Category: Dunning-Kruger

Narrative reversal

It has never been hard to reconcile this blog covering both science-fiction stories and the toxic weirdness of far-right extremists because both involve counter-factual storytelling. The difference is like the difference between a stage magician whose act involves an agreement between performer and audience to suspend belief and a con artist who uses misdirection and spectacle to deceive. Both the stage magician and the SFF author are also held to higher standards of consistency and elegance in maintaining the audience’s illusions.

Inevitably, I’ll be circling back to the January 6 2021 US Capitol Riot, in which Trump supporters stormed the US legislature to prevent the certification of the 2020 Presidential Election. The riot successfully delayed the vote but only for a time and did not usher in a Trump second term as predicted by QANON supporters.

At the time, there were three kinds of reactions I was seeing on the right:

  • Muted condemnation from some people
  • Praise and excitement
  • Claims that riot was being orchestrated by ANTIFA or the “Deep Sate” to some degree

The last dot point had actually been a common position the day before the protest. There was an expectation that there might be violence or police confrontations and commenters were claiming in advance that if there was any trouble it would be caused by left-wing agent provocateurs.

On the day itself, there was a duel between the bottom two narratives as people tried to sort out which of the two stories was the right one. Was the weirdly costumed “Q-Shaman” (the shirtless man with the tattoos and the horned furry helmet) an obvious infiltrator or a heroic symbol of the Q movement? [Spoilers: he was definitely part of the Q contingent].

Both Sarah Hoyt and Vox Day settled on the second dot point at the time. In particular, Day had been calling for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act as a means to seize power and saw the use of force as a legitimate response. He was also widely predicting that, despite everything, Trump would be inaugurated president before the end of January.

You can read contemporary reactions from Day here: https://archive.is/ZR2Oi and here: https://archive.is/4N7V7

Quotes include:

  • “The President orders his troops to stand down… presumably because their job is done. The certification was stopped and the Congress has been rounded up and secured.”
  • “President Trump’s silence so far suggests a major announcement is coming tonight. And I have to admit, this is already the greatest thing I have seen or heard since the Miracle on Ice in 1980.”
  • “Listening to Anderson Cooper’s voice shake as he tries to explain why it was right for blacks and gays to protest but wrong for the DC protestors to take over the Capital building is hysterical. You can hear the fear in the voices of the CNN commentators. They are TERRIFIED that Trump is crossing the Rubicon.”

Fast forward to June 17 2021 and I am sure you will all be shocked to learn that Day is now firmly in the “false flag” camp. Promoting a story from RT.com (aka “Russia Today”) which itself links to Tucker Carlson/Fox News, as well as an even more obscure right-wing news outlet, Day is advancing the theory that the whole riot was engineered by the FBI. The speculation arose from court documents which (according to the articles) show a number of unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators in the cases laid against protestors who have been prosecuted. The assumption being that these unnamed people are FBI agents who had infiltrated far-right groups such as The Proud Boys. It’s speculation and of course, it’s not impossible but from thin facts to speculation to the conclusion that the FBI organised the riot to discredit the right requires several unsupported leaps. https://archive.ph/3k3y3

The particular theory is not my focus though. What is interesting is the shift. In January 2021 (at least prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration and the complete absence of Trump staging a military coup) Day regarded the Capitol riot as a blow against the Deep State/Democrats/”elites”/SJWs/writers who put romance elements in science fiction novels/sundry other enemies. Now, he’s pushing the claim that the whole thing, even down to booking hotel rooms and flights, was a cunning Deep State plan.

“The false flags are getting a little more sophisticated. This is why Boomer-style mass demonstrations are such a bad idea. Whether the organization is suborned like the Tea Party or false-flagged like the Capital Hill fake riot, the probabilities lie with the situation being very different than the participants imagine.”

https://archive.ph/3k3y3

Anyway, Day has a message for everybody:

“Never take an Internet tough guy at face value, especially not when he’s publicly preaching violence against the government.”

Hey! For once I agree!

Further Annals of Libertarians Discovering Capitalism Sucks

I alluded to Larry Correia’s feelings being hurt by the action of Apple, Google and Amazon against conservative social media service Parler. As a reminder, Parler as well a being a privacy-data nightmare had such weak moderation processes that it was beset with issues with threats of violence.

Larry, who has been tirelessly pushing electoral fraud conspiracy theories since last November is rushing to the defence of Parler.

“Now comes the part where leftists suddenly love free enterprise and companies being able to do whatever they want… Okay, can all the small businesses open? Nope. Only companies that benefit leftist orthodoxy get to do what they want, and if you disagree with this double standard, obviously you hate–the leftist has to look at the printed word and try to sound it out–cap e tall ism?”

https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/01/11/bow-before-appgooglezon/

The “leftist orthodoxy” in question being “don’t murder Mike Pence” which…well I know I agree with that principle but I would not want to be too bold in claiming everybody I know on the left agrees with that on principle. I know for a fact that “let’s not overthrow the government” isn’t exactly against leftist orthodoxy. The principle on the left is more “we know that there are legal consequences for asking for people to break the law because we have a basic understanding of the nature of law, politics and common sense”

Larry goes on to explain:

“In principle I’m usually in favor of letting businesses do whatever they want. You know what else I’m usually against in principle? Bombing Japan. Yet strangely, after Pearl Harbor, circumstances changed, and things which were previously disagreeable become necessary. Go figure.”

ibid

True, all out war is a circumstance in which normal rules of interaction between nations are suspended. Which…well…isn’t that an argument in favour of big tech clamping down hard on a platform being used to encourage the over throw of your country’s constitution? To be fair, you don’t visit Larry’s Facebook page for clear thinking.

