographic question (ie. what happened to the prewar Jewish population) is the crucial question here, much moreso than the concentration camp doors or camp memoirs etc., but this is also a month old subthread so it's probably not a good place to discuss such issues.

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Wikipedia is incredibly ambiguous regarding the consensus on the authenticity of the shrunken heads and lampshades.

A human skin lampshade was reported to have been displayed by Buchenwald concentration camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch and his wife Ilse Koch, along with multiple other human skin artifacts.[2] Despite myths to the contrary, there were no systematic efforts by the Nazis to make human skin lampshades.[3]

This seems to leave their authenticity an open question (systematic doesn’t mean it never happened). Google’s top results also seem very evasive and weasely. Do you have anything more solid or unambiguous regarding current mainstream consensus?

General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the US zone of occupied Germany, explained the lampshade story, "Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial [of Ilse Koch] it was still human flesh." (Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation Quoted in M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 7(4), pp. 406-407.)... A similar statement from General Clay:

There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she [Ilse Koch] was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the 'Bitch of Buchenwald,' [and] had written that she had lampshades made out of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lampshades were made out of goatskin."—General Lucius Clay, quoted in: Smith, Jean Edward, Lucius D. Clay, An American Life, p. 301. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990

Moreover, Ilse Koch had left Buchenwald nearly two years prior to the liberation and PWD table display of these artifacts. If you are interested in a deep-dive into the circumstances surrounding this lampshade and shrunken head display, I would suggest this Revisionist film because the circumstances of these legends are far sketchier than you would probably believe.

The "mainstream consensus", however, is to categorically ignore the issue. They just don't talk about it.

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Oh well, that's all right then; they didn't deliberately murder the people they rounded up and held in camps, it was all down to collapsing infrastructure and typhus.

That is not really any better, SecureSignals, because you still have to explain "why did they round up all these people and hold them in camps?"

No, he actually doesn’t have to explain why they were in concentration camps, because the claim of the holocaust is not that Germans kept Jews in camps like the Americans did the Japanese. The claim of the holocaust is the intentional killing of millions of Jews in these camps.

The reason intentionality was such a big deal for holocaust historiography is because a lot of other nations have this on their records.

The gas chambers and skin lampshades and SS-she-wolves and Looney Tunes electric roller coasters have to be real, because if was all just starvation and cholera and slave camps and mass reprisal executions the holocaust starts looking too familiar. And it has to be seen as a categorically different and historically unique event, not just a quantitatively worse successor.

(Of course, future generations of historians might not care, and will instead prefer to treat the holocaust as just one of many related examples of "naturally evil white devils being evil")

The photos only prove that many starved and many died. Look at photos of Andersonville prisoners from the American Civil War, they look the same. That doesn’t mean necessarily that there were gas chambers or a deliberate extermination program.

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?

Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews, and unless you read exclusively denialist writers you would know this. With your wording I'm not sure if you're being deliberately dishonest or if you're just nonspecific in your wording. But I'm going to assume honesty and believe you're referring to the lack of a Führerbefehl: an order from Adolf Hitler, starting the Holocaust.

First of all, you might want to flip the question: would you necessarily expect an order to undertake a vast criminal conspiracy to survive? Ignore the context of everything else for a second: there were 9 million Jews in Europe, give or take, in 1939 (the Nazis believed a higher number because of their racial theories). Planning to kill that many people would qualify as the greatest conspiracy of all time. The key perpetrators might want to conceal their decision-making a bit. Certainly the lack of similar documents haven't stopped the same people who believe in Holocaust denial from alleging in 9/11 or moon landing conspiracies, as an aside.

And the Nazis were quite keenly aware of the importance of secrecy in what they were undertaking. Not only were they not so un-self-aware that they anticipated the rest of the world might quibble with them murdering millions of civilians, the Aktion T4 program had been undermined by insufficient internal secrecy leading to a considerable protest movement against it both within and without Germany. Awareness of the systematic murder of Jews, POWs, and "useless mouths" could (and eventually did) harden resistance and resolve to German conquest, pacification, and occupation of lands in the East. Institutional and operational secrecy was as important and necessary as the undertaking itself. It was, as Himmler later said, a "glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of."

Take the Commissar Order, for example. It acknowledged quite openly that it was brazenly in violation of international law, and there was a concerted effort to limit possible leaks: only thirty copies of the original were created, and the ultimate promulgation to the Army Groups was only extended to 340, and ultimately all copies were ordered to be destroyed. If they had been, presumably you'd also argue that "there was no proof of the order to kill Soviet commissars!" which would again be untrue, because even if the primary source documents had not survived we have plenty of contemporary secondary sources, both of those who received the order (including many who subsequently lied about receiving it) and of those who carried it out.

That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians. The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941). The order was almost certainly issued verbally to Heinrich Himmler, hence the lack of "documents", but many of the key figures in the Nazi regime discussed being aware of such an order. In any case, by the time this order had been issued somewhere between 500,000 and a million Jews had already been murdered, but that's a different discussion and deniers tend to very pointedly ignore the Holocaust by bullets anyways.

The big problem deniers have to always work around is that the Nazis themselves never denied the Holocaust. While individuals might have tried to shirk their specific responsibility, when it came to the criminal trials and executions the one legal defence never attempted was "it didn't happen."

Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews

Let's not do a Motte and Bailey here, there were documents ordering the killing of a lot of people in WWII. There are of course documents, well-studied by Revisionists, explicating the executions of Jewish partisans and reprisals against the local population. The executions and reprisals are the grain of truth within the wider Holocaust lore, but at the time reprisals were legal under international law and those reprisals were not even considered a warcrime at Nuremberg for that reason. When people talk about the Holocaust and the "final solution", they are obviously referring to the historical assertion that the extermination of the Jews became a matter of policy of the German government as the "final solution" to the Jewish question, and that most of six million Jews were exterminated in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. "There were documents ordering the killing of Jews" is a Motte and Bailey at a comical level.

Let's see how the most eminent Holocaust Historian, Raul Hilberg, describes the origin of the "final solution":

But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures [of the Jews]. They [the measures] were taken step by step. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.”

You correctly posit the Holocaust as one of the greatest conspiracies in human history- the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, using Zyklon B pellets or carbon monoxide from the engine of captured Soviet tanks. But Hilberg would have us believe that there was no plan, no blueprint, no budget for this mass conspiracy. It wasn't carried out by a "plan" but by "an incredible meeting of minds, and consensus mind-reading".

On the other hand, a simple matter like an order for the execution of Commissars, was unable to escape exposure in the documentary body of evidence despite being limited to 30 documents that they tried to keep secret and later tried to destroy. Hilberg and you would have us believe that the greatest conspiracy in human history was accomplished without the benefit or survival of written plans, blueprints, or budgets. It was just mind-reading across the German bureaucracy, according to Hilberg.

If the Commissar order couldn't escape being exposed in the documentary body of evidence, it is entirely incomprehensible that the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers was accomplished without the survival of explicitly written plans, blueprints, or budgets, and without bodies or mass graves that have ever been excavated. The Commissar order was directly exposed in the documents, why wouldn't this far more gargantuan conspiracy?

That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians.

Actually, some historians suggest that it could have not been known by Hitler but that's besides the point. The assertion that this was a homicidal gas chamber disguised as a shower room used to gas Jews is also not contested among historians, but it has been completely refuted by Revisionists nonetheless.

The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941).

Historians are all over the place in formulating a date on when the extermination was apparently decided upon, but none of them are internally consistent. Historians who pick a date too early are contradicted by documents proving Hitler and Nazi Leadership still considered the Madagascar Plan to be the "Final Solution." Historians who pick a date later than that run into the fact that it is claimed extermination camps were already built and operational, so they are saying the order came after the construction of the earliest extermination centers. But there is no consensus because there is no evidence to establish any of their positions.

Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.

Lastly, I'm sure you are aware that upon liberation it was the Western camps which featured most prominently in the propaganda surrounding German "death camps," like Dachau, which were claimed to be the centers of gas chamber extermination. But the Western Allies investigated those claims and found them to be false. The entire death camp narrative shifted to the East, where the Soviets denied access to outside investigators and freely modified structures post-war (like the Auschwitz "gas chamber.")

If the Western camps were originally accused of perpetuating the greatest conspiracy in human history, and those claims turned out to be completely false, why wouldn't that lower your confidence in the authenticity of identical claims in the Eastern camps where all of the evidence and investigation was managed in the Soviet sphere? The "current" map is now oudated as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum finally revised their website to revise Majdanek from "extermination camp" to "concentration camp", so that's another "death camp" that is in the dustbin of history due to Revisionist research. And that one was in the East and was in fact liberated before Auschwitz.

You can see this article form August 1944, before the liberation of Auschwitz declaring a mass murder of "1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematories" at Majdanek. Then the Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 and made the exact same claim. The problem is that in 2003 the death toll at Majdanek was revised to something like 50,000. The entire gas chamber narrative began at Majdanek, and just recently historians are finally admitting it was not an extermination camp.

Given your obvious bent and contempt for academic history, again I don't know if you're being deceitful, ignorant, or just plain dumb. The "functionalist" camp is the pre-eminent one in Holocaust studies; scarce few contemporary historians hold that the Holocaust was masterminded by Hitler from the beginning. The Holocaust began roughly simultaneously within three separate Nazi bureaucracies, each with specific problems, methods, and goals. Again, like almost all deniers do, you steadfastly ignore the Holocaust by bullets. By the time the Holocaust moved onto a more deliberate stage and the combined resources of the Nazi state begin to dedicate itself to the task, yes then we have plenty of documentation of that effort (which again you just ignore). Surely you know you're not convincing anyone who has ever opened a history book on the subject?

Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.

Well, Himmler would've disagreed with you. And Heydrich and Eichmann, and Goebbels. C'mon dude, these are your heroes! Why are you denying them their greatest works? Think of the shame they would have if 80-odd years on people who claim to follow in their footsteps would disavow the immense effort and sacrifice in attempting rid Europe of Jewry!

This exchange is a lot like this classic meme. You are being extremely condescending and scornful, sneering that anyone that “ever opened a history book” would know better (but refusing to elaborate or engage), while FarNearEverywhere is saying he would break the nose of anyone questioning genocide.

On the other hand, @SecureSignals is providing numerous sources, links and actual arguments regarding the historiography of the Holocaust.

I understand there is the whole issue from Epistemic Learned Helplessness, that a crank with a hobby horse can be much more prepared than a mainstream normie. But you should understand, SecureSignals is coming across better here. In this exchange, the mainstream looks smug and dismissive, but simultaneously evasive and heavily reliant on emotional manipulation.

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You know, stuff like this really doesn't help convince people. Obvious consensus enforcement works in most places, but a lot of people here are instinctively suspicious of it to the point that it becomes counterproductive to even try.

I may well get banned for asking this, but whatever. Are there any books or sites that present the case for Holocaust denial in a sane and somewhat reasonable way? I read some book skeptical of the Anne Frank diary that someone on here mentioned a while back, but I wasn’t impressed with it.

Now I understand the witches problem, and the fact that it is so taboo/ghettoized it’s going to select for nuts, but if there’s anything to it surely someone has put together a relatively coherent argument that actually engages with the strongest arguments of the non-denial side.

I have seen enough BS like Kamloops to be willing to give denialists a hearing, if any of them have written a summary worth reading

Also the opposite if anyone knows of one. It's almost impossible to research this because you'll just get banned in most places. I would be interested in an account of how scholars came to the modern consensus on how the holocaust happened with lots of original documents.

Are you looking for a discussion of historiography, or specifically a focus on primary sources?

A focus on primary sources, ideally something that goes through what would typically be taught in a class about the Holocaust but that meticulously shows how each claim is supported by primary sources.

Despite some answers below written with excessive charity, the best answer is "they don't exist". At most you can find books that use neutral language but present misleading information.

It's like homeopathy. Homeopathy is not a subject which leads to people being banned as witches, but even so, if you ask "give me books with reasonable arguments for homeopathy", there won't be any. Homeopathy is so out of touch with the real world that you can't have books with reasonable arguments for it, because there aren't any reasonable arguments for it. It's the same here.

Every once in a while, I'll take a look through the transcripts from the tribunals/interrogations to fact check an anecdote about the war and they're not quite the best at clearly establishing what happened either. Lots of inference, jumping back and forth between various incidents or to previous statements abruptly trying to catch out inconsistencies, try to get an admission then (at least in transcript form) quickly moving on to the next thing. And for many things testimony is the only thing that survived the chaos and destruction of war. For the ones I remember off-hand the textbook summary was generally in line with what was established in the transcripts but that establishment wasn't necessarily clear, reasonable or detail rich even if ultimately convincing.

Why would you get banned? The idea is not verboten, no matter how distasteful. If you're going to get links to decent scholarship...here is probably the place.

Bear in mind the usual disclaimers about epistemic learned helplessness. Given enough time--and a powerful enough selection effect--specialists in any field will develop some elaborate fortifications.

I think the case for the Holocaust is much, much stronger than Kamloops. The most defensible objections, in my opinion, are of scale or of details. But I will defer to some of our other regulars for actual citations.

The best resource is the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, they do consistently excellent work and have a rich archive of high-quality articles on many topics. They have an overview pamphlet of their claims but if you are willing to give their case a hearing I would suggest reading Debating the Holocaust (which is published by CODOH, you can get the full book or ebook here). This book is useful because it presents what is claimed in the official historiography alongside the Revisionist case, making it easier to see where mainstream historiography disagrees with Revisionism and where it does not.

There was never a single autopsy of a single person killed by one of these homicidal gas chambers.

"Hello. I very much doubt your murdered family actually were murdered as you claim, may I have permission to conduct an autopsy to prove that you are a lying liar?"

Guess my answer. Is it:

(1) Fuck you

(2) Fuck you very much

(3) Fuck you very much and also if you don't clear off within the next ten seconds, someone will be conducting an autopsy on you

I have very hair-trigger reactions when it comes to revisionism about the Famine (to the extent that I hate how Americans refer to it as "the Irish Potato Famine" and before any snoot-nose comes back with "well ackshully it was only potatoes that failed, other foodstuffs were fine", I hope you enjoy your broken nose), and that was way smaller numbers of deaths and not in reality any kind of planned extermination (even though some English sure were happy the Paddies were getting what was coming to them). So imagine if I were Jewish and some snoot-nose was "well ackshully how do we know the Nazis murdered your granny and her young kids? maybe they just got the flu and got badly sick and died of that!".

"Hello. I very much doubt your murdered family actually were murdered as you claim, may I have permission to conduct an autopsy to prove that you are a lying liar?"

Guess my answer. Is it:

(1) Fuck you

(2) Fuck you very much

(3) Fuck you very much and also if you don't clear off within the next ten seconds, someone will be conducting an autopsy on you

You are using the exact same pearl-clutching that progressives are using to assert that it's racist for skeptics of the Kamloops Mass Graves to ask for excavations to investigate if what is claimed actually happened. "How dare you demand that they disturb the spirits of the children to satisfy your perverted, white, racist, genocide denial!" It is emotionally powerful reasoning, I get it.

In most murder cases it is extremely typical for excavations and autopsies, and identification of bodies if possible. You would expect it in the murder case of a single person, but somehow for the case of the alleged murder of a million people in a precisely known location, it transcends any expectation for physical evidence.

Are you seriously saying you would break someone’s nose because of comments about an event in 1850? Why are you so sensitive about it?

Wasn't August Hirt's work all produced from gas chambers at a camp? Not mass grave of course given the nature of his work but corpses and there is some first-hand testimony of how they got there.

The alleged Natzweiler gas chamber in France is not considered to be related to the alleged extermination camps in Poland. There was an autopsy of some of the corpses from August Hirt's collection, which tested negative for cyanide poisoning, although if they were killed with gas it was probably not cyanide gas like the alleged gas chambers in Poland. The testimony is based on the confession of Josef Kramer, who was the commandant of the (alleged) extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Bergen-Belsen. The Natzweiler gas chamber was not included in the charges against Kramer or in the charges of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal.

Incidentally, Josef Kramer was commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1944 - November 1944 and was one of the earliest Holocaust deniers, who described the accusation of gas chambers at Auschwitz as "untrue from beginning to end."

More likely, they know that excavations would disprove the prevailing narrative in both cases.

And what Holocaust-denialist claim about for example Jewish population in Poland? It never existed? Coincidentally they almost entirely died during WW II but it was unrelated to German Jew-obsessed terror? German-ordered ghettos also have not existed? They ascended to higher plane of existence?

An explanation I've heard is for deniers to grudgingly admit that sure, they were brought into camps, but they only got ill and died because the war went bad! If those dastardly allies hadn't made it so hard to supply them, they wouldn't all have died!

This conveniently leaves out the gloating of high-ranking Nazis about all the Jews that died and how giddy they got about it, sure, but if deniers had a case to make theirs wouldn't be a movement made up solely of evil losers.

Hold up. I'm lost. While I'm sure that there are still mass graves, the bodies were generally burnt in the crematoriums. Am I mistaken on that front.

That isn't to say that there aren't mass graves or anything. However, is it not well known that the bodies were put into crematoriums?

Shouldn't you be challenging the claim that there were in fact crematoriums?

And I'm not undercutting you here. I want to get on the same page. Are you claiming that there was no explicit documentation related to death camps (save "coded" documents)?

Do you meant that Hitler himself never signed such explicit documents himself?

so I wouldn't call people who say the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil

Are they challenging any other figures? Do they say the Nazis didn't kill the number of Roma that was claimed? or that the military and/or civilian casualties were much lower than commonly estimated?

Or do they only question the Holocaust narrative? Because if they're happy that yeah, so many Germans died, so many Brits died, so many Japanese died - but hold on a minute there, you're wrong about the Jews! - then yeah, that looks motivated by more than impartial historical accuracy.

The Holocaust killing millions is very well documented.

How many millions?

2 (lowest estimate for 'millions') or 10, 50, 400?

the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil, but I would say they're likely mentally ill(like Kanye) and/or have made some very poor decisions in which sources they want to trust.

5% of what? What's a ballpark?

5% of 500 millions is still a million, while 5% of 1 million is a mere 50,000, which is still a considerable number, but only a quarter of the victims exterminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with technology developed by Oppenheimer and others.

There is more incentive to exaggerate the extent and significance of the holocaust than any other event in history. At the same time, it is one of the most ideologically influential events of the 21st century. These two reasons are why it should be morally acceptable, and in fact encouraged, to poke holes and relitigate the events of the holocaust. Holocaust denialism is not evidence of any bias whatsoever, because autistic men online will spend thousands of hours examining innumerable less important matters like the best tanks and rifles, who killed JFK, UFO sightings, the battle of agincourt and the policies of FDR.

In theory, it might be that some people just become obsessed with the nitty-gritty details of the Holocaust and exactly how many people actually died and what methods were used and the literal accuracy of all historical claims, etc.

In practice, I've never encountered a Holocaust denier who didn't, purely coincidentally, have a great deal of animosity towards Jews.

Some will use more evasions than others ("I don't hate every single Jewish person!" "I only feel animosity towards the organized Jewish media that pushes false narratives and ideologies on me, not Jews as a people," etc.) Even if I were to believe these disclaimers (I don't), Holocaust denial is clearly not like trainspotting, an odd hobby that certain people become obsessed with for no ideological motivation. It's something that attracts people who don't like Jews, not niche historians.

I've heard of him before. White supremacists can always find that one Jew or that one black guy who agrees with them.

I'm not going to do a deep-dive into every Holocaust denier and where they are on the scale from "No Jews died" to "Actually it was only 2 million", but I'm sure there are a few deniers who have idiosyncratic non-Jew-hating reasons. I doubt very much anyone just stumbles upon the subject and doing non-motivated research has a sudden epiphany that the Holocaust is a hoax.

Do you dispute that the vast majority come from a starting position of disliking Jews, and that Holocaust denial is generally part of a larger framework of Jew conspiracy theories?

