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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I have no idea.

Even if such would-be shooters exist, the idea this Robinson is one seems to be justified by absolutely nothing, except the fanfic you wrote.

I have no idea

I advise you not to play on prediction markets, and to consult someone you trust before making large financial decisions like signing a mortgage.

  • -31

I won the majority of the bets I made to date, the ones I have open can plasibly still turn around, but they're looking pretty good, actually, and I paid off my mortgage.

I'm also taking bets on this issue, and I actually think making future predictions is much more productive here than writing fanfics based on your psychoanalysis of the shooter. I believe the incestigations are going to keep turning up evidence that he was a radicalized leftist, and there were no personal motives for his shooting.

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

"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.

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