“So basically, if Home Depot and a cabal of every building supply store in the country wants to ban an entire class of citizens, that’s fine, just grow your own trees, cut them down, and shape them into lumber yourself. Oh… except once you’ve put in the labor and grown the trees, then the saw companies say no chainsaws for you either. I guess you should just build your own chainsaws from scratch.”

ibid

Their should be a word for this — “suspended epiphany”. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen people online walk up to an idea and get close enough to see the generalisation and realise that their core beliefs are just fundamentally misguided and then…well, just not take that step.

“Like I skimmed the comments to this post yesterday, and it was as expected. HUR DUR YOU SAID NO BAKE CAKE! Oh yeah… That’s totally the same thing. Because remember that time the entire baking industry colluded to deny bread to all gay people, and when the free market responded and somebody opened an LGBT bakery the powerful oven industry stepped in to shut them down… You fucking dopes.”

ibid

He is correct that it is not the same thing. The difference is that women, people of colour in the USA, gay men, lesbians, trans people, disabled people and a whole host of other people who have faced systemic and overt prejudice for years and years genuinely HAVE faced the situation where the individual “freedom” for business to discriminate that conservatives & libertarians have championed, has been so widespread that it the outcome was the same as massive collusion by business to exclude, discriminate and denigrate them. It’s exactly what people have been trying to explain to you for years and what you have so tirelessly scoffed and scorned them about.

Ownership of commerce is political power. That is either true or it isn’t. If it isn’t then Larry has no complaint. If it is then…well the question is one of whether these big corporations are using that power for good or ill and for that we can’t ignore WHAT was going on with Parler.

Hey Larry! Don’t you know that the “evil corporation” is a boring cliche of SJW message fiction? You should because you literally told us:

“The hoighty-toighty literati snobs prefer heavy handed, ham fisted, message fiction. (show picture of sci-fi readers giving up in frustration as they read yet another award winning book where evil corporations, right wing religious fanatics, and a thinly veiled Dick Cheney have raped the Earth until all the polar bears have died and the plot consists entirely of academic hipster douchebags sitting around and talking about their feelings)  “

https://monsterhunternation.com/2013/01/16/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo-part-2-a-very-special-message/

You also were opposed to any limits on big tech in 2014

“– “We believe that the Internet shouldn’t be rigged to benefit big corporations, and that means real net neutrality.”
Wrap your brain around that hypocritical bullshit. We must protect the internet from evil corporations? What about the NSA reading all our stuff? What about the government deciding what can and can’t be said, and Progressive senators trying to pass “Kill Switches”? I’m not a fan of Google, but Google can’t send a SWAT team to my house to kill me.”

https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/07/21/elizabeth-warrens-11-commandments/

It is a bit late in the day for Larry to discover that Elizabeth Warren had a point but it is noticeable that the step big tech took that tipped Larry over the edge was them clamping down on speech aimed at inciting violence to over throw an election.

People may enjoy the figurative aspects of this

I haven’t linked to former Sad Puppy outlet Mad Genius Club in a long while and nor have I discussed my compatriot Dave Freer’s unusual anecdotes for some time. I am a man of some restraint but when Dave literally loses his shit how can I not link to it?

The background is that he has hinted for some time about a bureaucratic dispute he is having with the local government of Flinders Island, where he lives (off the coast of Tasmania). In today’s column he provides the context and well, the punchlines write themselves that I will leave it to readers to pick their preferred ones.

“One of my current one is where the local council with the power vested in them by the state, are protecting my neighbor from our (two people’s worth) sewage treatment wastewater. I live on a farm, a long, long way from a neighbor and we are both well above the wastewater outlet. The chance of my wastewater getting to a neighbor… would take a Biblical flood. And beside the fact that the poor fellow would be far too busy building an ark to care – the dilution would be hundreds of billions to one. But that doesn’t stop the council extracting hundreds of dollars for doing nothing of any value, and forcing me to spend thousands of dollars to achieve absolutely nothing that I couldn’t for five hundred, and harassing the hell out of me. The designer, plumber, the seller of the specialized bits the designer mandated did give some degree of ‘value’ for their rent (back of an envelope – about the same as trad publishing – where the writer earns around 6-8% on that paperback, and 93-94% go to these other fellows). Of course I don’t actually need any of those, and could achieve the same without them, but their services and goods are worth something, just nothing like what I have to pay — because the government mandates I use them, and pure rent-seekers make sure I do.”

https://madgeniusclub.com/2021/01/04/besides-wood-chippers/

Yes, poor persecuted Dave is being oppressed by the government who are making the unreasonable demand that he (checks notes) deals with his own faecal matter properly. I…no, no, there are just too many metaphors here to choose.

When Things Are: Christmas Edition

‘Tis more-or-less the Winter Solstice and at this time of year the merry Christmas tradition of arguing about when/why Christmas is December 25th can be heard rining down the frosted tubes of the internet. I’ll confess to have thrown around a few “Christmas is just a repurposed pagan holiday” a few times as part of festive festivities — it’s not a false argument but it does get overstated. Meanwhile, in far-right trad-catholic circles you’ll find a fair bit of the exact opposite argument: Jesus was definitely born on December 25. I’m going to look at this and also how the English financial year ties into Gollum biting Frodo’s fingers off.

