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It's interesting hearing about your background. One of my approaches when I negotiate cases with prosecutors is that I openly admit the strengths of the government's case. I've recently had a factually innocent client who was charged as an accessory to burglary, but it seemed obvious to me she had no idea what the other people were up to. When I talked to the prosecutor, I fully acknowledged "This aspect does indeed look bad for my client, but..." and I've always wondered whether this approach has any effect. In this particular instance I did get the case dismissed (and many others like it), but I'm curious if it's a lesson I can continue extrapolating.
I think I recognize the power I wield in these circumstances. However, it only exists because I work to ensure my credibility doesn't get diluted too often.
I think they fully know they're lying about the facts. Where I'm more inclined to believe they've achieved self-deception is within the realm of positive thinking and unshakeable confidence about their anticipated results. Many of my clients seem to earnestly believe that their antics will get their case dismissed or somehow overturned on appeal, but that seems to be a coping strategy necessary to cope with the unimaginable torture of the upcoming years in prison.
The American Bar Association writes the Model Rules of Professional Conduct which are not governing but intended to serve as a template for attorney bars to adopt. Right off the bat that's at least 50 different jurisdictions (plus DC, plus Puerto Rico, plus federal judicial districts, plus many more) that may or may not adopt the RPCs with or without any modifications. Sometimes the modifications are done to comport with state constitution, a judicial committee, a piece of legislation, new case law, or whatever else. So very often, I don't even know that I don't know of a caveat. But even if I did, adding a disclaimer would render anything I write about the law nigh-incomprehensible. Just consider how many libraries have been filled with exceptions and caveats from this one sentence: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
You would think that the revolving door would help repeat offenders wisen up through experience, but the overriding effect is that they're repeat offenders precisely because they lack the capacity to wisen up.
What happened with 11 magic words is too arcane and unpredictable to "game". It mystified even me, and I've had the experience of going through criminal proceedings magnitudes more times than even my most decorated clients. I've commented here to a similar question but gaining my sympathy through lying is 1) not likely to be consequential and 2) very likely to backfire.
Correct, there are indeed potential advantages to lying to your attorney under very specific and narrow circumstances. You also have to consider the risky gamble this presents because you can't predict every aspect of the machinery. Maybe the jury never would've paid attention to the alibi aspect of the case, but if the alibi witnesses get exposed as liars by the prosecution, that alone could swing jurors from acquittal and towards conviction.
If a client tells me they know for sure that their alibi witness will be lying in their favor, then I'm not allowed to elicit the false testimony from that witness. If they admit to me to robbing the store but (truthfully and without omissions) say they were wearing a mask and functional gloves, then that lets me know what facets to focus on and what to avoid. If they're sure enough they left no fingerprints, then I can comfortably ask the investigating detectives if any fingerprints were found. If the circumstances allow it, then I may even get my own expert to dust the entire scene for fingerprints with the aim of presenting their absence as exculpatory evidence to the jury. Keep in mind that my job is not to help the government prosecute my client.
And yes, there are plenty of cases where the perpetrator might be obvious from a common-sense perspective, but it would be legally difficult to prove in court.
Not that exact line, but that notion is communicated all the time. You can imagine that it's not very convincing.
That's interesting, I was not aware of this dynamic. Were there any particular posts that served as a good summary or lodestar for people's stances on this topic?
As a relative outsider and with the job I have (and also fully acknowledging the self-serving aspect of what I'm about to say) this strikes me as a naive and self-destructive position to hold. People in the real world lie, cheat, manipulate, and exploit others, and it seems patently obvious to me that we need mechanisms to discourage that behavior. A culture of disdain towards that conduct is only one aspect of that fight.
Baby, I'm the only one you need.
The closest author I found would be the The Secret Barrister from the UK.
FWIW when I was having these conversations with my clients, I was explicitly thinking of the exact same ideas presented in the Sequences. I do think that overall, LW would benefit from a higher appreciation of deception and how it can manifest in the real world. The scenarios I outlined are almost cartoonish, but they're very real, and I thought it useful to demonstrate how I used very basic rationalist tools to uncover lies.
I get that a lot of people are concerned about this post due to the unabashedly displayed contempt for the clients
I hope it was crystal clear that if I had any contempt, it was strictly reserved to the clients who feebly but blatantly lied to me. Even then, being lied to happens so often that it only bothers me when it's persistent and pervasive past the point of it being funny.
