"This Is A Test"

Discussion in 'Off-Topic' started by Ohmin, Aug 13, 2021.

  1. Ohmin

    Ohmin Forum Royalty

    Important things should often be scrutinized.

    @Sokolov has, understandably, been highly skepticical of claims of election fraud, in relation to systems and the like. He wants "hard evidence."

    Though we may disagree as to how available such "hard evidence" is on the various aspects of the 2020 election, this is not a bad stance to have.

    However, I do believe this has possibly been applied unequally even considering other equally important (and potentially related) matters.

    So, this is a test, can an equal level of scrutinity be applied to PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) testing being used as a means of diagnosis?

    Specifically, what is the "hard evidence" that the test is an accurate means of diagnosis?

    Note that witness testimony (even expert witnesses) and mathematical models do not fall under the umbrella of "hard evidence". So this automatically excludes the digital genetic code supplied by the CCP to define "COVID-19", unless there is "hard evidence" (an independenlty varified isolate from a peer reviewed rigorous paper that followed proper scientific protocals could work) to verify it.

    Given how much of Governmental policy around the world currently hinges on the accuracy of PCR testing, including the Biden Administrations exhaltation of the CDC above the US Supreme Court (ignoring the USSC ruling that they can't extend eviction moratoriums), and the basis for many other hypothesis about the virus, being able to determine the accuracy of the testing, including how to differentiate false positives, is very important.

    It is worth noting that the creator of the PCR test, sadly now deceased, had stated that the PCR test should not be used as a means of diagnosis, this may contribute to how and why it hasn't been used like this previously. However, that would fall under "witness testimony" and therefore is anecdotal in and of itself.

    Likewise, the CDC has stated that they are looking at making a new test that will differentiate between COVID and the common Flu (pretty sure those are two completely different viruses, so I'm not sure why the US CDC would think such a thing necessary considering how much they've relied on the PCR test to supply data so far). This aggain however would be considered anecdotal in and of itself.


    This should be an easy thing for people to prove. So consider this merely to be a "test." Or a fun little game of fact hunting. Remember, methodology of discovery should be included, or it becomes merely testimony that can't be corroborated by "hard evidence."

    Happy hunting.
     
  2. L33Ch

    L33Ch I need me some PIE!

    Well u can see it with Cryo-electron microscopy if u actually need evidence it exists.
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02924-y

    But thats expensive, PCR as u likely know has been used for years to expand samples for genetic sequencing but has lead to false convictions for example, usually due to cross contamination in the lab.

    While not a perfect tool for diagnosis - it's difficult to estimate viral loads and can lead to false positives. Surely it's better to be overly cautious with any positive results than to risk further spread in the community. The same applies to 24 hour testing kits which detect antibodies within the blood.

    As for the hard evidence you require consult a micro-biologist which sadly I am not.
    https://www.science.org.au/news-and-events/events/genome-sequencing-covid-19

    Information on Rapid Molecular Assays, RT-PCR, and other Molecular Assays for Diagnosis of Influenza Virus Infection
    https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/molecular-assays.htm
     
    Last edited: Aug 13, 2021
  3. Sokolov

    Sokolov The One True Cactuar Octopi

    The problem here is you are conflating completely different concepts and misrepresenting my words, once again.

    ~

    Let's start with the definition of "hard evidence:"

    Hard evidence or facts are definitely true and do not need to be questioned.

    (Of course, nothing is perfect, so in a pedantic world we could suggest hard evidence never exists as we might all be living in a simulation, but obviously we are capable of being reasonable and pragmatic, and understand that it's about the quality of the evidence.)​

    Eye witness testimony on the level of "I saw someone moving boxes" is not "hard evidence" for the question of "did election fraud occur?"

    It's "hard evidence" for the question of: "Did you think you saw someone moving boxes?" but moving boxes, in of itself, is not a indicative of fraud, and those boxes may or may not have been moved.

    Video showing people moving boxes would, once again, not be hard evidence of fraud, but would be "hard evidence" of boxes physically being relocated.

