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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   20471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Given the significant interest around the 2020 stolen election claims (definitely my favorite hobby horse topic), and the serious accusations that I have been weakmanning the overall category of election fraud claims, I would like to extend an open invitation to anyone interested in exposing the errors of my ways to a real-time discussion for a Bailey episode.

Here are the conditions I would suggest:

  • Given the wide array of stolen election claims and our limited time on earth, you will have free reign to pick 2 or 3 of whatever you believe are the strongest claims worthy of attention, particularly if any of the claims are ones I have conspicuously ignored. Hopefully this will address any concerns that I'm weakmanning.
  • Once you have the 2-3 topics chosen, you agree to share in advance all the evidence that you plan to rely upon to make your case so that I have a chance to look at it. Same obligation applies to me for anything I might rely on. I want to avoid anyone thinking that they were either surprised or caught off-guard, and it's also not interesting to listen to someone carefully read a 263-page PDF.
  • In terms of number of participants, this might be best as me versus 3. Any more than that is prone to be too chaotic and too tedious to edit, and any fewer I'd be concerned of being insufficiently comprehensive about the topic.
  • Everyone involved will have immediate access to everyone's raw recording to guard against any concerns of selective/misleading editing.
  • Ideally, you're a bona fide believer (or at least genuinely believe the theories are sufficiently plausible) in the stolen election claims you're arguing for, rather than just someone who can competently steelman the arguments. I want to make sure that every claim is adequately defended.
  • I don't intend enforcing any strict format or time limit, as it would be best to discuss each claim for as long as is necessary to ensure it all gets a fair shake.

Are any of the above unreasonable or unfair? Do you have any suggested additions/changes?

I've been trying to set a conversation like this for years but haven't found any takers. @Dean, @jfk, @motteposting are the ones I know are sufficiently motivated and informed about the topic, and whom I'd most look forward to dissecting this topic with. Feel free to nominate anyone else you think would be good.

Navalny just died. There are a bunch of people in the Z-sphere who've gone 'well he just went on a hunger strike and Russian Arctic prisons are not a nice place to be - the simplest explanation is the most likely'. Beneath this you get 'who cares, he was a traitor and an enemy to the country anyway, he got what he deserved', rather the same sentiment people gave about Scott Ritter's (edit Gonzalo's) death: 'don't go to a country and criticize their vital war effort'. I think Navalny was an eyesore and Putin knocked him off. Everyone here and the rest of the world seems to agree. Nobody particularly cares about the evidence, I have no doubt that there'll be some official investigation that produces lots of official evidence that shows it was natural causes/some CIA falseflag. Who cares?

In the US, we had Epstein's suicide. The cameras on that 24/7 suicide-watch cell just happened to fail when they were needed. Well, the New York City medical examiner and the Justice Department Inspector General seemed to think it was suicide. I bet they had access to all kinds of papers and documents and medical things. I can't even take a pulse, what do I know about suicide mechanically? Shouldn't I just go along with the experts? As Attorney General William Barr said, Epstein's death was "a perfect storm of screw-ups". Nothing to see here! Well, few believe he actually managed to kill himself, polling says 3x more think he was murdered than accept the official facts.

My point is that the official evidence isn't always useful in some cases. Most people aren't interested in the evidence for whether 2020 was legitimate or not. People remember how 2016 was hacked by the Russians in some nefarious way - possibly through facebook ads, or the algorithms, or the FBI doing something improper. There were those water leaks that stopped the count that did or didn't happen. Or they look to the article talking about how the 2020 election was fortified. Or they have Sailor's pet theory of how the COVID vaccine results were conveniently delayed until after the investigation. Or there are the statistical anomalies in counties won over, or applications of Benford's law in certain places. Now we can easily conjure up official facts to discredit these ideas. Dominion won their court case, some journo asked whether they delayed the vaccine trial results and were told 'no of course not, that's laughable, everything's planned well in advance'. Well they would say that, wouldn't they?

In the mean time, we see the same legal system that ruled that 2020 was a perfectly secure election also have many issues with Mr Trump's affairs, business or otherwise. It's not unreasonable to think that Trump's a scam artist and cheat generally (he sure did pardon a few). But it's also not unreasonable to think that people capable of stealing an election can create enough official facts to get away with it. The US whipped up a major war based on a lie, why can't they rig an election?

Rationalism and weighing up evidence works well in low-intensity information environments when evidence is fairly reliable but on certain issues it's just fog and mirrors all the way down.

the same sentiment people gave about Scott Ritter's death

Pretty sure he's not dead.

Woops, I meant Gonzalo. Very silly moment!

There's nothing unreasonable about having suspicions or drawing conclusions based on insufficient evidence. I think it's very likely that Navalny was murdered, but I also have the awareness to admit that I cannot prove to any satisfying degree. That's perfectly ok! If someone has a suspicion about 2020 but cannot prove it, the honorable thing to do is just admit that instead of pretending to hold a well-grounded conclusion.

To nitpick, if you change the word “insufficient” to say “incomplete” or “indefinite” I think the Bayesian gods will be appeased about proportionate evidence for holding a belief.

Believing Russia very likely killed a prominent dissident, particularly one there is pretty strong evidence for a prior poisoning attempt, is not a significant claim. Rather par for the course.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and all that.

I am willing to go on the "fraud never stopped, why the heck do you think it did" theory. I will cite known major fraud cases and indicate that nothing has changed to make that less likely.

I'm excited that you're game. Are you referring to historical instances of electoral fraud that happened before the 2020 election or during it?

Historical.

I think the absolutely clearest evidence of it was bullshit was that invalid votes went to zero, basically. In every other case - older mail voting in the US, mail voting elsewhere it's like 1-2% because filling out ballots is not that easy.

Also, a recent fun incident, the illegal immigrant multiple felon who tried a mass shooting at one of those megachurches and she was registered as a voter in the county system. The screenshot posted is mine, I went and looked it up to check if people weren't just making it up.

Is voting registration a joke and not checked against national citizen databases or what ?

I would be eager to discuss those claims with you if you believe them to be the strongest out there. We can get this started by you emailing me whatever citations you want to use at ymeskhout[a]gmail.com and it'd be great if you have anyone else you think would be a good participant.

I'm leaving discussion of mail voting fraud to core* Americans with better work ethic.

*people who can vote in US elections without committing crimes.

Nobody can know that a claim is the strongest out there. They can know that it's the strongest they've seen so far.

I'll bite: The 2020 election was 'stolen' in the same way that the 2016 election was 'stolen'; or in other words the election was basically business as usual for United States politics and future elections are going to be equally 'stolen' as long as the current status-quo remains.

Bing Copilot -- Disputed Results:

In both elections, there were allegations that the results were unfair or rigged. Supporters of the losing candidate claimed that the election outcome did not accurately reflect the will of the people.

External Influence: Foreign interference played a role in both elections: In 2016, there was evidence of Russian meddling, including hacking and disinformation campaigns. In 2020, concerns arose about foreign interference, although the focus shifted to other countries as well (not just Russia).

Legal Challenges: After both elections, legal challenges were filed: In 2016, some lawsuits questioned the legitimacy of the Electoral College process and voting restrictions. In 2020, numerous lawsuits were filed by supporters of the losing candidate, alleging widespread voter fraud and irregularities.

Public Perception: A significant portion of the American population believed that the elections were stolen: In 2016, some Democrats questioned the legitimacy due to external factors. In 2020, approximately 40% of Americans believed the election was rigged or stolen, with claims of fraudulent vote counting.

Impact on Trust: Both elections had repercussions on public trust in the democratic process: Claims of election theft can erode confidence in the system. Open dialogue and transparency are crucial to maintaining trust.

In both instances there are strong cases to be made that motivated actors on both a smaller scale and a larger scale tipped the balance in favour of their desired outcome. Whilst the degree of interference and dirty politics was high by United States standards, the practice of dirty politics has been ongoing for decades at this point, so it represents an increase in an already increasing trend. Given the even greater stakes in the upcoming election to many foreign powers, as well as domestic reversals such as Roe V Wade due to the Supreme Court, all interested parties in the election are likely to have even greater motivation to influence the results by whatever means necessary.

Looking more broadly at the future, the current polls seem to indicate a status-quo election for Congress at 204 vs 207, with 24 seats being 'toss ups' at this point: https://www.270towin.com/2024-house-election/

The issue with your question in general is that if you apply a broader definition to the term 'stolen' then it becomes a both sides issues; and if you apply a narrower definition with respect to whether particular constitutional or electoral laws were broken, that argument simply hasn't borne fruit despite numerous challenges. With a broad definition, what kind of argument can be made that doesn't come down to 'their side stole the election more than my side', and with a narrow definition the argument is already settled.

I think it's notable that every Presidential election since at least 2000 has had large amounts of the opposition believing the election was stolen/illegitimate:

2000 - Florida
2004 - Ohio
2008/12 - Birtherism
2016 - Russia
2020 - "Stop the Steal"

However, the key difference in 2020 is just how far the losing candidate went to contest it.

Part of my concern with trying to "steelman" weak-form versions of the stolen election hypothesis is that Donald Trump was unambiguously pushing for the strong-form version. It was his clearly communicated view that the evidence in favour of a stolen election was so strong that the right and just thing to do would for Pence/Congress to just give him the Presidency.

This wasn't the case for any of the other losers (and neither McCain nor Romney (though not Trump!) endorsed birtherism).

If demographics really are destiny, then the one side that actually has the greatest reason to destroy or undermine democracy is the GOP. There are a number of verifiable claims for instance that they deliberated deregistered voters and attempted to minimise voter turnout by making it harder for some demographics that vote Democrat to exercise their rights. If the demographic wave washes away any chance for the GOP as it currently exists to ever wield power again, that will give them all the right motivation and incentive to prevent that from happening. The GOP can reform and form a new coalition to oppose the Democrats, but it might mean free reign in the foreseeable future for the Democrats to unroll their entire wish-list of changes like Healthcare and social spending that the GOP ideologically and institutionally opposes. Once that happens, it would be incredibly difficult for them to reverse as the changes would likely be incredibly popular with the broader American public.

