Wouldn't it just be written off as a conspiracy theory that provides little to no evidence for its claims?
If the only thing that gets this on HN is Seymour Hersh's reputation (which has lately become somewhat questionable) then you might want to reconsider. Plus, the quality of the comments has not been very good so far.
Btw, I haven't gone back and looked at the history but I'd be willing to bet that the same things were said about Hersh's reputation from the beginning. That's standard fare for counterargument.
p.s. It's astonishing how narrow the space is for someone to say they don't know the truth about X but it's interesting. If X has any charge at all, you get pounced on by people who feel sure that they do know what the truth is. But if you think about it, it's a precondition for curiosity not to already know (or feel one knows) the answer—and this is a site for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So I don't feel that this is particularly a borderline call from a moderation point of view.
b) There is a lack of evidence in the article. I can claim that you destroyed the pipeline and it would be equally as valid at this point.
c) His previous reputation is important but history is littered with examples of people making mistakes and relying on their own hubris. That is why we demand evidence.
An established reputation is the difference between those claims. You making a claim without evidence is just that.
Hersh making a claim without sharing his evidence is something different. That isn’t to say we don’t need evidence, but there’s a better reason to believe him than you, given the context of the situation.
> His previous reputation is important but history is littered with examples of people making mistakes and relying on their own hubris.
And it’s also full of the opposite. The existence of hubris is not evidence of it.
But even then, that claim doesn’t fit, unless you are implying that he made the whole thing up and concluded that it must be what happened.
Another conclusion is that he has a source, and simply has not shared it yet.
Maybe time will tell.
This article shouldn't be allowed here until that time.
Reputation is not evidence.
If John Carmack says there is an exciting breakthrough in 3D rendering that will give 8k 120fps ray tracing on commodity hardware, that’s noteworthy, and his reputation is evidence that there is substance to the claim.
HN would be super boring if only topics that had been conclusively proven could be discussed.
No it isn't. The guy's reputation is reason to give the benefit of the doubt, but either his claims are proven sound or else they are just as bullshit if Joe blow himself made them.
The concept of the benefit of the doubt still relies on this form of evidence. That doesn’t imply that this is sufficient.
Regarding Hersh vs. Joe Blow, there is still a meaningful difference in them getting things wrong.
When it’s Joe, you don’t care to begin with, and the revelation of wrongness doesn’t change your opinion of Joe.
When it’s someone like Hersh, such a revelation brings reputational harm, and raises more questions about how he became so convinced of this information to begin with.
Judging how incredulous one should be of an author’s writing based on their reputation is something else.
No.
Especially in stories involving classified information it's very rare to get unequivocal proof at first. For better or worse leaks are how stories break, and the leakers are careful about how they do it so to avoid criminal charges.
Given this, all you have is the reputation of the person doing the reporting. Historically have they shown good judgement in discarding the crackpots and do many of their breaking stories from unnamed stories subsequently turn out to be true?
In this case I think Hersh's reputation isn't what it used to be. This century only one of his major claimed stories (the Abu Ghraib prison story - which I don't think he broke anyway?) has turned out to be true, while most (all?) of his other major claims have turned out to be either false or completely unverified after many years.
>Especially in stories involving classified information it's very rare to get unequivocal proof at first. For better or worse leaks are how stories break, and the leakers are careful about how they do it so to avoid criminal charges.
>Given this, all you have is the reputation of the person doing the reporting. Historically have they shown good judgement in discarding the crackpots and do many of their breaking stories from unnamed stories subsequently turn out to be true?
I think we're back to an Appeal to Authority.
No one is claiming that a journalist’s reputation removes the burden of proof.
If you read what I said, it's the opposite ("In this case I think Hersh's reputation isn't what it used to be") but the point is that reputation is a signal that something is worth paying attention to in the absence of any other useful information.
I often think "false appeals to a logical fallacy without understanding nuanced argument" should be a fallacy itself. Nothing wrong with understanding logical fallacies of course - but often people just mindlessly use them without understanding what the fallacy says.
Expert witness in legal trials is a good counter-example to this fallacy for example. Expert witness testimony is given extra weight because of their reputation in the field. Sometimes this is wrong, but often it is not.
Which seems little different to an appeal to authority. Maybe you better understand the nuance between an appeal to authority and an appeal to someone's reputation as an authority.
Hersh is 85 and in the past decade he has already done quite a bit of damage to his prior reputation
Whether it turns out to be true or false, this article is interesting right now.