I’ll deal with the last point first. No, putting aside questions of the historical existence of Jesus, nobody knows when he was born and that’s not even a recent idea. The 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia[1] has an extensive entry on Christmas that points out:

“Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. Irenaeus and Tertullian omit it from their lists of feasts; Origen, glancing perhaps at the discreditable imperial Natalitia, asserts (in Lev. Hom. viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) that in the Scriptures sinners alone, not saints, celebrate their birthday; Arnobius (VII, 32 in P.L., V, 1264) can still ridicule the “birthdays” of the gods.”

Christmas is also celebrated on January 6 , January 7, and January 19 by different Christian groups and, of course, “Christmas” traditionally is a period of multiple holy days. Calendar differences mean it’s not even the case that different days indicate different dates. The Russian Orthodox Christmas (7 January)[2] falls the day after the Western feast of the Epiphany because of differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendar (which I’ll get back to).

That we can’t know what the actually birth date of Jesus was or indeed that given the changes in calendars and dating that have happened since is something some people find challenging[3], despite it not being an article of faith in any significant version of Christianity nor being theologically that important. That doesn’t stop people trying though because, I guess, certainty is something people find solace in. One argument is that Jesus’s birth can be deduced from John the Baptist’s birth by working out when John’s dad was serving as a priest:

“Luke informs us that Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was a member of the course of Abijah, and was burning incense in execution of his priestly office when Gabriel appeared and announced that his wife would conceive a son. Based on statements in Luke, John was about six months older than our Lord (Lk. 1:36, 56). If it can once be determined when Zechariah was serving, and therefore when John was conceived, it is thus possible to identify the approximate time of Christ’s birth 15 months later.”

http://www.dec25th.info/Unto%20You%20Is%20Born%20This%20Day.html

I don’t know enough about first-century liturgical practices in Judaism to know if that makes sense but firstly the margin of error there looks pretty big (“John was about six months older”) and the argument was regarded as unimpressive back in 1908:

“Arguments based on Zachary’s temple ministry are unreliable, though the calculations of antiquity (see above) have been revived in yet more complicated form, e.g. by Friedlieb (Leben J. Christi des Erlösers, Münster, 1887, p. 312). The twenty-four classes of Jewish priests, it is urged, served each a week in the Temple; Zachary was in the eighth class, Abia. The Temple was destroyed 9 Ab, A.D. 70; late rabbinical tradition says that class 1, Jojarib, was then serving. From these untrustworthy data, assuming that Christ was born A.U.C. 749, and that never in seventy turbulent years the weekly succession failed, it is calculated that the eighth class was serving 2-9 October, A.U.C. 748, whence Christ’s conception falls in March, and birth presumably in December. Kellner (op. cit., pp. 106, 107) shows how hopeless is the calculation of Zachary’s week from any point before or after it.”

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03724b.htm

So there are two points of uncertainty to the dating: when Zachary was serving and how much older John was than Jesus. Of course, there is a third point of uncertainty — how long was Mary’s pregnancy but I’ll come back to that.

So given all that, why am I saying that “Christmas is just a repurposed pagan holiday” is overstated? Mainly because it looks like an explanation of why Christmas is on December 25 but it really isn’t an explanation. Yes, there are definitely significant days that fall on or near (depending on calendars) December 25 that were celebrated by non-Christians in Europe and specifically in Rome. I shan’t list them all but a key point in the year being the Winter Solstice, which we currently put at round-about December 21. However, the year is littered with significant days and if Christmas was held in a different (European) season other than Winter, you’d hit some other point. With two solstices and two equinoxes dividing the year into handy quarters and add in a couple of weeks either side, you have a third of the year covered. Nor are those astronomical points the only way of slicing the year into quarters.

Given that any newer holiday is likely to fall near an older holiday, it’s hardly surprising that newer holidays syncretically borrowed from older versions. So, yes Christmas has pre-Christian elements. However, those elements can’t explain why Christmas is the date it is because it would have pre-Christian elements whenever it was in the year. If Christmas was June 25 for example then it would be close to the summer solstice. Move it on several weeks and you have Lughnasadh[4]. That doesn’t disprove that December 25 was picked to coincide with the birth day of Mithras or Sol Invictus etc just that an arbitrary choice would like as not fit near something.

To see how these calendrical shenanigans play out as secular authorities try to fit things into a crowded year, consider the English financial year for personal tax purposes. Just the name itself points to matters secular and distinctly ungodly and yet the date of it (April 6) brings us right back into the same issues of astronomical points, age-old holy days & holidays and duelling calendar systems.

When was George Washington born? That is surely an easier question to answer than when Jesus was born! And yet, the first President of the USA was born on February 22, 1732 and he was also born on February 11, 1731[5]. He was a talented man but two birthdays (both correct) were a consequence of a calendar reform in 1750[6]. Prior to that point, the official English year started on March 25 because that was the date of the Spring Equinox in the Julian calendar and the first day of the year in earlier Persian calendars[7]. When Britain caught up with everybody else and reformed it’s calendar, several days had to be chopped off in the year the reforms where implemented. That shoved tax day forward to April 6 and also resulted in George Washington having two different birthdates (and everybody else who was born a British subject before the reform but died after the reform).

Notably, Tolkien worked that date into the Lord of the Rings, starting the Fourth Age of Middle Earth on March 25 as the date when the One Ring was destroyed i.e. Gollum Bites Frodo’s Finger’s Off Day. Which, I guess we should celebrate on April 6? I’m not sure. My broader point being that April 6 is UK personal tax day because of the Spring Equinox which is on March 20.

No, I haven’t wandered off topic!

Where was I?