I’m going to let your uncalled-for use of the slur/exonym “white supremacist” roll off my back, but I do want to take extreme issue with your accusation that I went out of my way to “find that one Jew that agrees” with me. First off, I became familiar with David Cole’s work as a social/political commentator - specifically, his writing for Taki’s - long before I knew anything about his work as a revisionist. He’s far more well-known, by most on the online Right, for his more recent work. He hasn’t done any important new work on the topic of revisionism in nearly thirty years, and in the intervening years he made a name for himself first as a respected Hollywood screenwriter/producer and then as one of the most important figures behind Friends Of Abe, a secret society of sorts for Hollywood conservatives. He’s not some fringe figure or “token Jew” that I nut-picked as a fig leaf.

I think that Cole’s writing is actually extremely clarifying about the topic. Although he hasn’t done any new revisionist work in decades, he does still comment on the state of revisionism/denial as a phenomenon from time to time. Two examples would be this article from 2018, which is itself a re-evaluation of one of his earlier articles. His thesis, which I find very persuasive, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between so-called “denialists” (a field which has degenerated significantly due to the more intelligent and level-headed figures either aging out, dying, or realizing that their battle for public sympathy had been irrecoverably lost and bailing out) and the “anti-denial” lobby who build public careers as snarky “owned by facts and logic” debunkers.

When the average rational person with no strong opinions about the Holocaust over and above the standard narrative we’ve all grown up with wades into this dispute, they find it occupied on both sides by screaming lunatics and they wisely decide, as I have, that it’s probably not worth even trying to sift through the ocean of arguments. The only non-Jews who stick around to fight in that war at this point are people who love the fight. (Jews’ participation in the fight is a matter of direct ethnic self-defense and self-interest, which is healthy and normal and which I do not begrudge them, provided that they don’t stoop to transparently cynical concern-trolling like a couple of the comments below hand-wringing about this sub becoming too friendly to dissenting views on this, and only this, specific issue.)

I’m going to let your uncalled-for use of the slur/exonym “white supremacist” roll off my back, but I do want to take extreme issue with your accusation that I went out of my way to “find that one Jew that agrees” with me.

I didn't say you personally went out of your way to find him. My point is that there are black people who like the Confederacy, Jews who sympathize with the Nazis, probably there are some Chinese historians who side with Japanese nationalists in disputing the Rape of Nanking. Yes, I do think those figures are little more than convenient fig leafs that the pro-denial side likes to trot out as a defense against accusations of ideological bias.

Also, what's your beef with "white supremacist"? Do you just find it less palatable than "white nationalist"? This sounds like the TERFs who claim TERF is a slur even when it's literally accurate (as opposed to being used haphazardly to describe anyone on the other side of a debate).

Also, what's your beef with "white supremacist"? Do you just find it less palatable than "white nationalist"?

…Because I don’t think white people are “supreme”, nor do I have any desire for white people to be “supreme” over other people, to rule them, to dominate them, etc.? Like, the term you’re using has a specific meaning, which does apply to certain living people as well as to a great number of historical people. The logic of something like colonial empire is, explicitly, “white supremacist”. However, I’m not an advocate for empire - racial nor otherwise - but rather for peaceful, non-coercive racial separation. It’s the opposite of “white supremacy”, or at worst totally orthogonal to “white supremacy”.

This is less like a TERF objecting to being called “trans-exclusionary” and more like a TERF objecting to being called “misogynist”. (Because, see, trans women are women, and you hate trans women, therefore you hate women.”) It’s a blatant abuse of terms. Weaponized linguistic legerdemain.

Rudyard Kipling was a white supremacist. My beliefs are not like his beliefs, when it comes to the very centrally important questions of whether or not different racial groups should live together under the same political/geographic unit, and, conditional on one’s answer to that first question, the related question of how to best distribute relative power among those different groups. Since my answer to the first question is “no”, I don’t have to commit to any answer to the second question, let alone the “supremacist” answer that whites should hold the undisputed whip hand.

I am not convinced your distinction is meaningful. White supremacists believe white people are superior to non-white people, at least in most meaningful ways (i.e., anything to do with intellect and behavior; some will waffle about Asian IQ scores). I know not all of them literally want a white empire ruling the untermenschen. If you don't like the label, fair enough, but I wasn't directing it at you personally as a slur.

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I'm not sure if it's simply because of the political climate in the place i live, but the Holocaust is definitely treated with a far sterner hand than other forms of genocide denial in the western world, and by a large margin. In all likelihood it probably transpired very similarly to how historians think it did and the numbers will probably never be completely accurate given the chaos of the time period, but I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt with such a large scale event. But I've found myself having to defend Holocaust deniers in Canada because of how draconian the laws have become up here. It has to be said, what is so special about holocaust denial as opposed to other forms of denialism regarding events of the 20th century?

Before you accuse me of hyperbole, in Canada there is currently active laws that were recently passed that specifically outlaw holocaust denial in particular, in public.Thats right, you will be put in jail for up to 2 years for any type of spoken "Antisemitism," including holocaust denial. This is absurd when you take into account the complete ambiguity that these laws were put in place with.

https://www.cp24.com/news/holocaust-denial-downplaying-the-nazis-murder-of-jews-to-be-outlawed-in-canada-1.5854626

Now this would be all well and good, except this type of hate speech law is exclusively targeting this specific genocide. There are not real consequences for denying any other genocide. In fact, three years ago an assistant professor at the university I attended publicly denied the Holodomor as "Nazi propaganda."

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/calls-grow-to-fire-university-of-alberta-lecturer-who-deemed-ukrainian-genocide-a-myth-1.4707517

I'm ethnically Ukrainian. Not only did he not get arrested, not only did he not get fired, he is still employed at the university. Call me whatever you wish, but that is extremely unjust. These laws are not developed with some sort of altruistic end in mind, and they are not enacted with the same amount of utility that laws against holocaust denial are. You should never be put in jail for simply thinking something. It is extremely frustrating, and it does not mean i hate Jews when i point out these clear inconsistencies and injustices with how these hate laws are currently installed. I find myself having to defend Holocaust deniers even though i do not have any real sympathy towards their arguments, simply because the laws against them are increasingly unfair, and have essentially made it illegal to think the wrong thoughts. It's not, and should not ever be illegal to think dumb shit. Holocaust denial is on the same level of believing in a flat earth or 5G cell tower conspiracies. But one should not be thrown in jail for believing in them. Much like your comment is suggesting, any criticism of this is now tantamount to holocaust denial, which therefore inherently means that I am anti-semetic. What now should we do in this situation?

Well, in the U.S. we don't have laws against Holocaust denial, and I would strongly oppose any such laws.

Every time this issue comes up, I see the same series of talking points. Yes, I think Holocaust denial is bad (and factually wrong). Yes, I think Holocaust deniers are anti-Semitic. No, I do not think they should go to jail. Yes, I think a lot of other atrocities get overshadowed by the Holocaust and shouldn't be. Yes, I think there probably is some legitimate historical research that gets quashed by the stigma of delving too deeply into the details of the Holocaust. Yes, there's probably a catch-22 here where you can't find legitimate historians who will touch it so the only ones who will are anti-Semites, so the research is regarded as illegitimate.

All of those talking points miss the point I'm making to begin with. You say you would strongly oppose these laws, and yet opposing these laws are now implied to be inherently Anti-Semitic. That is the real catch-22. I am not making talking points, i am saying that it is now illegal to point out certain legal injustices. There is not a proper way to handle that.

You say you would strongly oppose these laws, and yet opposing these laws are now implied to be inherently Anti-Semitic.

Yes, well, that's why I'm liberal, not woke.

You are simply in the classic conundrum of "my rules applied evenly > their rules applied evenly > their rules applied unevenly." I don't think poking at the intellectual scab that is the Holocaust is worth it, though, because you will never take down anyone by exposing them as hypocrites and you'll probably only tarnish your reputation for no gain.

I guess the one silver lining for you is that, while the Holodomor was historically only recognized by some nations, that needle will probably have moved thanks to the Russian invasion.

I don't think it should be any surprise that the vast majority of Holocaust deniers are people who have disreputable beliefs about Jews. Given how it's considered rank antisemitism and just about the worst thing one can be caught believing, wouldn't we expect that the vast majority of people who have gone that rabbit hole (much less admit to it) are antisemites?

I just don't see how that has any bearing on the truth value of the claim.

It's always going to be the case that the most taboo ideas in a society are only ever seriously contemplated by people who have some strong ideological or moral conviction related to those taboo ideas. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people espousing atheism in Europe hundreds of years ago were rapacious sinners, edgelords, and reprobates of various other sorts. So what?

I just don't see how that has any bearing on the truth value of the claim.

In theory, it doesn't, but when the evidence strongly suggests a completely made-up set of facts constructed to support a pre-existing narrative (that everything is a Jew conspiracy to benefit Jews), it's not like a historical debate over exactly how soon Washington really got wind of the imminent Pearl Harbor attack. It's a bunch of people who really hate Jews who have this really handy theory that would make Jews the villains and their victimizers the victims, which you are suggesting we should examine impartially as if it emerged organically from independent historical research. It's like demanding I take seriously each and every new very slightly different claim made by a fundamentalist Christian that the Earth is flat and 6000 years old, and ignore the fact that all this "research" is coming from the Young Earth School of Scientists Are Dirty Satanic Liars.

I do think we should examine it impartially, but have a strong prior that their claims are highly likely to false on account of their near-universal antisemitic motivations. I think the reason it's different from creationism is that it's at least conceivable that the mainstream opinion on the Holocaust is what it is only because of institutional and social pressures against dissenters, much like I believe it is in the case of Covid policy, medical interventions for trans-identifying youth, racial differences in intelligence (observed - not even HBD), innate gender differences, etc.

With creationism, by contrast, I don't think anyone who believes in evolution is particularly ideologically and morally committed to evolution being true. It's just sort of like gravity and heliocentrism - it's just what we happen find reality to be, so we go with it. Now, I actually do understand why creationists suspect that scientists are ideologically biased and cunning purgers of threatening dissenters. They believe that secularists want a godless world to freely sin in, and that promoting evolution is one piece of a grander scheme to try and write God out of society. I just think that's 100% mistaken, so I don't doubt the mainstream view of evolution.

If institutions can purge dissent and manufacture orthodoxy and the appearance of unanimity and certainty with regard to all the hot CW topics this forum is very familiar with, why couldn't they do so with the Holocaust? I honestly don't know, but without extremely persuasive evidence I'm going to default to the mainstream opinion. Given how virtually the only people on the dissenting side are antisemites and I lack the expertise to evaluate their claims, I'm doubtful I'll ever be convinced. But why is it seemingly so inconceivable to you?

But why is it seemingly so inconceivable to you?

It's not inconceivable to me. I just see no reason to adjust my priors on it.

How would your opinion change if Revisionists are right? Let's say there was no order or plan to exterminate the Jews, and there were no gas chambers at all, and the 6 million number was pure symbology that Jews forced into the historical record and refuse to let go because of its symbolic importance. Would that even affect your opinion of Revisionists or would you still dismiss them as just people who don't like Jews?

I suppose that's kind of like asking me "What if you found out the creationists are right and the Earth is 6000 years old?" I'd be surprised that they got that one right and wonder what else they were right about, but it wouldn't convince me that everything else they believe is true.

Well you are kind of making it sound like you would just be surprised that somebody got a particularly hard trivia question right. It wouldn't change your perception of the world in any way? When I realized that Revisionists are in fact correct, it did not make me wonder what else they were right about, it changed the way I interpret popular culture and a lot of the cultural signals which were previously influential in my perception of history, morality, and politics.

It's interesting that you compare it to young-earth Creationism being truthful, so that leads me to think you would agree that it would have a significant impact of your perception on the world. Obviously, if young-earth Creationism were true it would significantly overhaul my perception of the world.

It wouldn't change your perception of the world in any way?

Well, obviously. Learning that the Earth is 6000 years old would change everything we know about science. Considering what would have to be true for the Holocaust to be a hoax, yes, I'd consider it nearly as dramatic.

I guess what you're getting at is, would I be convinced to join the resistance against the ZOG? And just like learning creationism is true wouldn't prove to me that Christianity is true, learning that the Holocaust didn't happen would not convince me that ZOG exists.

Learning the earth was really 6000 years old would actually go a pretty long way towards convincing me Christianity is true. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily follow in a strict logical sense, but it would adjust my trust in the involved parties in such a radical way I would have to consider Christians the most trustworthy generally

there were no gas chambers at all

Just forced labour camps? Just movement to be resettled in the East? Just smash up their property and declare them non-citizens? Just requiring everyone to prove they weren't descendants of filthy Jews?

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien:

From a letter to Stanley Unwin 25 July 1938

[Allen & Unwin had negotiated the publication of a German translation of The Hobbit with Rütten & Loening of Potsdam. This firm wrote to Tolkien asking if he was of 'arisch' (aryan) origin.]

I must say the enclosed letter from Rütten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries?

Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.

You are primarily concerned, and I cannot jeopardize the chance of a German publication without your approval. So I submit two drafts of possible answers.

To Rütten & Loening Verlag

[One of the 'two drafts' mentioned by Tolkien in the previous letter. This is the only one preserved in the Allen & Unwin files, and it seems therefore very probable that the English publishers sent the other one to Germany. It is clear that in that letter Tolkien refused to make any declaration of 'arisch' origin.]

25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. .... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject – which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and

remain yours faithfully

J. R. R. Tolkien.

Just all the above? The Revisionists still aren't coming out of this looking too good.

Oh it's bad stuff, I agree, but there is a historical context to it.

Besides, this kind of stuff is going on right now in Ukraine against the Russophone minorities, and I don't see much reaction besides enthusiasm coming from the people that want us to care about the Holocaust.

If anyone is doing it to any minority, it's wrong. Be it Germans and Jews, the British and Boer civilians, or Ukrainians and Russian-speakers.

Just forced labour camps? Just movement to be resettled in the East? Just smash up their property and declare them non-citizens? Just requiring everyone to prove they weren't descendants of filthy Jews?

Yes, all of those things. Although the assignment of class of citizenship along with financial and legal privileges based on racial laws regarding Jewish descent has made a comeback with the state of Israel.

Just all the above? The Revisionists still aren't coming out of this looking too good.

Agree to disagree. Revisionists acknowledge all those bad things happened. If they acknowledge the bad things that happened actually happened, and the things that did not happen did not happen, that "they still aren't coming out of this looking too good" is only going to be the case for a certain type of fanatic.

I'll give you another example. There are some rabble-rousers publishing articles openly declaring skepticism of the alleged Kamloops mass graves and demanding an excavation. Someone like you might say: "The history of Residential schools and the Canadian treatment of the indigenous people was completely horrible. Even if it turns out that not a single person was buried among the hundreds of alleged graves, you still come out looking bad." A lot of people will take that position, like you, but I don't. I think it would be brave for people to trust their interpretation of the evidence rather than expert consensus and popular narratives. And if they turned out to be right I would have respect for that, but clearly you would not.

The infamous David Stein isn't an antisemite. He's walking Jewish stereotype, but although he gets called a denier, his position essentially boils down to mainstream history is mostly correct, but "Auschwitz wasn't an extermination camp*" and total Holocaust death toll was somewhere above 3.5 million but not much more.

He is iirc mostly anti holocaust industry, thinks it unseemly that so many people keep using the historical event for political purposes today.

He's also the only 'holocaust denier' (according to ADL) who has been declared by a panel of US judges to not be a denier. (came up in some disciplinary process against a judge who ranted on Facebook too much, against a lot of people, one of whom was Cole. They looked at what Cole writes and said he's not a denier).

I follow him because he writes very good essays on the absolute state of California.

He's also about the only Holocaust 'denier' on record who also made a living making (non-controversial) documentaries about the Holocaust. Under another name. Apparently he has very solid historical knowledge of the events.

*I've never particularly cared to find out the specifics, as Holocaust revisionism is a fairly boring topic, but it's pretty fucking weird as e.g. the Budapest transports involved lots of people of no economic value, and Germans at that stage of the war weren't in the least squeamish, so .. what would they have done at Auschwitz with all the little kids and old people ? I really hope it's not some semantic dodge; e.g. Auschwitz wasn't an extermination camp because they only straight-up murdered those they couldn't put to work.

The usual dodge with "Auschwitz wasn't an extermination camp" is that there were multiple camps at Auschwitz, and only one of them (Auschwitz-Birkenau) was an extermination camp.

I've followed it some more and it looks like Stein is being stereotypically Jewish and engaging in some weird form of hairsplitting.

He says it's most likely the Hungarian Jews who weren't in work-shape were murdered, though the evidence for that isn't the best.

In practice, I've never encountered a Holocaust denier who didn't, purely coincidentally, have a great deal of animosity towards Jews.

Well, try this guy, lifelong socialist and antiwar activist, and also one of the first holocaust revisionists (yes, I know re is not representative of the movement at all)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rassinier

Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used...

... he writes, after implying that the total death toll was fewer than a million.

I'm going to echo @2rafa's thoughts here: of course this amounts to Holocaust denial. But I'd like to point out something else in this kind of argumentation. You say that claiming only a few hundred thousand Jews dying would not amount to "denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions", but if this claim was actually accepted, or merely allowed to exist as a hypothetical, am I to believe that this would not then change? After all, if it was only half a million Jews who died, well then that would be roughly similar to the number of German civilians who died via the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the number of ethnic Germans who died in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Eastern Europe in 1944-46. That would be particularly rhetorically useful to a prospective Holocaust denier: to equivocate between the slaughter of Jews and the killings of Germans, or even to suggest that while the Jews did suffer, Germans were disproportionately and unequally punished for this (which was generally speaking the prevailing public opinion in immediate post-war West Germany). Hell, given the rough-and-tumble nature of total war it would be natural then to suggest the Holocaust wasn't deliberate, but an unfortunate, regrettable, violent episode in a war full of them.

I'm much too well-versed in the rhetorical style and strategies of Holocaust deniers not to get a lot of red flags popping in my brain as I read this post. There's been a lot of this kind of bullshit this past few weeks, and I hope it's not a sign themotte.org is turning into the internet's #1 haven for witches.

he writes, after implying that the total death toll was fewer than a million

What?? I don't understand where you're getting that, but I don't want to argue with it because it feels like a distraction.

After all, if it was only half a million Jews who died, well then that would be roughly similar to the number of German civilians who died via the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the number of ethnic Germans who died in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Eastern Europe in 1944-46.

It would not be similar to the civilian casualties of war. War is morally complicated in a way that straight genocide isn't. As for your second example, I wasn't aware that there was a genocide that took place against ethnic Germans, but if such a thing did happen and was deliberately orchestrated by the government of whatever European country this took place in, then I do think it is morally equivalent to the Holocaust. That doesn't, however, mean it warrants as much attention as the Holocaust. The Holocaust is exceptionally well-documented by the very people who perpetrated it, and there are also thousands of hours of recorded interviews with survivors. The ethnic cleansing you speak of here is presumably less well-documented because I haven't even heard of it.

Germans were disproportionately and unequally punished for this

To my knowledge, their only punishment is living in a country where "hate speech" is illegal, and every Western country except America has unfortunately been given this punishment.

Hell, given the rough-and-tumble nature of total war it would be natural then to suggest the Holocaust wasn't deliberate,

They were put in camps, for Pete's sake! The camps are still standing! How can people be accidentally put in camps? I know you're trying to play devil's advocate, but I can't even follow the devil's advocacy you're doing.

I'm much too well-versed in the rhetorical style and strategies of Holocaust deniers not to get a lot of red flags popping in my brain as I read this post.

If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell." I also don't understand how someone could feel that way about the Holocaust, then turn around and express other taboo ideas without any cognitive dissonance. Dennis Prager is viewed by many leftists in prominent positions in the same way that he views people who underestimate the death toll of the Holocaust.

Again, I apologize if I'm making less sense now. This is one of the few subjects that makes me really emotional, and when I'm emotional, I don't make as much sense as I otherwise would. But that's why I need to talk about this, and there aren't any other places for me to talk about it.

