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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.
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.
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.
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