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Comment by laidoffamazon

6 hours ago

> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of the pond. And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.

Does Patrick want to address the fact that this happened during school break and that Nick Shirley didn't prove much of anything?

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laidoffamazon

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tptacek  5 hours ago

No? He dunks on Shirley. His point is that professional investigators found and documented much worse things.

  • wredcoll  5 hours ago

    Except for the part where when asked for proof he laughed off the idea of using convictions as a measure of accuracy.

    • saint_fiasco  2 hours ago

      My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.

      From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard.

      But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.

      A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.

    • tptacek  5 hours ago

      The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.

      It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.

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