    Both the testimony and the video can be used to look for further evidence of voter fraud, but in of themselves do not count as such.

    In other words, testimony, particular expert witnesses, CAN be "hard evidence" but it depends entirely on what they actually said and on what matters. But since you never provided any specific testimony to examine, we could not dive into any of them, and your claim was that lots of sworn affidavits count as "hard evidence," implying that the number matters, when it doesn't change the contents whatsoever.

    I also never said mathematical models do not ever count as some form of evidence, but they do not count as "hard evidence" since models, are in of themselves, guesses and estimates. This is especially when they can be shown to be false, misleading or have other problems, or the details of the model have not been released in a way that makes it easy to corroborate the model or its conclusions. (For example, climate change models is not "hard evidence" either, even if most scientists believe them to be true.)

    At the same time, the evidence threshold for extraordinary claims, of course, needs to be high. In this case, we are discussing the possibility of widespread, systemic fraud across the entire country of a federal election that was one of the most scrutinized in the history of the country. An election had concluded more than half a year ago, with many ongoing and concluded investigations. An election that's been certified in EVERY state of the union, by both Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as Congress. The DOJ has also investigated and found no cause to release any statement that would suggest wrongdoing (despite Trump's repeated phone calls and threats to the acting AG and meddling).

    ~

    In the case of whether you have COVID-19, a positive test is, of course, evidence.

    Can evidence be wrong or lead to faulty conclusions? Of course - even DNA tests have put the wrong person behind bars before. Alternatively, in another thread I posted how some people used data to claim that those infected with the Delta variant had a higher death rate if they were vaccinated - except it was the wrong conclusion because the evidence was interpreted wrong by not looking deep enough at the underlying data.

    This is why though, evidence, and also in general, PCR or other diagnostic tests aren't used in isolation.

    Typically, you don't go to the doctors, get a single test, and then is immediately prescribed treatment.

    Instead, what happens is that the doctor looks at a myriad number of symptoms and indicators, and comes up with a list of candidates, and then tests those, usually in order of likelihood.

    In other words, they are using leads (like "I saw someone moving boxes") to investigate and then uses the medical forsenic tools (tests) to validate their concerns.

    Note, too, that just because a result was positive or negative it doesn't mean they accept it immediately.

    For example, my wife recently came down with strep throat. Her test? Negative.

    But the doctor could SEE the physical evidence of it, so she ordered a different kind of test, and that one was positive. Turns out, my wife's version of strep had a mutation that meant one test type couldn't detect it. But by using more than one source of evidence, the doctor was able to reach the correct conclusion.

    A similar thing occurs with COVID-19 testing, as indicated by this article, where they discuss retesting methodology when false positives are suspected:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7934325/

    ~

    So to use the PCR test analogy...

    If there was a "test" of the election, and it came back "positive" for fraud, we should still look for other evidence, and possibly retest, in case there was a false positive.

    But "I saw boxes being moved" or "I built this special math model that predicts certain data in cherry picked counties" which basically just means that there are demographic similarities between counties is not on the level of a test for fraud and conflating the two things is incredibly problematic.

    Again, I link this article about election forsenics for how these things SHOULD be done:
    https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PA00MXR7.pdf

    ~

    There is also another difference between criminal forensics vs COVID testing.

    If COVID testing is a false positive, you may be subjected to more tests, or a short hospital stay - which, while annoying, is not the end of the world in most cases. You can also still refuse treatment. At the same time, you can just take the test again - which is very easy. It's not like we lock up people for 50 years or overturn an election result based on a single positive COVID test.

    On the other hand, in term's criminal proceedings and forensics, people are (supposed to be) presumed innocent until proven guilty - and this bar is usually quite high because the consequences of a false conviction can be very severe. And, unlike taking another COVID test, a re-trial can be costly and time consuming, assuming you are even granted one.

