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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.
“Abolish the police” is a horrifically bad idea! I’m a bit flabbergasted you would propose that as an area with weak evidence.
“Democracy” empirically outperforms anything else we’ve tried at scale. Plenty of debate to be had over what “democracy” even means or if an even better system is possible.
My approach to truth is bog standard rationality(TM).
The dynamic of “loose vs. tight” thinking is issue-agnostic, by the way. On this issue, I’m psychologizing some posters who seem allergic to the lawyerly approach overall.
“Democracy outperforms” actually feels weakly proven to me. Lots of great empires and golden ages were not Democracies. A lot of Englands peak was hybrid. Augustus period of Rome wasn’t Democracy.
Singapore wasn’t a Democracy.
Peter Thiel of course believes in Monarchy.
Democracy also seems to work very poorly in low IQ countries. Even if you could make a strong argument that Democracy works best for Western European people you would still struggle with Democracy is best in sub-Saharan Africa. Saudi Arabia I feel like would be worse if Democracy between the historical religious and a likely fight over oil spoils.
It seems as though the key thing to government is having a great deal of individual agency below the government and buy in by the people.
Oh it is weakly proven without qualifiers.
Gotta limit it to the last few hundred years of history to start.
And I completely agree it’s “hard mode” that simply can’t be pulled off well in many parts of the world. (I don’t think IQ is the issue in say Russia or Iran, but culture and ideology matter.)
Bur after the USSR’s collapse, the ChiComms have the only real rival system in the running and it’s not a model that anyone is copying (unlike the Soviet model).
Western democracy/market capitalism/liberalism has worked in enough places over enough time, and defeated or outlasted several strong competitors, such that using the short hand of “it’s the best system” is something I believe is well justified by the historical record since 1776.
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It wasn't tested very often, and definitely not under controlled conditions. If you think it has strong evidence, your standards are pretty low.
Historically "democracy" has been a spit in the bucket, and in pre-democratic times, it's rarity as a system of government was used as proof that it cannot work, the same way you are currently trying to claim it is clearly superior. I will also note the lack of controlled conditions. If this is your idea of rigor, you're using the word differently then I am.
Yeah, rationality(TM) isn't a great approach to truth for many issues.
Right, and you are not engaging with their arguments against the lawyerly approach, and not providing your own arguments for it.
It’s incredible to me that you assert here that we do not have sufficient evidence regarding policing or democracy to make reasonably confident assertions, at a broad level at least…
…but that there’s room to believe there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
Whatever system of epistemology you’re using is alien to me.
“Controlled conditions” is a red herring because it’s a laughably impossible standard for say the type and level of policing and its effect on crime. The best we can do is observe natural experiments and adjust accordingly. We can also use available evidence and a bit of extrapolation to judge the proposals to defund the police to be a very bad idea for improving crime rates.
Also, I have directly engaged with several arguments against the lawyerly approach. You might think I’m wrong, but please don’t accuse me of not engaging them.
You can find it incredible if you like, but it doesn't change the fact that the arguments for these things are very wishy-washy. As for "sufficient" it depends what you mean by that. Sufficient to not uproot our entire system of government? Why yes, I agree, and that was my point from the start.
I'm not sure this is even true. At first I thought it might be, but your responses re: controlled conditions show that in practice our epistemologies are not that different, you're just applying different t standards to things you like vs. things you don't like.
I agree, it is impossible to have a rigorous justification for that belief.
And what is the best we can do when discussing fraud in elections with secret ballots?
Fair enough, but in the course of our conversation, you seem a lot more interested in psychologizing and slapping adjectives on your opponents, than in discussing the substance of their ideas.
I’m using the same epistemology wherever I go, but different standards of evidence for different kinds of questions.
Asking for laboratory studies for phenomena where controlled conditions are impossible is simply inappropriate. (And of course we know a huge portion of studies with controlled conditions are BS.)
You accuse me of doing different approaches for things I like, but that’s unfounded. It’s not that I like the police. What I like is low crime, and I’ve read enough on the topic and have some lived experience to know having more rather than fewer officers tends to help reduce crime. Similarly, I’d actually prefer a fair bit less democracy than we have now, and I’d prefer a different system if I thought it could do better along various lines.