Oh yes, Tolkien. He was a smart cookie and a Catholic and March 25 was not a date he plucked out of thin air. As well as being the Julian date for the (Northern Hemisphere) Spring Equinox it is also the Catholic Feast of the Annunciation[8]. That holy day celebrates the conception of Jesus and lies neatly (and improbably) nine months before Christmas. The date also falls close to Easter making for a neat (or disturbing) idea that Jesus died on the anniversary of his conception. As a rationale for Christmas, this made a lot of sense to earlier Christians. The gospels were quite clear about when in the year Jesus died and so if Jesus died on the date he was conceived (out of aesthetic neatness) in March/April then he’d be born in December/January. It is neat but again, it is only speculation that this was the motive for assigning these dates.

The neat nine months between Feast of the Annunciation and Christmas Day is also rather neat. The cited figure for human pregnancies is 280 days but as anybody with any experience will tell you that is not a terribly reliable way of estimating what day birth will happen even if you manage to know when conception happened. 70% of people deliver within 10 days of their due date when pregnant [9] and so if we assumed March 25 as the date of conception, December 25 is both a reasonable and slightly unlikely date. Note that the earlier argument we met about the date of John the Baptist’s conception also implies an additional uncertainty of 37 days[10] .

So when is Christmas? Christmas is a point in time in which people have agreed to celebrate. The rationales for the date are numerous and inconsistent but then so are the reasons for celebrating Christmas. Traditional 6/7 January is a long held date, either due to a different calendar or as the Feast of the Epiphany as a day for giving presents. As a day for giving presents St Nicholas’s Day is widely celebrated in multiple European/Christian traditions (variously 6, 7 or 19 December)[11].

Am I saying that Christmas is a social construct defined by an intersubjective mutual understanding allowing us to coordinate social behaviour? Sure, I can’t thing of anything more festive than an intersubjective mutual understanding allowing us to coordinate social behaviour!

As the old carol goes: “May you all share your mutual understandings of when to coordinate celebratory behaviours with social groupings as best you can!”

I Guess I’m Talking About Benford’s Law

The US Presidential Election isn’t just a river in Egypt, it is also a series of bizarre claims. One of the many crimes against statistics being thrown about in what is likely to be a 5 year (minimum) tantrum about the election is a claim about Benford’s law. The first example I saw was last Friday on Larry Correia’s Facebook[1]

“For those of you who don’t know, basically Benford’s Law is about the frequency distribution of numbers. If numbers are random aggregates, then they’re going to be distributed one way. If numbers are fabricated by people, then they’re not. This is one way that auditors look at data to check to see if it has been manipulated. There’s odds for how often single digit, two digit, three digit combos occur, and so forth, with added complexity at each level. It appears the most common final TWO digits for Milwaukee’s wards is 00. 😃 Milwaukee… home of the Fidel Castro level voter turn out. The odds of double zero happening naturally that often are absurdly small. Like I don’t even remember the formula to calculate that, college was a long time ago, but holy shit, your odds are better that you’ll be eaten by a shark ON LAND. If this pans out, that is downright amazing. I told you it didn’t just feel like fraud, but audacious fraud. The problem is blue machine politics usually only screws over one state, but right now half the country is feeling like they got fucked over, so all eyes are on places like Milwaukee.I will be eagerly awaiting developments on this. I love fraud stuff. EDIT: and developments… Nothing particularly interesting. Updated data changes some of the calcs, so it goes from 14 at 0 to 13 at 70. So curious but not damning. Oh well.”

So after hyping up an idea he only vaguely understood (Benford’s law isn’t about TRAILING digits for f-ck sake and SOME number has to be the most common) Larry walked the claim back when it became clear that there was not very much there. As Larry would say beware of Dunning-Krugerands.

The same claim was popping up elsewhere on the internet and there was an excellent Twitter thread debunking the claims here:

footnote [2]

But we can have hierarchies of bad-faith poorly understood arguments. Larry Correia didn’t have the integrity to at least double check the validity of what he was posting before he posted it but at least he checked afterwards…sort of. Vox Day, however, has now also leaped upon the magic of Benford’s law [3]

Sean J Taylor’s Twitter thread does a good job of debunking this but as it has now come up from both Sad and Rabid Puppies, I thought I’d talk about it a bit as well with some examples.

First of all Benford’s law isn’t much of a law. Lots of data won’t follow it and the reason why some data follows it is not well understood. That doesn’t mean it has no utility in spotting fraud, it just means that to use it you first need to demonstrate that it applies to the kind of data you are looking at. If Benford’s Law doesn’t usually apply to the data you are looking at but your data does follow Benford’s law then THAT would/might be a sign of something going on.

That’s nothing unusual in statistics. Data follows distributions and comparing data against an applicable distribution that you expect to apply is how a lot of statistics is done. Benford’s law may or may not be applicable. As always, IT DEPENDS…

For example, if I grab the first digit of the number of Page Views on Wikipedia of Hugo Award finalists [4] then I get a set of data that is Benford like:

The most common digit is 1 as Benford’s law predicts. The probability of it being 1 according to the law is log10(1+1/d) or about 30%. Of the 1241 entries, Benford’s law would predict 374 would have a leading digit of 1 and the actual data has 316. But you can also see that it’s not a perfect fit and we could (but won’t bother because we actually don’t care) run tests to see how good a fit it was.

But what if I picked a different set of numbers from the same data set? Here is the leading digit for the “Age at Hugo” figure graphed for the finalists where I have that data.

It isn’t remotely Benford like and that’s normal (ha ha) because age isn’t going to work that way. Instead the leading digit will cluster around the average age of Hugo finalists. If the data did follow Benford’s law it would imply that teenagers were vastly more likely to win Hugo Awards (or people over 100 I suppose or both).