    And that's another thing - questions/concerns alone doesn't grant you a re-trial, you have to show actual new evidence or proof of misconduct in order to get that chance.
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2021
  4. Sokolov

    Sokolov The One True Cactuar Octopi

    To summarize:
    • Questions, concerns, and suspicions are not evidence
    • Not all evidence is hard evidence
    • Different kinds of evidence have different quality levels
      • things like diagnostic tests (which tend to have false positive rates of 5% or less AND can be re-run to verify) are generally considered higher quality than eye witness testimony
        • in one case, 6 different eyewitnesses misidentified a murder suspect
          • the chances of 6 PCR tests at 5% false positive all coming up false positive is 0.00000156%
        • 75% of all DNA exonerations involved eye witness misidentification
    • Evidence, hard or otherwise, are not conclusions nor answers in of themselves
    • The burden of proof is on those making a claim that is not supported by current observations
    When presented with questions, you should look for evidence, not draw conclusions.

    When looking at evidence, hard evidence is preferred, but not always available.

    Evidence should be questioned and scrutinized, and corroborated by other pieces of evidence.

    ~

    When you have enough evidence, you can start drawing conclusions, but be careful that you don't only care about evidence that points to the conclusion you desire, and ignore evidence that points to the contrary. This kind of "tunnel vision" is a common problem when we look at cases of police misconduct in false convictions.

    The researchers identified 10 factors that led to a wrongful conviction of an innocent defendant instead of a dismissal or acquittal:

    • A younger defendant
    • A criminal history
    • A weak prosecution case
    • Prosecution withheld evidence
    • Lying by a non-eyewitness
    • Unintentional witness misidentification
    • Misinterpreting forensic evidence at trial
    • A weak defense
    • Defendant offered a family witness
    • A "punitive" state culture
    We see here that "misinterpreting forsenic evidence" is a problem, along with "prosecution withheld evidence."

    It's very easy, even in professional police work, to want to interpret things to get the conviction you want, to the point where you may ignore or with-hold evidence that doesn't fit the story.

    We also can see here in this list the presence of "eye witnesses" and how they contribute, as well as other factors like "criminal history" which adds bias.


     
    Last edited: Aug 13, 2021
  5. GabrielQ

    GabrielQ I need me some PIE!

    This is wrong, one thing is an expert witness speaking of something and another is the work conducted by said professional. The results from a forensic analysis are analogous to the DNA sequencing and they certainly are "hard evidence".
     
  6. Sokolov

    Sokolov The One True Cactuar Octopi

    Absolutely. I doubt Ohmin himself believes that, he's just purposefully misinterpreting my statements regarding eye witness testimony and evidence quality.

    Of course, keep in mind that just because someone claims to be an "expert" doesn't mean that they are or that their testimony is good - like that one guy that was cited in one of the failed Trump lawsuits who basically argued that it had to be rigged because Biden got more votes than Hillary Clinton (because clearly, the number of voters each election voting for a particular political party must be equal to the previous one).
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2021
  7. Bushido

    Bushido Devotee of the Blood Owl

    I don't get you debaters. The only important thing to debate is whether Pox can be balanced with changes I propose
     
  8. GabrielQ

    GabrielQ I need me some PIE!

    we already told you that that isn't the case. No need for debate
     
  9. Bushido

    Bushido Devotee of the Blood Owl

    See? Fascism is the answer :)
     
  10. GabrielQ

    GabrielQ I need me some PIE!

    fascism would be if you weren't allowed to speak, people not agreeing with you it's like life is.
     
    L33Ch likes this.
  11. Bushido

    Bushido Devotee of the Blood Owl

    But im not allowed to speak... remember I've been banned! Haha! Also, people agreeing with you would just mean you are a midwit. I'd rather have top 10% agree, bottom 90% disagree personally.
     
    L33Ch likes this.
  12. GabrielQ

    GabrielQ I need me some PIE!