Not gonna lie, I admire Saul Goodman and his (non-illegal) courtroom antics. The first season of Better Call Saul was also a highly authentic vignette into public defender life.
I could have been more precise with my wording, but I never meant to imply that there are no innocent defendants.
Agreed. Almost all the advice in the link is too useless or too attenuated to consider.
It depends on the jurisdiction. Some states only recognize "marital communications" privilege which means whatever is going to be barred has to be something that was disclosed within the sanctity of wedded communications. States also differ on whether the privilege must be raised by the witness or by the defendant.
L A Y E R S of happy little accidents
It sounds like with "factual lies" you're saying that certain lies are about something that can easily be verified, and thus you're unlikely to convince other people that you're being truthful.
Not necessarily, I was referring to lies about the case itself, and those always have the potential to be exposed by either my investigations or the prosecutor.
Why do you say that sympathy lies are not very consequential (assuming they are successful)? My model is that defendants have a pretty large range for how hard they could work on the case, working harder increases the odds of of winning by a good amount, and how hard they work depends a good amount on how sympathetic they are towards the defendant.
Forgive me for answering with literal walls of text but this essay might explain things better: Eleven Magic Words. Bottom line is that I'm generally useless and any contributions I may bring to the table are almost entirely fungible. This other one of mine also gets into the inherent limitations of my job: Death of a Client.
I appreciate the feedback but it's a tension with no obvious answer. Writing simply is a much higher priority for my argumentative writing, where clarity takes precedence. Simplicity takes a backseat for my story-telling prose because the aim is painting an aesthetic collage with my words as much as it is conveying information. There are small poetic touches that I treasure and I would think others would also appreciate. I could have used puppet instead of marionette, but it makes me picture something out of Sesame Street where the puppeteer is below the puppet, in contrast with a puppeteer hovering above a marionette. The word was also a nod to Pinocchio, everyone's favorite fictional liar. Similar with chicanery, which in the original 17th century French meant "quibbling on minor points of law brought up to complicate a judicial case". I didn't actually know this at the time but the word had the right "cloak and dagger" type of vibe I was looking for.
And I also have to admit there is definitely a self-serving dimension as well. English is my third language and one I didn't fully learn until I moved to the US at the age of 10, so I get a kick from showing off my vocabulary.
I appreciate this systemic approach to analyzing lying! The Pros/Cons depend heavily on the type of lie, and you can split it roughly between "factual lies" and "sympathy lies". Factual lies are about whether or not this thing did or did not happen, while sympathy lies are used to generate sympathy from others (e.g. "if I get convicted I'll lose everything").
Sympathy lies are more likely to be successful, but they're also not very consequential. It's possible that it could have an effect at the slimmest of margins, but the risks give it an expected payoff close to zero. The only way I can see this work is if it's done by the truly sociopathic compulsive liars who can manage to successfully con dozens of people.
Factual lies are meaningless. The evidence either corroborates their claims or it doesn't. If there's no corroboration except their word, then they open themselves up to potentially brutal cross-examination. Many many (guilty) defendants have confidently believed they can talk their way out of a situation and failed spectacularly (SBF comes to mind).
And yes, absolutely my job relies heavily on building trust and rapport with my clients. It occupies at least around 80% of my initial conversations with a client.
They did go through with it! And yeah they were already dating so she was cool with it. At first he was beaming because he thought his case would get thrown out soon enough, but I had to explain to him that spousal privilege does not apply retroactively, but even if it did it would only have protected communications made between each other and not events either would have independently witnessed. He looked earnestly surprised and crushed, and of course he didn't tell me his scheme beforehand because he know I would have told him it was idiotic.
This is also true
Interesting! I wasn't aware of this exception. Writing about the law is hard because there are always a million different caveats, some of which will be obsolete by the next year.
It's perfectly reasonable for any client to be suspicious of my motivations and alignment, I'm after all paid directly by the same government that is gunning to throw them behind bars! The clients that are most honest with me are overwhelmingly either newbies to the criminal justice system or factually innocent. The ones who lie to me the most are frequent flyers whose guilt is not in doubt (non-legally speaking). Everyone wants to be let out of jail, the problem is that the latter group has no viable recourse available to make that happen, and their typical temperament drifts them towards pathetic dishonesty.