Generally you need a wide spread of numbers across magnitudes. For example, I joked about Hugo winners in their teens or their centuries but if we also had Hugo finalists who where 0.1… years old as well (and all ages in between) then maybe the data might get a bit more Benfordish.

So what about election data. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The twitter thread above cites a paper entitled Benford’s Law and the Detection of Election Fraud [5] but I haven’t read it. The abstract says:

“Looking at simulations designed to model both fair and fraudulent contests as well as data drawn from elections we know, on the basis of other investigations, were either permeated by fraud or unlikely to have experienced any measurable malfeasance, we find that conformity with and deviations from Benford’s Law follow no pattern. It is not simply that the Law occasionally judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its “success rate” either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst.”

Put another way, some election data MIGHT follow Benford’s law sometimes. That makes sense because it will partly depend on the scale of data we are looking at. For example, imagine we had a voting areas of approx 800 likely voters and two viable candidates, would we expect “1” to be a typical leading digit in vote counts? Not at all! “3” and “4” would be more typical. Add more candidates and more people and things might get more Benford like.

Harvard University has easily downloadable US presidential data by State from 1976 to 2016 [6]. At this scale and with all candidates (including numerous 3rd, 4th party candidates) you do get something quite Benford like but with maybe more 1s than expected.

Now look specifically at Donald Trump in 2016 and compare that with the proportions predicted by Benford’s law:

Oh noes! Trump 2016 as too many 1s! Except…the same caveat applies. We have no idea if Benford’s law applies to this kind of data! For those curious, Hilary Clinton’s data looks like (by eyeball only) a better fit.

Now we could test these to see how good a fit they are but…why bother? We still don’t know whether we expect the data to be a close fit or not. If you are looking at those graphs and thinking “yeah but maybe it’s close enough…” then you also need to factor in scale. I don’t have data for individual polling booths or whatever but we can look at the impact of scale by looking at minor candidates. Here’s one Vox Day would like, Pat Buchanan.

My eyeballs are more than sufficient to say that those two distributions don’t match. By Day’s misapplied standards, that means Pat Buchanan is a fraud…which he is, but probably not in this way.

Nor is it just scale that matters. Selection bias and our old friend cherry picking are also invited to the party. Because the relationship between the data and Benford’s law is inconsistent and not understood, we can find examples that fit somewhat (Trump, Clinton) and examples that really don’t (Buchanan) but also examples that are moderately wonky.

Here’s another old fraudster but whose dubious nature is not demonstrated by this graph:

That’s too many twos Ronnie!

Anyway, that is far too many words and too many graphs to say that for US Presidential election data Benford’s law applies only just enough to be horribly misleading.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/4864622073548683

[2] Sean S Taylor’s R code https://gist.github.com/seanjtaylor/cd85175055e66cdc2bb7899a3bcdf313

[3] http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-attack-on-benfords-law.html

[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lL9bm3I7yrkKxSAZwN1NhWr6OB8-s10IkV1g_MSSGXY/edit?usp=sharing

[5] Deckert, J., Myagkov, M., & Ordeshook, P. (2011). Benford’s Law and the Detection of Election Fraud. Political Analysis,19(3), 245-268. doi:10.1093/pan/mpr014 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/benfords-law-and-the-detection-of-election-fraud/3B1D64E822371C461AF3C61CE91AAF6D

[6] https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/42MVDX/MFU99O&version=5.0

Pandemics & Politics

The soup of conspiracy mongering about the covid-19 pandemic has never truly settled on a clear story. Even as the virus began spreading internationally, reactions ranged from claims that China was exaggerating the numbers of people infected to China was hiding the ‘true’ scale of infection. The common theme with conspiratorial thinking is that genuine doubt, genuine ignorance and genuine shifts in opinion about a novel situation are actually examples of deceit. There is a paradoxical relationship with authority and expertise in any conspiracy theory as the claims of deception always imply that the authorities genuinely do know a lot more about the true state of affairs than everybody else but are lying about it.

The most recent iteration of covid conspiracy-mongering is the ‘Plandemic’ conspiracy video which has sprouted out of anti-vaccine conspiracies. You can read more about it here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/14/plandemic-movie-discredited-dr-doctor-judy-mikovits-how-debunked-conspiracy-theory-film-went-viral but there is also a good analysis of conspiracy-theory thinking which uses it as an example here https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-plandemic-and-the-seven-traits-of-conspiratorial-thinking-138483. The conspiracy is being promoted among some sections of the media in the usual just-asking-questions/exploring-the-controversy way:

“Local television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group are set to air a conspiracy theory over the weekend that suggests Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases, was responsible for the creation of the coronavirus.The baseless conspiracy theory is set to air on stations across the country in a segment during the program “America This Week” hosted by Eric Bolling. The show, which is posted online before it is broadcast over the weekend, is distributed to Sinclair Broadcast Group’s network of local television stations, one of the largest in the country. A survey by Pew Research Group earlier this year showed that local news was a vital source of information on the coronavirus for many Americans, and more trusted than the media overall.”[1]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/24/media/sinclair-fauci-conspiracy-bolling/index.html

What the various conspiracy theories have in common is a belief that pandemic fears and public health measures are specifically a plot against Donald Trump. The details vary (or even contradict each other) but they aim to support a motive for the imagined conspiracy i.e. that the ‘ruling classes’ have manufactured pandemic fears as a way to undermine Donald Trump. To support this idea conspiracy-theorists point to pre-pandemic articles discussing how Trump might cope with a pandemic (e.g. this one by Ed Yong in 2016 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/outbreaks-trump-disease-epidemic-ebola/511127/ ) as evidence that people were ‘planning’ to use pandemic fears against Trump.

