Well, I am an immigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, and for me the evidence is strong. And about Putin being “democratically elected”, at least initially, I… well, “politics is a mind-killer”, so I am not going to expand in this direction ;-) But he was relatively normal, he was not a weird outlier (even with what’s going on now; it’s very unpleasant, but it’s not strange, it’s “traditionally bad”). So he would not be a counter-example.
But I don’t claim that the evidence is universal. (In some sense, the whole point of having this many people is to maintain a healthy diversity and non-uniformity of views. After all, certainties are rare, and here we are not discussing a subject where one would expect certainty, so why would one aim for a universal evidence here… The discussion here is whether it’s reasonable for some rationalists to update based on this, not whether it’s a “cognitive sin” not to update.)
If you look at my initial comment, I am not even saying that I should update. All I am saying is that this is an extra motivation to try to evaluate whether the overall level of weirdness is above of what should be expected of a “naturalistic reality”.
Well, I am an immigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, and for me the evidence is strong. And about Putin being “democratically elected”, at least initially, I… well, “politics is a mind-killer”, so I am not going to expand in this direction ;-) But he was relatively normal, he was not a weird outlier (even with what’s going on now; it’s very unpleasant, but it’s not strange, it’s “traditionally bad”). So he would not be a counter-example.
But I don’t claim that the evidence is universal. (In some sense, the whole point of having this many people is to maintain a healthy diversity and non-uniformity of views. After all, certainties are rare, and here we are not discussing a subject where one would expect certainty, so why would one aim for a universal evidence here… The discussion here is whether it’s reasonable for some rationalists to update based on this, not whether it’s a “cognitive sin” not to update.)
If you look at my initial comment, I am not even saying that I should update. All I am saying is that this is an extra motivation to try to evaluate whether the overall level of weirdness is above of what should be expected of a “naturalistic reality”.