I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell."

I'm mostly with the other incredulous people here, but alright. Let's say your username isn't trolly nonsense and you're deeper down the spectrum than I am, or the median mottizen is.

Put plainly, people really really really hate their enemies. Today's world is a little fraught, and people disagree on who this should be, but in any Western nation you'll find (at least) two groups that everyone really hates: nazis and pedophiles.

Nobody likes nazis. Depending on where you are you'll get taught more or less of who they were and what they were like, but everyone knows the big outlines. Swastikas, toothbrush stache man, holocaust, invading Poland, huzzah. To a median Westerner, the nazis wete evil losers, neo-nazis are evil losers, and they aren't interested in debating this. They have better stuff to do.

There are then two kinds of people who will go and doubt the dominant narrative about the Nazis anyway. The first are - obviously - their ideological descendants, who want to look good. The second kind of person is the sorts you'll readily find in here: the sorts who never got over being the smart kid in class. Reflexive contrarians who have never held a conventional opinion in life, because those are the normies' opinions and ohmygod they're so dumb.

A normal person, or even a smart one, isn't really going to notice or care for the distinction. They rightly know the Nazis killed millions of innocents. They rightly know national-socialist ideology is an evil one that has only brought misery to all those involved. They know this, they know their friends know this, they know their loved ones know this, they know every good person they agree with knows this. Every single one.

The people who loudly profess to disagree or question this are all, at the least, Nazi sympathisers. There's a lot of reflexive contrarians, but most of us have still the modicum of shame and social regard needed not to delve into holocaust denialism as the cause to espouse. Holocaust denier club isn't fifty truth-seekers with a couple Nazis around, it's fifty Nazis with a couple autistic kids who genuinely ought to seek their intellectual masturbation elsewhere.

The result is that the average person, or even a smart one like Prager, doesn't care to ponder just why someone might question the Holocaust. Not even the staunchly leftist atheists Prager hates like or will defend Nazis. No normal person will. But he knows that holocaust deniers fall into three rough groups: Nazis, smart people who should know better, and idiots who ought to listen to smarter sorts.

Does that help? Or are things still unclear to you?

I understand what you're saying, and I think we're at a point where my issue is no longer that I don't understand, but that I disagree. I don't mean that I disagree with what you're saying, but rather, that I disagree that this is acceptable behavior for public intellectuals. If Prager doesn't care to understand why people might question aspects of the Holocaust or how his behavior may do more to encourage Holocaust denial than discourage it, then he shouldn't write a column above the subject for both ethical and pragmatic reasons.

Also, the reasoning you've given for why people hate Nazis and the Nazi-adjacent certainly applies Prager, but I don't think it actually applies to most people, because if it did, they would hate communists as much as Nazis and respond to any attempt to rehabilitate Marx's image with the same anger they have towards anyone who they believe is trying to rehabilitate Hitler's image. Instead, Chapo Trap House has a best-selling book that was prominently displayed at my local library for over a year, with a favorable blurb by Tim Heidecker, the same person who thought Sam Hyde was too chummy with Nazis.

Communists are excepted not because of history, not quite, but because of the present.

Nazis are people nobody really personally knows. Insofar these are people you do know, they're skinhead degenerates and terrible people altogether - again, evil losers. Everything I said applies to Nazis because that's just who they are.

Communists aren't so rare. They appear in your library, you went to school with some, your child goes through a stupid phase, what have you. These people are, mostly, losers.. But not that evil about it. It's tough to be so viscerally hateful of communists when the median commie isn't a skinhead hooligan, but more of a weirdo who thinks society would be great if we'd just, like, learn to share, man.

Crucially, the people most likely to hate and revile communists as much as they do Nazis don't meet any in their regular lives - rural Americans. The median communist is irredeemably evil to them, because nobody close to them would ever think of adhering to such an evil ideology, much as with Nazis and anyone else.

You make a very good point, and I hate this because it should be a cause for people to recognize their own hypocrisy.

Why? They're not even really wrong. There are communists who are basically decent people. Nazis, not so much. A normal person might let a seventeen-year-old communist babysit their kids - a Nazi? Not a chance.

That sounds like prejudice on your part. Using pure logic, there is no reason for me to trust a communist other than Nazi, other than that because communism is more acceptable (even though it shouldn't be), it attracts people who are less psychologically deviant than white supremacy/fascism/National Socialism/etc.

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I have to say, the line from Hitler to Holocaust is much shorter than from Marx to the Holodomor. On that alone I think it’s more reasonable for people to want to rehabilitate Marx in broader society.

I think most Westerners would look askance about rehabilitating Stalin, though, and tankies who try are generally seen as lunatics.

I don't think the line from Marx to the Holodomor is pretty short. Seizing the means of production and having the government (euphemistically referred to as "the people") make all economic decisions inevitably leads to mass deaths. In my view, the only different between a socialist (in the original Marxist sense of the term) and a tankie is that a socialist believes if Snowball wasn't exiled, then Animal Farm would've worked, while a tankie believes Napoleon did nothing wrong. I think that Napoleon just accelerated an inevitable decay.

Even granting that Marxist rhetoric is violent in this way (which I’m hesitant to grant without significant qualifiers) surely you can see there is a difference between:

  1. A likely explicit order to exterminate a group of people when in paramount power, and

  2. A discussion of mass murder visited upon one’s political opponents, written not in any sort of office, which then was reinterpreted by various organisations decades after the death of the author, and in one case was perpetuated against a separate ethnic population, which was really not quite the point of the original texts (even if it was justified on those terms at the time).

In any case, it’s undeniable that Marx advocated for violent revolution, but I think there’s a qualitative difference between that and the sort of industrial murder machine created by the Nazis and the Japanese during WW2, as well as between advocacy and, well, actually doing the thing.

Okay, I'll agree with you that Marx isn't equivalent to Hitler, because he didn't actually do anything and only wrote about wanting other people to do things. But he's at least equivalent to.. oh, Richard Spencer.

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I have to say, the line from Hitler to Holocaust is much shorter than from Marx to the Holodomor. On that alone I think it’s more reasonable for people to want to rehabilitate Marx in broader society.

You are wrong. Extermination of undesirables was one of Marx's explicit prescriptions.

If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell."

Depends on kind of detail. Bunch of Germans tried to murder/enslave my gradfathers and grandmothers and my entire ethic group. My parents lived in area "liberated" by Red Army fighting with their former ally. Nowadays Russia is invading neighbour country and accusing them of rampant Nazism. (It degenerated into ukro-jewish-nazi-satanism-sim3cardinism since that time).

See also a related "mistake"

It is kind of thing where historical inaccuracy has a real chance to end with me being dead/oppressed/enslaved. Got significantly lower as Russia fails in Ukraine and Germany fails to spend this promised 100 000 000 000 euro for military. But still, that is likely one of easiest ways to get a lot of people irritated and scared.

Though I would reserve "damned to hell" for denialists of communist/nazi mass murder.

I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying that historical inaccuracy will get people killed because people will misidentify who Nazis are and use that as an excuse to invade nearby territory?

Not necessarily "will get" but it helps to enable this.

It also increases risk of this happening again.

Again, I apologize if I'm making less sense now. This is one of the few subjects that makes me really emotional, and when I'm emotional, I don't make as much sense as I otherwise would. But that's why I need to talk about this, and there aren't any other places for me to talk about it.

I'm actually going to back off and apologize here. In general I take a very dim view of anybody who comes out with the "what do we really know about the Holocaust" shtick because 9 times out of 10 they're deniers in disguise. With your response I think I overreacted and you're not actually a denier (though it did bring some out of the weeds). Something like acknowledging that the Germans were quite fastidious in documenting the murder of Jews is something deniers typically never cop to. So I'm sorry I was overly dismissive of your concerns.

If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell."

I think @Nantafiria gets to the heart of it. I would also add that in the contemporary context Holocaust deniers almost uniformly fall into one of two camps: white nationalists and Muslims. Both deny the Holocaust for obvious ideologically-motivated reasons, and people find it both crass and dangerous in this respect, because the ultimate aim of the denial is to again build support for violent ethnic cleansing.

That Holocaust denial gets more attention than any other historical genocide I think is mostly a product of the number of Jews in America, their relative influence/prominence, and of course the cultural soft power of the USA. But it is also history's largest genocide (in so far as the word can be rigorously defined) and perhaps also its most unique with respect to the extent and sophistication to which it was pursued.

I understand that Holocaust denial can be motivated by anti-Semitism, and obviously the desire to murder Jews is motivated by anti-Semitism (in conjunction with other pathological traits), but I don't know that one necessarily leads to the other. If someone is motivated to deny the Holocaust, that implies a recognition that the Holocaust was a bad, right? If somebody thinks it was a good thing, wouldn't they prefer to claim that it happened? But I'm speaking of psychological territory I'm unfamiliar with. I only empathize with Holocaust revisionism and denial when they are motivated by contrarianism and a disdain for ideological taboos, because that's the kind of person I am. I don't know if you've read this Richard Hanania post, but it sums up my feelings well if you replace "pronouns" with "morally castigating anyone who asks questions about a specific historical event, especially if you don't do the same with different historical events" and add the caveat that I think the p̶r̶o̶n̶o̶u̶n̶s̶ castigation will increase the chances of a genocide.

This is kind of a tangent, but my reaction to the alt-right over the years has continually been "well, they have legitimate grievances and are being treated unfairly," and I didn't feel a twinge of genuine fear about the possibility of another holocaust (or widespread pogroms) until I saw Nick Fuentes and Kanye West team-up for an interview tour and possible presidential campaign. I still think the odds of it happening are low, but they get higher every time "the Jewish media" takes action against Kanye. Look at this video, and look at the comments. Jonathan's behavior isn't just wrong, but it's creating the enemy he claims to be afraid of. And sometimes I think that he knows this, and is doing it deliberately so that he has something to fight. It's like an exterminator who breeds rats and strategically places them in local businesses so that he can be hired later to kill them. But what happens when the rats (anti-Semites in this analogy) start reproducing too fast for the exterminator to keep up? Has Greenblatt considered that a possibility?

Okay, tangent over. Thank you for explaining why you think the Holocaust is treated with more reverence than other genocides. I think that what you're describing is actually similar to the point that Kanye was trying to make before Nick Fuentes started whispering in his ear: that Jews aren't morally inferior to gentiles, but their overrepresentation in the media leads to a degree of unintentional bias, such as overlooking the death toll of communism. As I've said before on this sub, it's similar to the (valid!) complaint feminists make that when men are in positions of power, they tend not to think about the needs of women. I advocate meritocracy, so to me, the solution isn't removing Jews from power, as Fuentes has taught Kanye. The solution is asking people to be aware of their biases and listen to people outside of their group. Kanye is past that now, and so are the people listening to him, and so I fear for the future. Not too much, but enough that I feel compelled to voice this fear. (Or maybe I'm just afraid to admit the extent to which I fear a resurgence of pogroms because it would make my priorities seem ridiculous.)

I can't tell whether you're making a moral argument or a taxonomical one in this post.

Take the Rotherham grooming gangs, a conservative cause celebre in which largely Pakistani young men allegedly raped 1400 girls in the town of Rotherham over a 30 year period. Imagine if you responded to those accusations with the argument that “look, I’ll agree that maybe some Pakistani lads did molest about 15, maybe 20 girls over maybe 20 years, but that’s the same rate you’d expect from the white population, if not less, so really it’s not the big problem you seem to think”.

The leftists in this example are not arguing that molesting 20 girls is less evil than molesting 1400. They are arguing that because the problem is so small, dedicating resources to fixing it isn't worth it. I didn't pay much attention to the Rotherham stuff, but my inference is that people were paying attention because they were worried the gang rapists would strike again. Is that correct? If so, it's not comparable to the holocaust, because the holocaust is over and the perpetrators are almost all dead. However, this is only a rebuttal to your argument if you're making a moral one, and not a taxonomical one.

Taxonomically speaking, I consider holocaust denial to be "denying the specific thing that makes the holocaust bad and worthy of remembrance."

Saying that 300,000 died instead of 6 million is denial.

If it is, then I don't know why denial would be seen as morally wrong. I also don't know how much of the story you'd have to change in order to be committing denial.

If someone rapes you and the case goes to trial and they argue that they did non-consensually touch you but they patted your thigh instead of raping you

See, you're replacing rape with poking. That's replacing an act of horrific violence with a minor annoyance. Murder is murder no matter how many people are murdered, but when you change rape to poking, you are changing the nature of the crime.

I fear I'm letting my emotions cloud my mind as I'm writing this, but I am genuinely frustrated by this common sentiment that the more murders you carry out, the more monstrous you are. Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.

Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.

What do you think the cutoff is for emotional comprehension? I think it is higher than you suspect, if for no other reason than how that filters out to survivors.

For instance, on a raw level I don't think I can really process 300,000 deaths versus 6 million deaths. But using a hypothetical of something awful happening to my state, that's the difference between probably having a passing acquaintance die versus almost certainly losing multiple people close to me. Just because the quantities are more than I could reasonably handle on a direct basis doesn't mean there can't be a qualitative difference. The macro very much informs the micro.

I appreciate your response. When I hear you put it like that, I do think this might be a problem unique to me. If two million people in my state were murdered, but they were all people I don't know, then it would be just as bad to me as one million people who are scattered across the country being murdered.

That's fair! I will add another thought, once again trying to put in perspective why these differences between two large numbers matter due to how the macro impacts the micro.

There's a John Calvin quote about relics:

There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen [of the True Cross]. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.

So, if X churches claim to have Y amount of the True Cross, and X times Y is far greater than the possible dimensions of the True Cross, then obviously some of those churches are lying or have been taken in.

Similarly, at some point when the numbers go low enough (even with those numbers still being more than enough to be well into the realm of the truly monstrous/genocidal!) one is implicitly accusing living Jews of lying (or, at best, having been lied to by other relatives) about their relatives who died in the Holocaust. Does it make sense why that would be seen as at least in the same ballpark as denial?

So, if X churches claim to have Y amount of the True Cross, and X times Y is far greater than the possible dimensions of the True Cross, then obviously some of those churches are lying or have been taken in.

There was a Catholic guy who was obstinate and autistic enough to dig into these kinds of claims about how many such relics were out there (and Calvin and the other Reformers had good incentives on their side to ridicule relics and make outsized claims to mock the whole enterprises, so while indeed there were fakes, mistakes and outright frauds - read Chaucer and the Palmer's Tale - they weren't being anything but rhetorical in their claims) and he came up with figures that were not "a big ship-load":

Conflicting with this is the finding of Charles Rohault de Fleury, who, in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion of 1870 made a study of the relics in reference to the criticisms of Calvin and Erasmus. He drew up a catalogue of all known relics of the True Cross showing that, in spite of what various authors have claimed, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four metres (9.8 or 13.1 feet) in height, with transverse branch of two metres (6.6 feet) wide, proportions not at all abnormal. He calculated: supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood (based on his microscopic analysis of the fragments) and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilogrammes, we find the original volume of the cross to be 0.178 cubic metres (6.286 cubic feet). The total known volume of known relics of the True Cross, according to his catalogue, amounts to approximately 0.004 cubic metres (0.141 cubic feet) (more specifically 3,942,000 cubic millimetres), leaving a volume of 0.174 m3 (6.145 cu ft), almost 98%, lost, destroyed, or from which is otherwise unaccounted. Four cross particles – of ten particles with surviving documentary provenances by Byzantine emperors – from European churches, i.e. Santa Croce in Rome, Caravaca de la Cruz, Notre Dame, Paris, Pisa Cathedral and Florence Cathedral, were microscopically examined. "The pieces came all together from olive." It is possible that many alleged pieces of the True Cross are forgeries, created by travelling merchants in the Middle Ages, during which period a thriving trade in manufactured relics existed.

That's interesting! I wonder if there's even less today given the damage done to European towns and cities in WW2? It seems the far easier criticism would have been things like Saint's bones (I thought there was a similar quote from a protestant or atheist about all the Saints that walked around with many extra fingers but couldn't find it), though in both cases it isn't like the Church is saying that no one has ever made a forgery.

That being said, my purpose was more that despite that quote not directly saying "these churches are wrong/lying", Calvin's (apparently wholly incorrect) estimates of mass would necessitate that, independent of Calvin's estimates being accurate.

It's not unique to you, maybe it's an autistic thing. When @2rafa said " It is denial the same way saying “yeah, the Kurds got carried away and a few Armenians got caught in the crossfire, but it was like 50,000 and it wasn’t deliberate” is a denial of the Armenian genocide" I was blown away, I can't imagine not losing my shit if we had this conversation in real life. 50,000 is a few? Not genocide? Is my judgement of the value of human life jacked way too high?

And yeah it's true that the difference is the difference between losing loved ones and maybe losing an acquaintance, but it is still beyond the pale to me. To me the deaths are only the second most terrible thing about these kinds of events - it's the killing, the fact that someone could set thousands of deaths in motion and the fact that people will carry it out, that bothers me the most.

“yeah, the Kurds got carried away and a few Armenians got caught in the crossfire, but it was like 50,000 and it wasn’t deliberate” is a denial of the Armenian genocide" I was blown away, I can't imagine not losing my shit if we had this conversation in real life. 50,000 is a few? Not genocide?

It would say that it would be a denial of genocide that happened, while murdering 50 000 Armenians for being Armenians would be still a genocide.

In the same way that claiming that WW II had happened worldwide but had death count 100 000 would be still denial of WW II but such war, if would happen instead, would be likely still named WW II.

So it is a denial of the genocide that happened by claiming a smaller genocide happened.

I don't get this insistence on labeling the holocaust as undeniably evil when in this same forum you have guys celebrating the fact that their ancestors 'destroyed the Indian nations' and getting a bunch of upvotes for it. If you think that a group being a threat, competitor, or burden to your group is justification to exterminate them, then why would that principle not apply to what happened to the jews in europe.

People here are not median internet nerds, they hate the pride-flags-and-land-acknowledgements left above all. Celebrating the destruction of the American natives' nations is dunking on those people by proxy; celebrating the holocaust.. Isn't.

The land acknowledgements are as if the Nazi party survived the war, became just another political party like the rest of them, got into power, and then before every state occasion had a little ceremony about "We acknowledge that [the paintings in this museum/the property here/this land] were/was stolen from the Jewish people".

Are they going to give it back? Hell, no. Are they paying rent for use of the land to the Indians Jews? Also hell, no. So what is the purpose of this little song-and-dance act? Why, to feel virtuous about yourself.

I mean, obviously they did. I don't want to argue about that. The question is whether having doubts about that specific claim as you phrased it makes one a denier and/or whether that is a moral failing. Prager's insistence upon both is what bothers me. It feels hypocritical given his vaccine hesitancy, willingness to ask hard questions about gender and sex, etc.

I am genuinely frustrated by this common sentiment that the more murders you carry out, the more monstrous you are. Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.

Murdering 2 000 vs murdering 2 000 000 000 is beyond my emotional comprehension (if all of them lived far away and were not known to me and my friends and had no strong connection to them).

Nevertheless someone murdering 2 000 000 000 is far more monstrous than someone murdering 2 000 000 or 2 000.

Are you able to articulate why?

Because murdering 2 000 000 000 is far worse than murdering 2 000 (being 100% pure consequentialist is a pure ethics system, but consequences also matter and murder is bad)

It seems to me that all your similes are set up to have a significantly larger gap between the scale of the deed in the accepted narrative and the suggested lower one: revising the Holocaust down to hundreds of thousands instead of millions would be dividing by 10, whereas your Rotherham example involves a factor of 100 and a noise floor that is much higher relative to the signal than the noise floor for ethnically targeted killings, and in the Kurds and Ukraine cases you postulate non-deliberateness which no remotely sane form of Holocaust revisionism could defend. For the rape example, you are actually invoking a qualitative difference that in the minds of most would make a much larger impact to moral implications than any of the quantitative ones above.

If the comparison actually has legs, why do you need to exaggerate like that?