As a prolific criminal defense attorney, I cannot endorse that advice on those grounds. You should always hope that your attacker survives because killing someone (even if ultimately justified) exposes you to more serious legal jeopardy. Grosskreutz's testimony was disastrous not because he was a criminal who was bad at testifying, but because he told the truth and the truth happened to be on Rittenhouse's side. An attacker getting killed doesn't mean one cannot draw inferences based on the circumstances.
They're in a bind with severely limited options. I've never had a client focus on a single avenue towards acquittal, they'll take whatever they can get. They'll switch focus from witness credibility, wrong first name on traffic ticket, filing deadlines missed by prosecutor, constitutional law argument they found on youtube, pretending to have a mental illness, or MARRYING a witness while in jail under the theory that spousal privilege somehow would prevent them from testifying (this happened!), etc.
Whether or not they seem me as 'trustworthy' is a question with multiple dimensions. If they don't trust me to work hard on their case, I can prove otherwise by actually taking their Dick Bottoms leads seriously but that's generally the opposite of what they want. I can also prove otherwise by researching legal remedies but they get pissed if I don't reach the "right" answer. What it tends to boil down to is that they don't trust me to be their criminal co-conspirator, like with clients who (coyly) ask me to threaten witnesses on their behalf or otherwise tamper with evidence somehow.
Generally I'm a fungible component of the system and the sociopathic bunch have no reason to care about what happens to me specifically (I don't fault them for that) which is why I describe this as pure manipulation attempts.
No, the lying doesn't come from a lack of trust but rather a manipulation attempt. Their overriding goal is to get off the charges no matter what it takes, so they're willing to flip through and latch onto whatever narrative helps them get there. They basically want me to be a ventriloquist and use me to launder their talking points because it's more believable coming from me. Of course as I pointed out, they don't really think the plan all the way through.
This is an excellent breakdown of what I tried to articulate regarding "filling in assumptions in a hypothetical"
I've only been married two months, so I can't stake any longevity experience. As I wrote here in response to a further comment, it's really difficult to imagine how exactly I would react when a hypothetical scenario requires me to fill in so many assumption gaps. For one, I would find it alarming if my non-drinking wife got that intoxicated. I was previously in a relationship with someone who had a history of severe manic episodes, and it was deeply unsettling to always have to scrutinize her behavior through the lens of "does she really want this or is this a sign of burgeoning mania?"
I think this is correct. A parallel scenario could be agreeing to go vegetarian but then asking for an upper limit for how much meat you can eat second-hand from your friends (since they were going to throw it away anyways). You would be revealing a frequency graph that is similarly increasing up to the policy line, indicating serious reluctance to be a vegetarian. There's nothing wrong with this necessarily, but if someone is screening you for how much you really care about being vegetarian, it's reasonable for them to harbor suspicion.
I have a desire to be super rich, but it's either unlikely to happen or not worth pursuing. I have a desire to be an elite athlete, but it's either unlikely to happen or not worth pursuing. I have a desire to fuck an endless parade of super models, but it's either unlikely to happen or not worth pursuing. It's very possible that I would feel differently about pursuing multiple relationships if the chase was either much more effortless or more rewarding. Yet the number of sexual partners I've had already easily puts me in the top <1% of males on that metric. So if I'm expressing reluctance despite that relative advantage, I'm very skeptical how much my preferences would change much in response to greater opportunity.
Extreme hypotheticals can be useful in exploring the outer fringes of our positions, but they do a very poor job of informing our day to day conduct. I'm not averse to engaging with your "drunk wife meets sexiest person in the world" scenario, but for me to give any semblance of an answer requires me to fill in a multitude of assumptions that are too numerous to fully catalog (ex. how did my non-drinking wife get drunk? is she a materially different person when severely intoxicated? whether I went with her to the house party or not, how did my introverted wife find herself alone with the world's sexiest stranger? did I abandon her? etc etc.). Unless I'm specifying each and every assumption I'm relying upon, it's virtually guaranteed that you'll hold a different assumption, which would necessarily change how you interpret my answer. I don't understand what you find enlightening about this hypothetical.
It seems far more relevant to me to think about far more common scenarios, but I don't know if probability is the best way to contemplate this though. I can certainly imagine scenarios where my wife is smitten by a friend/co-worker/barista/whoever and if that happens then we can end our relationship because I wouldn't want to get in her way. I don't think about this scenario prospectively because there's no reason for me to care about it if it hasn't happened. Whether the risk of this scenario happening is 1% or 99% in the future bears little relevance to what I do in the present; I'll continue my relationship so long as it is satisfying.
