Shylock Holmes Profile picture
Nov 5, 2020 7 tweets 1 min read Read on X
A metaphor for the likelihood of voter fraud, for people who insist that it's a conspiracy theory, or there's no evidence of it.

(1/7)
Suppose Amazon wanted to know how many packages it had. Packages were kept in warehouses all over the country. The system was different in every warehouse.
(2/7)
Some people need to move packages around, and there's a list of who is allowed to do that in each warehouse. But if you go in and say you're that person, nobody checks. If someone else has already done that for you when you arrive, you just get another package.
(3/7)
Some packages get driven around by people in their own cars, some get moved around by the post office, some by volunteers or low paid government employees, and in each case they're largely unmonitored - there's no clear record of which ones left or arrived.
(4/7)
Packages are, by common consent, valuable for people to take. But nobody investigates closely what happens in each place, and very rarely are package thieves caught.
(5/7)
For what package system other than "votes" would this be considered a reliable and acceptable system?
For what important corporate outcome, if you proposed this setup as a manager, would you not be fired?
(6/7)
If someone told you there was no evidence of package fraud, how plausible would that claim be?
(7/7)

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More from @shylockh

Feb 28
Orwell is still undefeated as describing the best model of the psychology of charity:

""A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it."

1/
It is amazing how many social problems in life are utterly perplexing without this as your default understanding. One normally expects world leaders to hide it better, but the reaction itself is not a surprise at all.

2/
Whether you take this to mean you should stop providing charity, or you should do it but expect ingratitude, or only do it in such circumstances as you would be happy with the outcome even if the response were ingratitude, is up to you.

3/
Read 4 tweets
Feb 21
Every day for the past month, I've been reminded that for my entire life up to 2024, I was assured that it was impossible to fire civil servants in any meaningful quantity, that government departments couldn't ever be closed down.

It was all lies. It just hadn't been tried.

1/
And this is not a case of me just believing the New York Times. All my based friends agreed! I agreed. It was one of the most bipartisan beliefs I can think of. It was almost as rock solid outside the Overton Window as inside.

2/
I feel lots of people, myself included, have not fully adjusted to the implications of this belief being wrong, crazily and demonstrably wrong. How many other structures of government might turn out to be equally fragile in the right setting?

3/
Read 9 tweets
Feb 12
Sooner or later, America is going to have to grapple with the difficult philosophical question of whether "an illegal court order" is a contradiction in terms or not.

1/
You may be surprised to find out that the current regime does not actually have a clean answer to this question. Instead, it studiously avoids needing to have the question brought up. All systems with explicit or implicit judicial supremacy seem to have this trait.

2/
The reason is that both answers are deeply confronting.

3/
Read 11 tweets
Feb 2
The reactionary economist's steelman case for tariffs. An incomplete thread.

1/
Tariffs produce tax revenue which can be used to offset other taxes. The failure to include this in comparisons greatly slants the argument towards free trade in the eyes of economists, by conflating "lower distortionary taxes" with "lower tariffs specifically".
2/
Existing taxes, especially income tax, have huge deadweight losses - compliance is a big pain, distortions from lower incentives to work are damaging. Even if free trade is good, this justifies more agnosticism about a *revenue neutral tariff* than most economists display.

3/
Read 19 tweets
Dec 24, 2024
The essential personality trait that doctors develop is the ability to confidently give an answer on any matter and sound like a self-assured subject matter expert. Even if they've half forgotten, or don't really know. Patients hate an uncertain or unknowing doctor.

1/N
This is not just something that comes from the medical profession, but something patients themselves implicitly demand. People don't like doctors that get the wrong answer, but they tend to be even more scornful of doctors who Google things in front of them.

2/N
If we're both just googling medical ailments, why am I paying you? I can do that myself.

This attitude is terrible, and a collective norm that allows answers of "you know, I'm going to research some more obscure possibilities and get back to you" would be very helpful.

3/N
Read 10 tweets
Nov 17, 2024
Evidence Suggesting Voter Fraud in Michigan Senate Race

5 highly suspicious late-night vote updates in Wayne, Genesee, Berrien and Muskegon counties contributed 18.5K net Democrat votes, almost the entire Dem margin of victory. They look implausible on multiple dimensions.

A 🧵 Image
The updates boost Democrat votes at the expense of Republican votes, pushing the limits of what might be considered credible to a casual observer. However, they leave six properties that are consistent with fraud, and are collectively very hard to explain.

2/N Image
The suspicious properties are:
1. Very high Democrat vote share (89%+)
2. Enormous increases in Democrat vote share relative to past votes in county (26% to 52%↑)
3. Increases in Democrat share are huge outliers relative to all nationwide vote updates (above 99.6th pctile)

3/N Image
Read 32 tweets

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