I've been thinking for a while that the issue with society's response to Holocaust revisionism/denial is that we are seeing a very well-crafted piece of societal engineering (one of the instances that I actually think of as good evidence in favour of @DaseindustriesLtd's "political von Neumanns", whose influence I'm otherwise skeptical of, existing), whose effectivity in part depends on a lack of widespread understanding of its purpose among everyone including most Jews, doing its job against intended targets, as well as a handful of people (chiefly "sees a fishy orthodoxy and pathologically can't resist" autistic contrarians, but also excessive pattern-matchers with a beef against elites, in the Kanye class) getting caught as collateral damage.

WWII was, by all accounts, pretty catastrophic for humanity across all strata, destroyed untold amounts of value and industrial potential, and uncharacteristically created pain even for those social strata that normally are very good at keeping themselves shielded from any calamities short of disease and death, and for whom the social contract so far had been "we don't interfere with you living your life where and how you want close to the optimum the current tech level has to offer, in return you take token care of the plebs and advance our common intellectual and spiritual life when you feel like it". If you had to prevent "something like it" - where "it" is basically a modern, industrious, intelligent nation suddenly conquestmaxing with only a handful of years' warning - from happening again, what would you do? Simple global disarmament won't fly, because Moloch, likewise for wars of aggression, and even restricting nationalism in general won't fly, because Moloch and without nationalism you will lose against any defector that is willing to use that social tech to make its soldiers fight harder. So what's a specific, necessary and sufficient, prerequisite for any country to pull what Germany did then?

The answer on which the current architecture is based is "topple the Jews", as the Jews are a natural tripwire population for exactly that sort of thing. By virtue of aptitude and connections they float to top positions in every mostly-free country earlier or later, and by virtue of the strong ethnic identity they always have solidarity/altruism for their fellow Jews everywhere. If you want to unleash a rain of steel and fire over Europe, but you haven't removed the Jews from the top rungs of your society, then you'll find that your plans will fail, because they will be represented in every organisation that is involved in your country functioning and at least a good subset of them will be more incentivised to save their fellow Jews in the countries you seek to trample from your plans than by whatever you could offer them for cooperating with you. Now, of course, you might naively be tempted to just make this argument explicit; but then I would reckon that absent extra memes, for any leadership that has already convinced its population of the necessity of conquest-maxing, completing the inference chain by "and therefore we need to make the Jews stand aside, so we can go forward with what we must do" would be a formality. It is only by maintaining the perception that going against the Jews qua Jews is an ethical singularity that this last step becomes hard. This maintenance, however, has always seemed like a fragile affair (with threats constantly emerging left and right, from displeasure with Israel to displeasure with capitalism to most recently displeasure with white people), with the Holocaust narrative in its current form being the most reliable support of the edifice. Challenge the sacredness of it, and you might just find that you lost the last thing that pinned the singularity to minus infinity in human moral space; and if people can start bargaining about an exact finite price to put on removing the Jews, then it's only a matter of time until the next conquest-maxer successfully makes the argument to their population that it is a price worth paying for their cause. Therefore, we get the system in which Holocaust revisionism seeking a specific adjustment and even general attempts to profane the topic by dispassionate historical review are quashed, but everyone has to act coy about why this is, further triggering the pattern-matchers and /r/atheists to dig themselves into a social hole.

(How many people, either on the mainstream side or on the Holocaust revisionist side, actually think of it primarily in these terms? I should clarify that I'm actually in the pro-mainstream camp because I think the tripwire system has done great things for us, but I can imagine that many nationalists would in fact be motivated by at least a diffuse understanding that Holocaust figures in a roundabout way underpin the enduring emasculation of their country as an absolute ceiling on how far it could go in pursuing its own interest on the world stage.)

(A funny consequence, I think, is the disconnect that we're now seeing over the Ukraine narrative. The Soviet Union never was brought into this tripwire architecture, and though to some extent "one in our midst might go military FOOM" was never even a concern they shared, to the extent to which they've set up Nazi-detection heuristics at all, it's just "wants to threaten Russia". Therefore to Westerners Zelenskiy's Jewishness makes the "Ukronazis" narrative look comically incoherent, whereas to Russians it's just a curiosum that has little bearing on the perceived plausibility of it)

The consensus narrative about the Holocaust might genuinely be the last support pillar holding up America's triumphalist narrative built from the end of WWII. Everything else about the rah-rah story that America used to justify its superpower status has been picked apart by a combination of history nerds and leftists with axes to grind, turning the idea of American Exceptionalism into a sham.

If even the Holocaust is turned into "boring reality," devoid of those more powerful and special qualities of narratives, reduced to another part of the "outdated" and "misinformed" story that conservative, religious boomers tell themselves about how America was great, and becoming a "race card" that Israel plays whenever it's criticized for whatever it did in Palestine on any given week, I suspect that not only will the Nazis be turned into "just another war-monging power" from an age few remember as anything but the boring, deadly past (and thus losing their uniqueness as an antagonistic force, no more or less immoral than America, Britain, or Russia), it will indeed be "fair game" all around WRT conquestmaxing and general politics-by-other-means.

Japan in WWII is also another example that doesn't fit your "tripwire" architecture, to my knowledge, as they'd already been a colonial power that had been snatching up other parts of Asia for decades beforehand (Korea, Manchuria, Qingdao, etc.).

If even the Holocaust is turned into "boring reality," devoid of those more powerful and special qualities of narratives, reduced to another part of the "outdated" and "misinformed" story that conservative, religious boomers tell themselves about how America was great, and becoming a "race card" that Israel plays whenever it's criticized for whatever it did in Palestine on any given week, I suspect that not only will the Nazis be turned into "just another war-monging power" from an age few remember as anything but the boring, deadly past

If?

When.

The horrors of history always end up being mundane, and so it will end up too with the XXth century. It's only a question of time.

On the other hand, the past can be scoured indefinitely long ago and reinterpreted to fit the current narrative. See how Columbus went from being a point of pride of Italo-Americans and that celebrations were held to commerorate the 500th anniversary of his discovery, to him now being vilified.

The horrors of history always end up being mundane, and so it will end up too with the XXth century. It's only a question of time.

I'm more pessimistic, I think ideology can buttress whatever gap the passage of time leaves. Anti-semites still hate Jews for things that happened in Biblical times (or Quranic(?) times), Irish nationalists were more militant against the British in the 1920s than they were in the 1840s.

The consensus narrative about the Holocaust might genuinely be the last support pillar holding up America's triumphalist narrative built from the end of WWII. Everything else about the rah-rah story that America used to justify its superpower status has been picked apart by a combination of history nerds and leftists with axes to grind, turning the idea of American Exceptionalism into a sham.

Is it? My impression was that winning the Cold War was actually played up more these days. After all, the "Soviets only won because of lend-lease" narrative never really caught on, giving the Soviets at least a roughly equal share at the table of WWII winners in the public mind, thus not on its own really painting America as exceptional.

Japan in WWII is also another example that doesn't fit your "tripwire" architecture, to my knowledge, as they'd already been a colonial power that had been snatching up other parts of Asia for decades beforehand (Korea, Manchuria, Qingdao, etc.).

Well, yeah, the architecture doesn't work for those countries; it's not clear to me if the problem of the emergence of a potential WWII-Japan-like power in that area was in fact solved for that region, but maybe the victorious powers didn't consider it that concerning for some reason or another (perhaps they thought that the conditions for Japan's rise were more unique, or they were happy that the semi-permanent US occupation force plus denuclearisation were enough, or they figured that ultimately China is inevitably going to dominate the region and they can't do anything about it even if they wanted).

After all, the "Soviets only won because of lend-lease" narrative never really caught on, giving the Soviets at least a roughly equal share at the table of WWII winners in the public mind, thus not on its own really painting America as exceptional.

I actually just had to explain to my boomer dad the other day that the USSR was on our side in WW2. I'm honestly not sure how much credit they get in the view of the general public.

I've heard similar sentiments from the US before, so maybe it's different there compared to Europe (where, in the recent years, the "US did more" narrative has been winning out, but it's still not "Russia did little compared to it" outside of boo-lights discussions inspired by more recent events). In what country do you consider the maintenance of America's "triumphalist narrative" to be important? I find it hard to imagine that Americans would stop thinking of America as exceptional just because WWII receded into boring ancient history, whereas I do still think that in Europe its reputation never was exclusively dependent on it.

The consensus narrative about the Holocaust might genuinely be the last support pillar holding up America's triumphalist narrative built from the end of WWII. Everything else about the rah-rah story that America used to justify its superpower status has been picked apart by a combination of history nerds and leftists with axes to grind, turning the idea of American Exceptionalism into a sham.

It is easy to imagine that WW2 in general and holocaust in particular will be put on backburner and quietly forgotten, it is easy to imagine that foundation myth of new rules based international order in Cold War Two era will be Cold War One and brilliant American victory over Red Russkies.

Bored of holocaust movies? Get ready for deluge of gulag movies with Russian beasts behaving maximally sadistically brutally. Tired of compulsory holocaust classes? Get ready for gulag education at every school.

Exxageration? Germany, always the bellwether, is ready to classify Ukrainian famine as genocide (scholarly consensus? who needs scholarly consensus). Russian Z is already treated as hate symbol equal to nazi ones, other russkie/commie symbols will easily follow.

I don't think of myself as a decoupler, but rather, as someone who is all but incapable of coupling. I would never be able to form the link between "removing the Jews" and "imperialist empire." However, if your hypothesis that people have subconsciously formed this link in response to social pressures, then that is quite interesting and I will have to consider it.

Sorry if that wasn't clear, but my argument wasn't resting on people having to form some sort of mental association between the two; rather, I posited that without doing the former, doing the latter (while targeting your fellow developed countries) would be practically impossible. In a hypothetical world where people were actually biologically incapable of associating the two, the result I would expect would just be that those who tried the latter without coincidentally also doing the former would just fail without understanding what went wrong.

"de-facto Jewish conspiracy exists and is a good thing as prevents world-wars" is a take that I have not seen before, so points for originality at least.

He defines the holocaust specifically as the murder of millions of Jews, meaning that if you put the death toll at anything under 7 figures, you are denying the totality of the event in his mind.

Putting it at less than 1/6th of the actual total does seem like, pretty much, denying the totality of the event. In the same way that, well, the whole initial portion of the essay talks about.

So before watching this conversation unfold any further, I want to see you define your terms. What to you would constitute denying the Holocaust? If the next Fuentes popped up and said that Jews not only weren't the subject of targeted killings, but actually survived the war at a higher rate than Gentiles! Would that constitute denying the Holocaust?

Or do you state that the historicity of the Holocaust is unimportant?

Moreover, if you're looking for Conservatives, you aren't going to find one who denies the Holocaust for all the reasons Prager cites.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Gens. George Patton and Omar Bradley, visited Ohrdruf, a Nazi concentration camp, on April 12, 1945, a week after it was liberated.

Looking for an American conservative who will disavow Eisenhower and Patton is like looking for a Christian who will disavow Jesus. It's a contradiction in terms. Conservatism is about honoring traditions, tradition in the US at this point in history includes the Holocaust. Moving past that means moving past Conservatism into radicalism or reaction.

Eisenhower

Well at least for his military service. Politically there are plenty who would disavow him on policies.

We can all debate particular policies and contexts into the night {liberals will claim that tax rates were so so so nice and high under Eisenhower and peaceniks (I am here) will debate his decisions that laid the groundwork for later imperialism and his positions on race could probably get criticized by extremists on either side} but denying that Eisenhower was an honest man? To say that Patton lied about what he saw in Europe? That takes one directly out of conservatism.

Depends on how you define conservatism and who gets to qualify as within it. William F. Buckley, Jr. got a lot of physical hate mail when he pushed back against Bircher claims that Eisenhower was a secret communist. Buckley was actively interested in gate keeping the capital-C Conservative movement, which is why he wanted to exclude Birchers, antisemites, etc. But if the definition of conservative is wanting to preserve America and its traditions, the Birchers would tell you that’s exactly what they wanted.

Simple rule of thumb I use: A conservative loves and honors his parents, loves and honors the men and women who raised him and built the world he grew up in and lives in. So was it a dispute that our dad's generation were active in? My dad was seven when Eisenhower took office. The Birchers lost, Taft lost. Go back further than your parents, it isn't conserve, it is reaction, revisionism.

I don’t think your personal, temporal constraints on conservatism are widely held.

They are widely held, most people just use a lot more words and analysis to produce the same idea.

Conservatism is about the possible not the utopian, reality not fantasy, the tried over the untried.

You seem to have backed into a progressive criticism of conservatism: it’s about having reverence for an imagined past.

E.g. reverence for Eisenhower after nearly everyone who was a conservative and politically engaged during his presidency has died off. The view that the Republican Party was too liberal in the Eisenhower era was a motivating factor behind the launch of National Review, and Buckley’s lifelong quest to build an network of conservative intellectuals, that culminated in the Reagan revolution. The literal conservative movement that began by running Conservative Party candidates against Republicans to hammer home to the liberal, Rockefeller wing o the party that they could no longer take the conservatives for granted and remain electorally viable.

I don’t think Buckley would agree with you that conservatism is standing athwart history and yelling, “Stop!”, where prehistory is defined by each individual and based on their parents’ dates of birth.

More comments

So essentially Douglas Adams conservativism?

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Putting it at less than 1/6th of the actual total does seem like, pretty much, denying the totality of the event

If you want to consider it a denial of the event, then, fine, but it's not a denial that something equally evil was committed. Would the Columbine shooters and/or their actions have been more evil if they successfully blew up their school and slaughtered all the police officers who showed up in response, as they (delusionally) planned to? Shooting random people was their Plan B, which they resorted to because their bombs didn't go off. I think their Plan B is just as evil as their Plan A would have been, because murder is murder.

What to you would constitute denying the Holocaust?

Denying that the German government, under the rule of the Nazi party, deliberately murdered Jewish people for the sole crime of being Jewish. However, I consider any death that occurred in the concentration camps to be a deliberate murder, so long as the death was caused by the conditions in the camp. If the Nazis abducted 200,000 Jews and placed them in prisons where they died of starvation or typhus, I would not see it as morally different from the Nazis gassing 6,000,000 Jews with Zyklon B. It's still a murder of an excessive number of people because of their bloodline. That's genocide. That's the evil of the Holocaust.

If the next Fuentes popped up and said that Jews not only weren't the subject of targeted killings, but actually survived the war at a higher rate than Gentiles! Would that constitute denying the Holocaust?

Absolutely.

Or do you state that the historicity of the Holocaust is unimportant?

The details matter for historical purposes. Not for moral ones.

Moreover, if you're looking for Conservatives, you aren't going to find one who denies the Holocaust for all the reasons Prager cites.

I don't want a conservative who denies the Holocaust! I know that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis. I just want a conservative who doesn't morally castigate people for disagreeing over details of a historical event, use mistake theory instead of conflict theory when someone does a wrongthink, or say that Holocaust revisionism/human biodiversity/etc are right to be condemned on moral (and not just factual) grounds while it's okay to Just Ask Questions about vaccines or gender identity. You can't criticize the left for silencing dissent, then turn around and do the same, without being a hypocrite.

Looking for an American conservative who will disavow Eisenhower and Patton is like looking for a Christian who will disavow Jesus. It's a contradiction in terms.

Who said anything about that?

My opinion of Dennis Prager is roughly the same as Norm Macdonald's one of Hitler. And freedom of speech etc. etc., no disagreements here. However, here I must say that I understand where he is coming from (except the «If the Holocaust is a fabrication, Americans died fighting against nothing particularly evil» part – come on man, just pretend you give a fuck about tyranny and, say, mass killing of Slavs). It feels strange to put into words what a Jew has apparently failed at conveying to a sympathetic another.

The point is as follows. The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust is not just a sacred cow nor an academic sticking point. Six million – considering the incentives of researchers such as perceived immorality or danger of lowballing, maybe a biased estimate, but still close to the center of mass of my a priori model – is near the totality of Jews that had been living by that point on the territory controlled by Germany. As Praeger says,

Beginning in about 1941, the Nazi regime dedicated itself to murdering every Jew — man, woman, child and baby — in countries it occupied. Eventually, more than six of every 10 Jews in Europe were murdered.

Them having been killed, whether via gas and those absurd shower contraptions like mainstreamers insist, or indirectly via starvation and neglect, like some revisionists effectively tell it, regardless of proportion by method or nuances of timeline or sensational claims about particular cruelties, indicates the successfully pursued intention of a complete eradication of a people wherever possible – an intention one can derive from arguments in Hitler's magnum opus already. This clear intention is the main reason I feel disinterested in investigating revisionism (although I know that the mainstream can get stuck on asserting blatant lies, as the case of HBD shows). And, therefore, it is qualitatively different from killing hundreds of thousands, like in some vastly scaled-up impulsive pogrom. It was, indeed, a genocide, and it means that, were the Axis successful in its ultimate political program, it would have been the end of Jewry globally, the final death of Israel.

Jews, in my experience, have stronger sensitivity to existential threats than European peoples, to an extent that, I suspect, they cannot quite believe the difference, and mistake fringe right-wing white identitarian groups for «mask-off» evidence about the sentiment pervading, mostly subconsciously for now, the totality of the race. Must be an unpleasant mental space to inhibit. But they're still the sane ones in this relationship; and Europeans are abnormal by the standards of humanity, too liberated from the longhouse ethics BAP despises so, too collectively autistic and ethnically suicidal to recognize and feel viscerally what makes a genocide so «particularly evil».

Perhaps, as an autistic person, you're closer to white Gentiles in this regard.

too liberated from the longhouse ethics BAP despises so

What is this referring to? "Longhouse" makes me think of some of the structures built by the native nations of America, like Hogans and such, but looking it up, it's also a Viking thing? I thought BAP's thing was something in line with warrior/horse people aesthetics and ideas.

https://twitter.com/17cshyteposter/status/1161883143927767040 This is a decent intro to it. It's a reference to matriarchal stone age communal societies that may or may not be a product of communist anthropologists's fever dreams.

The modern is “nothing new”: it is the return of a very ancient subjection and brokenness under new branding, promoted by new concepts and justifications. If you want to see our future look to Europe as it existed before 1600 BC, or much of the world as it was until recently and still is…. the communal life of the longhouse with its young men dominated and broken by the old and sclerotic, by the matriarchs

Or 0HP's

Thaler called his ("Nudging") approach by the oxymoron "libertarian paternalism", but it's more motherly than fatherly.

The main social role of women is policing adherence to group norms, and the more they are empowered, the more monocultural and stifling social life becomes. A panopticon made of lightning will wrap us like a warm blanket, and already has. McLuhan said electric media makes the world a global village, because instant communication brings us closer together.

The global village turns out to be a global longhouse

Ah. So, essentially, "moms keep people from doing anything"? But what does it mean to be too liberated from this?

Afraid I don't know that part, I'm not a BAPista or whatever. But it probably involves roids, a Conan sword, and apparently raw eggs now for some reason.

The problem is Jews don't share your ambivalence to motives or means. If you deny an explicit plan for extermination, or six million, or "those absurd shower contraptions" then you are a Holocaust denier by definition. They do not take the position of "the number doesn't really matter, the existence of the gas chambers do not matter." Those things are sacred objects. If they are exposed as false, they cannot tolerate it and say "gas chambers or typhus, extermination camps or starvation due to catastrophic war conditions, who cares." They are all-in on a specific mythology and symbology.

It would be like saying Christ wasn't crucified, he died of dysentery in Roman custody. No Christian would accept that and say "who cares", because we aren't talking about historiography, we are talking about Mythology. Someone like you would just be mildly intrigued that Jesus died in prison rather than via crucifixion. But a Christian could not accept that update into his mythological worldview. "Jesus suffered a lot and died for our sins, but he wasn't hung on a cross." That's heresy.

Simply denying the gas chambers, even if you pay every other sort of homage to Jewish suffering in WWII, still puts you squarely in hell according to Dennis Prager.