Pascal's Wager is a good comparison here.
I said "my partner could be smitten by a particularly motivated sexiest person in the world" but you translated that as "she has a high probability of yielding to temptation in that scenario". I also did not say anything about what the scenario would reveal about her character (I'm not even sure what that means) but rather what it would reveal about her preferences. If you have a point I believe you can make it without mischaracterizing my statements.
I meant "date" expansively, so yes "date or have sex with". I don't want to be with someone who has an active desire to have sex with other people. Your guessed answer is off. I don't deny that either myself or my partner could be smitten by a particularly motivated sexiest person in the world, but then again I don't know how relevant such an extreme hypothetical could be. But if it did indeed happen, I would have no interest whatsoever in placing any restrictions on my partner after the fact. They expressed their revealed preferences, so it's best to let them go so they can pursue it. Even if they don't have a subsequent shot, I would have no interest in staying with them.
There is no one monogamy rule, but a range of expectations. For me it's that I don't want to date someone who has an active desire to date other people. From that standpoint, this is neither a rule nor is it a restriction. I wrote this above, and I don't understand why it's seemingly so difficult for others to parse.
The answer to your interrogatories for me would all boil down to "are my partner's actions indicative of a desire to date other people?" From that standpoint, there's no reason for me to care about handshakes, or kisses on the cheek, or a wayward glance, or even flirting, because that's not really indicative of this desire. Even random make-outs with a stranger at party might not be indicative, depending on the context. I wouldn't want to be lied to about this desire, so I wouldn't want to be flattered under false pretenses.
In terms of how long that exclusivity desire can last, I don't know! I can't claim to predict the future. Maybe it will end tomorrow or never (both very doubtful). I never made a claim otherwise, and I agree that would've been an example of self-delusion. I will remain in my relationship so long as it is worthwhile, and from my current standpoint I don't see any obvious reasons for that to diminish anytime soon, but you never know. I am comfortable with that risk.
Regarding the why I want restrictions, I don't. I am not restricting my wife from doing anything she wants to do, and neither is she to me. If she gains a desire for others, I wouldn't want to stand in her way. Doing so is absolutely anathema to my principles of prioritizing individual freedom and autonomy.
I don't understand, how is it missing the point? "Interest in more than one" is necessarily affected by practical concerns, non?
One of the neglected problems with the 'restriction' framework is that it assumes a pre-existing desire that needs restraint. Restrictions are meaningless if the desire isn't there, but if the desire is there then the restriction is bound to be intolerable. Therefore whether or not there is desire is the far more consequential factor. This is why I wrote this:
I wonder if there’s a lack of imagination from both camps. I’ve had several casual dating periods, so I have some insight into the thrill and excitement of rotating through flings like a flipbook. But when I see my poly friends juggling a stable cadre of full-blown secondary relationships in addition to their primary, I feel vicarious exhaustion. I admit it, the energy devoted seems so excessive that I wonder how much of it is performative, motivated by the desire to showcase their apparent enlightenment,[4] or maybe it’s to ensure they have enough board game partners. On the flip side, I wonder if they believe my assertions that I’m not interested in pursuing others to be genuine, or whether they assume I’ve been browbeaten by the dominating cultural narrative into accepting my imaginary handcuffs.
How do you determine who counts as a whistleblower? The generic definition refers to anyone who discloses insider information with the intent to warn others about potentially illegal or unethical misconduct. By this definition, Kat is a whistleblower because she revealed information about Alice's history of dishonesty (assuming of course this accusation is correct).
I hope you receive this feedback packaged along the constructive nature I intend. A concerning number of your responses that touch on legal issues demonstrate an obvious lack of subject matter familiarity. This is very apparent to me because I am a licensed and practicing lawyer, but your statements are likely to be read by other non-lawyers as epistemically certain to a degree that is unwarranted.
Everything I will say in this paragraph is potentially subject to a million needling obscure exceptions, because lawyers love exceptions. In general though, Tracing is correct that it's largely irrelevant whether a contract was signed, when it was signed, or even whether it was ever written.
