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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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AAQC'd even though it doesn't fit the "normal" profile of an AAQC because I really appreciate these types of comments that tell me about something interesting I didn't know about before (especially on topics that don't fall within the ambit of what normally gets discussed on TheMotte) and I want to encourage more of them.

Maybe you don’t know about them because they’re not actually reasonable?

Like, the same reasoning applies here as to underwater pyramids. Or moon landing skeptics. Or celebrity gossip. It’s bad epistemics.

Assuming the armed forces does not lie about who dies, how when and where seems... silly. The most obvious reason being that you might not want your enemies to know what is going on.

Oh, they probably do. Maybe even in these specific cases!

That doesn’t make a series of anecdotes into evidence.

That's the case for all anecdotes. On top of that, the nature of some questions can deprive us of our preferred tools to deduce fact from fiction. That doesn't invalidate the questions or unburden us from the consequence of the answers. Using heuristics to help guide us towards some sense of rationality is perfectly valid and reasonable.

A key example of this would be military propaganda. We know it was used. We know there were branches within the armed forces and government whose sole purpose was understanding, disseminating and otherwise advancing propaganda for whatever purpose. Seemingly all the major players in conflict hide or obfuscate their casualty numbers in a variety of scenarios. So without evidence we can reasonably claim that news about Ukrainian or Russian or IDF or HAMAS casualty numbers are at best skewed. Why would the US army be different in this regard? Maintaining a narrative of how strong the US specials forces are or how powerful the navy is seems to fall within the basic purview of a propaganda arm.

Yes, we are missing fact, but the nature of the subject matter kind of has that problem built in. That doesn't make it unreasonable. In fact, the only position on could argue that point from was if one believed one had a better understanding of reason than anyone else. That one is here to finger wag other people as if they can't understand the nature of the question and the inherent problems just overviewed.

Do you think it’s ever reasonable to infer that the government is lying about anything, prior to it being vetted by “official” sources?

I distinctly remember thinking “damn why are training missions so dangerous?” at several points in the past. And this seems like a pretty reasonable explanation for why they’re so “lethal”. I don’t think that the government lying about cause of death for service members is on the same level as moon landing and UFO theories.

Yes, sure. I am absolutely willing to believe that the government covered up one or more of these things. But not on the basis of one guy listing his favorite coincidences. If the only reason you encounter a data point is because someone picked it for you, it’s not evidence. It’s trivia. It’s an excuse to repeat whatever you already believe, maybe feel a bit clever about it.

What’s the expected fatality rate for training? Is there historical data? Previous spikes whenever a U.S. ally fights some terrorists? Who knows? Who the fuck cares? Some guy on the Internet said special forces “tend to” do this, so it must be real.

"The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war." Training exercises are deliberately as close to the real thing as possible. That means safety rules that exist in peacetime are often waived. Flying low to the ground, jumping out of perfectly good aircraft, operating a boat with no lights or radar, for example, are all things that can easily go catastrophically wrong. But the military trains to do them anyway because practicing while no one is shooting at you is still safer than learning while under fire.

Occam's Razor says that the same USN that's had multiple destroyer and carrier collisions in the past, including with merchant ships, including lethal ones, might also have another one, rather than a massive conspiracy that requires the entire crew of both ships (and any potential nearby observers) to be in on it.

The counterpoint would be that training missions aren't especially lethal, there's just a lot of them.

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