The winning candidate in 2016 alleged mass voting fraud.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/25/donald-trump-claims-none-of-those-3-to-5-million-illegal-votes-were-cast-for-him-zero/

Upon taking office, he did not take action to investigate and rectify the issue.

In 2016, many Democrats claimed the outcome did not reflect the will of the people because in pure terms it did not: Trump lost the popular vote. So the system was “rigged” in the sense of the electoral college helping Trump. But them’s the rules.

I do not recall a bunch of Democrats claiming widespread fraud, and claims of Russians perhaps actually hacking the vote tally were not widely endorsed or sustained.

There’s a giant Trump-sized asymmetry between the two sides.

It seems incredibly incompetent for Trump to allege voter fraud and then do seemingly nothing to counter it in the four years he held office. What can you really say? It was there, he saw it, and he was too useless to do anything about it? If it was a true claim, then the most motivated person in the world to deal with it would be Trump himself or his closest advisors.

At least with the border he tried.

But yeah either massive incompetency or simple outright dishonesty.

The issue with your question in general is that if you apply a broader definition to the term 'stolen' then it becomes a both sides issues; and if you apply a narrower definition with respect to whether particular constitutional or electoral laws were broken, that argument simply hasn't borne fruit despite numerous challenges. With a broad definition, what kind of argument can be made that doesn't come down to 'their side stole the election more than my side', and with a narrow definition the argument is already settled.

I agree with your framing, the level of disagreement depends almost entirely on people consider 'stolen'. The OP was made in response to incessant accusations that I have been weakmanning the issue, which is why I left an open invitation for my accusers to bring forth whatever they believe are the strongest claims I have been ignoring/dismissing.

Congratulations, you have won the debate without even having to debate. Now that your opposition seems to have retreated back to their bailey, so you can go and do your victory lap around it.

Seeing as others have pointed out that you're considered to be in the stronger position, as a defense lawyer and podcaster -- could you defend the election stolen viewpoint? That is possibly the only way a debate on this issue is ever going to move forward seeing as so far nobody is game to take up the losing side, but this is the kind of fight you're probably used to undertaking.

What do you believe are my motte and bailey positions on this topic?

could you defend the election stolen viewpoint?

It all depends on what viewpoint we're talking about, which is why I keep asking for specifics. I already believe that some fraud happens in every election but not enough to make a difference, so I can defend that viewpoint against whoever out there happens to believe that electoral fraud does not exist. The overall problem with this topic is the inverse correlation between how defensible vs how consequential an allegation is, which is why there's a see-saw oscillation between "millions of fake ballots were cast for Biden" and "one guy in Nevada filled out his dead wife's ballot".

What do you believe are my motte and bailey positions on this topic?

The election fraud issue is vapid because taking a deep dive into what amounts to propaganda is an exercise in frustration. The claims serve the purpose of riling up his base support, and to shore up his power; given the vast number of them they act as a shotgun approach for his supporters to find one particular claim compelling.

Your motte: All claims are at best specious and at worst groundless. Your bailey: Insufficient evidence exists that has survived testing by the court system and all attempts have failed, there is simply insufficient evidence to make the claim that the election was stolen -- I'm not so sure on your fall back position to be honest as the motte here is so strong that it would be hard to imagine ever having to fall back to the bailey.

I thought about this issue while I was at the gym, and the most plausible take that fits the evidence or lack-thereof would be internal government agencies such as the CIA. I'm looking at this issue through the lens of The Dictator's Handbook, which you can get 90% understanding through watching this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&ab_channel=CGPGrey

If the Democratic party had a concrete means to steal elections, or an 'auto win' button, then I cannot see them not pressing it every single time as they have already worked themselves up into a rhetorical fervor that their opposition is evil and cannot be allowed control of the government. On the other hand, the only institution with the knowledge, wherewithal and motivation to steal an election would be the CIA as they already have considerable experience in doing this exact thing in overseas countries, the list of governments overthrown or rumoured to have been overthrown by the CIA is quite frankly staggering. The CIA has literally had one main job over the past 75 years that it has been around, dunk on the Russians, and it would be hard for them to let that go -- especially given the alleged ties between Trump and Russia. The sheer amount of useless chatter can be explained away by one of two possible scenarios: either propaganda, as I suspect, or a successful intelligence operation flooding the information space with useless junk.

Biden came to the White House with a long history of receiving intelligence briefings, having served eight years as vice president and 36 years as a senator from Delaware, where he led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served on the Intelligence Committee when it was first created in the 1970s. The thing he missed most after leaving the vice presidency, he said, was reading the President’s Daily Brief, the compilation of the intelligence community’s top collection and analysis.

Joe Biden has had considerable ties to the CIA through his long career in office, and during this term he has increased the funding and elevated the status of the agency within the United States government by for instance elevating the director of the CIA to his cabinet. See: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/politics/bill-burns-cia-director-cabinet-level/index.html . Biden would have the necessary ties to coordinate the effort with the CIA and I believe the CIA could have been motivated to help him, especially given accusations publicly for instance that Trump compromised several agents with his intelligence leaks, along with a number of other OPSec issues as well. One the other hand, Biden has given greater 'treasure' and power to the agency over the past few years; whereas the Republican party has developed a spottier relationship with the agency ever since the second gulf war; finally, the 'drain the swamp' rhetoric is a direct challenge to the institutional members of the government.

Unfortunately, there is no real evidence and at best it is 'evidence of absence'. I am picking on the CIA as a potential conspirator simply because they are the only agency that could pull this kind of mission off and then get away clean. They have a potential motive to act due to their seemingly poor relationship with Trump; the means to act because of their close relationship with Biden as well as their institutional know-how in the spheres of dis/misinformation and election tampering, and finally they have recieved rewards from the Biden administration with considerable additional funding going their way. This is heading down the road of 'conspiracy theory', but the agency deemed responsible to prevent foreign interference in the election is likely the best placed agency to tamper with the election themselves. The necessary number of potential guilty parties is quite small and well contained given only a few top level people need to know the full extent of a 'possible conspiracy', and the rest of the agency has little motivation to offer help to Trump who has shown disdain for them and has actively hurt their operations.

I apologize, I misread your prior comment as claiming I was retreating a bailey position.

Your CIA exercise is a good attempt at trying to steelman a strong-version of the stolen election claims. Another possibility I wondered about is some sort of a decentralized conspiracy of sneaking in as many operatives (most likely an election activist) into positions of election authority. After that, I don't know how that would be accomplished or what they'd be able to do without getting caught.

The best evidence that we have election fraud is that no one is using any of the many tools developed to detect and prevent financial fraud. We don't white hat test fraud prevention like we do in auditing, we don't audit votes verifying that people who are reported as voting filled out their ballots in compliance with the law. We don't do any of that, even though these tools widely known and used.

The prior should be that significant fraud exists until proven otherwise, by showing that the system catches frequent, thorough tests.

I reject this analogy on the basis that no own powerful benefits from catching large-scale financial fraud. The organizations responsible for catching it have been continuously granted more duties without corresponding budget increases for decades, to the point where they do not have the time or resources to catch or prosecute it, because no one who makes those decisions really benefits if they succeed.

Powerful people benefit from catching their opponents committing election fraud, so I'd expect the tools to catch it to actually be used.

  • -13

Are you asserting that audits and other checks don’t happen or that fraud is not ever detected under our present system?

Moreover, the best check on election fraud at any scale is that people of various ideologies and parties make up the officials and volunteers in any given area, and all it takes is one witness to expose something.

  • -10

Audits and checks don't happen.

Nor recounts?

Investigations?

Observers?

Do our elections have any checks and barriers to fraud?

Nor recounts?

GIGO applies

Investigations?

Rarely, and almost never by disinterested authorities.

Observers?

Useless.

Do our elections have any checks and barriers to fraud?

On paper, yes, but practically speaking, not really. Between the desire to have a secret ballot and initiatives to designed maximize the number of votes cast, it seems to me that only very obvious malfeasance is readily detectable.

Assuming arguendo that voting fraud is possible because there aren't enough safeguards, I don't see how that gets us to 1) fraud did not cancel itself out and instead favored a particular candidate then to 2) the one-sided fraud was significant enough to affect results 3) the fraud remained undetected despite significant efforts to uncover it.

If someone just wants to argue that fraud is possible, I'll take whatever I can get, but I'm looking for the strongest possible claims.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about potential electoral fraud to get into much of a debate, but it does seem to me that any fraud should tend to favor Democrats over Republicans simply because it’s easier for Democrats to cheat.

As @SwordOfOccam pointed out, “the best check on election fraud at any scale is that people of various ideologies and parties make up the officials and volunteers in any given area, and all it takes is one witness to expose something.” The trouble is, that’s just not the case in all urban districts. In 2012, for example, 59 voting precincts in Philadelphia alone voted 100% for Obama. The linked article notes that precincts in Chicago and Atlanta did the same in 2008. It would be much easier to run up the tally in those areas, either via fraudulent votes or fraudulent tallies, than it would be in even the reddist of Republican precincts, since Republicans don’t cluster up in the same way that urban Democrats do, and there are always at least a few Democrats in the strongest Republican strongholds.

I'd definitely be suspicious of 100% vote for anybody, because people mess up ballot papers, make mistakes, and surely there was at least one voter for the other guy. Maybe they mean "after all the spoiled and invalid votes were discarded, out of the remaining valid votes there were 100% for X", but even then it seems extraordinary.

For fucks sake, you can’t rely on 100% of people to enjoy a delicious free meal that they pick out themselves, or sex with an extremely attractive and willing partner.

Unless these voting districts consist of approximately 25 voting people, any district reporting 100% one way voting is like Soviet level bullshit.

I actually think this passes a basic sniff test.

A quick search reveals that Philadelphia has 1703 voting divisions, and that Obama and Romney combined had 5,670,708 votes in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2012 with the resulting map looking like this. Philadelphia is the bright blue part in the lower right part of the image, and it is obvious just looking at it that Obama's support in Pennsylvania is concentrated in a few highly populous municipalities, including Philadelphia. The claimed oddity is that 59 of the 1703 voting divisions in Philadelphia amounting to 19,605 votes all went 100% to Obama. But why is this strange?