This issue is also tangential to the overall allegations levied against Nonlinear, because the dispute does not center on whether or not a contract was breached, but rather on behavior too inchoate to be adequately adjudicated within a legal framework. Consider for example how no one reads the lengthy terms of service that we all reflexively click 'agree' on. Courts in the United States have repeatedly ruled that these contracts are enforceable, even if they take the form of a loose piece of paper that slips out of some shrinkwrap. I personally think that's an unfair standard, but the law doesn't care about my opinion.
Similarly, the technical legal attributes of the salary contract will all undoubtedly take a backseat to more pressing concerns about consent, awareness, power imbalance, and basic fairness.
I agree with asking this question. There's a worthy journalistic norm against naming victims of sexual assault, and a norm in the other direction in favor of naming individuals charged with a crime. You could justify this by arguing that a criminal 'forfeits' the right to remain anonymous, that society has a transparency interest to know who has committed misdeeds. Whereas a victim has not done anything to diminish their default right to privacy.
How you apply these principles to NL depends entirely on who you view as the malefactor (or none/both), and there is demonstrable disagreement from the LW community on this question. So how do you adjudicate which names are ok to post?
I'm not sure what point you think I made here. I have a vague idea of how many lawsuits are filed in general, an extremely vague theory about what portion are defamation suits, and a hopelessly speculative guess of how many of those are frivolous. You're expressing a significantly higher level of epistemic certainty about that last question, and I'm questioning what evidence it's based on. You haven't offered any basis except assertions and anecdotal citations to notable examples.
Given that Ben is working on a response, I think it's clearly the right call to wait a week or two until we have another round of counter-evidence before jumping to conclusions.
This is a remarkable sentence given your prior statement from three months ago:
I don't have all the context of Ben's investigation here, but as someone who has done investigations like this in the past, here are some thoughts on why I don't feel super sympathetic to requests to delay publication
Have you changed your mind since?
To be clear, the decision to delay publication will always be a judgement call subject to reasonable disagreement. As pointed out, sometimes the targets of an investigation will request a publication delay under false pretenses either as an indefinite delay tactic or to break the story themselves under much more favorable framing.
Even the question of whether to notify the targets of an investigation is subject to reasonable disagreement. To give an intentionally trivial example from a journalistic amateur, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus published an expose a few months ago about what it saw as shoddy practices by Linus Tech Tips, a wildly popular tech review channel. GN's video was very well received, but the most notable criticism was around their intentional choice not to contact LTT for comment prior to publication. They defended their decision, arguing it is not necessary when there's either a pattern of misbehavior or a significant risk of a cover-up.
One of the criticisms against LTT was how they failed to return an expensive prototype they received for testing purposes from Billet Labs, opting instead to auction it off without notice to or permission from Billet. GN's concerns about notifying LTT appears vindicated, because less than 3 hours after GN's video was posted, Linus quickly sent an email to Billet asking for an invoice (after months of radio silence) and then publicly proclaimed "we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype" falsely implying that Billet was in agreement. This was solid evidence that had LTT been notified in advance, they would've scrambled towards similarly dishonest attempts at public relations damage control.
So yes, reasonable people can disagree on whether or not to delay publication or even notify the targets of an investigation. No denying that. What should guide our decisions here should be adherence to generally-applicable principles, and I struggle to discern what yours are in this area.
For example, @Ben Pace vaguely cited what he thought were credible threats of retaliation against Chloe and Alice for speaking out. You speculate on several other possibilities:
My guess is Ben's sources were worried about Emerson hiring stalkers, calling their family, trying to get them fired from their job, or threatening legal action.
Just by your telling there are ample reasons to discount the fears in this instance (though not conclusively so). Ben wrote that Emerson "reportedly" had plans to hire stalkers, and though this allegation is not impossible it strikes me as too inherently absurd to take seriously (How does one find stalkers to hire? What instructions would these stalkers receive? Would this be in person or online? How would Emerson guard against being linked to these stalkers? etc). The other fears you outline fall under a similar penumbra in that had Emerson pursued the plans, it would only serve as the best confirmation of the allegations against him as a vindictive and vengeful character (but also what exactly would he even say to their families?).