Europeans are abnormal by the standards of humanity, too liberated from the longhouse ethics BAP despises so

The Holocaust mythology is a big reason for this. Perhaps the largest, in explaining European racial sensibilities in 2020 compared to 1920.

The Holocaust mythology is a big reason for this. Perhaps the largest, in explaining European racial sensibilities in 2020 compared to 1920.

I thought that the line you responded to here was more about European passivity and submission to authority--they don't have the reputation for it quite like the British do (what with their surveillance cameras and the ever-memetic loicense), but Continentals lived under hierarchical monarchies for centuries and didn't much question being killed in wars started by their higher-ups for the longest time. Upon re-reading it, maybe your angle is more the frame to take, but I feel like one of the missed/forgotten lessons of the Holocaust is/was/could be/should be "it's okay to stand up for yourself and others sometimes, you know--it can even save lives."

Holy moly. I hadn't thought of it like this. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that what upsets people about the Holocaust isn't just that millions of people were murdered, but that the end goal was exterminating a group of people in its entirety. I'm deracinated enough that it makes little difference to me, but if I had a stronger sense of Jewish identity, then that might make a difference. Thank you.

Many people claims to be in favor of free speech and free thought until it conflicts with their own beliefs. This is I would argue the default for most people, left and right. There are a handful of principled libertarians who are able to maintain their stance but it is very rare in my experience.

Prager is an example. Elon Musk also. He wouldn't lift Alex Jones' ban because of it's closeness to his emotions around losing a child. It is useful to claim to be in favor of free speech and thought when you are the one being censored. It is then expedient to be in favor of censorship when it is your hobby horses that you are able to censor others on. This is the way of social power and control. And because we are very good at rationalizing our own beliefs it isn't even necessarily a conscious technique

Elon Musk was transparently lying about his level of offense as an excuse to keep one of the most controversial public figures in America off his platform. He was also transparently lying about Kanye West inciting violence. I hate liars, but Musk is in a uniquely tough spot where he wants Twitter to be freer than it was under the previous owner, but he can't make it too free because that would drive away advertisers and make the site unprofitable.

Or he is telling the truth. But regardless he then values keeping his advertisers above free speech, so either way he counts.

If you lose the advertisers, you lose the site, and then there's no free speech at all for anyone on Twitter... I think he's trying to do the most pro-speech things that are practically possible.

Again though he could fund it himself. Free speech is not his fundamental principle. He values other things above that. Which is fine, but makes my point. He is in favor of free speech unless it conflicts with his other values, such as keeping his money, or his business, or making money off dead children, depending on which you believe is his driving value for this choice.

I'm not criticizing him for it, free speech certainly isn't my overriding principle after all, just pointing it out.

Using accusations of holocaust denial to shut up critics is not exactly new, though, is it? As I recall David Irving didn’t actually claim the holocaust never took place, either.

I expected better from Dennis Prager.

Why? He’s able to put things in layman’s terms that happen to be true. That doesn’t mean he’s incapable of bias.

Nobody is incapable of bias, but something this blatant makes me unwilling to take him seriously in the future. And it's a shame, because I liked his stuff.

The deaths of tens of millions in the Gulag Archipelago just plain isn't the current records-based expert consensus. (It bears mentioning that the records of Gulag system camps were opened up during the post-90s thaw and the efforts by Yeltsin government to categorize CPSU crimes for political benefit against the still-strong CPRF, and were then studied fairly extensively by Russian and Western researchers). Wikipedia summary:

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher.[5][6][7] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[8] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[9][10] some 390,000[11] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[12] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[13] According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility.[2] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[14] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][15]

Of course, if you include the higher estimate of famine deaths into account, you get a bit over 10 million of total deaths, but that still isn't tens of millions, and the specification of Gulag Archipelago leads one to understand we are specifically referring to the claims concerning camp deaths made by Soltzhenitzyn, among the others.

To steal an idea from Timothy Snyder, if you look at mass killings of civilians in Europe from 1933-45 you can divide them into three principal and roughly even groups: the German killings of Jews, the German killing of non-Jews, and the Soviet killing of Soviet citizens

I've sometimes observed that one of the things about the way Holocaust is discussed is that it often leads to people underestimating Nazi deaths, since, upon hearing the question "How many people did the Nazis kill", the number that automatically comes to mind and is hard to unlodge is "six million", even though that leaves out at least the equal amount of non-Jews killed.

I don't know this guy, but come on: if revisionists and outright deniers successfully get it into the mainstream that "Hey, nowhere six million Jews died, it was [a few thousand/a couple of tens of thousands/some hundred thousands] at the very most", then it becomes "just another casualty of war". Nothing special, the Jews were not specifically targeted, look at all the [Russians/Italians/Chinese/British] civilians who died as well".

Except that is not true. There really was a plan to target and exterminate the Jews. It didn't 'just happen' along with all the other civilian casualties.

So yeah, I can understand why Jewish commentators are going to lose it over anything that looks like "nothing special, just like anyone else" attempts to downplay what happened. And even at the best interpretation "Well, only 100,000 Jews died in the campaign to exterminate them, not 6,000,000, so why are you upset?", can you really not see why someone Jewish might be upset about being told they should be glad that the death plan wasn't as efficient as claimed? They wanted to kill us all, they didn't manage it, why would I be okay about being a target of deliberate murder if only they had been able to get me?

"just another casualty of war".

That's if they were killed by another country that was bombing indiscriminately, not by their own governments because of ethnic animus.

can you really not see why someone Jewish might be upset about being told they should be glad that the death plan wasn't as efficient as claimed

Of course I can! What happened is still an abomination, either way.

Vox Day was/is right about him, and I am not even that far on the right. This is why I read bloggers, not columnists.

What did Vox Day say?

Because I am evil bastard I would go in the other way - I would claim that the Holocaust was 18 million Jews instead of 6, that would put my troll targets in a very hard position to defend. Not correcting me means that they are not attached to historic truth, and correcting me while not giving ammo to the deniers is an exhausting balancing act.

And with barely anyone left alive with coherent memories of the camps - the youngest people that can claim survivorship are in their mid 80s - the Holocaust is turning into mythology by the day. And also with taking so much mindshare - it does deprive the other 70 millions that perished in this war of recognition.

And probably 150 million if we count Gulags, Great leap forwards and other jolly things that happened around that time.

I Accidentally Got SBF To Admit to Fraud

So...SBF is simply a moron. I've been trying to resist that conclusion, but now I'm asking myself why I bothered.

In the link above Youtuber Coffeezilla drops into a call with SBF (a second time! Why is he still taking calls??) and proceeds to basically get him to admit that funds were comingled.

Coffeezilla noted that SBF always deflects the issue by arguing that some accounts were trading on margin and so were deliberately open to being used by Alameda, unlike regular accounts. So literally all he does - and all any journalist needed to do - was just keep drilling down on whether the FTX only customers who weren't doing that could still get their funds. SBF obviously has no answer. Even worse, he basically screws himself by admitting that they had one withdrawal process which was him admitting to comingling funds.

So...the guy is just a moron. He doesn't have some grand legal plan to plead negligence or ignorance. He has a half-baked plan based on the idea that everyone is dumber than him (despite multiple counterexamples) and he falls apart the minute anyone puts any thought into his answers.

The entire video is actually a good look at how a journalist should view someone like SBF and his word games and deflections and how they should strategize to defeat them (and the end has the sort of pure joy at skewering the target that I bet all journalists feel but are too dignified to admit when picking up their Pulitzer). And this is coming from someone who thought the idea of people like Coffeezilla being "journalists" laughable.

But he has legitimately done the best job of questioning SBF out of everyone (Stefanopoulos was the close second)

So...the guy is just a moron.

Well, yeah. But the important thing to remember is that he's a smart moron. The embarrassing Sequoia fanboy squee article hit that point, too:

Highly mathletic, SBF breezed through Crystal Springs Uplands, an elite prep school in Hillsborough, California. Though he earned top marks, he kept to himself, spending most of his free time playing computer games (StarCraft, League of Legends) and a trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. But at MIT he found his tribe: fellow pledges at Epsilon Theta, a coed fraternity of supergeeks similarly interested in Magic, and video games. Thetans are fond of debating math, physics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and logic problems—for fun—at alcohol-free parties.

As an aside, anyone who coins a cutesy neologism like "mathletic" should be rolling around on the floor, clutching their ears, in agony. But what is my point here?

Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.

Well, guys, here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans".

He doesn't have some grand legal plan to plead negligence or ignorance. He has a half-baked plan based on the idea that everyone is dumber than him (despite multiple counterexamples) and he falls apart the minute anyone puts any thought into his answers.

I agree that he doesn't have some grand legal plan, but I do think he is relying on "negligence or ignorance". The entire set-up at his Bahamas tax haven base (see the Sequoia article again, man that is probably the worst thing this Adam Fisher ever wrote but it's a treasure trove of nuggets about the mindset of everyone involved, from the fanboy journalist to the investors throwing money at Bankman-Fried on the basis of one Zoom call) was juvenile - it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties". Everyone seems to have had an instinctive mindset that the conventional way of doing things - even business - was somehow icky, somehow.... normie. And they weren't normies! They were supersmart EA types who were going to save the world by making tons of money and having fun doing it!

So whether or not Bankman-Fried set out from the outset with fraud in mind, the setup was so chaotic, it was conducive to it. I think there is something suspicious there, because Bankman-Fried had so much ownership and control behind the scenes, but he may genuinely have thought he was a supersmart cookie who could find a new way to make zillions after his One Weird Trick dried up.

His parents are lawyers, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he imbibed some half-baked notion that "if I say X was separate from Y, and it was Y did all the fiddling around with funds, then I'm in the clear" when it comes to his technicality about "it wasn't FTX that did it, it was Alameda". I do think he's relying on technicalities to save his skin, which just shows once again that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

I really hope one of the lessons people in the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent sphere, including on here, take away from this is to lose the ugly attitude around the idolisation of 'intelligence' and the corresponding denigration of 'normies' (this constant assumption, as I've said, that ordinary people are all 90-95 IQ and not the average of 100 IQ or even up to 105!).

Can we see the math and logic he's said to have done?

I ask because I remember there being something of a dive into his League of Legends ranking based on the infamous investor call, and apparently he was not at all ranked the way a genius mathlete willing to put in the hours would be at all, and also because I myself have seen a lot of people who associate with smart, nerdy things entirely for smart, nerdy cred, and whose actual ability to engage with the crunchy, mathy, requires-focus-and-practice bits of them is completely nonexistent.

I'd absolutely believe that Sam got top marks entirely based on his family and social connections and the fact that a prep school is about making him look good for a college environment that has completely desisted from actual educational discernment. It's absolutely the case that smart people can believe very dumb things, especially when those dumb beliefs are serving as vital shields for their self-image, and that high-IQ memorize-loads-of-facts-and-do-novel-work-with-them types can end up carefully compartmentalizing against the heresies of their day and circle, and get badly bitten when their failure to think in that one context happens to arise.

But until I see Sam's math SAT scores or evaluate some complex code he's written, I'm personally going to hold off on claiming that he's smart.

For me, it's just parsimony. I have no faith in colleges in general any more, and Sam has demonstrated his ability to manipulate elite institutions, and is also a goober. It could be that he is high-IQ and a goober, or that he's a goober all around and simply bamboozled MIT the same way he did a bunch of others - or it might be that he simply had a lucky interpersonal-connection 'in' to MIT that would have worked whether his boiling-hot IQ was measured in C or F.

I also think it's probably fairly unlikely that we'll get hard data either way, especially now, given the extended time that's passed from any potential objective-ish evaluations like AP exams or SATs. Also, nowadays, it would be trivial for someone of his resources to game a few slightly-harder-to-fake signals, like a ghostwritten StackOverflow profile and some boilerplate personal projects on a GitHub account.

But given the sheer stupidity and utter agnosticism towards the very idea of personal consequences he has displayed so far, I feel like I can safely say he's probably real dumb, in the classic sense, excepting for his ability to lie and manipulate people (which, in fairness, is a non-trivial skill, but also one not necessarily interacting with deep math, science, and programming geekery). I predict that no actual evidence of Sam doing anything difficult and valuable with anything not vulnerable to social pressure, where the results can be verified (meaning mostly math or programming, since those are things I feel I could verify myself) will be found. I am not super-invested in this theory, and I happily admit this is purely a balance-of-probabilities as I see it; I'd be delighted for someone to turn up, e.g., a deeper dive into Sam's LoL rankings, if nothing more objective can be found.

He said multiple times he played LoL to distract his brain while doing other things, and that he never cared about rank. The fact that people think his League of Legends ranking could actually correlate to his IQ in this thread is surprisingly high.

What the heck does the fact that SBF said something (in this case, something nakedly self-serving) have to do with reality, reason, or any truth about the world?

It could be that this is the case, that SBF chooses to play a competitive ranked multiplayer game and generally bring his random teammates down, and deal with a notoriously stressful and distracting environment that (to my knowledge) no one else says is a good flow-supporting distraction like music or walking, and that he puts in zero effort because he doesn't care.

Or, alternatively, he could play the game because LoL is the kind of thing that smart, nerdy, driven people play (because it's so miserable for the casual player), wholly as part of a brand-building activity, and that he not only has no real interest in the game beyond the bare superficial needed to use it as a prop, and the reason he has not gitten gud in his hundreds of hours of play is because either he is profoundly uninterested in learning, improving, and gaining skills, or because he can't, and bronze league is his natural skill ceiling. (Also, as a note: this is entirely from second-hand absorption from one of my friends who plays MOBAs and extremely cursory research. I could be absolutely wrong about the rank of his accounts, the hours he's spent playing, and what both signify. I eagerly await any LoL-players present to chime in with first-hand information.)

My current position is that everything SBF says or has said, and that everything everyone around him who would plausibly benefit from him looking good or be punished for blowing the whistle on him, is suspect. He's a super-affirmative-action-hire, basically; he could be as competent and smart as his rep and just happened to fail horribly in these few cases (or, possibly, used to have been extremely smart and competent and then fried his brain on nootropics), just as an affirmative action hire maybe possibly good have gotten their job even if they'd been evaluated fairly, but there's no real way to know.

Or, the null set is that SBF is incredibly fucked-up to the point that he somehow enjoys what would be an otherwise painful and salt-inducing experience. There are people in the world who can eat durians or jellied scorpions or whatever and actually like it, maybe mining the League of Legends angle isn't very productive and has little implications for the things we know he did.

Yeah, again from that article and things his 'psychiatrist' (the guy whose job apparently was to write prescriptions for the Adderall etc. type drugs the FTX/Alameda people were on) said, Bankman-Fried has few interests. Doesn't read books, doesn't watch movies, is a vegan, isn't interested in fine food, etc. So playing vidya games is one of the, or maybe only, hobby he has.

Or, alternatively, he could play the game because LoL is the kind of thing that smart, nerdy, driven people play (because it's so miserable for the casual player), wholly as part of a brand-building activity, and that he not only has no real interest in the game beyond the bare superficial needed to use it as a prop

This is a great point, if he truly had a crafted/scripted persona to sell to VCs and finance folks, as well as crypto maxis and regulators. I still haven't bought the whole 'he's really a genius mastermind' narrative, I think it's likely he truly was nerdy and raised in an extremely weird way, but got nerd sniped by naive utilitarianism.

The fact that people think his League of Legends ranking could actually correlate to his IQ in this thread is surprisingly high.

IQ supremacists online seem weirdly attached to proxies for IQ tests, so that they can then turn that proxy produced IQ to an indication of ability at {x}. I've noted before the difficulties with layering multiple potential correlation margins-of-error on top of each other.

I've noticed this as well - Chess was the game of choice for a long until time it was conclusively proven that there isn't a real link between IQ and chess. Helps that Magnus Carlson, the world champion of the past few years, refuses to get his IQ tested and specifically argues chess masters can't be too intelligent.

I hope there are studies being done on the link between League of Legends (or MOBAs in general) and IQ. Unfortunately studying IQ becomes less and less fashionable every year, unfortunately.

It's worth nothing that correlations are likely to increase with ability. That is, being good at chess is not that highly correlated with IQ, but being among the best in the world is highly predictive of having a high IQ, too.

How would one equalize for effort? It seems like prep, especially in terms of research, is going to mean too much to any game outcomes for it to be a useful IQ proxy. That seems an insuperable barrier to using any casual hobby. Only things in which we can presume an average effort of "full" work as proxies for ability, things like competitive levels of sport, schools, and professions. Otherwise we're rating effort not ability.

Still, there's something pretty funny about the suggestion that a guy's ranking in a video game is an indicator of intelligence. It's like suggesting that a guy who wins his fantasy league every year would be a good NFL GM.

Paul DePodesta seems to be doing pretty well career wise even if he mostly gets hired by loser teams, they tend to improve after bringing him on.

More comments

If you were familiar with the interview process at Jane Street you would know that you were wrong.

Would you care to elaborate?

I know nothing about Jane St. other than they're a finance shop that is known for brain-teasers in their interviews. If they have in-depth procedures for, e.g., double-blinding the results of applicants' written responses to their math and statistics questions, so that the person deciding "Yes, this answer shows sufficient mastery of the topic and reasoning skills." has no cues from college or name, then that's a significant data point in favor of me being wrong, and I'd welcome it being pointed out.

But I've been in IT for a while and I know exactly how much brain-teaser questions (or, for that matter, basic tests like FizzBuzz) are actually treated as hard checks when either upper management or even just the interviewer in question really wants the interviewee to pass, and it is not much at all. And I absolutely do not consider Jane Street a quasi-priesthood of intellectual integrity, and that every employee working for them cares utterly about the incorruptible truth, because (again), they hired SBF to trade crypto for them.

But again, I know no specifics, and if Jane Street has specific procedures and checks in place to stop a charismatic fraud from joining their august ranks, I'd love to hear about them in more detail.

As someone who's gone through the Jane Street interview loop (no offer), I never was asked brain teasers; its questions are harder and more rigorously evaluated than any I've gotten at FAANG companies (many offers). As much as I'd like to write it off as their bias for privileged scion, there's no real reason to think that. Take that anecdote for what it's worth.

I'd be terrified of getting fizzbuzz at Jane Street; they'd be expecting something like this.

And I absolutely do not consider Jane Street a quasi-priesthood of intellectual integrity, and that every employee working for them cares utterly about the incorruptible truth, because (again), they hired SBF to trade crypto for them.

He worked at JS in 2014-2017. The crypto trading was in 2018 with his own money or other money, unrelated to JS.

Have you ever met a < 100 - 1sd IQ person trying to bamboozle you? They are not very good at it.

I am quite sure SBF must be > 100 on the basis that he managed to run FTX and related organizations for several years. Maybe he scores better on verbal than math, but I think there are all indications he is above average, because your average manager and quant certainly are. Difficult to say if it was "boiling hot", but where did that claim from anyway? You don't need boiling hot for score > 105 or even >115, and I'd guess >50% chances he is above that cutoff.

I feel like there's a point around good toupees here; it could be that I've been bamboozled by dozens of low-IQ people and just never though to check.

As for my boiling comment, I was making a joke along the lines of room-temperature IQ, in that 212 (F) and 100 (C) are both boiling depending on your measure. And, to be clear, I don't think that SBF is significantly below average, and assume he's between 107 - 115 IQ generally just based on his heritage.

But I put no faith in his words, his presentation of himself, and any evaluation by someone who would either gain by reporting him smarter or be put at risk of retaliation by reporting him dumber as indicators of his smartness. I think that his first talent is shamelessness, and his second is creativity in exploiting trust, and his third is in presentation to limit the number of people who think to check on his first two strengths, and while he could also be quite smart at the shape-rotate-y stuff (and is probably not blisteringly incompetent at it), I see at present absolutely no reason to assume that SBF is "really really good at STEM/maths".

He does seem to have some sort of charisma which, frankly, I wouldn't expect from his appearance. That Sequoia article is embarrassing in how hard the writer is squeeing over him, and it's really hard to know why, unless Bankman-Fried has some in-person ability to baffle you with his bullshit. I cannot get over the account of the Zoom call where Bankman-Fried is looking for funding and he gives some waffle in response to "so what can you do with your crypto exchange?" and they all fall over themselves to throw money at him:

Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’”

That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”

Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.