Ironically, across the world many political leaders have gained popular support as a consequence of the pandemic (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/05/13/some-world-leaders-popularity-grows-along-with-coronavirus-case-numbers/ ). This pandemic poll-boost has helped politicians both on the left and right and isn’t tied to any particular policy measure nor even whether the covid-19 response was particularly successful. Clear messaging and decisive policy appear to be the main factors but even the shambolic Boris Johnson gained an initial popularity boost (although he eventually squandered it https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/14/poll-uk-government-losing-public-approval-over-handling-of-virus ).

The reality of natural disasters, including pandemics, is that they can often boost the standing of national leaders. Nor is it difficult to gain support because it is mainly a halo effect from the leader being seen in the company of competent people doing their jobs at a time when people will naturally hope for national unity. It actually takes some effort to mess up. Notably, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, managed to do this during the 2019/20 bushfire crisis leading to a rapid plummet in support and humiliating scenes of firefighters refusing to shake his hand. Conversely, Morrison saw his poll numbers boosted during the pandemic, mainly by not repeating the same basic errors he had a few months earlier.

In short, natural disasters are more likely to boost a national leader than undermine them. As a plot against Trump, a pandemic would be a terrible idea: all Trump would need to do is look presidential, let experts speak and pat them on the back. Of course, there is a counter-argument here. A pandemic may well be an actually electoral boost for most politicians but specifically a problem for Trump. As we have seen, Trump has spectacularly failed but this was entirely due to his own incompetence and the incompetence of his cronies. Even so, in late March, the pandemic led to Trump’s approval numbers steadily improving, only to be undermined by Trump’s inability to handle a crisis.

In short, as a plot against Trump, a pandemic would only undermine Trump’s popularity if Trump was actually a uniquely bad president. Of course, he is actually a uniquely bad president, so I guess that is one thing the conspiracy theories have going for them.

[1] Apparently Sinclair media have since changed their plans https://twitter.com/WeAreSinclair/status/1287110687093714944

Tying up old plot lines

There is a lot of noise amid the right-SF social media sphere currently. It’s very free form and the broader cause is that in mainstream SF&F communities there has been the recent cases of some very prominent and well connected men being held accountable for the way they have been treating other people (earlier coverage). Although post-Puppies, the world of right-wing science fiction claims to have separated and living an idyllic SJW-free life, in reality ructions in mainstream SF&F are felt keenly in the breakaway bubble. The problem they have is working out a clear position. On the one hand various authors they dislike are having a bad time of things but on the other hand, powerful men are being held accountable for their actions against women. Bit of a tricky dilemma and hence we get to see various diversions attacking the ‘wokeness’ of mainstream SF&F (e.g. Dave Freer recently).

Another recent example is Cirsova magazine. Cirsova was, in many ways, a better attempt by the right-wing SF&F community to challenge their energies into something a bit more positive i.e. an on-going story magazine. Up until recently, it had largely avoided outrage marketing techniques. However, that changed on June 29 with the unintentionally funny announcement that they had declared that the SFWA was a terrorist organisation (File 770 coverage). Cirsova’s stance on terrorism had been notably absent during their long association with Vox Day’s Castalia House despite Day’s infamous support of convicted terrorist and mass-murderer Anders Breivik. (“Virtue signalling” could be the term for it if we could find any virtue signalled…)

I draw two big inferences from this:

  1. This is another example of the diversions I talk about above
  2. Sales/income must be bad for Cirsova. There is always a grift with right-wing SF&F. Always, and this is classic outrage marketing. [That observation got me instantly blocked on Twitter by Cirsova…]

On the second point, right-wing SF&F publishing has been contracting. There are still some big sellers (i.e. Larry Correia) but in the time since the Puppies stormed off with their own football from the field, Castalia House has stopped publishing new science fiction and Superversive Press has closed, various at attempts at alt-SFWA have fizzled and Sarah Hoyt is claiming she can’t get published by Baen any more. There’s still a right wing audience out there but it’s just not big enough to maintain a large number of authors and outlets and much of it is catered to by more generic military SF provided by less partisan groups like LMBPN.

On the first point…well the SFWA statement on Black Lives Matter was June 4. Cirsova’s counter-terrorism unit didn’t make its deceleration until twenty-five days later i.e. not until mainstream SF&F was having its own ructions and right-wing SF was trying to find a way to join in.

Let’s throw in a few other bad actors (n both senses of the term). So I was watching a video by Jon Del Arroz…that’s never a good start to a story nor is it something I would recommend. Anyway, JDA’s video was about another charmer Richard Fox. Remember Richard? Fox got a story nominated for a Nebula award courtesy of the 20booksto50K/LMBPN slate in 2019 (https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/03/02/nebula-shorts-going-dark-by-richard-fox/) and then had a bit of a melt-down in the comments section here partly when people noticed the similarity between him and a Goodreads commenter called “John Margolis” who wrote racially abusive comments to people who gave Richard bad reviews on Goodreads.

Fox would go onto behave in even more odd ways (to put it politely) https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/authors-behaving-badly-episode-1234543-richard-fox/ accusing Mike Glyer’s File 770 of “piracy” because it had a link to the SFWA public Nebula reading list to a PDF of his story that he had uploaded. No, that made no sense but it was enough for the axis of Jon Del Arroz and Larry Correia to try to spin into a scandal.