I don't know what evidence Ben saw (and apparently neither do you) but absent specific evidence, retaliation is a meaningless metric to consider because anyone saying anything negative about someone can plausibly cite retaliation as a potential risk. But assuming the threats are 100% legitimate, how exactly does hewing to a specific publication date mitigate against any of them? You say that having things out in the open provides a defense, I admit I don't understand how that works exactly, nor do I understand why public disclosure would cease to be an option had Emerson actually followed through on his hypothetical retaliations before the post was published. We all know about the Streisand effect by now.
I believe you're completely off-base in concluding malicious intent from Emerson threatening a libel suit, and I addressed that in a separate reply. The argument against publication delay I found the most shocking was this one:
Separately, the time investment for things like this is really quite enormous and I have found it extremely hard to do work of this type in parallel to other kinds of work, especially towards the end of a project like this, when the information is ready for sharing, and lots of people have strong opinions and try to pressure you in various ways. Delaying by "just a week" probably translates into roughly 40 hours of productive time lost, even if there isn't much to do, because it's so hard to focus on other things. That's just a lot of additional time, and so it's not actually a very cheap ask.
This was a giant blaring red alarm to me. When I heard about "40 hours of lost productive time" I initially parsed its meaning as "lost productivity because I was flooded with tons of irrelevant information that took 40 hours to sort through". I never would have guessed that you were instead referring to a mental fixation so severe that it occupies nearly half your waking hours. I would like to think that this should serve as a warning, a caution that perhaps one is too psychologically invested to adequately pursue truth, not as a justification to further accelerate.
The general animus against defamation lawsuits is one aspect I found particularly puzzling within this saga. And here I confess my biases in that I am a lawyer, but also a free speech maximalist who used to work at the ACLU (back when they were cool) and an emphatic supporter of anti-SLAPP statutes.
I suspect that defamation lawsuits have a poor reputation in part because of a selection bias. There are significantly more threats to sue than actual suits in our universe, and the threats that will shine brightest on the public's memory will necessarily be the most outlandish and least substantiated. Threats are further proliferated because they're very cheaply deployed (anyone with a bar card can type out a cease & desist letter on their phone on the toilet and still have time to flush) and — crucially — authentically terrifying regardless of the underlying merits or lack thereof. As you point out, there is no question that lawfare is often levied as a war of financial attrition.
The closest corollary would be the bevy of tort abuse stories. Before it was widely and thoroughly vindicated, the McDonald's hot coffee story served as the lodestar condemnation that the American tort system was fucked beyond repair. But again, we're going to deal with a selection bias problem here. Unless you're trawling through every civil court docket in the country, the only time any layperson would hear about a personal injury story is when it's blatantly ridiculous. The same issue exists with defamation lawsuits.
So just because defamation lawsuits are used as a tool of abuse, does not mean that every defamation claim is baseless. I would hope that this statement is self-evident. Instead of picturing a scorned celebrity siccing their horde of rabid lawyers against any whiff of criticism, I'd want you to consider that sometimes random nobodies are accused of quadruple homicide by TikTok psychics, or accused of election fraud by the former mayor of New York City. I'd hope that you can appreciate how terrifying it can be to be the subject of a malicious smear campaign, how daunting the prospect of initiating a defamation suit can be, and how uncertain any potential vindication might be.
I have no idea how many defamation lawsuits are initiated, but there are more than 40 million lawsuits filed every year in the US. Ideally you'd have some way to discern which grievances are valid and which ones aren't besides just declaring all as inherently suspicious.
I mostly agree with your points.
Singular leaks can only be effective if coupled with evidence that you would rationally expect. Snowden's singular leak was extremely effective, because he had the receipts to back up what he claimed. The UFO leaks have not been, for the opposite reason.
Nebulousness can be an indicator of a falsifiability fugitive, but it can also have innocent explanations as you point out.
I gave two succinct definitions: "the circumstances conspiracy theories must assume also, ironically, render the conspiracy moot." and "theories that assume circumstances that render the titular “conspiracy” unnecessary."
There is an element of Occam's razor for sure, but relying on it exclusively is another instance of a potentially misleading heuristic. There's going to be contention over what exactly counts as "simpler explanation" and also in reality sometimes the real explanations require more nuance or complexity. OCH approaches it from another direction by not challenging any of the conspiracy theory's premises and instead shows that by the conspiracy theory's own premises, the entire reason to have a conspiracy in the first place becomes unnecessary. IMO it's a more straightforward method of establishing a logical contradiction within the conspiracy theory, rather than just asserting the simpler explanation is the more correct one.
