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Nov 12, 2021Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Ok now do Covid

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IMPORTANT CORRECTION!

Huber wasn't a wife beater, he was a sibling beater. From The Motte:

"In 2012, Huber brandished a butcher knife and threatened to “gut” his brother “like a pig” if he didn’t clean the house. The family told police that Huber choked his brother with his hands for 10 seconds before letting him go and retreating to the skate park. Convicted of strangulation and false imprisonment, he was placed on probation but violated the terms and was sent to prison in 2017. When he came home, he got into another argument over the state of the house. This time, he kicked his sister, and went back to prison on a charge of disorderly conduct in 2018."

So apparently he was a psychopathic clean freak who attacked his siblings violently and went to jail because he used violence to try to make them to clean the house.

So weird.

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"And that people are so invested in these lies that they can't recalibrate their opinions."

This goes back to a comment I dropped in another article you wrote about a year back. The book is Superforecasting and the reference in there is to a study on experts and their predictions. Two sets of experts were asked to predict an outcome. One set of experts publicly proclaimed their predicted outcomes; the other set kept their predictions private.

Then, new facts were introduced that affected whether the predicted outcome was more likely to be accurate or inaccurate. Experts were periodically asked whether they wanted to revise their predictions, then new facts would be introduced and the experts re-queried, and so on. Eventually, there was an outcome.

The experts who publicly proclaimed their predictions were more than twice as likely to refuse to change their prediction, even when presented with new facts that undermined the likelihood of their prediction. This was true even when they were told that the actual outcome was the opposite of what they predicted -- some who publicly staked themselves to the opposite outcome refused to concede.

This is what we see with social media. People publicly take a position on issues. Then they refuse to change their minds, even when confronted with new facts that undermine the position they've taken. It's actually even broader than that. People publicly stake themselves to this or that echo chamber. Then, they refuse to believe the echo chamber could have led them astray.

"It's the social media, stupid."

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Nov 12, 2021Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Good article, as always.

A couple of notes:

Per court testimonies Kyle opened fire for the first time only when he ended up being cornered at the parking lot and rapist lunged at him trying to grab his rifle, not due to other rioter shooting (whose identity is known and he wasn't even subpoenaed if I'm not mistaken).

TYT co-host admitted being wrong about Kyle chasing the rapist, not about skin colors.

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Nov 14, 2021Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Such a great post!

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That punk should be in prison for double homicide. Also illegally possessing the assault rifle.

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Uh, so no discussion of the fact that Rittenhouse decided to go to another state with a rifle to shoot bad people? I don't give a rat's ass if the people he shot were the most despicable humans on the planet—Rittenhouse decided to take a rifle to another state to play cop. His vigilantism is the cause of all of this. So the focus on the victims of his bullets and the media portrayals is way off-base. Kyle caused this to happen by his misguided attempt to be a cop.

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Where does "business model abstraction" come from? Unless you assign responsibility to some individual or group more specific than "the media" you inductively blame The Industrial Revolution And Its Consequences, which is not useful.

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