Each voting division in Philadelphia seems to have about 332 voters, so all that needed to happen was around 332 voters in a single voting division all decided to cast a ballot for Obama 59 times in a city where around 560,000 total people were casting their vote, and 80-90% of the votes were going to Obama. With voter clustering, does this seem that unlikely of an outcome?

It still seems a bit odd. Blacks voted to Obama at a rate like 95% Let's generously assume that urban poor blacks are 99%. But aren't odds of every single vote being for Obama in a 332 person district something like 0.99^332 which works out to 3.5% ? Without that generous assumption, if black vote for Obama was only 98% vote share, they'd be really low (e-6) ..

What was the amount of invalid votes in those districts?

I'm not sure you're thinking about it correctly.

First, the math you're doing implicitly assumes who any two people vote for is an independent event. But there might be social, political and economic reasons why the people in a single small subsection of a city all vote a particular way. If the type of people who live in a single neighborhood isn't completely random, and the type of political messaging that appeal to a person aren't randomly distributed throughout a state, then you might completely be wrong to treat the voting events as independent.

In addition, even if you assume that the events are independent, then the real comparison you're making is all of the votes cast in the entire United States. You might be right to say that there's a generous 3.5% chance of a single voting division of poor black people going for Obama. But the question really is, how many of this kind of black voting division are there in the entire United States? How many degrees of freedom did the people looking for claimed irregularities have? If they hadn't found 59 majority black voting divisions in Philadelphia going to Obama, are there similarly striking "irregularities" that might occur entirely by chance that they might have looked for instead?

More comments

Consider then that the fact those stats came from older elections, not 2020, and that 2020 had higher rates of black votes for Trump would indicate a decreased chance of skullduggery.

If you read the article, the fact that those precincts have almost no registered Republicans and no white people goes a long way towards explaining the 100% votes for the black candidate.

Frankly, if one was manufacturing an election outcome, one would hopefully not be stupid enough to just put 100% of the votes for the one guy. One would also have to watch that they don’t overshoot the number of registered voters or anything else too blatant.

If it were that obvious there’s no way for it to remain undetected. Any meaningful fraud has to be big enough to swing things and subtle enough to avoid detection. That’s a tall order as plots go.

Back in 2012, I don't think they cared about being subtle. Remember all the "demographics are destiny" triumphalism? So a Show Vote of 100% Havel's Greengrocer is not implausible. I don't think that the result necessarily indicates fraud, but it's a bit too good for an ordinary election, especially for 2012. 2008, yes I could imagine a lot of never-voted-before black voters showing up for First Black President, but 2012 was for the second term when some of the shine had worn off.

On the other hand, maybe it was just business as usual for certain districts: you pay us the walking around money, we get the vote out (no questions asked).

Wonder why they gave it up in 2016.

Even if we assume total corruption in a given county, there’s a limit to how far the plotters could run up the numbers without it being blatantly obvious.

And it has to be done in a swing state to really matter.

In an election with high scrutiny, it’s pretty challenging to cheat enough to make a difference, but not so much to get caught.

And if the plot extends to multiple counties and states, the coordination would be incredibly difficult to conceal.

Look at Watergate, a far simpler plot than changing election tallies, and how it went off the rails.

My point was mostly that @ymeskhout’s first point was not necessarily correct—that I would expect the background level of fraud to favor Democrats in any given election due to ease of opportunity.

As for a grand, national conspiracy to change election results, while I do think that is a threat due to most states’ remarkably poor election security practices, I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, threat model to be worried about. Instead, I would think a distributed conspiracy would be far more likely, with low-level participants each working independently and without any direction from on high, but all from the same motive.

Take sex abuse conspiracies by way of analogy. The Catholic sex abuse scandal was a grand international conspiracy, with almost all members of the hierarchy implicated in some way or another in moving priests around and preventing them from being prosecuted. The conspiracy naturally eventually leaked, and it caused a huge scandal. By contrast, every time some Baptist minister abused a girl in his church in the past 50 years, the elders just quietly removed him, sent him away to counseling, and didn’t say anything when they learned he was serving another church a year later. You had pretty much the same actions in both cases, but for the Catholics, the conspiracy was (naturally) a top-down one, while for the Baptists, it was (naturally) bottom-up, without any coordination from congregation to congregation. A bottom-up conspiracy of people individually choosing to fill out absentee ballots for their mentally incompetent relatives, poll workers in safe areas slightly inflating their numbers, and the like, would be very difficult to prove, since there would be essentially no coordination among participants or even knowledge that anyone else is doing anything similar. Just about the only thing they’d have in common would be opposition to rules that make voting more secure, which is a position that’s remarkably more common in one party than the other.

Covering up sex abuse is way, way easier than trying to rig an election. You can do it case by case, it’s not a public event, there’s no particular timeline, there’s no adversarial party keeping watch, and you’re a church, which most believers put a lot of trust in.

The place where it really matters to affect election outcomes is swing states, which basically by definition tend to have a mix of partisan power (even if some counties swing all blue/red, state officials are going to have some variety). The partisan competition keeps things in check. And not coincidently, these swing states are the places with the most scrutiny. Decentralized or not, running any ~county-level plot is nearly impossible to pull off without attracting an investigation.

Having a bunch of little independent groups/individuals doing small-scale fraud is very unlikely to affect an outcome, and also you can’t presume only one side does it.

(Ironically, at this point Dems have a solid lead with regular voters (a significant advantage in boring mid-terms) and so efforts to expand the vote are more likely to hurt Dem chances.)

Overall, if you’re able to analyze why sex abuse by religious officials could be covered up you, should be able to understand why significant voting fraud can’t be covered up the same way.

You’re nitpicking the analogy without really addressing my point. Your previous comment pointed out that it would be extremely difficult for a coordinated group of national conspirators to fraudulently alter the election results in enough swing states to change the election. I’m saying there wouldn’t need to be a grand conspiracy. Recent elections have hinged on only a few tens of thousands of votes in the right places. With such small margins, all it would take to tip the scales is one side having either more motive or more opportunity to cheat than the other. I’m not even saying that necessarily happened in 2020. Thanks to insecure vote by mail procedures coupled with the secret ballot, it would be almost impossible to tell one way or the other. (For the record, I support the secret ballot, but I’m opposed to vote by mail except perhaps with the narrowest of exceptions.)

I’m not nitpicking, I’m trying to explain why this other model is aLao unlikely to either work or remain undetected, because it’s not trivial to add the right amount of fake votes.

You do realize mail in ballots can be audited right? Fraud at any meaningful scale is still very hard to pull off because things have to align with voter registration.

Voting by mail is excellent and I’m glad my state has long had it.

All of that bottom-up effort facilitated by media, politicians and intelligence agencies that keeps pushing lies over lies. How much harder is it to convince the average poll-worker to look the other way when somebody dumps a bunch of ballots against a candidate without a multi-year campaign to persuade them that he's a fascist who works for the Russians?

How would the poll worker know what is happening? Are they warned beforehand they will be part of a crime? Who is telling them? How many instances of this are there?

How are the observers avoided?

How are the ballots filled out so as not to arouse suspicion and match real names?

(You’re not putting forth a realistic scenario that could possibly scale without something being detected.)

My understanding is that there are entire organizations dedicated to gather votes, some of these people essentially go door-to-door to target people that would otherwise not vote, perhaps because they don't speak enough English, are too old or too cognitively-impaired to direct themselves to a polling place. Then they perform the same kind of art on these people as the door-to-door salesmen or phone scammers (2.4 millions fraud last year, a $8B business), and they make these people input their customer's information on the ballot, which they collect and then go on to drop at a ballot drop box.

Is this illegal? It may be in some places. But it should look pretty suspicious to have one person deliver hundreds or thousands of votes at once in a ballot drop-off box.

Observers are avoided through various tricks depending on the area, sometimes more obvious than others.

There is a lot of variation on how absentee votes should be processed and counted and how that process is tracked, and there were a lot of last minute changes to these rules across the country ostensibly 'due to covid'. Here is an example :

State law doesn't explicitly say ballots lacking a secrecy envelope must be discarded, and the secretary of the commonwealth advised counties to count naked ballots in the primary.

Should a poll worker discard or not discard a ballot lacking a secrecy envelope? Perhaps if it's a ballot for evil orange dictator it's okay?

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This is a coherent and testable theory and I appreciate you raising it. If anyone wants to either build on this or argue that it's the strongest 2020 stolen election claim, I'm happy to talk to them.

You're talking to them now.

Lewis2 said they're not knowledgeable enough to get into a debate, so I'm asking if there are other people willing to herald this argument as the strongest 2020 stolen election claim.

In financial fraud, the assumption is if fraud is possibile; fraud is happening. You design systems to make it difficult to hide evidence of fraud, and then constantly look for that evidencem, because you can't really prevent fraud.

In financial fraud, the perpetrators are trying to make a buck.

In voting fraud, the point is to change an election outcome.

These are extremely different kinds of fraud and the former is far easier to do than the latter.

Election fraud happens. Some cases get caught every year. Some undoubtedly don’t. But if it’s not large-scale then it isn’t affecting election outcomes.

If the strongest claim from people who believe the election was stolen is that "some fraud is happening" then there's nothing for me to disagree with.

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we don't audit votes verifying that people who are reported as voting filled out their ballots in compliance with the law.

Wouldn’t this (and many other auditing proposals) be (or certainly risk) fundamental violations of the secret ballot? That the public has faith their ballot can’t be tracked back to them is a cornerstone of the system that an audit would compromise.

Some tests that don't violate ballot security:

  • Auditors posing as fraudulent voters to see if they are allowed to vote.
  • Auditing that people recorded as voting verify the details of their voting method, time and date match the records. If you go ask 1000 votors in a presinct a week after thier vote is recorded and they match that's no problem, but if 200 of them report they didn't vote or voted by some means other than the records show (like they voted by absentee ballot mail when their vote was recorded in person).
  • Auditing the rolls to ensure all are eligible and still residents of the location where they are registered.