Where was I? Oh!…a video by Jon Del Arroz. [Here for reference but seriously, it’s just trolling. You can skip it https://delarroz.com/2020/07/01/nebula-award-nominated-author-pulls-story-from-sfwa-anthology-because-of-their-racism/ ]

JDA was proudly announcing that “Nebula nominated” author Richard Fox was withdrawing his story from the Nebula Award anthology (yes, that story mentioned above) in solidarity with Cirsova. Notably, Fox’s author Facebook page and author website say exactly ZERO about this brave stand against ‘terrorism’. It’s not something Fox wants his regular readers to know but…well he’d like some of those Dragon Award votes from the people who are most likely to vote in them.

Long story short: various right wing science fiction people are generally agitated by the fact that some specific male SF authors (who happen to people they don’t like but are also powerful men…so a bit of a dilemma) are being held to account because of misogynistic behaviour and so are finding various random ways of acting out.

Vox Day’s ‘Replatforming’ Backfires

Vox Day has managed to have a large number of his supporters legally doxxed in court documents with the help of his even less competent side-kick former comedian Owen Benjamin. A case filed in the Superior Court of California by crowdfunding tech company Patreon, cites seventy-two people whom they are suing due to a ‘lawfare’ campaign instigated by Day and Benjamin. I’m not linking directly to the court documents but the case “PATREON, INC. VS. PAUL MICHAEL AYURE ET AL” (Case Number: CGC20584586) can be found online via the Superior Court of California’s page https://www.sfsuperiorcourt.org/

The case connects with Day’s struggles with crowdfunding (see past coverage from me here and here) but specifically connects to Owen Benjamin (see past coverage from me here and here) who was kicked off Patreon last year according to the court documents:

Patreon Terminates the Individual Account of Owen Benjamin Smith

18. On October 9, 2019, Patreon terminated the creator account of an individual named Owen Benjamin Smith, a self-described comedian who had repeatedly engaged in hate speech, in violation of Patreon ‘s Community Guidelines. For example, over the course of approximately 18 months, Smith made offensive public statements in which he blamed black people for AIDS, mocked Hollywood rape survivors, and targeted Jewish people for scorn on the 25 basis of religion. 19. Soon after the account termination, Smith, though his attorney … filed a JAMS demand for arbitration against Patreon, asserting claims for breach of contract and tortious interference with alleged contractual relations between Smith and his former patrons on the Patreon platform. Patreon denies, and is presently litigating, these claims in arbitration….20. Smith has an online fanbase, and he responded to his termination by appealing to that fanbase to file abusive claims against Patreon for the purpose of driving up Patreon’s litigation costs and extracting a settlement unrelated to the merits of his claims.

Court documents Exhibit A in DECLARATION…IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFF PATREON, INC.’S EX PARTE APPLICATION FOR ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE RE PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

The idea as outlined by Day elsewhere is that tech companies like Patreon often have an arbitration clause for disputes. Day’s scheme involves individual subscribers/members/sponsors/patrons/etc also demanding arbitration when a notable member of the far right is kicked off a platform. The tech company then faces not just one manageable arbitration process but potentially hundreds e.g. the Castalia House Patreon account has 1,634 patrons – a number that hasn’t changed by much (if at all) since the initial push last year and which averages as $4 per patron.

Unfortunately, according to the court documents Patreon filled in that potential hole in the terms and conditions:

6. The Current Terms of Use provide that individual users “may not bring a claim against [Patreon] for suspending or terminating another person’s account.” Exhibit A at 11-12. 8 Users expressly agree they “will not bring such a claim[,]” and they are “responsible for the damages caused, including attorneys fees and costs,” if they do bring such a claim.

ibid

The court documents claim that the seventy-two Owen Benjamin supporters had agreed to Patreon being able to amend the Terms of Use when they signed up and by not deleting their account and by signing in this year under the revised Terms had effectively agreed to them.

According to Patreon’s court documents, Benjamin’s lawyer used the possibility of Benjamin’s followers making arbitration claims as a lever in the negotiations:

“On November 15, 2019, Mann made a settlement demand: he would proceed with the threatened 83 additional Patron Claims unless Patreon agreed to pay Smith $2.2 million and reinstate Smith’s Patreon account. Mann made clear that the payment to Smith would resolve the claims asserted by the individual patrons, stating “[o]ur intention is to address all claims -Smith’s and the individual patrons’ – in any discussions with you based upon the required relief described above.” Patreon rejected that demand”

ibid

Instead, it seems the individuals may end up liable for Patreon’s court costs. According to Day this is Patreon “playing dirty” (warning: link to his blog http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/06/patreon-plays-dirty.html )

“Since a lawsuit is a matter of public record whereas an arbitration is not, the Owen-haters on Reddit have just published all the names of the Bears being sued by Patreon. Needless to say, the Legion is on it and we will be legally retaliating very strongly in order to see that Patreon and their lawyers are severely punished for this despicable and unexpected tactic. But the doxxing has already taken place, so if any of you experiences any blowback from this, please be sure to document everything and let us know right away so that the Legion can include everything in their future filings concerning this element of the matter.”

Vox Populi “Patreon plays dirty”

Day is also reassuring the Owen Benjamin fans (aka “Bears”):

“If you’re one of the Bears concerned, please don’t worry about anything. It’s going to be fine. The Legion – and more – are on it, and everyone will have your back, just as you have had Owen’s. This is an absolutely desperate move by Patreon to try to further delay your arbitrations against them because they are losing very badly. And if you’re wondering how this joke of a lawsuit can be a matter of public record when you haven’t even been served, exactly. As you can see here, Patreon’s lawyers are not following any of the rules of either the legal or the arbitration processes, which is one of the reasons they are losing so consistently and comprehensively.”