My understanding of the chemtrail conspiracy is the purpose is to for the government to spread mind-control chemicals (or something) via commercial planes. For that to be true, we'd have to assume the "chemicals" we're talking about must be extremely potent given the altitude. If the government has access to this level of mind-control chemical technology, it does seem odd to waste so much of it by scattering it over absolutely remote areas at an altitude of 6 miles up. If the government already has an established web of secrecy and logistics implicating every airport, it would seem to me much cheaper to surreptitiously dump the mind-control chemicals into either the water or food supply. Or maybe the chemtrail argument is that they need the mind-control chemicals floating in the atmosphere? Again, it would seem cheaper to deploy the chemicals by fake factory smokestacks.
This conspiracy is hard to pin down obviously, but it seems to fit the overkill framework.
Maybe I am misunderstanding this sentence, but if you ask someone 'what went wrong' to help alleviate further victimization - isn't that gathering information on what advice to give, and not about giving advice? This might be a small thing, but it is something I noticed.
I don't understand the difference. You can't give someone advice if you have no idea what happened to them.
Regarding the distinction between pre & post-victimization, I agree the two circumstances are not identical but the advice for the two situations will have a significant amount of overlap. "Make sure to use a u-lock" is good advice for all cyclists in the city, including those who just had their bike stolen because an insufficient lock tends to be the most common failure point in my experience.
I wouldn't like to get advice if I lost a bike, I would like empathic support, care, understanding and a friendly hug.
I agree that a different tact might be necessary for post-victimization, but I flatly don't understand the aversion to advice. I mentioned a friend who locked up a very expensive bike with a dog collar chain, thinking it would be enough. Her bike was stolen within 5 minutes. She ended up buying the same bike again within a week, and it would've been absolutely cruel to not warn her that she should get something stronger than a dog collar chain.
Lastly, I fully agree that rape is far more traumatic than a bike theft! The purpose of analogies is to pare down the common elements to avoid confusing what motivates our positions on each respective issue. That's precisely why I picked something relatively trivial like bike theft, it doesn't stop anyone from adding distinguishing factors.
You're right, the gazelle analogy absolutely does not apply in the context of sexual violence. I didn't realize I left that implication until later and though I didn't intend to imply a connection, I regret not saying so explicitly.
The parallels between bike theft and rape are obviously not going to perfectly match, nor should we expect them to. My point here was to start with something small ("giving advice to victims on how to reduce risk") and then start extrapolating to see if we can reach a consensus on what precisely is bad about that. I'm not sure that the distinction you draw about "against what the person wants to do" is valid in this context. For one, protecting against bike theft goes beyond just time consumption. For me personally it has affected so many decisions I make about what components I'm willing to buy (and willing to risk), what places I'm willing to bike to, whether I should carry just my u-lock or bring a heavy cable as well, and has made the prospect of getting an electric motor & battery a non-starter. This also applies in other crime context, for example some people like to start a car early and leave it running to warm-up, but several states make it illegal to do so because of car theft concerns.
I disagree that we're confusing multiple issues; my central point is that these things are deeply related.
This is what I'm talking about. It's ok to say that these issues are related to each other, but it'll remain useful to retain the ability to discuss and evaluate individual components. Otherwise:
A: "It's ok to offer victims advice on how to reduce their risk."
B: "No because the advice gets packaged with doubt over whether the victim really is a victim."
A: "Ok but I'm not saying we should doubt victim's stories, I'm only talking about advice on how to reduce risk."
B: "But the advice tends to be given at inappropriate times and with what appears to be insufficient compassion"
A: "Yes that would be a problem, but again I'm not suggesting that people give advice inappropriately. I would hope that when I advocate for something, folks can presume there's an implied 'appropriately' qualifier in there."
B: "Well most of the advice people give is straight up wrong."
A: "I just said..."
And so on. I'm not saying that the concerns you raise are invalid! But stuffing everything into the same discourse gets confusing very quickly. My post was strictly about "giving advice to victims" and the pushback you're giving invokes all these collateral issues I never argued in favor of.
Maybe it turns out it's impossible to disaggregate "giving advice" from all the other phenomena you're describing, or maybe it's impossible to give advice with appropriate timing and grace. Those are important discussions to have but nevertheless it helps to first imagine the least convenient possible world and to keep issues discrete, otherwise it all gets mixed into a murky soup.