(1) would require cooperation from the people running the election. But (2) and (3) do not as they only involve looking at publicly available information (depending on state may require an explicit request, but in many states you can simply go to the Secretary of State's website and click download). Why haven't the groups claiming election fraud done them? Or maybe they have?

The only study I know of for auditing voting was done by the NYPD in which case every fraudulent vote was successful except for one. The officer claimed to be the son of a poll worker who was in jail at the time! I believe the elections department worked to make such audits illegal in response. I can not find a link.

I think you are trying to be fair, but agree with the people pointing out that going up against a lawyer and experienced podcaster is not a fair fight if you don't have experience in that kind of venue. I mean, I am pretty convinced that the theory of evolution is true and young earth creationism is not, and I think I understand the science well enough to argue that from an educated position, but I am neither a public debater nor a scientist, and if I debated a professional young earth creationist who runs a podcast "debunking" evolution, I expect I'd be made to look like a fool.

There are definitely young earth creationists who would challenge you to a public debate that they then lose. They tend to be on the more total schizo, Robert Sungenis end, and not on the more Ken Ham, add enough epicycles to make the theory work end. But Ken Ham probably doesn’t want to debate you anyways, so you’re probably on even ground accepting a debate invitation to a YEC podcast.

I don't believe I gained any super powers from being a lawyer, and I reached my positions with access to the exact same resources that anyone else has. But whatever advantages I may have I would assume are mitigated by sharing resources ahead of time and the 1v3 format. I'm open to other suggestions. I also think it's perfectly ok/commendable for people to admit they're incapable of defending their beliefs, but keep in mind that the three I tagged have made confident assertions about my dishonesty and bad faith on this particular topic. Unless someone is making a baseless accusation, I have to assume it's based on some evidence and that they would be eager for an opportunity to establish the validity of their beliefs.

It's not a super power but your setting the domain rules to favor other trained lawyers over people less familiar with legal procedures.

How do the rules favor other trained lawyers, and what changes would you suggest?

It's not a thing you can change by just modifying a few conditions. The only meaningful way to get rid of the advantage of being a trained lawyer is to find an opponent who's also a trained lawyer or equivalent.

This incessant insistence on "if you REALLY were serious, you'd do it at a time and place and under circumstances of my choosing" is as annoying as rationalists insisting "if you REALLY were serious, you'd bet money".

The objection was on the rules themselves, not just that I'm a trained lawyer. I'm trying to separate the earnest objections versus the pretextual excuses from those unwilling to have their beliefs scrutinized. If someone objects to the rules but then offers no alternatives, I have nothing to go off.

Nobody can possibly give an exhaustive list of all the ways in which the rules can advantage a trained lawyer. Asking for them to give a list of rule objections just leads to a situation where they left one out or didn't phrase their objection properly, and you go "Ha ha, well now you admitted in advance the rules are okay, so I can do anything I want that you didn't mention, and you have no reason to complain".

It's just like the situation with rationalist bets, except instead of "you're probably not going to phrase the bet in a way free of loopholes" it's "you're probably not going to phrase your objection to the rules in a way free of loopholes".

I never asked for an exhaustive list, I just want some specifics on why the rules are unfair rather than just proclaiming they're unfair for unspecified reasons. Someone who knows their beliefs will crumble when it encounters a stiff breeze of scrutiny has an incentive to make up whatever excuse to keep them safeguarded, so I need some method to discern who has earnest objections and who's just making shit up.

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Right. It's like dealing with the Devil. You may not know how you're going to get screwed over. You may be able to look the contract over carefully and not see a catch. But you can be sure there is one and you're going to Hell without getting the full benefit apparently promised, because the Devil's that much better at this game than you are.

Being a lawyer is not magic.

Nobody here is going to be impressed if @ymeskhout tries to win on a technicality instead of the substance of the issue. Moreover, if he did act in some kind of unreasonable procedural way, it’s going to decrease anyone ever being willing to go on the podcast, which is against his demonstrated preferences.

But you can try to lay the grounds for the excuse that anyone debating an issue with him and doing poorly is because of legal superpowers and not on the merits.

Or you can propose a different format. Or find a lawyer who holds the relevant beliefs I guess.

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I think you’re way overestimating how much it matters that @ymeskhout is a lawyer relative to him simply being very sharp and, it seems, having the facts on his side.

Skill issue.

It's a trust issue. People are familiar with the conduct of lawyers with an axe to grind, and simply know better than to voluntarily place themselves in front of that buzzsaw.

I said "trained lawyer or equivalent". "Or equivalent" includes being a trained debater who doesn't actually practice law.

This is also a good example of not being able to phrase the objection to cover all the loopholes in advance. I thought I covered being sharp and having skills, but it seems you think the way I phrased it didn't.

It's essentially the rationalist bet scenario.

I think you’re overly worried about loopholes and training instead of whether someone who has good evidence has a fair shot in a discussion, not a court of law or formal competition.

You’re actually demonstrating a talent for nitpicking much as a lawyer or policy analyst might. Raw talent can go a long way.

You might look like a fool if you debate them, but wouldn't you want to just ask the quesiton and hear their argument so you can evaluate it for yourself?

Sure, but I think that's happening here. I'm not really criticizing @ymeshkhout for making his offer, I am just pointing out why people might decline for reasons other than "I lack the courage of my convictions."

Major social media companies colluding together to prevent the voter from accessing vital information about a candidate is such a significant violation of democratic norms that it should be our entire focus when discussing election fraud. We had information hidden from us which indicated a candidate’s son was paid by the spy chief of our geopolitical rival, and a corrupt oligarch in the most important geopolitical region of Europe (Ukraine), and that the candidate met with many of the players paying his son, and that Biden-as-VP held Ukrainian aid hostage unless he fire the prosecutor that was investigating the corrupt company which was paying his son. (This oligarch went on to participate in one of the largest money laundering cases in American history, in a little discussed story, using his Chabad-affiliates — but this is a story for another post).

Right, I've repeatedly identified the motte-and-bailey tactic of making bombastic fraud-fraud claims about Dominion Voting or whatever but then shifting towards the weaker "the election was unfair" position when pressed for evidence on the initial claims. I don't want to tip the scales here and it's why I'm asking people to volunteer what they believe are the strongest claims worthy of attention. If someone wants to claim that the strongest argument in favor of the stolen election is the attempted suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story then that's fine and I'll take whatever I can get, but that's conceding the more dramatic claims as indefensible.

Again, I've been repeatedly accused of dishonesty and weakmanning on this topic, and I'm trying to do everything I can to facilitate them making their case that it's a valid allegation instead of a baseless smear.

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That's not a motte-and-bailey tactic, that's something that happens whenever a lot of people have ideas about something. There are plenty of naive people who complain about Trump being bad because he eats his steak well done. If other people on the left don't care about steak, and criticize Trump on a different basis, that doesn't make it a motte-and-bailey where the bombastic claim is that Trump is bad for a totally ridiculous reason.

That's true! The problem is the lack of acknowledgements along the lines of "Yes, the Dominion Voting stuff is crazy but this other thing is worthwhile...". And I don't know how many times I need to repeat this, but people go beyond refusing to acknowledge the retarded theories to accuse me of dishonesty/weakmanning. I suspect the lack of disavowals is part of the sanewashing tactic, where the crazy wing of any faction is kept close because their enthusiasm remains useful.

We're not going to get anything from such acknowledgements (which have in fact been given if not as clearly as you would like). No one on the "most safe and secure election ever" side is going to be more likely to seriously engage with the strongest claims because the person wanting to engage is willing to stipulate that other claims are "crazy".

Closing off motte-and-bailey acrobatics is a great way to raise one's credibility.

Perhaps, in the eyes of some sort of rationalist receptive observer. There aren't any of those around here.

Hopefully there are on this site, at least.

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Major social media companies colluding together to prevent the voter from accessing vital information about a candidate is such a significant violation of democratic norms that it should be our entire focus when discussing election fraud.

Very much noncentral fallacy, but ok. However if we're calling shaping media coverage and the national conversation as election fraud, then Russia definitely committed election fraud to help Trump get elected the first time.

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The premise of democracy is that we can access truthful information, and that we can share political information to peers using the expected normal means of communication. The normal means of sharing political information since 2010 has been online. Yet, every major company which controlled our normal means of political communication conspired to hide essential political information. This thwarts how democracy is intended to operate, regardless of whether it technically violated a rule. It is very much central to the concern of, “is our democracy working or did an actor destroy it?” And this is the heart of the concern over election fraud, whether it in substance thwarts democracy, not just by a technical rule.

(If one political side is fundamentally thwarting democracy, then in my humble opinion the other side can do the same. They can do this by, for instance, accusing them of technical election fraud or vampirical adenochrome or whatever they want. They are morally justified to defend themselves using the same weapon as their attacker.)

(If one political side is fundamentally thwarting democracy, then in my humble opinion the other side can do the same. They can do this by, for instance, accusing them of technical election fraud or vampirical adenochrome or whatever they want. They are morally justified to defend themselves using the same weapon as their attacker.)

This is just silly. If you're saying you wouldn't look down on the other side for getting down in the mud with their opponents that's one thing, but I think setting things up so that if Side A suppresses even a single voter-relevant news story, then that gives Side B full moral license to claim actual election fraud without evidence or to make up conspiracy theories, then I think you've set up an insane and unworkable game.

I think you've set up an insane and unworkable game.

This... does not seem like grounds for ruling out such a situation currently being in effect?!

The steelman case for a stolen election is to take the entire "electoral fraud" bit, pick it up, throw it in the bin, and instead look at censorship. Basically you'd need to argue that some of what's come up in Missouri v Biden predates Biden's presidency and was used to sway the election in a way that'd be recognised, if it occured in the third world, as leaving the election deeply flawed at best. The second argument you'd want to make was that self-coups committed by some State Governers and institutions damaged democratic procedures before the election even occured. Then the third argument would be threat of intimidation or violence coming from riots that occured shortly before the election.

