It’s really a good small scale model of war.
I listened to a radio segment about The Afghanistan Papers today and that was a good description of war on a large scale.
There have been a bunch, there’s a Wiki list of them here.
Upgrade your Bayesian thinking imo. The question “what causes planes to go down” is a very different one to “what causes planes to go down over Tehran, on fire, at now of all times”. A low-probability theory which neatly explains the particulars can easily become more likely than a coincidence. This is also sort of what is going on in the Epstein thread. The question “what causes prisoners to die in jail” is a very different one to “what causes Jeffrey Epstein to die in jail”.
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This is a really good post that plugs Clovis’s leak pretty tightly. Context really matters.
I disagree. I simply operate under the long proven postulate that conclusions require evidence. I’m not the least bit interested in supposition, bayesian or otherwise.
Sure I may be late to the party a few times but the vast majority of the time I’m going to avoid silly tinfoil hat speculation that is not only wrong, but actually poisonous.
But sometimes that leaves you drinking the Kool-Aid.
Wikipedia list 33 Iranian plane crashes with fatalities. Your assumption that Iranian accidents are more likely caused by shoot downs is just not true.
We’re not considering “Iranian accidents”, we’re considering cases where a plane went down on fire in a place where military activity is happening. It’s not being skeptical to refuse to consider the context, it’s just throwing data out for no reason.
Here is a list of crashes caused by in-flight fires. There are not many more or them than there are incidents of planes being shot down. These are two unlikely explanations, but in one of them, the location in Tehran and the day it took place are intrinsic in the explanation, while for the other, in addition to accepting an unlikely event, we also have to suppose that a gigantic coincidence took place. The explanation which does not require the coincidence is therefore much more likely. There’s nothing very controversial about any of this.
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You are acting like I’m denying it was a shoot down. My “sin” in this discussion was waiting an entire extra day for additional evidence. It’s the same “sin” I supposedly committed in the Epstein thread. Waiting for actual evidence, then once it was available, agreed with its conclusions.
Let me ask you, what benefit comes from the early supposition? I can’t think of a single one. I guess in the rare times the supposition turns out correct people can pat themselves on the back.
I can however think of many problems that arise from this type of evidence-free guesswork. Its the same strain of thinking that basically led us to trump.
For the record, my op on this discussion literally gave you credit for being correct and admitted I was wrong.
If you were surprised then you had come to some kind of conclusion without any evidence.
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The problem with your line here is that you have just swallowed the line from your Prime Minister with an unhealthy lack of skepticism. Chris is right and it was just pretty likely that this plane got shot down by Iran, almost certainly in a fog of war (completely unsurprising) kind of accident. That’s a lot better way to form beliefs about what happened than the official statement of any of these governments (Iran says it was a mechanical failure) or their newspapers of record. The video may be actual evidence.
The problem with Victor’s line is that he’s also not assessing what is most likely, but just believing the opposite of what the US gov’t says. The government does lie a lot, but they probably wouldn’t lie if Iran shot the plane down, and that’s the most likely cause here.
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I generally operate under the postulate that most explanations are mundane and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I am swallowing the dozens of news reports, multiple government leader confirmations and an actual video showing it being shot down.
Maybe you haven’t been following the news, but Iran shooting down a plane at that time was absolutely not more extraordinary than a 6 year old plane just bursting into a huge ball of fire.
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I was halfway through a much longer post saying what this says more succinctly.
The problem is that selecting the lens through which you view the event changes what you think a reasonable “default” explanation is. If I just treated this as “fatal transportation accident” and ignored all the particulars from there, my working theory would probably be that it was a head-on collision on the highway, let’s say. You know, because that’s what most fatal transportation accidents are. My point here is that by treating this incident as “plane crash” and ignoring the specifics, you’re going to make far too general assumptions that will lead you to a weird default conclusion.
But your perception of what constitutes an “extraordinary claim” here is coloured implicitly by how you decided to categorise the event. Edit: Ponied by microbet making the same point above.
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You didn’t answer my question. With my approach when I am wrong nothing happens. With yours, we have further spread false information.
I get a tiny bit of egg in my face waiting a day. If it turned out not to the a shoot down, your posts would add the the endless conspiracy theorizing eating our democracies from the inside.
You didn’t just have no theory. You had a theory that the plane had some kind of mechanical problem. If you kept that entirely to yourself, then I guess you didn’t spread fake news.
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I can’t tell if you are missing the point or just playing with me.
I’m multi-tasking so missing the point is possible, but I’m confident about the point that you had to have a theory (without evidence) in order to be surprised. And I don’t think your theory was the most likely explanation for what happened, even before the evidence came in.
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Arguing about whether it’s a good idea to discuss theories of what happened is a separate question to what those theories ought to be. I know your theories were different to mine because you said so. Arguing that we should be team “wait for the facts” is another thing.
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ChrisV can you apply your prodigious research powers to finding out why Tehran airport was apparently business as usual in a potential war situation?