If it’s true, for obvious reasons.
If it’s false, for what it says about Hersh, and a myriad of followup questions that arise.
a) I don't understand the relevance at all to Hacker News. There are plenty of interesting things going on in the tech world that aren't making the front page.
the war/defense industry is the foundation of all US technology:
https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Chom.h...
ukraine is a massive test ground for us weapons/tech -- including operations which don't occur strictly in Ukrainian territory.
and, the world might be over any day now because of the war, so there's always that.
is there a HN in heaven/hell?
1) The US would wait 7 months after Russia invaded Ukraine
2) The US would risk Navy divers for such a petty operation achievable without risking valuable personal
3) The US would not simultaneously detonate (17 hour delay between? wtf)
4) President Biden would not have immediately after taken the opportunity to interrupt broadcast and cable programming to remind us how tough he is.
Likely pieces of the torpedo could be found and traced back to American manufacture.
No, it wouldn't. The narrative provided by Hersh's source, whether it's true or not, explains many of the facts that demand an explanation. It provides plausible answers to the questions "How were the explosives placed", "How were the explosives triggered" and "how weren't they detected". Not necessarily true ones! But plausible ones that are internally consistent, and don't in themselves raise huge new questions.
If you want to be in the running, that's what you need to supply too.
This is not a defense of Hersh, it's a defense of his article. You should consider the claims in an article for their internal consistency, and consistency with public evidence, even if you don't trust the source.
This article is remarkable for how different it is from Hersh's Syrian gas claims. There, to the degree Hersh has answers at all to the similar questions how were the chemical weapons acquired, how were they placed and how were they triggered, they just raise impossibly hard questions (like "how was this coordinated", "how did all the participants go along with it" and "how did Russia and the Syrian government utterly fail to expose and document any of it convincingly")
It really isn't:
>What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines …
>… Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
>… Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City."
That's exactly the sorts of things from his other recent articles that people who know how things actually work would immediately know is BS.
But to the parts that aren't, I'm open to be convinced. Tell me what you think is unrealistic in the substance of the narrative, and tell me how you came to know how these things work better than the rest of us.
I know from many jobs that the image we would like to preserve for outsiders about how you work, especially in leadership and decision making, is a lot prettier and competent than how it actually works. Hearsh's source tells a story about a messy process, which he sounds, despite it all, kind of proud that still worked. Only he thinks the whole thing should never have happened. I can totally relate to that. It's completely different from typical conspiratorial stories (including some of Hearsh's).
And you sound, unfortunately, like one trying to defend the reputation and preserve the prestige and mystique of planners and decision makers in hierarchical institutions. All that's missing now is that you reply with some variant of a huffy "think what you will" to this.
But you can try to prove me wrong, by spelling out in detail what's so implausible about the sources story.
It's possible the tech stack for the detonator was written in Rust.
It makes it less surprising to me. Back in 2006 I believed Hersh when he reported that the U.S. had troops inside Iran laying the groundwork for an imminent American attack. This was also based on anonymous sources. After the attack failed to materialize, I learned to take such reporting with a large grain of salt.
He used to be credible. Then unfortunately a lot of shady people learned they could manipulate him and get away with it, and so they've done. He can publish something like this and when anyone says, "prove it" he can't. Because Top Secret.
This is something that will always be problematic when reporting on something that hasn't happened yet. As the future hasn't been written, there's always room for all actors to adapt and change their plans.
Sadly I don’t think your request is the morally good action you presume it to be.
When Modi-critical submissions get flagged to death, just to pick another flame war guarantee as an example, there is no such intervention. So it is odd it happened in this case.
Why do you believe that it's desirable to push at best unfounded assumptions and at worse questionable propaganda?
I honestly panicked reading this! At first I was under the impression that this was breaking news. And if true it has major implications. But that’s a really big if. It wasn’t until I read the article that it became obvious I was being manipulated to believe a narrative without evidence. The most disingenuous part of the article is that it starts with a bold claim presented as truth, and then immediately includes two sentences about the White House denying the claim before jumping into thousands of words of hearsay and a story presented as fact. As if to say, “what you’re about to read is a story, and you should know that, but you have to be smart enough to parse between the lines to see that — and I’m avoiding stating it directly so that I can get away with writing the story the way I want to write it on the chance it’s true.”