I will not elaborate further on this, however, because I think the legitimacy of a government depends on more than just whether it was elected or not.

I personally think pursuing the "election was flawed/unfair" angle is a sound strategy much more grounded in reality, but it requires disavowing the "election was stolen" angle in order to close off motte-and-bailey acrobatics between the two.

I think my comments on electoral fraud, "pick it up, throw it in the bin", should make clear that I'm not trying any acrobatics or ambiguity here. But limiting the definition of a "stolen" election to just electoral fraud seems to lack a basis. Plenty of non-democracies "steal" elections even when the number of votes cast were not subject to fraud. For example, the Cuban election system functions on a basis of non-competitive elections. The number of candidates always matches the number of seats and therefore all candidates win their seats. Hypothetically there's a candidacy system that is subject to competition prior to the election, but actual attempts to run as opposition in these selection votes leads to intimidation. This means that all election results showing victory by the Communist Party of Cuba are "stolen", without actually requiring that fraud took place at the ballot box itself. To use another example of how elections can be stolen without requiring fraud (though there probably was fraud anyway), the 2015 Venezuelan Election gave MUD a supermajority but the ruling PSUV would later strip the National Assembly itself of legislative powers in a self-coup. So the results of the election itself weren't stolen but the outcome the election promised, that the winners of the election would have legislative powers, were.

As an aside, trying to figure out if there was any concrete definition of a "stolen" election pre-2016 turns up a long papertrail Democrats and Socialists accusing Bush of stealing the 2004 election, including in academic literature. It's interesting how the shirts on this flipped from blue to red.

should make clear that I'm not trying any acrobatics or ambiguity here.

Yes, you've made your position completely unambiguous and I apologize if anything I said implied otherwise.

I'm not trying to limit the meaning of 'stolen'. I've conceded that it's a term with fuzzy definitions and open to interpretation, I only use it as an imperfect signifier to distinguish the two types of claims within this topic. I agree that you can reasonably label an election outcome "illegitimate" even if no actual fraud took place.

What if I believe it was deliberately made structurally unfair going into the election, and that it was, in the end, stolen? Can I argue against the injury as well as the insult?

That's fine if that's the version of 'stolen' you want to argue, the word is ambiguous enough. I was primarily interested to hear from people who have stridently accused me of weakmanning the overall genre and hoping to hear from them about what they believe are the strongest claims I've allegedly ignored or unfairly dismissed.

Are you saying that the word 'stolen' has a hard technical meaning such that someone who believes, for example, that there was a distributed effort by various actors including those in service of the US government to pervert the course of a fair and free US election, can not in good faith describe that as a 'stolen' election? Is this a standard or established somewhere else? Did Russa 'steal' 2016?

Are you claiming that anyone who wishes to argue that the election was flawed or unfair must also state emphatically that it was not 'stolen' before it is possible to have a productive conversation, even if the person in question never said it was stolen, or did, but never referencing the more extreme and implausible versions of that claim?

Are you sure this is not an isolated demand for rigor, is it really your normal operating procedure to demand disavowals from interlocutors in this way, either over a specific definition or cluster of ideas, even if that person has not previously held or promoted them?

How would you feel about reciprocal rules, would you be okay with both parties not using the word 'stolen', such that they could not say it was stolen, and you could not say it was not stolen?

Motte-and-bailey fallacies rely on ambiguity in order to maintain as much flexibility as possible to jump between the two positions, and so the best guard against this tactic is to get people to be specific and unambiguous about their positions. A request for disavowal is only appropriate if there is a history or suspicion of this kind of slipperiness, and I would apply it consistently to any other topic where this issue applies.

The word 'stolen' perhaps implies some measure of dishonesty but is still too ambiguous to have a hard technical meaning. Someone claiming that the election was 'stolen' doesn't tell me enough information about what they actually belief, and paired in contrast to 'unfair' it's my imperfect attempt to try and draw a distinction between the two camps of allegations. I don't really care what vocabulary people use as long as the meaning is clear and unambiguous enough.

A request for disavowal is only appropriate if there is a history or suspicion of this kind of slipperiness, and I would apply it consistently to any other topic where this issue applies.

To clarify my question, is it your position that someone who has only ever been a part of camp 'unfair' who wants to discuss camp 'unfair' with you, must first disavow camp 'stolen'? If not, then that is resolved and I simply misunderstood you. If yes, then while I have no intention of going through your comment history I think it would be quite extraordinary if this was actually a consistently held principle. Demanding that people you are talking to disavow Bailey position they have not themselves mentioned or argued for, seems like it should violate community norms if not rules.

It depends. The two factors I would consider most is how often the individual has engaged in slipperiness and how often slipperiness is utilized within the given topic. I consider disavowal to just be one of the ways of stating one's positions clearly and unambiguously. I have been very consistent about this because it applies to many topics and it's a very easy way to close off slipperiness. A good example is 'Defund the Police'.

Isolated demand for rigor indeed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/25/donald-trump-claims-none-of-those-3-to-5-million-illegal-votes-were-cast-for-him-zero/

Could you explain what you think I was referring to when I used the phrase 'Isolated demand for rigor' in my comment, and how this is a reply to me, because I can't parse it.

Trump alleged, in an election he won while slightly losing the popular vote, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast, but 0 of those were for him.

That is an insane claim. It has no relation to reality. This is par for the Trump course, where he will simply say things like his crowd was the largest or exaggerate the value of his property or any number of documented falsehoods, large and small.

No evidence of this mass voting fraud was ever produced and I don’t recall President Trump or anyone else taking action to investigate or rectify this massive, critical issue threatening our democracy, such that it could not be repeated (out of self interest if nothing else).

So that’s the baseline to consider when evaluating future claims.

The isolated demand for rigor here is you focusing on the true meaning of the word “stolen” instead of acknowledging that the entire “election was stolen” theory is originated by a man with a long history of making fact-free assertions about elections and many other things. Another isolated demand for rigor being made by others is something like “prove to me no fraud happened” in a sad attempt to shift the burden of proof.

An insane man believes even elections he wins are massively rigged. A cohort of buffoons generated baseless theories and tried to generate evidence that the 2020 election was in fact stolen, as proclaimed by their dear leader. All of those claims, to my knowledge, did not survive contact with basic scrutiny, and TTV refused to produce evidence it claims to have.

And when our resident lawyer @ymeskhout brings up a prominent case of obvious grift and buffoonery to examine in detail, just in case anyone here sympathetic to the claim of a rigged election can defend it, he gets dragged for his approach, the obsession, his lack of character, an inability to engage with the “true” issues, and for posing an isolated demand for rigor.

It’s a basic demand for rigor that apparently cannot be met.

I am sorry but this still does not seem very relevant to what I was trying to get across, I will try again.

I am specifically asking if the demand for people to disavow a position they have not advanced is an isolated demand for rigor only being brought out in this instance, or a standard practice for productive conversations.

@ymeskhout has themselves acknowledged that it is, if not an 'isolated demand for rigor' a 'specific demand for rigor' because they think it is only appropriate when the person is 'slippery' or the topic is particularly fraught. Personally, I think this allows @ymeskhout far too many degrees of freedom, that this is functionally an isolated demand, and the correct approach would be to treat people as bad actors only after they have behaved badly, state clearly what you expect from them before continuing to engage, or simply not engage with commenters who you think are bad faith.

I am not replying to the broader conversation with @ymeskhout and have not participated in it. If specific users are behaving badly and @ymeskhout knows this and wants to act on that information, I don't see any problem with that. If the initial comment was, I can't have a productive conversation with @ motte-user-i-just-made-up without them first acknowledging that all of their previous election fraud claims turned out to be wrong, I would not have commented.

Do you think, as a general rule, it is reasonable to demand that people disavow popular Bailey positions that they have not personally advanced, simply because the topic is one in which Motte and Bailey arguments are common? I have a strong instinctive dislike for this kind of compelled position taking, it feels like a 'debate tactic', which is why I also asked about tabooing the word stolen. If @ymeskhout had simply said, it is necessary to state ones positions clearly and unambiguously, which they claim is all the disavowal is supposed to accomplish anyway, I would not have commented.

I brought up the Defund the Police example because it illustrates the problem really well. If we're talking about the issue, it's helpful to know if someone means "literally abolish the police" or "reduce the police budget slightly by recategorizing 911 dispatchers as non-police". It would be annoying to have someone argue the 911 dispatcher accounting trick only to then turn around with "and therefore that's why we need to abolish the police" when the coast is clear.

Given how many comments I’ve seen where people have expressed the “big lie” stolen/rigged plots are so obviously dumb and almost no one here believes them, I don’t think you’re identifying a real problem.

If it’s a position this hypothetical person has not advanced and presumably they don’t believe it then I fail to see a problem. Nobody is being compelled to do anything since it’s a voluntary debate with ongoing negotiations as to what would even happen.

Somebody here should be theoretically able to meet the stated requirement.

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That’s a really complex ways of agreeing the 2020 election wasn’t stolen.

Especially because arguments 2 and 3 can cut both ways if you go looking for examples.

What benefit would anyone gain from going on your show to talk about the 2020 election? It looks like all downside to me at the moment man, you need to sweeten the pot a little.

You have home ground advantage and podcasting experience, you get a great episode (at least conceptually, I would love to listen to motters argue) and a very positive spin on a potential mea culpa (I know it's unfair to imply you are working an angle and I apologise, but it is a positive thing you'd get.) Meanwhile they get a potential embarrassment and have to expose their identity.

Also it's @jkf, I used to catch on that too.

you need to sweeten the pot a little.

What would you suggest? All three I tagged have variously accused of me flagrantly dishonesty, bad faith, and other misdeeds on this particular topic. I would imagine someone who holds that belief would be eager for the opportunity to substantiate it and record it for posterity.

Meanwhile they get a potential embarrassment and have to expose their identity.

Huh? You're talking about having to expose their voices? I don't think that really constitutes "expose their identity".

I think part of the point is, people will have to come out and identify as election deniers. The next thing, they're being accused of supporting the Jan 6th coup, wanting to overthrow the legitimate government, and being a fully-signed up fascist.