“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.

“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.

“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.

...The B round raised a billion dollars. Soon afterward came the “meme round”: $420.69 million from 69 investors.

After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.

But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

So I find myself convinced that, if SBF can keep his wits about him in the years ahead, he’s going to slay—that, just as Alameda was a stepping stone to FTX, FTX will be to the super-app. Banking will be disrupted and transformed by crypto, just as media was transformed and disrupted by the web. Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

If it helps, a bit of information about MIT's Science Core, which is one of the graduation requirements for every undergraduate, regardless of major--two semesters of Calculus (single and multivariable), two semesters of Physics (mechanics and electricity/magnetism), one semester of Chemistry, and one semester of Biology. Also, if you have not completed every class on that list by the end of your freshman year, something has gone wrong.

As one example from the list, the course summary for 18.02 (Multivariable Calculus) is as follows, from MIT's Course Catalog:

"Calculus of several variables. Vector algebra in 3-space, determinants, matrices. Vector-valued functions of one variable, space motion. Scalar functions of several variables: partial differentiation, gradient, optimization techniques. Double integrals and line integrals in the plane; exact differentials and conservative fields; Green's theorem and applications, triple integrals, line and surface integrals in space, Divergence theorem, Stokes' theorem; applications."

I assume that you and a number of people on this board would have no trouble passing these classes, particularly when you were college-age, but the Admissions Office shouldn't be in the business of approving candidates that can't pass hard graduation requirements, and you need a bit of a pushed IQ to get through that material.

None of that material is remotely difficult to learn and get throught for the first time, if you are a student with no day job or child caring responsibilities that is.

Not that I went to MIT, but the material remains the same even if you study it somewhere else ;-)

I admit trying to learn it between say 2330 and 0000 after being busy all day and having to get up at 6am might be difficult.

Anyone about 100- 115 IQ wise really shouldn't struggle with it if they actually try imho.

Putting SBFs intelligence lower bound as...median..

Not that I went to MIT, but the material remains the same even if you study it somewhere else ;-)

MIT is not a plug and chug school. Their goal is to create engineers and scientists who understand the technology they use/manage on a deep level.

I do agree - comparing the deep knowledge in computer science between MIT/CMU/etc grads and even just the next tier of CS universities is night and day - but I was under the impression that much of that happens after freshman year. In which case this…

None of that material is remotely difficult to learn and get throught for the first time, if you are a student with no day job or child caring responsibilities that is.

…makes a bit more sense, even if I think @Azth rather underestimates how much difficulty the average 100-IQ person would have with something like calculus or physics. Like, for someone smart, even something like 15-213 in CMU is possibly doable solo, let alone freshman calculus (not even analysis!), physics, chemistry, and biology.

I guess what I mean is that both of you are kind of right but some statements are kind of wrong? @Azth underestimates the intelligence needed to take those classes without trouble, and you overestimate the deep learning required in such entry level courses, but would nevertheless be on point about the degree generally.

Yes, I can accept that.

Maybe I underestimate the intelligence reuqired - like stokes theorem is brought up by another poster and that is, at a deep level, implcitly obvious and formalising it is straightforward, dare I say trivial so perhaps I fell into the typical mind fallacy trap (although I am retarded).

Deep understanding of first year undergraduate material?

Deep understanding, as relevant for scientists or engineers, of the stuff previously listed is still quite superficial.

Edit: For clarity, superficial as in a first year undergraduate course as part of training for scientists or engineers.

Do you really think if you asked a sample of 100 IQ people to learn Stokes' theorem (perhaps with some monetary incentive) to the extent they could describe it and use it in applications that most would be able to?

Yes, once you filter for those who don't know calculus, other prerequisites, have sufficient time, etc. Pay them to learn the prequesites then stokes theorem. I think the main barrier would not be that people can't understand it but that they simply do not care.

Anyone about 100- 115 IQ wise really shouldn't struggle with it if they actually try imho.

You severely underestimate how stupid I am 🤣

Yeah, I think most of us can agree Bankman-Fried is smart. Not as smart as made out when everyone was polishing his shoes with their tongues because he was worth (notional) billions, but not an ordinary dumb criminal either.

Smart in one particular way, but not street-smart enough to know to keep his damn mouth shut. Caroline Ellison seems to be smarter than that, I think she did one NYT interview (but I might be wrong about that) but otherwise has said nothing. Singh and Wang, his co-founders, seem to have dropped off the radar altogether (although the authorities might be on their track). It's Bankman-Fried who keeps stoking the fires with interviews and appearances and what-not.

What are the odds he's making a noble sacrifice play to draw all the heat away from his partners?

I don't think so, he seems to be throwing blame around on everyone he can think of but he was only careless, not intentionally fraudulent.

More like 99%. Even legit smart guys do not get into jane street. You need another tier of intelligence above that.

That’s still just 135. 90-95% would be just 125-130. The 1% aren’t all actual geniuses.

employment at Jane Street suggest he is probably at least 90-95th percentile

That's conservative. Jane Street doesn't hire 90th percentile interns. They work pretty hard to ensure all their interns are 99+ in quantitative skills

Might it be closer to 130 than 160? Sure, but he's not dumb.

He's dumb – for what he got into.

I say often that merely-smart guys like Sam have a tendency of pegging themselves, like, 20 points higher than they deserve, fancying themselves premier league players; and that can have catastrophic consequences for their circle and many others. Bill Gates is, by all accounts, a genius; he was appropriately arrogant for his level when young, and now he has matured into a superficially humble guy with wide latitude of expertise who can afford pretty large-scale shit.

Top-tier colleges are supposed to help with that by exposing a smart guy to actual geniuses and forcing to recalibrate. Certainly helped Bezos..

I say often that merely-smart guys like Sam have a tendency of pegging themselves, like, 20 points higher than they deserve

Early success or praise (which may have more to do with access to material or conscientious/education-focused parents) probably doesn't help

Jane Street does not hire traders or interns who cannot pass notoriously tricky technical interviews with math problems and brainteasers. Period. This is well known in the industry.

I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.

But, less facetiously, I'd like to lay out my default assumption here, based on what I've seen of SBF's work and statements so far; he is not IQ <90, and he has ruthlessly exploited the high-trust presumption of society, and because of that, I trust not a single word or explanation that comes from his mouth, nor those of people who would plausibly gain by his own gains. Given his willingness to spend money on regulators and punish dissenters, the general halo effect, and the fact that I know well how easily the job interview process gets twisted in general, I am not willing to assign Jane St. the same impartial evaluation trust that I would a math SAT scantron machine, or a compiler attempting to compile code he wrote.

Again, I don't think that he is an idiot. But I do think that he has absolutely adopted the appearance of smart nerdy things consciously, as part of a presented image, and that I need to consider everything about him from an adversarial position.

But he didn't steal from them, did he? They were smart enough to know how much leash they could give a man like that to safely make use of his talents without him getting ideas. Which is probably the most important part of managing finance guys.

Did he? I honestly don't know. Has anyone done a post-fall post-mortem deep dive on SBF's time in Jane Street?

That would interesting, but JS is very secretive too. Employees are incentivized to stay quiet .

If I go by the Sequoia article, the timeline goes something like this:

(1) Bankman-Fried is doing his physics/maths degree at MIT

(2) Meets Will MacAskill, who was recruiting for earn-to-give, via people in his fraternity

(3) MacAskill steers him towards an internship in Jane Street

(4) He seems to have done okay there (but as you say, we have no idea what really went on). Meets Ellison there. Article fanboys hard over him, so take the following with a grain of salt:

In 2017, everything was going great for SBF. He was killing it at Jane Street. He was a trader’s trader: so fluent with transactions that others would come watch him work, like one might watch an esports athlete streaming on Twitch.

(5) Quits, for whatever reason (article says it's all in the service of his devotion to utilitarianism yadda yadda but again, we don't know if he was asked to leave/let go/decided to quit for unknown reasons)

(6) Goes back home to the Bay Area, gets a job - courtesy of MacAskill - as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism

(7) Ellison is sent on a recruiting trip to California by Jane Street, decides to look up Bankman-Fried

(8) Turns out he set up this thing called Alameda Research with a grubstake of $50,000 (could be his own money, his parents' money, who knows) to exploit the 'kimchi premium' and is coining it

(9) But he could be making much, much more! So he goes looking for $50 million loan and gets a good chunk of that via EA contacts

(10) He puts together an admittedly ramshackle operation to exploit this hard

(11) Ellison quits Jane Street and signs up

(12) MONEY! MONEY! MONEY!

(13) But of course, all good things come to an end, and so the next step is "Hmmm, maybe I should open a crypto trading exchange, there is probably easy money to be made there, too"

(14) Founds FTX and the rest we all know

I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.

The crypto trades came much later, in 2018, and with his own money. Jane Street was 2014.

Fair; I am operating entirely off of a few article summaries which specifically mentioned that he traded crypto at Jane Street, and if there is evidence that Jane Street wasn't trading crypto at the time, I certainly don't have either any specialist knowledge of Jane Street or notable faith in the article summaries.

The point remains, however; if my (hypothetical) investment manager was bragging to me about how much money he made with Bernie Madoff, I would seek another investment manager, even if said investment manager decried buying into the Ponzi scheme specifically and even if Bernie had other legitimate investments. It doesn't matter if they came out ahead (plus, I, being a suspicious bastard, would figure that a smart investment manager would make damn sure to conceal the fact that they lost money by not doing basic due diligence on Bernie's fund if they did lose money in it); no matter the outcome, my own trust in someone who put money down on Bernie would go inexorably down.

this guy gets it

I wouldn't be shocked if he aced his SAT math, given MIT Physics major/Math minor, but neither would I be impressed.

Assuming that he was a decent student, but not outstanding in context, and that he organized his classes with at least a half-assed gesture towards efficiency, something like the following describes his math education:

  • 5 on the AP Calc AB exam to test out of single variable Calculus general requirement (18.01).

  • Multivariable Calculus (18.02, general req) and maybe Differential Equations (18.03, Physics major req) his freshman year.

  • Physics Flexible track with Math as his focus area--three more math classes after DiffEqs. Let's say Linear Algebra (18.06), Combinatorial Analysis (18.211), and Introduction to Numerical Analysis (18.330).

  • Two more math classes to finish off his math minor. Possibly Probability and Statistics (18.05) and Principles of Discrete Applied Mathematics (18.200).

(Also, the rest of his Physics major.)

130 IQ isn't unreasonable. Very smart; not exceptional. The above courses are roughly the minimum you'd need for his major/minor combo, and nothing I've seen indicates a student that was punching above his weight through grit, determination, and excellent organizational skills.

How much IQ would you need to cheat your way through your entire MIT education, I wonder?

My own knowledge of MIT is rudimentary, but I remember it having a strong focus on student trust and honor from looking into the Aaron Swartz fiasco. And it appears that the story of Sam was finding and exploiting high-trust environments where not even bare due-diligence against adversarial actors was being done.

Am I wrong about this? Does MIT gleefully count coup against attempted cheaters? Is there a high-publicity case of a student turning in their roommate for cheating, or a professor being recognized for diligence in uncovering a novel cheating method and bringing it to the attention of all and sundry?

Again, I assume that he needs to have reached a basic minimum to cheat competently; I'll qualify him with "probably smart, with no verys". But nothing I've seen qualifies him as one of the STEM cognitive elite other than some certifications, and in current year, I do not trust any certifiers.

The "Sam is one of the cognitive elite" narrative appears to rest on three pillars; FTX itself (now distinctly counterevidence), his job and educational history (which I don't trust at all without a deeper dive), his accidents of dress and hobby (taking interest in math, logic, debate, and LoL). For myself, I find a missing pillar; I would expect a STEMLord to need to sharpen themselves against the unyielding whetstone of reality to achieve mastery. It certainly could be that Sam was a technical genius who focused all of his productive energies on his set-up for FTX (and then growing FTX), and that he judged a better expected return from laser-like focus on that than a model rocket hobby or a few hundred Project Euler solutions. But absent any hard evidence of such, I consider that Sam could be either a cheat, a liar, and a fraud who is also a brilliant technical mind, or simply a cheat, a liar, and a fraud, and as such do not multiple entities (or properties, I guess).

And, again, if you have evidence that it would be wildly unlikely for MIT to let a cheat, a fraud, and a liar through its programs, I'd love to hear it.

MIT's selection processes is hard enough that someone who would be inclined to cheat would not get in. Given that SBF got into Jane Street, likely he was smart enough to graduate without needing to cheat.

Can you demonstrate this? I admit, I'm not seeing how making selection criteria harder would decrease the likelihood of cheating. I mean, in the extreme case, if you make a test that only one billionth of humanity could pass fairly, then the odds that any given person passed the test fairly (when there are great reputational and financial rewards for passing the test, no deep culture of investigating and calling out cheaters, and strong incentives to have everyone passively trust the process and not assume cheating as a default possibility) are fairly low.

Again, I'm not an expert on MIT's admission methods, but if, e.g., they hold their own proctored and blind-graded exam for all students they are considering admitting, I'd definitely update in the direction of considering MIT more reliable. But given that my default assumption about colleges (which is that they will cheerfully drop admissions standards into the ground to accept those of their favored demographics, and raise the standards on the unfavored demographics to compensate), I simply do not believe that MIT is honestly selecting students according to fair criteria.

Demonstrate how? It's well known that MIT is both hard to get accepted ,as is the coursework

He attended something called Mathcamp, I don't know if this really is for mathematically-gifted students and can't be finessed, anyone who does know if this depends on pure brainpower please comment.

That his parents are lawyers but he went the STEM route would seem to indicate genuine ability there.

He got into Jane Street. It's worth reminding that even people who have credentials suggesting very high IQ often do not get in. So, family and connections would not have worked in regard to that. I don't see what is wrong with saying he is a legit very smart dude who fucked up badly.

Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.

My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.

Well, guys, here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans".

Ordinary people buy scratchcards. And honestly, who's to say that SBF even messed up as far as his own benefit is concerned. He got to spend several years as a rich and influential power broker, and may still evade severe punishment. The actual dumb people are the 110 IQ cryptophiles that got ripped off again.

The entire set-up at his Bahamas tax haven base (see the Sequoia article again, man that is probably the worst thing this Adam Fisher ever wrote but it's a treasure trove of nuggets about the mindset of everyone involved, from the fanboy journalist to the investors throwing money at Bankman-Fried on the basis of one Zoom call) was juvenile - it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties".

This describes a lot of people in their late twenties nowadays. It's not abnormal.

My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.

Every time I've run into this, it has not been presented as a fact, and the number was far lower than 100 - I think 85 or 80 maybe? Where here have you seen someone claim that it's a known fact that people of 49th percentile intelligence or lower can't understand hypotheticals?

I saw someone on the SSC subreddit who had supposedly done IQ studies claim this. It was a very lengthy post with a lot of upvotes.

I remember that too, but thought it was <85 IQ. Camas search hasn’t found anything, though.

There was some discussion by ZorbaTHut and Naraburns here that I found interesting.

I remain confused, at best, on this topic. I've brought up the sort of incapability revealed by Gwern's review of McNamara's Folly (including with Gwern), and if you work with seriously developmentally disabled adults at all it comes across as, if anything, an understatement. But there are alternate explanations (eg, people don't take tests seriously, the lizardman's constant being high, etc), and some of the conclusions regarding how wide-spread these problems are don't seem present in the real world, even ones with far less political relevance (IQ is supposed to strongly correlate with reflexes). There are more complex explanations that might make it all work out, but I don't know how many of them are serious rather than best-fit.

Shameless link to the blog, but the Project 100,000 recruits likely had IQs between 80-90, which is average-to-below average, not developmentally disabled at all. https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/07/30/project-100000-an-analysis/

What happened was due to troop shortages, a greater quantity of low-quality soldiers was recruited than typical, but this was not unprecedented at the time. It was practiced during WW2.

Looks like the US is poised to repeat the experiment. US Navy now enlisting recruits with ASVAB score of 10. ASVAB scores are set with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10, so people scoring 3-4 standard deviations below the mean test taker.

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I saw a guy on 4chan claim this for under 90 IQ.

It is likely wrong

I've never seen it here but I've seen something similar claimed on Twitter. I don't remember the exact IQ number so it could have been 90.

My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.

I feel like I need more context on the purported relation between IQ and ability to understand hypotheticals. I'm confident a statement like "For some IQ X all people above IQ X can understand hypotheticals and no people below IQ X can understand hypotheticals" is false for any X. Like, why would it be true? Just based on the way we measure IQ what's the relationship between being able to do reverse digit span and understanding hypotheticals?

I'm happy to believe there's some IQ threshold X below which no people can understand hypotheticals, but I suspect there would also be a substantial population of people with an IQ above X that also cannot understand hypotheticals. Similarly there's probably some IQ threshold Y above which everyone can understand hypotheticals, but also a substantial population of people with IQ below Y that can understand hypotheticals.

Just based on the way we measure IQ the claim that there exists some IQ level that perfectly partitions individuals into can/not understand hypotheticals seems pretty implausible.

This is a greentext from 4chan but it's pretty funny and demonstrates the point if true - it's more about conditional hypotheticals than any hypotheticals: https://i.redd.it/i1ywg8dajac71.png

That "We did research on convicts in San Quentin. They're absolute fucking retards" - well yeah, they ended up in San Quentin. They are also fucking with you because why would a bunch of convicts go out of their way to help some nerdy white middle-class motherfucker with his science project who all too plainly is treating them like lab rats?

The part about empathy may or may not be true, but it's also "You never admit anything, you say you don't know, when the cops are questioning you". If they said "I imagine that guy I beat up felt awful, he was in pain, he was humiliated" then bozo, you have just admitted you beat the guy up, that is another X days on your sentence.

Whatever about the convicts being unable to model theory of mind, our grad student researcher also can't model why convicts in jail are not going to cop to anything an authority figure asks questions about.

The idea seems to be that «a hypothetical», as a form of syllogism, has some minimum complexity/minimum description length that cannot be represented in a mind that has e.g. working memory corresponding to a given IQ – the minimally sufficient thought, even optimally chunked thanks to experience, just breaks down from noise and signal decay, in the same way complex mathematical expressions or rich verbal statements or puzzles break down for people of somewhat higher level.

That model strikes me as implausible because a basic hypothetical is very simple and people who struggle with understanding that ought to struggle even with speech.

On the other hand, using a hypothetical in practice usually involves thinking through some scenario diverging from known reality, which recruits imagination and a mental scratchpad with some non-negligible context length. So there are at least two levels of understanding – a hypothetical is an asymmetric function of sorts; you can check if it makes sense, but you're not necessarily able to use it as the first step in a reasoning chain that the other party's trying to prompt you into. In that case, it's prudent to concede your failure, drop the entire line of argument and just output the «okay smart guy, not listening» before you're tricked.

Of course intelligence is heterogenous (modestly so, given that g accounts for most variation, but still), and hypotheticals of different nature ought to be unequal in MDL. Additionally, Wason selection task shows that some ecologically valid concepts allow for efficient application of what seems to be the same basic algorithm – we don't have general-purpose theorem provers in our heads, more like a population of heuristics and cached partial solutions for specific cases. So people can be «good» at some hypotheticals but flounder when provided a novel one. Weeding out those specific cases is what good test design is about.

That model strikes me as implausible because a basic hypothetical is very simple and people who struggle with understanding that ought to struggle even with speech.

I wouldn’t be so surprised, at least with speech; they‘re different areas of the brain (and cognition, probably), and the way Broca‘s and Wernicke’s areas correspond to speech production seem much more fundamental and binary than whatever thing is to intelligence.

My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals

You are most likely right about this being a myth about low-IQ people, but I have personally verified, on more than one occasion, that people who don't understand hypotheticals exist.

