This shouldn't need to be said at this point, but given the new Speaker's apparent beliefs, it bears repeating:
While there are weaknesses in US election infrastructure, there is simply no evidence whatsoever that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" or that technical attacks in any way altered its outcome.
58 of my colleagues and I wrote this shortly after these nonsensical conspiracy theories began to spread two years ago. It remains as true now as it was then. https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/election2020.pdf
@mattblaze it's a mistake, both factual and rhetorical, to say there is no evidence instead of saying the evidence is scant and uncompelling.
It's like, yes, there is evidence that the world is flat. It's poor evidence and the overwhelming body of evidence and analysis debunks it. But it exists.
If one wants to engage with someone who has questions about the election, they're going to be immediately shut out once they deny that the evidence exists.
At that point they're clearly gaslighting and won't make any progress.
Although, if the goal is just to preach to the choir or signal tribalism, have at it.
@volkris you’re not as clever ad you think you sound. This isn’t a freshman philosophy class.
@mattblaze who said anything about philosophy?
This is really about rhetoric and political science. This is 100% about real world choice of words.
Philosophy doesn't enter into it.
The moment a person feels gaslit they're going to shut down and your argument is not going to be convincing.
Again, maybe your goal is not to convince. That's fair. The choir will still eat it up.
But if you do want to reach some people with misguided beliefs, then you have to reach them where they are.
@mattblaze that might be, but AGAIN, if you want to convince someone then you have to meet them where they are.
If I'm a fervent believer that the earth is round and your first words to me are, "Seeing as the world is flat..." I'm going to start with the assumption that you don't know what you're talking about, and you're unlikely to convince me of your perspective.
Maybe a person does believe a bunch of made up bullshit about the election. Fine. If you want to reach them you have to engage with that.
Again, IF your goal goes beyond preaching to the choir.
@volkris I’m not going to meet you halfway on bullshit. Facts and evidence actually matter. If someone says the COVID vaccine is full of 5G tracking microchips, it’s not helpful to say, “ok, but there are probably really only a few 5G microchips in there.”
@mattblaze so again, What's your goal here?
Do you want to educate, influence, and maybe even bring others over to your perspective?
Or is your goal just to shout into the wind?
Or something else?
@volkris @mattblaze His original post states that it's nonsense, with a link. Isn't that clear?
@volkris no, the more interesting question is what your goal is. I can only conclude that it’s to waste my time. And I’m done with you now.
@mattblaze I'm not very interesting, believe me.
I don't know why you're being so cagey about your motivations here, especially as mentioning what you're aiming for probably helps magnify whatever impact you're looking for.
@volkris @mattblaze for what it's worth, he's not being cagey, you're being embarrassing.
@quinn Why not both?
My ego can stand being so embarrassed. But yes he is being cagey.
What are you getting at with this post? shouldn't be a controversial or difficult question.
so, and i'm not at all being sarcastic or anything, one thing to understand is that matt not only has a popular presence on social media, his accounts are always high engagement.
i have myself gone through periods of high vs low engagement, and it requires a lot of management. when someone comes to you with a question you've already answered, in some cases (this one particularly) many times, you're not likely to get a lot. it's the first time for you, high nth time for them.
@quinn so do you know what his motivation is? Is this something he has clarified before?
@volkris @mattblaze it isn't Matt's job to educate the invincibly ignorant.
@abraxas3d I don't know if he's taking on that job or not, as I tried to stress.
As I keep stressing, if a person's goal is just to preach to the choir, great!
If their goal is to do more and educate, even better in my book, but if so, there are ways to do that effectively that don't start with making the listener feel gaslit.
But whistling into the wind is definitely an option.
This is social media, after all, and Matt can pick his own job.
@volkris @abraxas3d @mattblaze
Trump and the Trump-adjacents are 0 for 62 in the courts. That's close enough to "none" for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_U.S._presidential_election
@bks courts don't judge whether there is evidence at all. Courts judge how the evidence stacks up, which is my entire point.