This podcast is probably okay if nobody except the likes of mottizens are going to listen to it, but it's a real possibility that someone might listen to it and decide to out the fascists getting ready to support Trump in his second attempt to impose totalitarian dictatorship. Look at all the alarm and disquiet over Project 2025 from sober reliable sources.

(Yes, that last was tongue-in-cheek). Everyone from "women and minorities most affected" to "climate change denialism" to "concentration camps for gays and forced pregnancy!" just in that random sampling.

I think part of the point is, people will have to come out and identify as election deniers. The next thing, they're being accused of supporting the Jan 6th coup, wanting to overthrow the legitimate government, and being a fully-signed up fascist.

There's plenty of election deniers who openly admit to it and would probably have no problem with it even in conversations with strangers. What has happened to them that is bad?

Fox news was sued and lost almost $800 million.

Am I misremembering, or was this the one in which Fox was shown to have peddled the idea that Dominion's voting machines were rigged but not even the hosts saying it believed what they were saying?

That's not what the lawsuit alleged. It said that hosts were allowed to make claims that executives believed were false, and that guests were brought on and made claims that the hosts believed were false. I don't think there were any claims that were (provably) disbelieved by the person who made them. The argument was that executives/hosts had enough control over the claims of hosts/guests that allowing those claims to be made was tantamount to making them directly.

But in this case that means the podcast itself would be analogous to Fox executives/hosts, and the motte members would be the hosts/guests, so it's not a direct example.

That's not what the lawsuit alleged. It said that hosts were allowed to make claims that executives believed were false, and that guests were brought on and made claims that the hosts believed were false.

Okay, yeah, this is the case I was thinking of. I recall going through the evidence brought against them and I found it fairly convincing that Fox had no reason to believe what they were peddling and also didn't believe it themselves.

The actual proof can be found in the pdf at the bottom of this article. It's 192 pages, but it's either screenshots that can quickly be read or large font question-answer segments. I think it clearly indicates that the people at Fox didn't believe what they were saying, because their own research team was telling them there wasn't any evidence, and it notes that Fox believed executives had an obligation to correct people from stating falsehoods on their own network.

Ultimately, what did Fox in wasn't the view that the election was stolen. It was not believing their own public statements.

Well but keep in mind the Boston Strangler got away with it for for decades before we discovered how to use DNA to identify people. Voice identification isn't far off I'd bet, but it isn't really necessary - this isn't a court case, fancy computer programs aren't required to whip up an outrage mob to ruin your life, only plausibility is, and like Pierre said a motivated individual could do that today. So yeah they are exposing their identity in my perspective, in a way they hadn't before, but even if you think it's only a possibility why would someone roll the dice on their livelihood for a podcast argument?

You could just speak through a speech synthesizer.

I've previously spent $130 to hire a Nigerian voice actress to redub someone concerned about their identity and I imagine the masking options are way cheaper now.

Redubbing is a great idea, and it would mollify my concerns about my identity enough to sweeten the pot. Although yeah, I'd hope it was cheaper than $130.

Adjusting equalizer settings is usually enough, and I haven't explored the AI voice tools yet but I imagine there's potential there

There's also a possibility that some of the snow which hits my tongue was irradiated and I end up slowly consuming enough radioactive material to kill me. We don't take risk by itself as our sole factor. At the end of the day, I think the chances of someone maliciously using a voice recording from someone here is low enough that going on the podcast isn't an issue.

This case from a few months ago is interesting.

A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person

I think that your relatively safe opinions have stopped you from fully thinking this through. It certainly does seem unlikely at this moment that someone would use a voice recording from here against a user. But it also seemed completely ridiculous that people would lose their jobs for opinions they held 20 years ago, or go after members of your family, until it happened and now it happens all the time. The concern isn't simply this moment, it is the rest of time.

All of those people made it much less work to find their identity than is under discussion.

20 years ago there was an expectation of privacy which doesn't exist today. There weren't programs that could search images and match faces. The culture frowned on the idea of firing someone for non work related issues, so even if someone did suspect their black face halloween costume might resurface, they probably thought they could just apologise for it like in a sane world.

Besides which, we are talking about people who are convinced that the most powerful government in the world has become an anarchotyranny that hates them and does everything in its power to gaslight the planet about its democracy. And they're right.

I'm not convinced that anyone who goes onto the podcast is in serious danger of losing their jobs or having their families harassed in two decades time or even further into the future. Even if they happen to be election truthers.

Yeah I gathered. How about you get ymeskhout to say your full name, address and telephone number on the next episode. Boy would my face be red then!

Man, it's a good thing Yassine isn't asking for those in the first place, huh?

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Voice + whatever history one can build up from this website + potential reddit history and in the present of AI that's more than enough for a motivated journalist to round up a list of wrong-thinkers to push whatever psyop-of-the-month or even just to keep on file in case whatever organization they associate with started making statements about Gaza or whatever in the next year. If I can allow myself to be slightly paranoid.

I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about this issue. I have to admit it's just not that interesting to me. It just feels like Daily Show level dunking on the proles.

The equivalent might be multiple effort posts trying to argue against flat earthers, Nation of Islam, Bush did 9/11, or astrology.

I just don't feel a strong need to make arguments for or against low status belief systems.

I think what makes the issue compelling to me is the same reason lockdowns, the origin of COVID, became controversial or to some extent the vaccines. The big thing driving interest in these things was the absolute insistence by every mainstream source out there that there was “nothing to see here” and refusing to entertain the idea that it was worth looking at.

That’s one thing that keeps me interested in the idea. I don’t think it likely that the election was stolen in the ballot stuffing, vote switching sense; it seems that instead the media and government and social media conglomerates worked tough to prevent negative press from being spread about Biden. But if you want a claim of fraud to go away, I think it needs a fair, open and honest investigation. There are statistical methods that can be used to look for fraud, forensic accountants use them quite often. There are historical sources that can tell us a fair bit about how a given precinct votes, an$ you can compare the trend lines to what happened in 2020. Hell, look for mail in ballots from the recently deceased. Compare the results to polling trends that every polling company had, including the internal polls used by the parties. None of these are foolproof, obviously, but I can’t exactly blame people for being suspicious when the government and media both are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “nothing to see here.”

Also, I think it’s interesting just for the mathematical evidence that might be gathered or used. Trying to sus out whether an odd result is just a fluke as compared to evidence of an intentional attempt to change the results is just interesting.

It gives me 2000s edgy atheist vibes. Come on my podcast and offer hard evidence that god exists! That sort of thing.

Of course there isn't hard evidence. That's how the secret ballot works, if you manage to make the switch successfully no one can prove otherwise because you can't trace the votes back. The evidence simply doesn't exist unless one of the conspirators leaks it or fucks up. If they fucked it up the evidence would already be out there. It's not really a debatable issue, you could flip it on OP and ask him to provide hard evidence that the votes that were counted were in fact the votes cast by the voters and they wouldn't be able to prove that either.

You can point to other things like motive, ability, etc. Talk about how institutions and 3 letter agencies were openly coordinating against Trump and even foreign government spy agencies like mi6 appear to have coordinated with them. It's not hard evidence though, so OP can sit around and twirl their fedora all day.

If there's no hard evidence then it makes the weakmanning accusations even more baffling.

  • -10

You might be more interested in debunking flat earthers if they dominated one of your primary social spaces.

If the constellation of stolen election beliefs was treated in a similar manner to the low status beliefs you reference, I would agree with you that this would be a waste of time. Unfortunately it remains a deeply consequential position that isn't just relegated to some fringe. The Republican party has enshrined this belief into a shibboleth that is a practical requirement for admission, as the presumptive leader of the conservative movement uses it as a screening/loyalty test.

I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about this issue. I have to admit it's just not that interesting to me. It just feels like Daily Show level dunking on the proles.

The equivalent might be multiple effort posts trying to argue against flat earthers, Nation of Islam, Bush did 9/11, or astrology.

A lot of Motters seem at least mildly sympathetic to fake vote counts in 2020. (The election being 'stolen' is a much squishier topic, but let's limit things to fake ballot-casting or vote-tallying.) Given my other belief that posters seem unusually insightful on other topics, this makes an important discrepancy. Is there really something to it? Or are these posters hyper-irrational and I've misjudged them all this time?

If a large chunk of The Motte started signaling interest in flat earth, 9/11 truth, astrology etc, I would be more interested in investigating those claims, too, either to credit those claims or to discredit The Motte.

I’ll back @ymeskhout here and say that there’s a pretty significant amount of motte-and-baileying going on, where people retreat to ‘obviously the Deep State didn’t literally hack voting machines and the people who claim to have evidence of large-scale ballot stuffing are grifters, but there was still a widespread effort across the country to swing it for Biden using unsavoury methods’. And then the minute pressure is relaxed, people go back to ‘the deep state literally stole the election’.

So I understand why he’s being a hardass and saying, ‘can any of you provide any evidence at all that the election was literally, actually stolen’. And he gets crickets, or attempts at sanewashing.

I do actually believe that the combination of censorship, changed voting rules, and keeping Biden in a basement so his senility wouldn’t show add up to ‘an election that should shame a first-world country’. But the American Right has an amazing ability to take valid, compelling critiques and convert them into obviously wrong factual claims.

When it comes to "hacked voting machines", I remember that being the explanation for how Trump beat Hillary coming from the liberal/left side. My go-to example of that is the otherwise reasonable and sensible Jane on the old SSC who provided accounts of how the Russians had hacked the machines and stolen votes and meddled in all kinds of elections to give Trump the victory.

What's that saying again, 'what goes around, comes around'? If you've been going on for years about how obviously voting machines are insecure because the operators/owners of the software are all Republican donors, then you can't expect to swing round now and go "no, this election was 100% secure" when it's the other side making the complaint.

Obligatory disclaimer: I don't think there was voting machine hacking by Russians or Republicans or Venezuelans or Democrats (even though the attempt to introduce electronic voting in my country in 2002 faltered and ended up a total fiasco), but what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If, when your candidate lost, you had 'reputable' sources going on about 'this is how the machines could have been hacked', you don't get to call it conspiracy theory when the other side do it when their candidate lost.