    Have you read the terms and conditions? where you banned for your opinions of the game or for a legit reason? aren't you speaking right now (even when you should be banned for bypassing a ban)? and don't you have access to the spreadsheet where everyone makes rune suggestions? you even admitted yourself that some of your ideas made it into the game. So don't play victim here.
    And the second part of what you said, that's fascism. Of course you wouldn't be able to notice, but still, it is.
     
  13. Bushido

    Bushido Devotee of the Blood Owl

    Almost 0 of my full ideas made it into the game. The only suggestions of mine that made it into the game were largely FW nerfs or large buffs that people too stupid to do math didn't realise they were adding into game.

    Secondly , I didn't bypass any ban. Ive said this multiple times, I didn't join the discord with the names that were flaming Beth. He just said it was me with 0 proof. I know who it likely was.

    I was banned for calling a group of the people terrorists (markus could tell you full story of my ban since he was the snitch). I didn't really think the ban was justified, but I also didn't really care to argue it; it's pretty clear that the "community" discord is mostly a bunch of circle jerking midwits, and they wanted me out of their safe space anyways, and would have eventually just banned me for not getting the vaccine or not celebrating pride month and BLM.

    I am not playing victim, I am just refuting your "argument". But please don't blame the atrocity that is the state of the game on me, I had nearly nothing to do with the current balance state other than bringing nerfs to FW simply because I played them. I made a spreadsheet of a banlist BEFORE Beth put together his, and I also made countless suggestions to the "community" spreadsheet that were deleted in favor of [insert dumb change that made it through].

    If Beth wants to ban me, he supposedly has the power to and I dont actually care. Truthfully i don't even think they can at this point, since they can't even change rune abilities but idk. But dont ban me for something like "invading the discord server" because I didn't actually do that. I'd rather just make my own, which I would have done if I cared enough to begin with.

    Anyways, I don't really want to talk about why I was banned, but you said I was doing something which I wasn't; I was more so just trying to illustrate that democracy is a joke.
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2021
  14. Sokolov

    Sokolov The One True Cactuar Octopi

    "I am a victim of an authoritarian government because a private organization refuses to allow to continually break the rules and give me an unfettered platform to be abusive to others! FREEDOM!

    Also, I am not playing victim, I am just going to talk about it every chance I get about how UNFAIR it is that *I* am not being listened to and my ban was TOTALLY unjustified."


    https://quillette.com/2021/02/27/the-evolutionary-advantages-of-playing-victim/
     
  15. GabrielQ

    GabrielQ I need me some PIE!

    Dude I don't really care about why you were banned. By bypassing a ban I am referring to the fact that you also got banned from the forums and yet, here you are, with another account.
     
  16. Bushido

    Bushido Devotee of the Blood Owl

    According to Beth, I was not banned from forums. I made a new account because old one was slow. I posted semi recently from dicemoney account as proof
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2021
  17. Bushido

    Bushido Devotee of the Blood Owl

    I mean to me, when you say you are playing a victim, the implication is you, are not, in fact, a victim. If im legitimately banned, then I am by definition a victim of banning.

    And you can tote that separation between governments and organizations is a real thing but in reality governments act as corporations for the most part rn anyways. Although, I personally don't consider myself a victim at all, I after all, was born with a superior intelligence and good fortune than most, and I am incredibly humbled by my opportunities in life.

    And as far as me being abusive, that's just ironic, because a) it's online and b) I am against singling ppl out and bullying, unless the person is doing it non stop to others. But obviously I don't intend to be on the same side as many ppl in the "community "
     
  18. L33Ch

    L33Ch I need me some PIE!

    Bushido likes this.
  19. GabrielQ

    GabrielQ I need me some PIE!

    Dice was banned for legitimate reasons not at all related to his current trolling. Also see how he says "abusive? it's the internet" and tell me that that isn't a red flag.
     
  20. L33Ch

    L33Ch I need me some PIE!

    Sure but I was referring to this platform...As for "abusive' text it definitely has it's limits but I generally find modern PC culture far too restrictive in regards to free speech.
     
    Last edited: Aug 19, 2021

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