Hacker News Reader

Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

> I got flagged here on HN for stating (right as the news was breaking) that the shooter could just as likely be right wing as left

I don't think you should have been flagged for such an observation in general, but assigning a prior of equal probability strikes me as frankly absurd. It would be much harder for someone on the same ideological "side" to have a motivation to murder. False flags really aren't that common, in general. This is the same kind of conspiratorial thinking behind Alex Jones' "crisis actors".

Also, your comment was off-topic to the sub-thread. People were discussing whether Kirk would be seen as a martyr. The ideology of the shooter has quite little to do with that.

> (I'll probably get downvoted again for this lol)

Commentary like this is inherently obnoxious, and tends towards self-fulfilling prophecy.

View on HN

> It would be much harder for someone on the same ideological "side" to have a motivation to murder.

Is the likelihood lower or higher if it already happened (at least) once last year?

Is it lower or higher if you’re aware of the hostile dynamics between TPU and at least one popular very much violence-encouraging even-farther-right influencer? Nb this group has opposed Trump for being too timidly white supremacist. Would that shift your guess at the odds?

Safe bet if you’ve been paying attention to this stuff for a few decades was about equal odds right or left winger, and maybe somewhat higher right, if the target’s a right winger (almost certainly the attacker is, if relevantly affiliated, right-affiliated if the target’s a Democrat or otherwise left) or else (in either case of political affiliation of the target) there’s fair odds of apolitical notoriety-seeking or straight up lunacy without a strong political motivation.

[edit] nb I’m not saying 100% that the guy won’t turn out to be coming from the left, but I think if you’re playing the odds on something like this and go “must be a leftist” you’ve misread the situation in this country.

It doesn't sound conspiratorial to me. It seems a lot of shooters are right wing, I guess because they like guns and the right tends to be more pro gun.

Also "just as likely be" <> "equal probability".

> It doesn't sound conspiratorial to me.

The conspiratorial thinking is jumping to an assumption of a high probability of a "false flag". In reality, the base rate of such attacks is low.

> It seems a lot of shooters are right wing

Many right-wingers would dispute the methodology behind these statistics, but that's beside the point. This information, however, is more or less rendered irrelevant by the circumstantial evidence that this was a political assassination, combined with the fact that the victim was right-wing.

> Also "just as likely be" <> "equal probability".

It quite literally means the same thing. If I flip a coin, the result is (ignoring all the standard gotchas) just as likely to be heads as tails. If I flip a coin, the probability of a heads result (ignoring all the standard gotchas) is equal to the probability of a tails result. The information content of the previous two sentences is the same.

I use just as likely in the manner of it's just as likely to be sunny tomorrow as not, ie. of approximately similar likelihood, not exactly 50/50.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com