It’s actually permissible to consistently criticize unjustified claims of election interference no matter what side they come from.

Whackadoodles on the left should be criticized too, but there’s nothing quite like the “MAGA election was stolen” brigade on the left, probably in no small part because Trump is a special kind of politician.

I'll say three things about this:

  1. I have professional familiarity with voting machine security, enough to know that most people would be horrified to realize how insecure they are.

  2. If I were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, I would fire my intelligence chiefs if they weren't trying to influence American elections to our advantage.

  3. It stands to reason, therefore, that any sufficiently motivated and financed group could be (and has probably at least considered) trying to hack elections.

That doesn't mean it's actually happening, of course, but the concerns are not crazy moonbat conspiracy theories.

I think we'd have to be concerned with the likely motives of such actors.

I think Russia and China etc don't have much reason to care whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge - the outcomes on things they actually care about are probably within a standard deviation of outcomes regardless of which party is in charge of what. What they are likely to care about more is the overall levels of tribal division and conflict.

Low internal conflict means that anything we do or intervene in overseas is likely to be broadly supported, consistent over the long term, decently well-planned and robust against setbacks. High internal conflict means that anything either party does will be opposed by the other for tribalistic reasons if nothing else. Interventions will tend to be the opposite - inconsistent, weak, poorly-supported, poorly-planned, likely to be canceled at minor setbacks.

As such, they probably don't really care about actually hacking voting machines, except in as much as half-assed and ineffective attempts to do so reduce everyone's confidence that whoever gets elected won legitimately. They are probably much more interested in backing extreme activist groups on both sides to amp up the overall level of division. Which IIRC is pretty much all they've been credibly accused of doing.

I think Russia and China etc don't have much reason to care whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge - the outcomes on things they actually care about are probably within a standard deviation of outcomes regardless of which party is in charge of what.

??? That is clearly not true. Trump intends to collapse NATO and let Russia do as they wish to their neighbors. Biden doesn't.

Well, he said that at one point, but he also threatened to bomb Moscow if they attacked Ukraine. Whatever any of us might believe, it's pretty clear that Putin started planning his invasion of Ukraine right around when Biden was sworn in. Not exactly a sign that they thought Biden and the Democrats would be much more effectively tough on him. Seems more like American chaos is what they really want.

I mean you can twist this the other way too.

Perhaps Putin felt he needed to take decisive action because of the potential for Biden administration policy to make the geopolitical situation worse for Russia.

It’s possible Trump was deterring Russian aggression against Ukraine by being a bit of a wildcard and also Putin not wanting to put him in a hard place, vs. having him as about the friendliest US president he could hope for. Once Trump was out the calculus changed. Trump was also extremely unpopular with basically all of our allies, in and out of NATO, and that division was generally good for Russia.

But also they do love American chaos.

Iran also really hates Trump and the GOP has more hardliners on Iran than the Dems.

Disagree that 3 follows, because it being easy to hack voting machines is very different from it being easy to hack voting machines and get away with it.

Any large criminal conspiracy of this type is going to involve some idiot mooks on the ground and a lot of contact points for someone to notice something suspicious. And any small conspiracy is going to have to focus on a single point where any anomaly large enough to sing a major election will be super obvious when compared to the exit polls.

Whether the machines are 'secure' or not, I don't actually believe anyone can influence enough of them to change large national elections without getting caught.

I was professionally involved in fending off foreign election influence/interference in 2020.

Some cases are publicly documented. Scale for influence is very hard though, and actually affecting the voting count is very, very hard. Not because the machines are all that secure, but because we have a decentralized system.

What perhaps has been effective at influence is “hack and leak”, as happened with Guccifier and was (incorrectly) suspected of the Hunter laptop.

What’s far more effective for foreign countries is not trying to affect voters directly, but instead buying good will via donations to say think tanks, universities, and pet projects of prominent politicians.

We've seen American attempts to influence elections in other countries, something which seems to be conveniently forgotten; Obama making suggestions about what way to vote in the independence and Brexit referendums for one.

And notice how we know that fact because the evidence is really obvious.

I believe China could influence our elections. I don't believe they could do it through hacking voting machines or changing vote counts, without leaving clear evidence behind.

Yes, exactly. Everyone does it, we all know this, we pretend to be shocked when it's suggested that we would do that and we pretend to be outraged at the suggestion that anyone else might do it to us.

Conflating a politician making an overt statement of preference, regarding the closest ally of the US, and covert influence or interference operations is not a smart way to analyze the issue of election meddling.

You seem to think I am making an argument I'm not.

I'm saying I think that Russia trying to meddle in American elections is plausible and in fact I would expect them to try.

I am not saying I believe all the various theories about how they did.

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What's that saying again, 'what goes around, comes around'? If you've been going on for years about how obviously voting machines are insecure because the operators/owners of the software are all Republican donors, then you can't expect to swing round now and go "no, this election was 100% secure" when it's the other side making the complaint.

Much like my complaints about irregularities, violations of law and policy, and the decline of true secret balloting, I actually am very sympathetic to people that are highly suspicious of voting machines. There simply is no need for voting machines with software. Introducing additional vulnerabilities where they're not strictly necessary is just a bad idea on general principle. People should simply show up to their voting location, present their identification for comparison against the registered voters in the locale, complete a paper ballot, and have that ballot counted locally with results reported to a central location. Additional mechanisms that involve software, ballot movement, centralization, and so on just introduce unnecessary vulnerabilities that rightfully decrease trust in elections. I don't really think there is any grand conspiracy going on, but if there was, it would probably involve introducing a bunch of pointless vulnerabilities with pretty lame excuses for doing so.

But the American Right has an amazing ability to take valid, compelling critiques and convert them into obviously wrong factual claims.

Not to be too whiny, but this isn't just a characteristic of the American Right. The biggest social movement on the left over the past decade has been BLM and BLM-adjacent movements. When it comes to some of the core complaints regarding police brutality, police acting as an adversarial group towards the public, and other policing issues, I and others that now identify more with the right are often sympathetic. Instead of trying to build a coherent coalition around that and stick to the facts, they come up with absolute nonsense like "hands up don't shoot" and the idea that police are "hunting black men". It's ridiculous, it has nothing to do with facts, and it makes the country a worse place. People believe ridiculous fabulists and race-grifters rather than sticking with the defensible critique.

There are a lot of examples like this (Israel-Palestine, business practices in the medical industry, predatory lending in housing and education) where the facts are actually relevant and probably sufficient to build a substantial coalition, but the most prominent voices push the most retarded version of the argument that you've ever heard in your life.

True, thanks for the pushback. I wonder how much of this is downstream of having a healthy grassroots community. The British Left, which has an extensive set of community organisations and publishers behaves on the same kind of way (see ‘the countryside is racist’) but the right mostly doesn’t as far as I can see.

(Instead they all stick their fingers in their ears and chant ‘this is fine, this is fine, everything is fine, nothing is wrong, I can’t hear you lalalalala’).

I agree this is a concern though we might disagree on how widespread it is comparatively speaking. The best guard against this phenomenon is for the sane actors to disavow the retarded versions of their arguments. I'm someone who has long supported BLM's policy positions (at least the Campaign Zero ones released in 2016) and I'm not shy about acknowledging the retards who are nominally on my camp, or otherwise acknowledging reality and facts adverse to my positions.

I'm not shy about acknowledging the retards who are nominally on my camp,

I'll bite. Describe some of them.

Sure, anyone who when asked 'how many unarmed black men were shot by police last year?' answers something insane like 10,000. Anyone who calls for the literal abolition of police or prisons. Anyone who believes the Jacob Blake shooting was unjustified (though I'll leave room for a compelling argument based on the reality of the case). Anyone in general who lies or otherwise misrepresents the circumstances for any particular incident of police abuse. Anyone who argues that the only explanation for any racial disparity must be racism. I could go on, and you're welcome to take me to task on anything else within this constellation.

I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about this issue

I don't know if that's his motivation, but come on, it's just fun to plant a flag and defend a spot against superior numbers, when you feel confident enough you can pull it off.

but come on, it's just fun to plant a flag and defend a spot against superior numbers, when you feel confident enough you can pull it off.

Yes, but it's unsporting, since it's basically an NBA player versus the Junior Varsity basketball team, and on his own turf no less. @ymeskhout is a lawyer, taking on a bunch of amateurs demonstrates little.

I do think it is hard to design public debates that function as a genuine meeting of minds and not just a spectacle for good rhetoricians to flex their skills. But even so, I think ymeskhout's proposed format is a good faith effort to make something that will lean more towards the former than the latter.

You don't need to be a lawyer to take down a lawyer. Someone who did speech/debate or forensics in high school, who is a reasonably competent public speaker, and who has the weight of evidence on their side would probably do a reasonably good job arguing against a lawyer who is bullshitting all their points.

I think planting a flag is enemy territory is a noble project. But... is this the right spot for that? Almost no one here believes in the strong stolen election hypothesis.

This feels like going into a Christian church and yelling "it's okay to eat bacon - fight me". Like, yeah, everyone agrees with you, and you are fundamentally misunderstanding your audience.

If you want to debate something more interesting, maybe debate the weak stolen election hypothesis, which I'll define thusly: An election run under 2016 rules would have led to a Trump victory.

I don't know how long you've been around, but in the immediate aftermath of the election there was an entire gaggle of posters who would jump on practically any allegation of fraud as being dispositive, from people claiming that the specific numbers were "Statistically impossible" because they violated some kind of theory, to every video that was purportedly of some guy with a suitcase full of fake ballots. When 2000 Mules came out there were a lot of people who thought this was pretty strong evidence. This is what @Corvos means when he talks about a motte and bailey argument; someone was accusing Yassine of weakmanning a few days ago because nobody really took the 200 Mules arguments seriously. WEll, I remember getting into several heated arguments with people who were insisting that, previous claims aside, this was the strongest evidence available showing that Biden fraudulently won the 2020 election. I was mostly focused on the ridiculous mechanics involved in actually running such a scheme, but now that it's clear that the factual claims were likely fabricated out of whole cloth, that argument is suddenly no longer in vogue.

