> Iraq body count is a common reference, it paints the coalition forces in a rather good light
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/Another common reference is this one, which has numbers as high as 1,000,000+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
I wonder: does it seem possible that humans might choose (and psychologically/epistemically favor) one source over another according to how well it supports their pre-existing worldview?
Similarly: might people also "calculate" causality (which directly affects attribution of responsibility for death) differently for similar reasons (assuming they don't just ignore it entirely, even when it is explicitly mentioned in a conversation)?
> For Afghanistan it’s harder to find numbers, but given the vastly higher casualties among local forces, it seems fair to assume that they’d have been doing most of the fighting.
Do you have any interest in the causality that preceded that fighting, and if so: how many years do you go back in your model, and how many variables are in your model? (Perhaps I should also ask: do you even have a model, or might you be using a different technique/phenomenon to produce your values?)
> Given the doctrinal differences between US and Russian forces, it’s completely unsurprising that Russians would be killing way more people.
Perhaps...but then there's also this rather unpopular question: what is actually true?
> Not to mention that US doctrine does not really involve terror attacks on civilian targets, whereas Russian doctrine clearly does.
"Clearly".
> You don’t see US bombing power plants many months into a conflict in order to cause civilian misery to gain an upper hand in negotiations.
You see mostly what is shown to you, and what your mind allows you to see. I recommend against the premature formation of belief, as well as being mindful of the mind's tendency to conflate belief with knowledge.