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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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I think that you are correct in you assessment of the probabilities. However, another consideration is that the gait analysis evidence was reported on simply because it was found to be somewhat significant, so it is subject to p-hacking considerations.

Fundamentally, I am not sure how a Bayesian should update on true but potentially adversarially selected evidence. As an intuition pump, consider two persons A and B which are in a relationship which is supposed to be exclusive. A suspects that B is cheating. B proposes to send A screenshots of their text messages. Normally, a random sample of texts which contain no evidence for misbehavior would be at least weak evidence of the absence of such misbehavior. But A will not get a random sample, but potentially a curated subset selected for being misleading. Thus A should not update at all on receiving harmless screenshots (beyond the signaling value of going through the effort of sending them, at least). If A is willing to update even a tiny bit on such a screenshot, B can take them for a ride.

On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument. Most of the evidence which we use to build a world-view does not come with a strict chain of custody to guarantee that it was randomly sampled and reported without publication bias etc.

I have no good way to resolve these two viewpoints. In criminal justice, the idea to allow both sides to make their best case certainly seems helpful.

Pinging in @Jiro. I understand you're argument, and while I addressed the potential adversarial motive in selection of the evidence, it was more as an aside, an observation that would give me another reason to be suspicious. But it isn't essential to my argument, because this failure mode seems to happen regardless of whether the observer has an ulterior motive, and is usually the result of a completely logical chain of events.

The cases I was referring to where this happens with police is where they get a Level 2 Description and become on it to the point that they fail to appreciate how broad it is. Take my example from above, where a witness sees a perpetrator running from a crime scene who is an African American teenager, short and very overweight. Let's suppose that a couple hours after the incident a beat cop canvassing the neigborhood come across a young man of that description who is 5'4" and 200 pounds in a pool hall a few blocks from the crime scene. Detectives question him, and while they don't get much in the way of evidence, they don't entirely buy his story. So they spend the next several weeks investigating him, never coming up with anything useful, but also never considering that he might not be the guy. Years later someone writes a book about the case and talks to an old cop who insists that this kid was the killer but they never had enough to prove it.

The police in a case like that didn't go on a wild goose chase because they had some special reason they wanted to pin a crime on that kid, they did it because they came across him early in the investigation and he matched a description given to them by an eyewitness. They didn't consider that the description could apply to hundreds of people, and that they should have been casting a broader net rather than narrowing the scope of the investigation early based on the description alone. It ultimately doesn't matter if Baker has an animus against the police. Even if he was arbitrarily reviewing CCTV footage to try to find a match, if he found some guy walking outside a restaurant who matched to the same degree and started making the argument that it must be that guy based on nothing else, then it's still just as bad.

On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument.

Not really. It's just a fully general reason to reduce your confidence in the evidence (combined with rejecting evidence beneath a certain threshold). Your confidence may be reduced and there could still be enough left to believe it.

If someone says "I robbed the First National Bank at 11 AM on Tuesday", even if it's reported by your enemies, the fact that it's adversarily selected doesn't matter much, because it's hard to take that statement out of context without lying. (Things like "that's actually from a roleplaying game" are considered lies by normies.)

This is related to the discussion above as to why to believe the DHS when it says things about the immigrants it catches. For one thing, even an adversarial selector is believable if they say "this man was wanted for assault". They'll rarely lie and that's hard to take out of context.