If you read some of my comments you’ll see more than once where I acknowledge the existence of various anomalies and suspicious happenings, as well as overall unfairness regarding one thing or another. It’s easy to concede what seems to be real (smoke), while maintaining that the idea that significant fraud or anything else (fire) justifying claims of a rigged/stolen election are baseless, given any presented evidence.
With claims of fraud, it’s not natural experiments we want, it’s evidence it happened. It’s a criminal investigation situation. You can actually read about cases where people have been convicted of election fraud. It’s not a new thing. It does take solid evidence though.
I'm not sure if the former is true, because getting you to say anything specific about your approach is turning out to be a long and arduous process. As for the latter - I agree, and that has been my point from the start.
I don't disagree, but at that point you have no way to pretend your thinking is rigorous. With every condition you relax (even if it is simply because meeting it is just not possible) your approach gets progressively wishy-washy.
Yes, and I've met libertarians you professed to particular attachments to libertarianism, it just so happened that they marched in lockstep with von Mises, Rothbard, et al., or communists who just so happened to believe communism yields superior results, and they would totally change their mind if only shown evidence that they wrong, but somehow every counter-argument they ever ran into could be waved away by pointing out some state intervention / capitalist exploitation.
It is "baseless" in the same sense that the idea that police is necessary to protect from crime is "baseless" - only true if you demand an inappropriate standard of evidence. It is "baseless" in the same way as claims Epstein was running a prostitution Ponzi scheme before of it was officially released to the public, or the more recent claims that he didn't kill himself.
Exactly, and given that none of us can be expected to have access to evidence proving it happened, or to be allowed to conduct an investigation where any such evidence could be revealed, it is disingenious to demand we concede election fraud did not happen, barring we meet that standard of evidence.
Many of these schemes were running undetected for years before solid evidence was found. By your logic, the investigation should have never taken place, because the claims were baseless.
I don’t get the sense that there’s anything I could say to get you to stop pretending like you can mind read my epistemology and consistently misrepresent it.
Which is really ironic because my underlying philosophy and approach is identical to Scott’s. I’m not innovating.
Your whole paragraph about libertarians is baffling. But then you bringing in “democracy” as a comparison point was inappropriate and unhelpful from the start.
You are being pretty damn obtuse when you write:
This is not a good faith take in a conversation branching off from the fact TTV (among others) claims there is evidence they have for the courts and that we in the public could see, and where one of the strongest arguments against any meaningful election fraud is that the claims were investigated.
Forget “proving” it happened. We’re pretty far from actual evidence suggesting meaningful election fraud took place because the many claims did not survive scrutiny.
You’re doing an election fraud version of Sagan’s garage dragon and it’s tiresome to have to address your apples to orange comparisons with e.g. police and crime.
And now on the new thread you’re also responding in a way that isn’t even wrong because you can’t seem to grasp the actual point I was making. I might be wrong but it’s not because you refuted my points.
Take a breath and read slower.
I did indulge in a bit of mind reading when I claimed you might be applying different standards to different ideas, but when I see an inconsistency, I cannot help but point it out. The simplest thing to say in that situation is to describe your standards, and to point out how you're actually applying them consistently across ideas, using the claims we've been discussing as examples.
"Identical to Scott's" doesn't really cut it, unless you're literally Scott himself, our interpretations of his work might be different, after all.
I was making a pretty basic point about rationalizing one's biases away. And as for "inappropriate and unhelpful", I wish I could do better, but since you don't really say what your issue is, it's hard for me to address it.
This is where our conversation started. The substance of TTV's claims was not my concern anywhere in our conversation.
If Sagan's garage dragon involved screaming at the believer that they're a far-right conspiracy theorist, instead of investigating, you'd have a point. All I'm saying is that the case is suspicious enough that it warrants an investigation, rather than dismissing it out of hand like it's currently being done.
While this may be occasionally good advice for me, it's a swing and a miss here. First, I'm not sure what's the point of bringing up the other thread, other than to attempt to distract from this one, but more importantly, I think you're just plain wrong. But let's leave that for the other thread.
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