So if you start pulling up those cases, you will see the evidence submitted to courts.
If anything, that there were 62 court cases highlights exactly what I'm saying, that there is evidence, it's just really bad evidence.
@volkris @abraxas3d @mattblaze I think we will have working nuclear fusion reactors before we have a good way to reach people who have fallen down a conspiracy rabbit hole🙁
@edyoung sadly, tragically, part of the issue is how people sort of accelerate as they fall down those rabbit holes, so it's really important to reach them early, to nip the claims off at the bud.
I never think people in general are unreachable (even though some individuals absolutely are) but the longer you wait to start engaging with them and debunking things they are falling for, the harder it is to arrest their fall.
These days I'm especially frustrated with the things people are spouting about COVID, and I sure do wish we had addressed some factual claims about vaccines and stuff even half a year ago when the misunderstandings were just beginning to really snowball.
And it was something I watched in real time, in frustration, because it's not like I have the microphone that, say, a national journalist does to answer questions being brought up but not addressed.
Anyway, it's my theme here that anyone is free to give up and I understand that choice. It's not the one I make, but I respect other people who just give up on the other side and don't bother addressing them.
Let’s also compromise with Flat Earthers. The Earth is a hemisphere.
@mikej exactly!
So there was plenty of bad evidence, and it needed to be called out as bad, not just ignored.
It was a huge problem, and it remains a huge problem, that all of this evidence is just ignored as not existing at all instead of being properly debunked and refuted.
So many people continue to believe this evidence today because so many in the mainstream never dealt with it, and that's a huge problem.
@mattblaze qoto is a troll farm. You'd be better off blocking the server.
@volkris Can you give some examples of people being successfully deprogrammed of the belief that the election was rigged, stolen, etc.?
@mark I know a few people personally.
Just one example was a friend who brought up statistical evidence that the vote counts didn't satisfy the expected distribution, but once you went through the stats with them, they were satisfied that the evidence was due to a misunderstanding of the statistical expectations.
And that's exactly how we (as a society) should have addressed those questions, not denying that they existed but answering them.
SO MANY reasonable people would have been assured of a fair vote who even to this day don't know.
@volkris I don't believe that, at scale, questions could be answered. Not when there is a dedicated core of non-believing agitators who have something to gain from raising questions forever. The nature of communication at scale ruins nuance and subtlety.
But I am pleased to hear you had success in person-to-person contact. I think it's asking a lot of people to be able to pull that off, but I won't diminish it worked for you.
@mark the thing is, once a claim has been generally debunked, non-believing agitators are not only rejected by the mainstream, but they're rejected even more powerfully the stronger they agitate.
Heck, I saw this play out anecdotally just last night, hanging out with a group where one person became more and more forceful trying to promote a far out theory about the world, which just annoyed the rest more and more, so they got more and more excluded from the conversation.
No, you'll never convince everyone, but you don't have to.
Address the questions and concerns of a mainstream and what's left will be rendered marginalized and powerless.
once a claim has been generally debunked, non-believing agitators are not only rejected by the mainstream, but they’re rejected even more powerfully the stronger they agitate.
I'm not seeing evidence of this hypothesis. Basically all of Trump's lawsuits were thrown out, and his supporters' response to that fact was that he hasn't been given a fair shake by... (error actual opposing actor not found), not that, maybe, the common thread was he was filing bad lawsuits.
It appears that people believe what they want to believe and fit facts to that belief structure, most of the time. Especially when there's nothing as meaningful as "a personal friendship" to influence them to alter their beliefs.
@volkris @mattblaze Today I learned that saying the world is round is akin to "preaching to the choir"
@volkris @mattblaze
I think you misunderstand the direction of debate.
I can't prove the election was secure/accurate. I can't start a conversation this way. It's not valid.
The onus is on the other side to come forward and present the strongest evidence that supports their argument of election fraud.