Substantiate the claims and I’ll rescind criticism. I like to believe I’m a thoughtful and relatively apolitical person, I just have a visceral reaction to being manipulated in this way (bold claim, no evidence) and I’d hope other people share the same standards.
Given who authored this, and who is referencing it, this is now a “thing.”
This being published is for sure going to have an impact on diplomatic relations. Removing it from HN doesn’t stop anyone of relevance in this from seeing it. Presidents, ministers, ambassadors, senators, etc. are probably being briefed on this. The White House is going to have to deal with this regardless of its truthiness.
I suspect countries are going to want answers. The U.S. saying “this is not true” probably isn’t going to cut it for the countries involved.
This story has relevance regardless of its truthiness.
After seeing how Germany handled the USA spying on Merkel (phone saga), I do not expect them countries involved asking further questions or taking appropriate actions.
Welp, maybe taking no action IS the appropriate action. The west must stay united and trade must flow.
But such submissions also suck up a lot of oxygen and it's understandable that they are often flagged or discouraged when they get too flamey. It might be worthwhile to have a designation like 'Chat HN:' which is understood to be non-technical, and which users can filter in or out of their feed.
This seems a little partial and hard to implement consistently. Can we assume the same metric will be applied to every Robert Woodward story, or any of many single-sector journalists with a lengthy track record, such as Radley Balko who has spent years writing about policing?
I also don't think adding a question mark to the headline clarifies; I can treat an assertion with skepticism, but 'How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline?' reads like a submission from a non-native English speaker, of the sort which often clutter up the New submissions page.
Re your other question, the answer is somewhere in the space demarcated by (1) yes, (2) we'll try, (3) moderation consistency is impossible, (4) we're always open to reader input. (I'm sorry that I'm responding in shorthand but I'm being inundated atm)
Seymour Hersh's unnamed source on how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline
If you wanted to hear it, you could just read it as it's been stated repeatedly ITT and it's in the HN Guidelines #1:
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
One of the unironically hardest things about maintaining a community is Saying No. And I'm not just speaking abstractly here, I'm talking personally. When you have a community of interesting and intelligent people who you've enjoyed discussing things with, it's completely natural to start to want to bring everything there for discussion. But some topics inspire far more substantial discussion than others. Some topics are inherently meaty, in particular when they are about things that we, individually or in our direct organizations, can directly take action on, extent further, or otherwise make use of in our lives/work. That helps ground discussion in reality vs emotion and subjective infinities. Other topics risk being more and more intellectual empty calories, where many words can be written that have no actual use of any kind, pure jawboning and ever more self-referential spirals. This is particularly risky for something like this, which is a level removed from hard reports due to lack of hard proof which in turn naturally results in much of the discussion going one or more levels more meta: rather than even discussing the impacts, however useless it might be, it's discussing the report, the author of the report, their credibility etc.
It's not that it's inherently wrong to have those discussions, but does it need to be here? The answer to a lot of us is no. Even if we want to discuss it very much. Self-discipline (and community enforced discipline, and moderator enforced ultimately) is key to maintaining a place like this, and that includes erring towards not having low quality, highly meta and vacuous discussions with no ability for anyone in the community to do any grounding or contribute anything you couldn't read in a newspaper.
I can take issue with some of the other stuff you wrote, but ultimately it comes down to that. Maintaining good communities often involves picking areas and sticking to them, generalization being death. If this was a forum devoted exclusively to space habitats and cats, someone taking out pipelines would still be very important, but it would be neither space habitats, nor cats. It would be completely reasonable for the community to flag it dead. That's not a judgement on the topic nor discussion of it in general. It's just not space habitats or cats.
No, it's not harmless to repeatedly claim things without evidence. No, people do not make their own judgments.
When reality and your expectations are out of sync, it's probably best not to call it arrogance.
What is your judgement based on, intricate knowledge of explosives, experience of deepwater diving or training in black ops?
Because if you have none of those things, then no, you cannot form informed judgement. There hardly any difference between asking me, you, or a random child.
This is an actual case of speaking truth to power. He clearly (and rightfully IMO) does not trust the US government and his "somewhat questionable" and recent work has continued that trend. Is it any surprise that the same institutions/people that continuously carry water for the government now rush to label him a conspiracy theorist?
No level of reputation or historical track record should exempt anyone from the basic responsibility of providing evidence for claims they make.
I'm not sure. Bloomberg and Reuters are two media outlets who regularly release information while only citing anonymous sources and not releasing any evidence.