To add onto this, while I don’t actually know much about the research in the area, I don’t find it actually that difficult to believe (that some very select, very stupid people can’t understand hypotheticals). All children at some point of growth don’t, just as all children at some point don’t have anything resembling a theory of mind. You just need some people who never quite get beyond that as they age (or spend way too much time getting there).

To be fair, I don't think it's stupidity, if anything it might indicate intelligence. My guess at the mechanism is people intuitively recognizing where the argument leads, and throwing a wrench into the conversation so you don't get to make it.

I'll buy that people below a certain IQ threshold can't understand hypotheticals, but this IQ threshold is obviously to me far below 90. I think I have a pretty good understanding of what 85 IQ people are like and they can grasp that they would be hungry if they didn't eat breakfast. They are not very good at following logic, learning foreign languages, planning ahead, or doing math, but they can understand hypotheticals at a basic level.

A few months ago I met a guy who bought me a scratchcard and insisted I complete it for 'fun'. It was not fun. The scratching is tedious and messy and the anticipation is unpleasant because I anticipate losing.

This describes a lot of people in their late twenties nowadays. It's not abnormal.

I'm pretty sure when both Bankman-Fried and Ellison were working at Jane Street, that operation was not run out of the CEO's beanbag office with no accountancy or audit services.

This was not a bunch of kids working on their zany start-up about crocheting motor bike helmets for chihuahuas. This was a large business dealing with huge sums of money.

Would SBF be teaching law at Stanford in your world?...I suppose that could reduce the damage, but the idea is funny.

philosophers can comfortably engage in thought experiments about double-or-nothing without hurting anyone. Perhaps owners of crypto brokerages cannot.

Only if they don't teach people who go on to work in crypto brokerages.

In slightly more general terms, this indicates that philosophers don't fully appreciate the "nothing" side of the thought experiment. Perhaps having to make a public speech. Just something to drive home the emotional element of the "nothing", along the lines of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=K_Kzf21cFoQ

Only if they don't teach people who go on to work in crypto brokerages.

Will MacAskill must be ruing the day he ever met this smart young guy, right now:

Not long before interning at Jane Street, SBF had a meeting with Will MacAskill, a young Oxford-educated philosopher who was then just completing his PhD. Over lunch at the Au Bon Pain outside Harvard Square, MacAskill laid out the principles of effective altruism (EA). The math, MacAskill argued, means that if one’s goal is to optimize one’s life for doing good, often most good can be done by choosing to make the most money possible—in order to give it all away. “Earn to give,” urged MacAskill.

...MacAskill couldn’t have hoped for a better recruit. Not only was SBF raised in the Bay Area as a utilitarian, but he’d already been inspired by Peter Singer to take moral action. During his freshman year, SBF went vegan and organized a campaign against factory farming. As a junior, he was wondering what to do with his life. And MacAskill—Singer’s philosophical heir—had the answer: The best way for him to maximize good in the world would be to maximize his wealth.

SBF listened, nodding, as MacAskill made his pitch. The earn-to-give logic was airtight. It was, SBF realized, applied utilitarianism. Knowing what he had to do, SBF simply said, “Yep. That makes sense.” But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake. All the rest was merely execution risk.

His course established, MacAskill gave SBF one last navigational nudge to set him on his way, suggesting that SBF get an internship at Jane Street that summer.

...After SBF quit Jane Street, he moved back home to the Bay Area, where Will MacAskill had offered him a job as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism.

Oh gosh, imagine if he had followed his parents! Yeah, that would be something else. But I sort of get the impression that he wasn't bright enough, or bright in the way of law? He went to MIT for the physics degree, so not the humanities type.

EDIT: I got distracted going down a rabbit-hole by looking up the school Bankman-Fried attended, and lemme tell you, meth-fuelled polycules in the Bahamas are nothing compared to what our grandparents' generation got up to! 😁

So Bankman-Fried went to Crystal Springs Uplands School, a prep school established in what was the mansion of one Charles Templeton Crocker. But the real wild child was his sister, Aimée - five marriages, a host of lovers, (alleged) conversion to Buddhism and a complicated family life:

Aimée Isabella Crocker (December 5, 1864 – February 7, 1941) was an American princess, mystic, Bohemian, and author. She was known for her cultural exploration of the Far East, for her extravagant parties in San Francisco, New York and Paris, and for her collections of husbands and lovers, adopted children, Buddhas, pearls, tattoos and snakes.

Crocker and Gouraud [husband #3] adopted three children, Reginald, Yvonne and Dolores (she would later adopt another daughter Yolanda), and acquired numerous bulldogs. The couple lived in Oriental-themed homes in Manhattan and on Long Island. They also had tattoos of each other's initials inscribed inside coiling snakes. Crocker then reunited with her daughter, Gladys [by husband #1], who went on to marry Gouraud's brother, Powers, making her daughter (who was already legally her sister [due to Aimée's mother adopting the girl, her grandchild, as her daughter]) a sister-in-law.

Aimée would marry her fifth and final husband, Prince Mstislav Galitzine, when she was 61 and he was 26. When asked by a friend who lost count of her marriages whether Mstislav was her fifth or sixth husband, she said, “The prince is my twelfth husband if I include in my matrimonial list seven Oriental husbands, not registered under the laws of the Occident.”

Interesting, that could have been one more spur for Sam to decide "I'm going to be so rich, no-one can ever bully me again!"

Well, I didn't want to mention names so as not to be pointing fingers at specific people. Your 95 IQ rednecks comment was made in the context of that guy is not thinking about sending his son to Harvard.

No, he's not. And he's probably not thinking about sending his son to the local state college, either. Maybe he's thinking about the kid doing an apprenticeship with Uncle Carl the mechanic or Cousin Bill the electrician.

So if you're talking about "ordinary people whose kids will never get the chance to go to Harvard", why use "95 IQ redneck" as your exemplar? Maybe our redneck is 105 IQ! Maybe he's not a redneck! Maybe he's just a hard-working blue collar guy who would love it if his kids could go to college (any college) and get an education and get a nice white collar job where they don't have to bust their humps like he does! (My father was that guy).

Do you see why it comes across as dismissive and condescending?

It's also possible that his extensive drug use caused functional brain damage.

Or the dude is just frickin' weird and doesn't understand social cues.

MIT + Jane Street . if this is not high IQ, i dunno what is

Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths".

Yeah, even though I've been as critical of him as anyone I have to ask myself if that's at play in my frustration here. Like...I have an intellectual theory for why Bankman-Fried is acting this way, but it just seems to not be able to intuitively connect. So I keep instinctually looking for more and then get annoyed when I don't find it.

But, if this was some random SovCiv representing fucking himself in court, I don't know that I'd be having this same reaction at the inability to just shut the fuck up. I'd laugh at the video of the moron on /r/PublicFreakout and move on.

But SBF was supposed to be smart, even if just in an Elizabeth Holmes way.

It would be ironic if his original PR blitz is still subtly shaping my reaction despite its original purpose having fallen apart.

it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties"

I was literally thinking to myself, upon hearing of them in the mansion, that "this sounds like kids playing start-up in the Bahamas with Daddy's money". Unfortunately for them, they didn't use Daddy's money.

Everyone seems to have had an instinctive mindset that the conventional way of doing things - even business - was somehow icky, somehow.... normie.

That part is debatable, because a lot of the "non-normie" stuff they did was directly in service of fraud: e.g. sending sensitive messages in a format that deleted them after some time. Now SBF is trying to cover up some of that shit (most importantly the comingling of funds) by acting like they were basically just college kids doing bullshit without following the rules cause they were innovators maaaan. But that "we moved fast and broke things" seems like a convenient cover.

But, then again, there was some shit that I can't see being beneficial to fraud and really does look like stupid/lazy people simply not bothering with rules: e.g. the revelation that they apparently paid expenses via chat emojis.

So whether or not Bankman-Fried set out from the outset with fraud in mind, the setup was so chaotic, it was conducive to it. I think there is something suspicious there, because Bankman-Fried had so much ownership and control behind the scenes, but he may genuinely have thought he was a supersmart cookie who could find a new way to make zillions after his One Weird Trick dried up.

I think it became fraud, more than it started as fraud (otherwise why lose all that money trying to do legitimate trades in Alameda? Caroline Ellison allegedly lost $1 billion....). But the whole thing had such a basic lack of any controls and regulation that it was a hop skip. If you're smart but also dumb, desperate, likely hopped off on stimulants and working/living in some weird nerd-frat house instead of a real company then maybe this seems like a good idea. And then there's no one to stop you.

But, then again, there was some shit that I can't see being beneficial to fraud and really does look like stupid/lazy people simply not bothering with rules: e.g. the revelation that they apparently paid expenses via chat emojis.

I do not understand why handling expense claims via Discord or Slack bot is somehow problematic. This emoji thing gets repeated together with other clearly problematic ones and I do not understand it.

Because Discord and Slack messages are mutable after the fact, they do not create an auditable trail (depending on implementation).

Imagine an implementation that runs like this. When an expense is submitted a bot posts a summary of that expense in a Discord channel. The expense is authorized by some kind of emoji reply or react to the bots message. It would be trivial for anyone with administrator privileges on this discord (or even mere expense approver privileges) to commit fraud in this system, in a way that would be difficult to detect.

At some time t_0 our insider submits an expense they know is fraudulent. The bot posts the expense summary and the insider approves the expense. At some later time t_1 the actual disbursement of funds for the fraudulent expense occurs. Then at some later time t_2 the insider goes back and undoes their approval of the expense (they remove their react or delete their message or whatever). If the insider has admin permissions on the discord they could even delete the bots message perhaps wiping away any trace the expense existed. At some time t_3 the apparently unapproved disbursement is discovered. How do you reconstruct who approved the fraudulent disbursement?

There's a reason that software specifically for managing expenses exists. There's a reason that software records information like who submitted the expense, what the expense was for (often by line-item), and who approved. Crucially there's a reason why these expense records are immutable after they are approved and the funds disbursed.

I assumed that Slack/Discord would be used as interface, with bot archiving it to some persistent less mutable database.

Or channel being configured in way blocking editing - for example with bot reposting message.

Given that it was crypto and specifically FTX I assume that expense claim process was filled with fraud with bad implementation serving as smoke screen (deliberately or accidentally).

But I still do not see problem with emoji specifically

If the insider has admin permissions on the discord they could even delete the bots message perhaps wiping away any trace the expense existed.

That is possible also with software specifically for managing expenses, there someone with admin permissions also can tamper with database. It is also possible with paper.

It is also possible with paper.

Which is why you have two people who keep track of where the money are goin'. One of the joys (🙁) of my admin work is getting the year-end reconciliation of the petty cash dumped on me before we send the accounts off to the auditors. You have to match up receipts with expenses claimed, money out, money remaining, money drawn on to replenish imprest, etc.

I couldn't just print out a list of emojis and say "there you go, boss" as to who purchased what, where, when and for how much.

When I was keeping track of expenditure on a multi-million punt project back in the day, I certainly couldn't have got away with "here's the list of emojis by which we approved that £100,000 for buying equipment that time, dunno when exactly".

According to the Sequoia article, where the reporter was in the Bahamas sitting in on meetings and ordinary operations, this is the kind of money they were shifiting:

The next order of business is a round of belt-tightening. “In general, money is going to be tighter for everyone in our industry and other industries too—it’s not super-crypto-specific,” SBF says. “So, if you are thinking about expenses that are, say, above $100 million, we should have a chat about that,” he continues.

You really do want to be keeping a record of where even your sub-$100 million purchases are going and who approved it and who asked for it.

“So, if you are thinking about expenses that are, say, above $100 million, we should have a chat about that,”

that part is DEFINITELY insane

When I was keeping track of expenditure on a multi-million punt project back in the day, I certainly couldn't have got away with "here's the list of emojis by which we approved that £100,000 for buying equipment that time, dunno when exactly".

that is also insane - but not emoji part part - the "lol, we have not recorded what was actually approved by whom"

The bankruptcy filing is great reading because John Ray is very not happy one bit with the way things were done.

I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.

Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.

The FTX Group did not maintain centralized control of its cash. Cash management procedural failures included the absence of an accurate list of bank accounts and account signatories, as well as insufficient attention to the creditworthiness of banking partners around the world. Under my direction, the Debtors are establishing a centralized cash management system with proper controls and reporting mechanisms.

Because of historical cash management failures, the Debtors do not yet know the exact amount of cash that the FTX Group held as of the Petition Date. The Debtors are working with Alvarez & Marsal to verify all cash positions.

The Debtors have been in contact with banking institutions that they believe hold or may hold Debtor cash. These banking institutions have been instructed to freeze withdrawals and alerted not to accept instructions from Mr. Bankman-Fried or other signatories. Proper signature authority and reporting systems are expected to be arranged shortly.

The Debtors did not have the type of disbursement controls that I believe are appropriate for a business enterprise. For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.

In the Bahamas, I understand that corporate funds of the FTX Group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors. I understand that there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans, and that certain real estate was recorded in the personal name of these employees and advisors on the records of the Bahamas.

The Debtors now are implementing a centralized disbursement approval process that reports to me as Chief Executive Officer.

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Because you're supposed to have a system to deal with petty cash disbursements, with expenses, with "okay hey boss I need fifty mil, fine?" "yeah sure fine".

Boring, conventional, stuffy old-fashioned business routine stuff. The problem with Discord, Slack and emojis is now all this money has gone "poof!" and nobody can say who spent what or where it went, and when they need to account for this in order to pay the creditors, that's important.

But, if this was some random SovCiv representing fucking himself in court, I don't know that I'd be having this same reaction at the inability to just shut the fuck up.

It's true. Your average idiot knows enough to "shut the fuck up and lawyer up". I do think part of Bankman-Fried's problem is that he is smart but up to now hasn't really faced any (obvious) consequences of failure. He seems to have been conventionally bright, done conventionally well at school, went into a conventionally good job, then decided (and maybe this is on MacAskill and maybe not) that philanthropy was the way to get fame and good repute, and to do that he needed a lot of money, and hey he was already working in a trading firm, crypto was the new big thing all his nerdy friends were geeking out about, how about he picked up some of that easy money?

And now he really doesn't seem to realise that he did anything wrong. Everyone in crypto does sketchy stuff! If only they had given him a bit more time, he could have made all the money back! Why doesn't anyone realise he isn't the bad guy here? So he keeps giving interviews and shooting his mouth off to show how he's just misunderstood and sure he fucked up but that wasn't malicious, and he keeps digging the hole for himself deeper and deeper.

here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans"

No he's not; the "ordinary people" are the ones getting rooked into buying at the top of the crypto bubble, or latching onto one of the innumerable scams out there. Running one of those scams, especially one as big as FTX, is harder. Plus, SBF did legitimately stumble into profitable bitcoin arbitrage opportunities; if he had just stopped there, and not gotten out over his skis, he would have still made a lot of money - completely legitimately! - on those "magic beans".

Plus, SBF did legitimately stumble into profitable bitcoin arbitrage opportunities;

I made the point below, but how do we even know this is true? Given what we know about SBF, isn't it more likely that he was simply stealing user funds from the start?

Think about it logically. Which makes more sense?

  1. Obvious billion dollar arbitrage opportunity is discovered by SBF and no one else OR

  2. Known fraudster steals user deposits for his own purposes

He very probably did make legitimate profit off the "kimchi premium", and while it wasn't his own money and he did need to hit up investors for it, he wasn't stealing their dough, at least not at the start, because they lucked into making money faster than they could lose it. Interesting and indicative parts bolded by me in the below:

Curious, SBF had started looking into crypto—and almost immediately noticed something strange. Bitcoin was trading at a higher price in Japan and Korea than it was in the U.S. In theory, this should never happen because it represents a riskless profit opportunity—in other words, a free lunch. One simply buys Bitcoin at the lower price, sells it at the higher price, and pockets the difference. Jane Street built an empire on high-frequency trades that took advantage of fraction-of-a-cent price differences. But here was Bitcoin, trading at around $15,000 in South Korea: an unheard-of 50 percent price premium.

…Another day of work dealing with the red-tape problem netted SBF a single round-trip trade—to Asia and back—for a $20 profit. That was it: the proof of concept. There was an opportunity to be had. SBF immediately put $50,000 of his own money to work. The first job was just getting the money into the system. The operational challenges were huge. Not just anyone can walk into a foreign bank and start wiring money out of the country every day. There are know-your-customer rules, caps on withdrawals, citizenship requirements. Even worse, to any normal bank, the constant zeroing out, then maxing out, of a cash account—with the money coming and going overseas, to and from fly-by-night Bitcoin exchanges—raised every red flag in the book. It looked like laundering. It looked like drug money. There were even monetary policy concerns: The liquidity of the South Korean won is sharply limited by the country’s central bank.

Fortunately, SBF had a secret weapon: the EA community. There’s a loose worldwide network of like-minded people who do each other favors and sleep on each other’s couches simply because they all belong to the same tribe. Perhaps the most important of them was a Japanese grad student, who volunteered to do the legwork in Japan. As a Japanese citizen, he was able to open an account with the one (obscure, rural) Japanese bank that was willing, for a fee, to process the transactions that SBF—newly incorporated as Alameda Research—wanted to make. The spread between Bitcoin in Japan and Bitcoin in the U.S. was “only” 10 percent—but it was a trade Alameda found it could make every day. With SBF’s initial $50,000 compounding at 10 percent each day, the next step was to increase the amount of capital. At the time, the total daily volume of crypto trading was on the order of a billion dollars. Figuring he wanted to capture 5 percent of that, SBF went looking for a $50 million loan. Again, he reached out to the EA community. Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million.

With a goosed-up capital account, the money started piling up so fast that SBF placed what he refers to as “a market order for employees” to tend to the Rube Goldberg operation that kept the capital spinning. There were constant blowups with banks, which are wary of anything crypto. Crypto was so new that regulators in South Korea and elsewhere were constantly changing their mind about regulations—then making those changes retroactive. It was a swirling mess. …The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. The kitchen was given over to stand-up desks, the closet was reserved for sleeping, and the entire space overrun with half-eaten take-out containers. It was a royal mess. But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities.

The Bitcoin arbitrage didn’t—and couldn’t—last forever. The Japanese appetite for overpriced Bitcoin withered (or, more likely, another shadowy arbitrage outfit also found its way to the trade and collapsed it). Either way, the spread narrowed to almost nothing. But there were other trades to be had. The simple fact that crypto was new, and that the tools traders needed to handle it were still under construction, meant that there were market inefficiencies all over the place. And behind every market inefficiency is an arbitrage opportunity.

…At this point, mid-2019, SBF decided to double down again—and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda’s multimillion-dollar trading profits on a new venture: a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase’s stolid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others.

…And, with that, he moved the nascent company to Hong Kong, a jurisdiction with a crypto-friendly regulatory regime. Hong Kong also happens to be conveniently located next door to the country that, at the time, had the largest and most enthusiastic crypto user base in the world: China.

…The problem, as Bailhe saw it, was that FTX didn’t appear to need any money. She was correct, but what she didn’t know was that SBF was starting to think about raising money anyway. Alameda had some unexpected losses due to so-called counterparty risk. Arbitrage is, in theory, riskless. But not when the rickety exchange you’re using to place your trades suddenly locks up and refuses to disburse your money. Or, worse yet, when two crypto exchanges can’t even agree on what a crypto transfer looks like, and so the act of sending crypto from one exchange to another results in tokens just disappearing into the ether. And don’t even ask about futures contracts that see their terms unilaterally changed mid-agreement: the dreaded “clawbacks.” Alameda was not immune to the exchange-level shenanigans that gave crypto as a whole its sleazy reputation. But FTX had an ambition to change that. It was built to be the exchange traders could count on. SBF needed to get the word out. He wanted FTX to be known as the respectable face of crypto. This required ad campaigns, sponsorship deals, a charitable wing—and a war chest to pay for it all.

So Alameda starting running into the problem of no more easy money and worse, losing money. Bankman-Fried decided that setting up his own exchange would be the new easy money, and getting more funding from investors was the solution to Alameda's losses. That seems to have worked for a while, too, but the losses continued and so he started dipping into the funds FTX was supposedly holding separate from Alameda.

