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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:
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.
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.
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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.
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You might be more interested in debunking flat earthers if they dominated one of your primary social spaces.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'll say three things about this:
I have professional familiarity with voting machine security, enough to know that most people would be horrified to realize how insecure they are.
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.
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.
??? 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.
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Iran also really hates Trump and the GOP has more hardliners on Iran than the Dems.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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’).
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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'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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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