The analogy isn't flat-earth, but space-aliens. With flat-earth, I can prove the opposite, that it's actually not flat. But I can't prove there are no space-aliens. I can't only debate the evidence that UFO believers bring forward. If they refuse to bring forth the. strongest evidence of their claims, well, then there's nothing for me to do but laugh at them.
Same with election denial. We have a secret ballot (good) and sloppy/opaque ballot handling (bad). There's no way I can prove that votes weren't flipped from Trump to Biden in enough numbers to flip the election.
All I can show is that the evidence shown to date do not show any fraud, any flipping or insertions of votes.
Until Trumpists/election-deniers bring forth what they think is the strongest evidence, we can't have a debate.
And they won't. Republicans have been in control of the House since 2022. They could've had hearings on the evidence. They refuse to, because pretty much all the strongest arguments that have convinced the rank-and-file have already been debunked.
@ErrataRob You're assuming there's debate but I'm not! @mattblaze might be happily just spouting off into social media, and that's fine.
Anyway from your comment I would take away the phrase "the evidence shown to date" to highlight exactly what I'm saying, that evidence was shown even if it was really bad evidence.
But again, none of that matters if Matt's point was not to debate but just to preach to the choir.
@volkris @mattblaze
The standard dictionary definitions support both concepts.
a. facts/observations PRESENTED in support an assertion
b. facts/observations THAT REALLY DO support an assertion
One could therefore say:
a. all the evidence to date has been debunked
b. there is no real evidence
@ErrataRob YES exactly!
@volkris @mattblaze I'm not sure that tribal-marker conspiracy-theory "beliefs" like Flat Earth and The Election Steal are in the same category as things people really _believe_.
Pretty much everyone _believes_ in gravity. If you jump off the house, you _will_ fall. You're never going to persuade someone on the edge of a cliff otherwise.
Some people "believe" in The Election Steal. "LOL like we have secure elections now? Amirite?" But that attitude will vanish if the winner has an R after their name. It's not a factual or principled belief, it's contextual, it's utilitarian. It's something different, something that doesn't even merit the name "belief" IMHO.
I think there's a case to be made that engaging with that sort of "belief" offers it validation that it does not deserve.
@WesternInfidels Oh I've known a lot of those people personally. Well I know both people who believe in the election steal and I know people who are literal flat earthers. (Although that Venn diagram doesn't really overlap in my personal experience).
And from what I've seen, the attitude doesn't vanish if the winter has an R. They just are falling for BS from the uncontested claims that they are receiving.
So in my experience the key is to systematically sit down and go through the claims that they are receiving from BS sources to debunk them one by one, as annoying as that may feel.
But yeah, I go out of my comfort zone to interact with these people so I know a little more about how they operate than a lot of people here seem to.
That's a pretty different context. Having the opportunity from time to time to delve into a specific misapprehension with a specific person (likely in most cases someone who has at least a minimal level of pre-existing friendly feeling for you), follow their argument where it leads, analyse where the mistake is, and potentially change that one person's mind... Doesn't mean it's a good idea _in general_ to entertain claims which you have reason to believe are fictional.
@unchartedworlds no, I am thinking about SO many cases where some mass media figure was interviewing some expert, and the expert didn't address the points that the figure was bringing to the table, allowing the figure to both present the misunderstanding to their audience, but worse, continue to promote the misunderstanding and even double down on it in the future.
I'm especially frustrated from seeing this in contexts involving COVID these days. It's an ongoing issue, and the questions that were left unanswered way back when are now snowballing.
It seems like so many public officials may have been technically skilled but really failed in the part of their jobs that involved engaging with the public to explain what's happening.
The way I see it, I consider it tragic the missed opportunities to engage with the public through such mass communication channels.
@mattblaze @volkris On the other hand, properly collected bullshit from an operating farm is worthy of notice, if you can stand the smell
philosophy doesn't enter into rhetoric or political science.
huh. that's certainly a take.
@volkris made up bullshit isn’t evidence.