Apparently the casualty numbers coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry are entirely made up—they don’t look anything like real data.
Apparently the casualty numbers coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry are entirely made up—they don’t look anything like real data.
No politics, please. At least you have to argue why this is not politics.
I actually don’t think the problem with this post is politics, but that it’s nothing more than a link post, and except in rare cases, I’d like to see people add something more than just provide links.
The analysis in the linked article itself is interesting and not obviously politicized (or at least, isn’t from a mistake-theory standpoint; it’s definitely political if you’re a conflict theorist, but then what isn’t!).
Anything related to the Israel/Palestine conflict is invoking politics the mind killer.
It is the hot button topic number one on the larger internet, from what I can tell.
“Either the ministry made an honest mistake or the the statistical analysis did” does not seem like the kind of statement most people will agree on.
Perhaps, but I also feel like this is a real misunderstanding of politics being the mind killer. Rationality is critically important in dealing with real world problems, and that includes problems that have become politicized. The important-to-me thing is that, at least here on Less Wrong, we stay focused, as much as possible, on questions of evidence and reasoning. Posts about whether Israel or Palestine is good/bad should be off limits, but posts about whether Israel or Palestine are making errors in their reporting of facts in ways that can be sussed out using statistical analysis feel very much on brand.
For comparison, COVID was a hot button issue for a long time, and Less Wrong hosted tons of great posts about various mechanical things about COVID while avoiding many of the political issues. Less Wrong has also stayed away from topics like abortion and racism because there’s little to say on the topic that isn’t a thinly veiled attempt to argue over values. So while some aspects of the current Israel/Palestine conflict are fights over values and should be off limits here, I’d be pretty sad if we couldn’t talk about trying to understand the facts of the situation, like whether or not Palestinian death figures are correct, just like we’ve been able to talk about COVID origins and whether or not masks are effective and controlling the spread of COVID (if you can remember back to when that was a controversial topic!).
What he said. Analyzing politically volatile data and determining that it’s clearly made up feels on-brand for LessWrong regardless of what one thinks about the underlying issues...
Thanks for the link to the interesting article!
The appropriate lesswrong-adjacent-adjacent place to post this would be the culture war thread of the motte. I think a tweet making similar claims was discussed there before.
I have some hot takes on this but this is not the place for them.
Any chance you can link to that discussion? I’m really curious.
Link. (General motte content warning: this is a forum which has strong free speech norms, which disproportionally attracts people who would find it hard to voice their opinions elsewhere. On a bad day you will read five paragraphs of a comment on the war in Gaza only to realize that this is just the introduction the author’s main pet topic of holocaust denial. Also, content warning: discussion is meh.)
I am not sure it is the one I remember reading, not that I remember the discussion much. I normally read the CW thread, and vaguely remember the link going to twitter. Perhaps I misremember, or the CW post was deleted by its author, or they have changed reality again.