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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   42702 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I believe the incestigations are going to keep turning up evidence that he was a radicalized leftist

Incestigations do tend to produce distorted results, I hear. So you’re probably correct, Rorschach.

  • -20

Somewhere in here you were lamenting how the place is just a husk of it's former self. Is your recollection of it's glory days that of people grasping on to typos of their interlocutor, in an attempt to avoid making predictions? Does your tone throughout this conversation represent what you think we should strive for?

I think you misunderstood my comment. I’m saying of course they’ll turn up evidence of more leftist radicalization because that’s what people want to be found.

  • -18

Well, free to provide some scenario that might disprove your theory then, because if you expect the same thing to happen whether your theory is right or wrong, than your theory is not very useful.

It’s just sampling bias. For example, if you trudge through my Reddit history and find only the posts that sound left-wing and present those, you could probably convince someone I’m a leftist. There’s far, far more evidence than could be presented for this shooter! But it’s not because I’m a leftist, it’s because I have many thousands of posts, and you only need a handful to present for a case.

Similarly, you could find all the horrible contraband I’ve posted on HBD and easily prove I’m a fascist.

None of the underlying evidence changed; just the choice of what to magnify.

  • -11

It's trivial to come up with justifications for why your theory is correct no matter what, that's why predictions are so important. You should be able to make some that prove your theory correct, and some that prove your theory false.

Obviously the way to know is to look at the unfiltered post set.

For example, you have people in this very thread contending “oh, the markings on these bullets prove he’s a leftist! obviously they’re not meaningless game references like the markings on these other bullets.” And of course no mention of the one that’s coded right-wing, “If you read this, you’re gay!”, because that one doesn’t fit the narrative.

Look, I’m sorry, I don’t enjoy this discussion with you. I do not find it meaningful, so for the last time, thank you, and good night.

  • -11

As a general point: all of this means nothing, if you can't make a prediction. It just shows you feel more comfortable squeezing established facts into your preferred theory, something that is pretty trivial to do, no matter what you believe, for the very reasons you, yourself outline.

And on the specifics:

And of course no mention of the one that’s coded right-wing, If you read this, you’re gay!”, because that one doesn’t fit the narrative

You have backwards. Left wingers are the ones glossing over the bullet that clinches it ("catch that, fascist"), and the "you're gay" one is not even very right-coded. I've seen gay people throw glitter bombs and exclaiming "you're gay now!".

Also the point of my prediction is that upon further investigation we won't need to rely on one-liners scrawled on bullet casings, the wider context will become available.

"The evidence that thoroughly debunks my goofy personal pet theory is surely coming, but whatever it may be I'm already certain it's fake and a conspiracy."

Yeah okay, sure. Good job. Gottem.

This guy needs to be banned. He offers a stupid theory. He then insults people whilst focusing on minutia. He states views that are basically unfalsifiable. And, he implicitly justifies (though he denies it) murder (who the fuck would say that if Kirk was more “gracious,” the shooter wouldn’t shot unless they were tacitly explaining away the murder?)

This guy needs to be banned.

Only took another hour, albeit for a short ban.

He states views that are basically unfalsifiable.

The failure at "making beliefs pay rent" is ironic when juxtaposed against moaning that "This place used to be LessWrong and SSC", but epistemology is hard and sometimes you can come up with an idea that's falsifiable in principle even if you have trouble figuring out how it might be falsified in practice. I think the point where he really went off the deep end was the thread where one of his claims actually got falsified and instead of taking the opportunity to literally become less wrong he started misinforming everyone about the response and insulting the respondent and calling correctness "pedantry". I've seen people speed-run the decay that LessWrong described as "pass from lying about specific facts ... to lying about the rules of reasoning" before, but I've never seen someone doing it while approvingly citing LessWrong!

who the fuck would say that if Kirk was more “gracious,” the shooter wouldn’t shot unless they were tacitly explaining away the murder?

But, to be fair, this is exactly the sort of distinction between causality and blame that autism-adjacent LessWrong-type folks have no trouble making correctly. There is no logical incompatibility between positive claims like [if you hand over your wallet a mugger is less likely to shoot you] or "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all" and normative claims like [the mugger is completely at fault and the victim not at all at fault for the negative consequences of the mugging] or "I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified", even if the positive claims feel like victim blaming.

I don’t disagree (ie do t leave your keys in your convertible with the roof down).

The difference I see it is (1) the poster called Kirk a bigot and (2) used the word graciously. The latter has a connotation of being good and well mannered. The opposite is bad and uncouth. So the poster is saying “if Kirk wasn’t a bigot and didn’t do this bad thing, then he’d be alive.”

That strikes me as categorically different than “if Kirk didn’t give his view, then he’d be alive.”

The first is value laden to suggest Kirk maybe it had it coming. The second is purely descriptive

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