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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

I don't doubt that something fishy happened, but I also think that the repetition of those occurrences are something that fuels the fires of baseless conjecture. There is no comparison to a baseline. How scrupulous are the guards on a typical basis? What were the existing uptime statistics for the cameras?

Any statistics for noncompliance at any sizable organization are going to be non-zero due to the law of large numbers. That is just evidence that they exist and do things. The baseline for comparison here shouldn't be zero, it should be the normal statistics for compliance.

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It's completely silly to use "how was a typical prisoner handled" as the baseline for what should have been expected with Jeffrey Epstein. There was extremely intense news interest, mainstream outlets were speculating that his testimony might bring down a huge swath of the U.S. ruling elite, and every conspiracy theorist in the world was predicting (correctly, as it turned out!) that he would never make it to trial.

I 100% agree that he should have been treated differently and that the whole situation overall was fishy. What I'm saying is that the anomalies may suggest different things in contexts of different baselines. Was compliance better than normal, worse than normal, or about the same? How did it compare to other places?

I just don't think it is good for public discourse to use out of context statistics, even (and especially) if they are right, because it emboldens others to do the same when they are wrong.

To put a little meat on the bone here in terms of what you're asking, this is the same prison that held El Chapo through his trial. If it was a sloppily run facility it seems unlikely it would have been chosen for that purpose. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but I believe successful suicide attempts at the MCC were also very rare, as in, Epstein's was the first in 20 years or something like that.

That's the sort of information I find 100 times more convincing than a list of events out of context.

From the same reference article about Epstein's Death :

"...In 2020, associate Jean-Luc Brunel was arrested and charged with the rape of minors by French prosecutors. He later died from an apparent suicide before his trial could proceed..."

Martin Armstrong was beat unconscious there.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/the-secret-cyc...

"At one point, a fellow-inmate beat him in his cell. (Armstrong suspects that it may have been an assassination attempt.)"

Martin recently wrote an interesting book about banker and politician meddling in Russia.

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/russia...

I'm not arguing that he wasn't murdered.

I'm arguing that "two broken cameras" means nothing without context.

It doesn't really make much difference if those occurrences happened frequently, as it may well have been known that e.g. the guards often slept during their shifts and thus that prison was chosen to make it easy to get rid of embarrassing people.

Did these guards sleep more than guards at other prisons?

(again, I'm not saying you're wrong, just saying these arguments aren't statistically rigorous)

> Did these guards sleep more than guards at other prisons?

No idea.

It just seems a poor defence of the events of that particular night by also stating that it's a common problem.

I'm not defending the events, I'm trying to establish whether or not they are anomalous.

I didn't mean that you were defending anything. I just think that the various events are indicative of problems whether or not they are anomalous.

As a bad analogy, if a murder suspect was found to be carrying an illegal weapon on the night in question, it would hardly work in their defence for them to state they often carried an illegal weapon.

So stating reasonable conjecture is bad because it fuels baseless conjecture? This doesn't sound like your milieu.

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