Vox Populi “Patreon plays dirty”

Day predicts that Patreon’s actions will lead to its destruction (where have we heard that before?)

“So, it is increasingly looking like there either won’t be a Patreon by the end of the year or Owen and the Bears will own it. It’s rather like finding yourself fighting a duel with someone who genuinely believes his most effective attack is to disembowel himself.”

Vox Populi “Patreon plays dirty”

In an earlier post this month, Day made a similar prediction:

“Of course, literally all of the relevant law and case law, both state and Federal, points to this being either a) Patreon attempting to commit suicide by law, or b) Patreon’s lawyers desperately trying to convince Patreon to keep writing them the checks that it shouldn’t have written in the first place. This legal “strategy”, to the extent that one can call it that, is so obviously futile that if you’re financially dependent upon Patreon in any way, I would not count on it being around in 12 months.”

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/06/patreon-ups-ante.html

Quite what will all happen at the end of this, I don’t know. Day has a long history of starting or threatening to start legal disputes. However, I can’t say I have yet to see an actual clear resolution to any of them (the closest in the time I’ve been running this blog has been the Indiegogo dispute whose resolution is unknown). It is worth noting that just because Day has a very flexible concept of what counts as a victory and Owen Benjamin thinks the world is flat and that bleach is medicine, that doesn’t mean they will definitely lose.

The topic is being discussed on various subreddits hostile to Day and Benjamin as well as in Day’s and Benjamin’s own videos.

[ETA the court website also has dates for when the next steps will happen:

2020-11-04 10:30 AMCASE MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE
2020-07-13 9:30 AMOrder To Show Cause Re Preliminary Injunction [Opposition – 6/29; Reply – 7/06)
2020-06-30 9:30 AMNotice Of Motion And Application For Order To Show Cause Re Preliminary Injunction

Looks like this will drag on for months.]

The Virus, The Lockdown and the Wingnut Eschatology

A post really wasn’t coming together on all this stuff on the anti-lockdown ‘movement’ among the US right. However, I wanted a bunch of links in one place to come back to later. The whys and the hows and whos and how it all connects to money, oil and denial is sort of there. I intended just a list of links but you get a rambling post instead. Somehow Jonestown and the Last Jedi get connected in here. More after the fold.

Continue reading “The Virus, The Lockdown and the Wingnut Eschatology” →

Hoyt’s Covid Denial Hits the Big Time

Sarah Hoyt wrote a new version of her critique of epidemiological models (see my post A Study in Denial) for her column in the far-right outlet PJMedia: https://pjmedia.com/blog/modeling-covid-19-and-the-lies-of-multiculturalism/ It’s basically the same points she made in her original essay, nobody really knows and therefore Hoyt knows and therefore she knows that it is all down to culture or population density etc. It is at best wild guesses and half-formed opinions where her credentials are established like so:

“However, as the mother and wife of STEM people for whom physics is a game and who create such models for fun, I know that the accuracy of the model depends on how much you put into it and how much of the real factors on that day, in that place, you can put in.”

Her theory is, of course, another kind of model and it shares with any model all the flaws plus the additional ones of being half-arsed opinion based on a weak grasp of the news.

“For instance, my friend in Albany, Georgia, tells me he assumes part of the reason it got so bad in his neighborhood (the worst per capita in the U.S. last I looked) is that “we are the touchiest, most social people I know,” i.e., there is a lot of touching and hugging. At a guess, this is the reason it got so bad in Italy, too, but not nearly as bad in Germany, where, frankly, people aren’t that touchy/feely/huggy.”

Quite how the UK fits into the Hoyt-Covid-Hugs model of infection I don’t know but I can’t say us Brits have ever been accused of being a very hug-prone nation. It does help resolve what Hoyt things ‘culture’ might be: national stereotypes. Maybe France has a high infection rate because they wear berets whereas Brazil has a different pattern because they wear bikinis? That’s about the level of Hoyt’s analysis.

So if there is nothing new in Hoyt’s PJMedia piece (one of four, two behind paywalls) why am I mentioning it. Well Rush Limbaugh (who apparently still exists even though I’d forgotten about him sometime around 2010) has been praising the column by Hoyt.

“Now, this is a tough case to make. And Sarah Hoyt does a great job in the piece, a very long piece. We will link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. It was published yesterday. But I want to try here because her point is that we get these models projecting how many people are gonna get sick, how many people are gonna die, assuming everybody’s identical, everybody’s the same, gonna behave the same.”

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/04/13/the-covid-19-models-cant-account-for-culture/

Hmm, so what would Mr Limbaugh or Ms Hoyt suggest instead for a pandemic response? Now consider, neither of them deny that there is a pandemic even if they question the severity of it. Yet consider, there is no reason to believe that Covid-19 is the worst possible novel viral disease that could occur. Notably, the measures that have been seen to work require them to be implemented BEFORE the full severity of the pandemic is known – the earlier the better. So there is no viable scenario in which the response to a novel pandemic can be made with full and accurate models. Nor is there any possible way of creating models that account for every person’s unique individuality (and what a rabbit hole that would be — implying a level of surveillance state of dystopian proportions).

[ETA: For a better discussion of the limits and value of models in this pandemic see this extended cartoon/discussion at FiveThirtyEight by Zach “SMBC” Weinersmith https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-comic-strip-tour-of-the-wild-world-of-pandemic-modeling/ ]