As far as the Biden v. Missouri stuff is concerned, at a certain point, the alleged misconduct becomes so vague and collateral to the central argument that it should no longer be persuasive to anybody. In baseball, the Mendoza Line is a sort of minimum statistical performance standard. Mario Mendoza was a player from the 1970s who embodied the true spirit of a "replacement level" player, someone who was of similar ability to a fringe major leaguer or minor league call-up. The idea is that players should be evaluated based on how much better they are than the kind of player who a team can get on a moment's notice for practically nothing. Usually the term is used pejoratively, as in "he's batting below the Mendoza Line".

For election fraud claims, I present the Abrams Line. Stacy Abrams famously refused to concede the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to winner Brian Kemp, because she thought that Georgia election policies were rigged in such a way to discourage likely Democratic voters, particularly minority voters. Almost all Republicans waved away these claims as horseshit. I agree that they were, but at least they ostensibly had something to do with the election itself. The idea that "Trump lost because social media companies cracked down on supposed COVID-19 'misinformation'" makes Abrams look like she has them dead to rights by comparison. OR the corollary "Trump lost because social media companies censored the Hunter Biden story", which leaves out the fact that this censorship was only in effect for, at most, a few days, and that the story itself was national news about a day after it broke. These theories also rely on the supposition that social media is so powerful that no one can avoid the grip of the information it conveys... except of course, for the people making these arguments, who are obviously immune to any forms of persuasion. The other side's propaganda is always leading the country down the tubes, be it social media ads or talk radio or whatever, but whenever, for instance, a lefty is asked how much conservative talk radio they'd have to listen to before voting Republican, the obvious answer is that they'd never vote Republican but other people would. I'd like to meet these people some day.

people claiming that the specific numbers were "Statistically impossible" because they violated some kind of theory

Do you mean me in particular?

I'm quite proud of that. The New York Times posted two data points from ongoing vote tallies, based on their direct access to the data. I said that those two couldn't be consistent with each other, based on nothing more than a priori mathematics. It turned out that I was right and the New York Times was wrong, because one of the updates in their data source was just a typo and a later update reverted it. The conspiracy theorists' explanation for the discrepancy was also wrong, but the final score in that particular round was still New York Times 0, Specific Numbers 0, Conspiracy Theorists 0, TheMotte Statistics 1.

I don't remember who it was, exactly, but what you posted wasn't the kind of thing I was referring to. I'm too lazy to research the specifics here, but there was some kind of law used in auditing that says certain numbers are evidence of fraud because of how the digits are distributed or something along those lines, and they were using that alone as evidence that vote totals from certain counties were fabricated.

Ah, Benford's Law. Great in other contexts, but here that one didn't pass the smell test for me; the "law" only applies if you're sampling from distributions spread over orders of magnitude, not voting districts drawn to be nearly equally sized multiplied by vote percentages centered around .5. I later learned there's a clever trick where you can look at later digits' distributions instead of the first digit's, but all the skeptics I saw in 2020 were just misapplying the basic version of the law.

I've seen final vote tallies that were obvious fakes from the numbers alone, but for elections like Saddam's or Putin's, not Trump's or Biden's.

I still heartily approve of trying to check, though. An election isn't just about getting the right result, it's also supposed to be about getting the right result in a transparently trustworthy way.

You're talking about Benford's Law, which works by counting the leading digits in order to build a distribution, then comparing this distribution to the expected. Perhaps unintuitively, 1 is by far the most common leading number, and 9 the least.

The idea that "Trump lost because social media companies cracked down on supposed COVID-19 'misinformation'" makes Abrams look like she has them dead to rights by comparison. OR the corollary "Trump lost because social media companies censored the Hunter Biden story", which leaves out the fact that this censorship was only in effect for, at most, a few days, and that the story itself was national news about a day after it broke.

To be clear, I would classify both of these as malicious election interference, especially the latter. Yes, the news made its way out eventually but it was prevented from going viral. The combination of preventing mainstream outlets from discussing it and wheeling out someone from the FBI to lie about it being fake turned a legitimate and hugely damaging story into a wacko conspiracy theory. It was a close election, I wouldn’t be surprised if that and a couple of other things tipped it.

These theories also rely on the supposition that social media is so powerful that no one can avoid the grip of the information it conveys... except of course, for the people making these arguments, who are obviously immune to any forms of persuasion.

Different people respond to different forms of media. I know people who are influenced by, say, radio vox pops even though I certainly wouldn’t.

I feel like this place would have difficulty finding someone to argue the strong election hypothesis of votes changed but also have trouble finding anyone to argue against a Trump victory in 2020 if the election was ran on 2016 rules. Both seem to be very difficult positions to take.

More interesting and entirely difficult to prove would be whether the Democrats could have won in 2020 if they didn’t go full tds. TDS I believe was a root cause of COVID lockdown excesses and the severity of the 2020 “everything is racists” and riots. If the Dems stayed normies and didn’t go full scorched earth and just ran on a milder Trump is unstable type of campaign. If the Dems do mass mail-in voting and avoid the riots they win in a landslide in 2020. If they avoid the riots but have closer to 2016 rules it would be quite interesting. One could also say the same thing about the 2024 lawfare attempts as actually boosting Trump despite it obviously be an election strategy for the left.

Would you define "strong stolen election" hypothesis as people actually faking actual votes in some way? Cases of fraudulent ballots, directly manipulating vote totals, etc?

I am pretty sure I have seen a number of people here argue for those sorts of hypotheses, both during and immediately after the election, and over the years since.

Almost no one here believes in the strong stolen election hypothesis.

Yeah I agree, and it's been one of my frustrations with ymeshkout. I think there's lots of things that are reasonable to believe / valid to discuss without having ironclad evidence one way or the other, but with him everything turns into a trial where you have to prove everything beyond reasonable doubt.

but with him everything turns into a trial where you have to prove everything beyond reasonable doubt.

Patently false. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having confidence qualifiers to any of one's beliefs, I myself do this when I express a conclusion I'm unsure about. It's perfectly fine/commendable for someone to acknowledge that they lack ironclad evidence for their belief. The problem is making confident assertions without the ability to back them up.

This is the place for folks to "test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" after all. We could all save a lot of time if people were more transparent about their foundations.

Patently false. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having confidence qualifiers to any of one's beliefs,

Oh god, you're doing it again.

Yes, I'm sorry for not stating my objection in the form of a 10 page legal document, where all possible caveats are pre-emptively addressed, but that is exactly the problem I'm gesturing at.

Nah, I'm thrilled by the most perfunctory of acknowledgements from anyone holding a position weakly. I rarely even get that much of a morsel.

Right, but now you're just flat out dodging the objection I raised.

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IME:

-Weakly justified beliefs resist close examination.

-Loose thinkers dislike rigor taking all the fun out of it. Theory is fun but details are a drag.

Weakly justified beliefs resist close examination.

True, but if you insist on only discussing strongly justified beliefs, you won't have much to talk about. A fair application of the standard you're bringing up end with abolishing many of the ideas that the functioning of our society rests on.

Loose thinkers dislike rigor taking all the fun out of it. Theory is fun but details are a drag.

False. It has nothing to do with the thinkers, but with the ideas. Rigorously justified ideas simply become a matter of fact. The theory of relativity might be mindblowing at first, but becomes rather mundane when you're taking time-dilation into account in your calculations for a living. The ideas that are fun are the ones that still have some mystery about them.

True, but if you insist on only discussing strongly justified beliefs, you won't have much to talk about. A fair application of the standard you're bringing up end with abolishing many of the ideas that the functioning of our society rests on... The ideas that are fun are the ones that still have some mystery about them.

This reminds me of nothing so much as the flat earthers in that documentary who do experiment after experiment to "prove" the earth is flat, fail every time, and still retain their belief. Seriously trying to examine and justify the belief is gauche, that was never the point. The point is to get together with your buddies, talk about how the man is getting you down, and work on some crafts projects with cool toys.

Cute, but then how many ideas we've been fighting over can be described as "strongly justified"? Is mass immigration good or bad for a country? Are differences in performance between groups down to genetics or systemic oppression? Will AI be our doom, and what steps should we take to prevent it?

Take either position you want on these, and neither one will be "strongly justified. You could argue that the proper approach to that would be to say "we just don't know", and I suppose I agree, but there still decisions to be made on these issues. Rationalists have their Bayesian schtick, but as far as I've seen it's just a mathematical expression of whatever opinion they wanted to hold anyway.

My conclusion is that there are issues that aren't going to be proven rigorously, and in these cases it's fine to have strongly held beliefs without strong justification. The best way to get at the truth in these cases is to create an environment where people with strongly held opposing beliefs are forced to interact with each other. You're not going to get a particularly accurate answer, and half the time might not even be directionally correct, but it blows "rigor" out of the water.

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It’s fine to discuss any kind of belief. What’s problematic is having an imbalance between the strength of the belief and the strength of the evidence.

There’s a type of person who relishes gray areas and loose approaches towards grand theories. This type of person does not like systemic approaches to truth. Perhaps the classic example of this is when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson tried to hash things out in multiple podcasts.

On a Motte podcast re: Jan 6, at some point toward the end Yassine’s counterpart said something to the effect of “you know I’m not following the exact details on that; I’m more of a big picture guy.” Same dynamic.

What’s problematic is having an imbalance between the strength of the belief and the strength of the evidence.

I don't think that's the case. Our entire society rests on very weak evidence. Is "abolish the police" a good idea? Is democracy the best way to organize society? We're no way near to rigorously answering those questions, but dicking around with them would most likely end in disaster.

There’s a type of person who relishes gray areas and loose approaches towards grand theories. This type of person does not like systemic approaches to truth. Perhaps the classic example of this is when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson tried to hash things out in multiple podcasts.

I notice that your arguments rely a lot on psychologizing your opponents, and don't really contain much of a case for your approach to truth.

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