The Japan-US arbitrage was known in early 2018. Even now there are still ways to make $ trading crypto. I imagine someone with enough data analytics and his intelligence could find patterns.

I mean, it seems pretty easy to check. Go back and look at the buy/sell records for Korea and Japan at various points during which the "kimchi premium" was allegedly there for the taking.

He did make legit fast bucks on the arbitrage, but that was something that was not sustainable and he should have known it. He took advantage of a loophole, and that loophole got stopped up. He probably did realise it, couldn't or wouldn't give up the lure of fast easy millions, and decided to go into exchange business instead.

And the ordinary people weren't the ones who gave him $1 billion in funding, it was the (presumably) smart investors at Sequoia Capital and elsewhere:

The B round raised a billion dollars. Soon afterward came the “meme round”: $420.69 million from 69 investors.

$420 million divided by 69 comes to around $6 million each, so do you count someone who can drop $6 million into an investment as "ordinary people" and if you do, then you and I have very different definitions of "ordinary people".

My understanding was that the reason the FTX scandal went from "niche finance scandal" to "world-shaking cataclysm" was that SBF wasn't just losing institutional/high net worth individual money, but instead was raiding ordinary joe-schmo funds nominally being used to buy and sell coins on FTX to transfer to Alameda. Is that incorrect?

The discussion of IQ below lacks the proper conceptual grounding in theory of intelligence.

It is simple - four quadrants.

Einstein is a Smart Smart Guy. High IQ, very nerdy.

Jack McMoron who you've never heard of, never graduated high school and drives drunk to his McJob. He is a Dumb Dumb Guy.

Joe Rogan is a Smart Dumb Guy. Deep but often strange analysis, but internally consistent, applied to everything from politics & history, to guys beating the piss out of each other. Interests are pedestrian. Smart Dumb Guys make good friends.

Sam Bankman Fried is a Dumb Smart Guy. He's very mathematically strong, speaks eloquently, built multiple massive businesses. He also taunts the people with the power to destroy his ponzi scheme on Twitter.com, and then when it is obvious he is a criminal, decides to speak. A LOT. Against legal advice. In embarassing ways.

So where does IQ fit into this? Is IQ only for the first "smart" in the descriptor, or does high IQ mean someone is good at both?

Maybe both smarts are correlated with IQ, but the second one probably more so than the first, at least for raw IQ?

I don’t really have any stake in or have a deep understanding of this, but that’s my impression.

Joe Rogan -smart average guy

I really hope one of the lessons people in the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent sphere, including on here, take away from this is to lose the ugly attitude around the idolisation of 'intelligence' and the corresponding denigration of 'normies' (this constant assumption, as I've said, that ordinary people are all 90-95 IQ and not the average of 100 IQ or even up to 105!).

I think that this is an affliction that affects all intelligent people, but the concentration of people who think of themselves as "underappreciated geniuses" is probably higher in EA and other nerdy spaces, fortifying the walls of the echo chamber to the point where reality can rarely penetrate to bring people back down to earth, and so you end up with midwits who think they're geniuses getting mugged by reality. It's good to have some friends who aren't college educated, don't work in tech, etc. if only to ensure that you're not completely trapped in such a bubble.

I acknowledge that there genuinely are a lot of Really Smart People in these spaces. And it's not everyone who does it, but the automatic correlation some make between "ordinary person" and "95 IQ" really annoys me (as someone who hits 105 IQ only on their best days, if I believe that Ravens Matrices test I took online). Yeah yeah yeah, "Most people (about 68 percent) have an IQ between 85 and 115. Only a small fraction of people have a very low IQ (below 70) or a very high IQ (above 130). The average IQ in the United States is 98" so really X is not being dismissive when they reach for "95 IQ" in their imaginary ordinary person.

But when we're talking about ordinary people, we are talking about "the average" which is set at 100 IQ. So a glib "95 IQ normie" is being dismissive, is saying "those dumb people are really dumb, so much dumber than me" and that's no way to think about or talk about your fellow citizens. You can disagree with the presumed opinion of the man in the street, but there is no cause to presume he's stupider than the average.

Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.

From personal experience posting/discussing about IQ here, this is hardly true at all. Maybe it was more true pre-2018 but not anymore. Many on the right are as equally skeptical as those on the left about the worship of IQ.

Highly mathletic, SBF breezed through Crystal Springs Uplands, an elite prep school in Hillsborough, California. Though he earned top marks, he kept to himself, spending most of his free time playing computer games (StarCraft, League of Legends) and a trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. But at MIT he found his tribe: fellow pledges at Epsilon Theta, a coed fraternity of supergeeks similarly interested in Magic, and video games. Thetans are fond of debating math, physics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and logic problems—for fun—at alcohol-free parties.

I dunno how indictive this is of genius IQ, probably not much. It's not that hard to do well in high school. MTG would not be so popular if it was only geniuses playing it. He got into Jane Street, which is pretty damn selective, so probably an IQ of at least 140 if I had to guess.

SBF and his friends stole billions of dollars. Either they go to jail at some point, or they manage to sneak away like most crypto fraudsters. Neither outcome would be remarkable.

This kind of gotcha journalism is lame. SBF gives the same so slow stupid answers to every question and never really says anything concrete. Hopefully his new lawyer can convince him to stop embarrassing himself.

The interesting part is the people who jumped ship back before any of this came out, when Bankman-Fried was still being lionised as a genius and philanthropist. Some of them make vague allusions to being scared to say anything because Bankman-Fried was vindictive, and that's probably true: at the time, he had enough clout and good reputation that he could have make things uncomfortable for people who spoke out against him.

But that's a deficit of the EA crowd that I've noted (reading back the reports around sex pests and worse in the community, it struck me very much): nobody wants to be a nark. There's a real reluctance and indeed abhorrence of "going to the cops". Reading the various accounts of, and reactions to, that case about a harasser and abuser had me yelling all through it "For fuck's sake, he did that, why didn't you go to the cops???"

But, no. There's so much nuance, you see, and context, and grey areas, and that might be victim blaming, and this is not the community norm to be vindictive and punitive, and and and... so in several cases there were formal committees which set up and investigated and issued a report and said, in effect, 'we can't do anything about anything'.

Bankman-Fried got away with all this for so long because EA/Rationalist values are to be nice people and value community and not to engage with the state because of their non-traditional values and attitudes (I mean, cops are all part of the carceral state which has a monopoly on violence and and and).

So there were people who, back at the start, had an idea shady shit was going on but they didn't want to rock the boat especially not drag the other people still there into trouble, so they just left. It would be very, very interesting to track them down and find out what they knew; why did you resign as co-CEO of Alameda, for instance? Why did this set of people leave? What was going on, that they didn't like and didn't think was what they signed up to?

But we probably won't ever get that, because Bay Area Omertà.

because Bay Area Omertà.

Yeah I've heard some awful shit (like death threats to AI researchers from AI safety folks) but can never actually accuse anyone because the code of silence among that group is surprisingly strong.

There are some public accusations - such as stuff against leverage research here, here, drama in comments, commentary, potentially wrong initation of curzi post. Even there there's a sense it should've been public earlier. There's also the ziz stuff.

There are also periodic struggle sessions about being safe for women - in the comments specific people are called out for misconduct.

Any of these would make for great effortposts on the marsey site!

Agreed! Those posts, including Ziz's blog and general craziness, are what I was thinking of. I've also heard some recent stuff said in confidence from a couple of friends in the space. At one AI Safety workshop apparently there was an older gentleman who owned an AI research company. In the anonymous 'ideas to save the world' spreadsheet, apparently someone wrote "kill X person (owner of the AI company, in that same workshop)."

My friend reported that the young event organizers just kind of nervously laughed and said don't do it again, without really addressing it or trying to find out who was responsible. That kind of behavior with kids in/just out of college who legitimately think the world will end soon is deeply troubling to me.

anonymous 'ideas to save the world' spreadsheet

My friend reported that the young event organizers just kind of nervously laughed and said don't do it again, without really addressing it or trying to find out who was responsible.

Trying to find out who was responsible for a specific post on a designed-to-be-anonymous spreadsheet would have been a massive breech of trust.

Zounds am I sick of "Death Threats" discourse. What named person has ever actually been killed following an anonymous death threat from some extremely online dork? If you'd looked around the AI conference and seen the scrawny pale guys there, you wouldn't have worried about the death threat either. Death threats can't be used as some trump card of oppression, they're too easy to fake and too hard to verify.

It's also actually a good conversation starter. If X's work is going to destroy the world, don't we have a responsibility to restrain him if he won't restrain himself? There's a lot of good philosophical debate to be had there, it wouldn't surprise me if X threw it in the hat himself to start discussion.

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True... but that sort of death threat, even joking, should warrant immediately shutting down the workshop and severely scolding everyone in any remotely healthy group setting. Again, especially when dealing with impressionable and radicalized young folks. I see it as only a matter of time before AI safety terrorists start doing incredibly dumb things, shooting the movement in the foot.

Struggle sessions about being safe for women, in particular, seem more like a null hypothesis than indication of anything actually wrong. If anything, I would expect it to be counter-associated with actually being an unsafe place for women.

Oh, agree - the above is evidence of EA publicly discussing 'awful shit', as opposed to evidence that EA is bad - as the comments go into, EA puts a lot of effort into 'safe place for women'.

On the forum in particular and in EA discourse in general, there is a tendency to give less weight/be more critical of posts that are more emotion-heavy and less rational

Boy oh boy. It's sad to see how much effort Scott et al. need to expend on defense in the comments for every post like this, and they can just post the same one each week until people are ground down and give in. The last one was demanding Title IX inquisitions for EA, right?

Yeah, but it's all within the group. Whisper campaigns. Nods and winks about "we can't invite so-and-so because, well, you know what he's like". But never going outside, never any suggestion that maybe if so-and-so is such a pest, it's not safe to be around him if you're a woman or trans or whatever, that this behaviour is at the level of "get the authorities involved". Lots of internal drama and struggle sessions, but dead silence around outsiders.

That "safe for women" link - and what did this delicate blossom do, apart from clenching fists and tears streaming down her face? Write a long blog post that will only be read by insiders, instead of (if there really is a genuine problem, instead of simply "you are not validating my lived experience and so I must stamp my foot!") doing anything concrete - even just going "hump this for a game of soldiers" and walking away.

IMO the crypto people are much more likely to be in the boat of "I know this is a scam but I won't say" than EA people SBF knew (besides people directly in FTX) since they're deeper on the process side of making that money.

But the crypto people know that imo because they themselves are running the same scam. Binance's CZ (who basically helped take down SBF) for example looks very shady. Ever since this FTX thing he's continually been saying they have no problems (like SBF did) while steadfastly refusing to do an audit.

Not only do they not want to out themselves, not only do they hold each other's funny money as (worthless) collateral, everyone has to worry about what happens to the entire space when large exchanges go down. (This is why SBF was cultivating the image of savior for failing exchanges)

Combine their shared complicity and interests with SBF being a booster for crypto and courting regulators and politicians I'm not surprised that the people most knowledgeable shut up.

All the crypto people I know weren't touching FTX with a 50 foot pole. Crypto people tend to mess around with decentralized exchanges.

Crypto people would also know that margin trading is bullshit.

Enough people buy into his game. Maxine Waters. Even Bill Ackman has talked about him being honest. On a jury of 12 I wouldn’t be surprised if he could convince 1 or 2 every joes who know nothing about the evidence issues to vote with him.

unlikely. this is why the feds wait so long to arrest , to gather enough evidence to make sure this cannot happen ever.

Why do you think evidence would matter? We are talking about a good salesman versus boring accounting and custodial rules. The entire argument I’m making is he could just get a few jurors to like him versus some UC Chicago professor brought in as an expert witness that what he did was outright theft.

the feds have something like a 99% conviction rate. The odds he will be among those lucky 1%? not too good, imho

Why is that relevant when I’m citing a specific reason for why that would not be relevant.

I do agree he gets convicted more likely than not but I would buy that 99-1 odds all day long. It’s a completely obvious Ponzi scheme and he’s got high ranking congresswomen praising him who had to get scolded by higher ups.

because it would not work..jury nullification is rare, usually motivated by political reasons, not fraud

I’m not calling it nullification. They would just believe he’s innocent.

I highly doubt he will submit to a jury trial. It would take years and the odds would be greatly against him prevailing.

He might have no choice. I think the facts in the case would rationalize a Madoff level punishment. He might be better off hoping his snake oil salesman routine fools a couple jurors.

If there is a warrant for his arrest, which I am sure will eventually happen, the odds are not good (except this guy [1] and a few others, so we're talking a tiny possibility, but this was in 1998; feds have way better tech and will not make those mistakes again).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruffo [1]

I have followed this for awhile. The level of incompetence in that case is astounding, if not willful. They basically let him walk away ..a guy who had millions presumably overseas an a 15+ year sentence.

Its hard to find someone more annoying than SBF, but this guy fits the bill. The guy who reports on scams after the damage is done, or scams no one actually falls for but total idiots or obvious inside jobs. Where was this guy a month ago. Just more annoying clickbait from this guy.

Well, you have a point about all the people who come out of the woodwork after something happens and go "I knew it all along", but on the other hand if you don't have solid enough evidence that somebody is scamming, just strong suspicions or indications that something is not right, then posting anything online or in the media about "Well-respected Joe Jones is a big fat fraud" is going to get you into legal trouble.

For example, right now I'm seeing stuff online that indicates maybe something hooky is going on with Binance. But it's also likely that maybe the guy claiming this is lying or crazy. My own personal opinion is that crypto is a scam (right now, at least) and I don't have enough information to point at Binance above any of the rest of them as "Yep, for sure, this is a scam and a fraud".

If six or more months down the line it comes out that yes, Binance is a scam like FTX, then I'll be one of the "where were you a month ago?" people saying "I knew it". I don't know it, I may suspect it or have feelings that it could be, but without evidence one way or the other, I can't and won't go on the record about "This is a fraud".

Related case: by all info known to me Tether is a scam. But my reaction is to "lets not invest anything into it or anything related" not "spend effort on making people aware what is going on".

The same goes for FTX - if someone believed lies of 15% risk free returns and is not my family member/friends then I am not going to bother with it.

Yeah, some people suspected FTX was fishy well before its implosion, but no one made any link between Alameda, binance and FTT, etc.

just strong suspicions or indications that something is not right, then posting anything online or in the media about "Well-respected Joe Jones is a big fat fraud" is going to get you into legal trouble.

I believe this is protected by the 1st Amd. This is what Bill Ackman did with Herbalife, and what professional short-sellers do. They get evidence of fraud and make their case. They can be wrong, but it's hard to win damages against short sellers if taken to civil court.

Speaking of which, where was this guy? He seems to have opinions on crypto and it's his schtick to uncover overpriced frauds.

Uhhh, he literally did.

I mean, okay, he didn’t come out and say “FTX is a fraud, your money is getting stolen as we speak.” But he did strongly imply it.

I think he actually did call some crypto scams ahead of time...

The Stefanopoulos interview (~8 minutes long) was so bad. I have my biases as a lawyer but a good interview should absolutely feel like a cross-examination, and Stefanopoulos did a great job at repeatedly hammering the same questions SBF kept evading. You can see the dude's gears working in the video as he keeps stumbling into pincer attacks.

The thing that gets me about the whole situation is how boring and predictable the whole thing is. It's a pretty straightforward situation that's done in many an attorney or financial advisor or any other position that involves having custody of other people's money—taking loans you shouldn't be taking. So FTX or one of its associated companies had a lot of its own funds invested in crypto and when crypto tanked they didn't have enough cash to meet their debt obligations so they "borrowed" money from people who invested with them and when that wasn't enough, and they didn't have enough new money coming in, they still couldn't meet their obligations and the chickens came home to roost and now a ton of people are out a lot of money.

And in a company as large as FTX there's simply no excuse. No, he wasn't a Bernie Madoff intentionally running a pyramid scheme, but that would have at least made more sense. Instead he decided to loan customer funds to Alameda Research, which is bad even if the money is paid back with interest, but is catastrophic if the whole company goes under in the meantime. Had he not done that Alameda probably would have gone bankrupt, and that probably would have accelerated FTX's bankruptcy, but companies go bankrupt all the time. Now he's looking at prison time, and doesn't seem to be doing himself any favors with respect to avoiding it.

Had he not done that Alameda probably would have gone bankrupt, and that probably would have accelerated FTX's bankruptcy, but companies go bankrupt all the time. Now he's looking at prison time, and doesn't seem to be doing himself any favors with respect to avoiding it.

yes, he could have just stopped 2 years ago and still made a lot of money. exchanges are very profitable business due to fees.

he could have just stopped 2 years ago and still made a lot of money

Except he couldn't, because that wouldn't have fit the narrative he constructed. I do think, and this is just personal opinion, that he very badly wants validation from Mommy and Daddy. So having to quit the big huge money-printing operation he put together because it was unsustainable would be admitting failure, he wouldn't get the same praise that he was getting from everyone about being a genius whiz-kid and world saviour, and Mommy and Daddy would have been so disappointed (once again?).

I do think there is a ton of ego involved; he seems to have been the stereotypical Smart Kid who was expected to go on to bigger and better things, but ended up with a finance job like just another schlub with an MBA and not all those Big Brain MIT graduates:

Highly mathletic, SBF breezed through Crystal Springs Uplands, an elite prep school in Hillsborough, California. Though he earned top marks, he kept to himself, spending most of his free time playing computer games (StarCraft, League of Legends) and a trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. But at MIT he found his tribe: fellow pledges at Epsilon Theta, a coed fraternity of supergeeks similarly interested in Magic, and video games. Thetans are fond of debating math, physics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and logic problems—for fun—at alcohol-free parties.

...After SBF quit Jane Street, he moved back home to the Bay Area, where Will MacAskill had offered him a job as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He rented a modest apartment near CEA HQ in Berkeley, he still had a couple of weeks to just explore before his job started. This was his first vacation in, well, ever. In the years working at Jane, SBF had never taken any significant time off.

He spent his vacation just soaking everything in: It was his first time in the Bay Area as an adult, and he found his home turf unexpectedly thrilling. It was where all the new technology was. It was where all the startups were. It was where the bulk of the EA community was starting to congregate. SBF ended up hanging out a lot with his younger brother Gabe, who was living in an EA commune on nearby Stuart Street.

I do wonder about his brother Gabe, was he the Favourite Child and Sam was always trying to out-do his younger brother? But that is wandering into the territory of armchair psychology, and I don't even have a first aid certificate 😀

If you want a look at where the FTX money was going (including all that Guarding Against Pandemics charity work), take a gander at this. Oh yeah: hosting cocktail parties for both political parties, which Carrick Flynn would probably have attended had he been voted in, that's really effective charity in action right there and not just one more lobbying outfit as I prognosticated EA efforts would become if they shifted to political meddling!

EDIT: If that last reads as unkind, well EA has come a long way from its Drowning Child guilt-tripping days; now you don't worry about replacing your expensive suit, you buy a $3 million dollar DC townhouse to host cocktail parties instead of frittering donations away on malaria nets.

FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried tweets that he's willing to testify before lawmakers

Yes, this is after he made Coffeezilla -some random Youtuber- look like Saul Goodman. I checked the date and still can't believe it.

It's happening again: I'm getting back into the spiral of "oh, he's just a moron" to "he can't be as dumb as he looks - what on Earth could be his plan here?".

what on Earth could be his plan here?

Taking a guess: he really doesn't think he did anything wrong, he really does think that if only he had been given a little more time, he would have made all the money back and no problems. He wants to push the angle that he was tricked/bullied into signing the bankruptcy agreement which was a bad decision, so all the lost money is Not His Fault and he was so high on the constant praise and adulation he got for being some kind of financial genius who was making ethical billions and changing the world via philanthropy, that he can't parse how everyone has now turned against him. After all, when they were all kissing his boots, he was doing exactly what they are condemning him for now.