Just posting proofster.png [1] doesn't undo America's long history of doing weird stuff to achieve its goals. Thinking about funding terrorism in Cuba, backdooring all electronic communication ever or saying that your President did not have a stroke.
Also, someone posted further down in the comments that the White House has a history of discrediting witnesses and questioning motives. [2] Interestingly enough, it appears to me that this tactic engages citizens to follow the ad hominem attacks of their policymakers, although they don't gain anything from doing so. Maybe this dynamic is even more interesting than the article itself because the causes of this crime are only for history books. America got what it wanted anyway, and nothing will change that.
It's bad when they do it too. That's what Bloomberg did with their Supermicro Chinese chip story and it was a disaster (and one for which they still haven't apologized or really even acknowledged).
Huge allegations require evidence. Your name is not good enough, no matter what you've exposed in that past.
And that worked great on that "all server motherboards are compromised" article right?
p. 112; The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Journalists; John Micklethwait, Paul Addison, Jennifer Sondag, Bill Grueskin; John Wiley & Sons; 2017 ed.
For you.
But maybe, just maybe, other people are willing to to accept claims backed by reputation.
I mean, do you have any idea how difficult some of these stories, throughout history, would be to bring to light with "hard evidence"? What would "hard evidence" even entail? A whistleblower?
However, evidence is not the only valid form of claim-making. Predictive power also has value: if someone can assert something unlikely without evidence, but with sufficient specificity that it describes a subsequent development very accurately, then it's fair to presume that person probably has insight into the issue.
So while I am somewhat skeptical of Hersh's claims, they're also detailed enough that corroboration could be sought for.
Both were corroborated with evidence. I'm scanning this post for new evidence and coming up empty. The fact that American action was technically plausible has always been known.
One might twist Hersh claiming he has an anonymous source as new information. But that's the closest we get. On its own, that's not sufficient to advance the discussion in a meaningful way because it presents no new facts.
I can't find any proof whatsoever as to who actually did it from the western authorities claiming to investigate it either though. In fact, there's been little to no news or updates at all since the incident.
Not an evidence.
> the source
Remains anonymous. Also, not an evidence.
It’s a signal to pay attention to the issue. To keep an eye out for evidence. It’s not evidence per se.
It is not gatekeeping to demand that extraordinary claims are backed up by evidence.
And there is an absence of evidence here.
Nope. The normal flagging rules are a sperate threshold.
These tensions have been brewing between NATO (mostly America) and Russia for at least a decade. It's unfortunate that the situation escalated in Ukraine though, which AFAIK is the victim in the scheming and plotting of those two powers.
I don't support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it seems like that's the only thing people are focusing on because it makes the situation simple for them, and it's easiest to have a single villain and the rest are the good guys.
I assume most people offended by this submission here are American (or at least heavily support America) and want to think of their current government/country as the good guys.
I don't think there's any good guys in this situation.
Of course. You don't think there are people claiming to have anonymous sources about Putin doing all manner of things?
As a person from Eastern Europe this is literal Russian propaganda or in simple words - dogshit. You know why somebody like Baltic countries wanted to get in NATO? Because Russia was/is a genuine threat after these countries were deoccupied from the Soviet Union. Russia thinks that these former Soviet Union countries are still their own property, they can't imagine that these countries don't want to live "the Russian way".
They even have a term for it - "Cordon sanitaire": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(internationa...
Here's a collection of sources compiled by someone on Quora. I dont know how biased or accurate this person is. However, there were other instances that made me think this isn't so black-and-white or "clean" as I'd like it to be.
https://www.quora.com/If-Putin-is-indeed-the-real-aggressor-...
A lot of the sources he used are from Ukranian websites so you might need to run them through Google Translate. Some are from reputable (for at least some definition of reputable) western media outlets like CNN, BBC, NYT, etc.
The embedded vidoes don't seem to work in Chrome (they just disappear when I click them) so I've extracted the link for one of them here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 - Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer, uploaded by The University of Chicago
Other videos are shorter clips to prove a point, but if anyone's interested they can see the video ID in the embedded image URL when inspecting the element.
Again, maybe this is all dogshit like you say, but I find that too dismissive of the facts presented.
There is definitely propganda on both sides (and how much of it is true is hard to tell). Russia isn't the only one with a propaganda machine, if anything the US is much more successful at it than Russia could ever hope to be.
I encourage you to read more of the Quora article, even if I appreciate that some of the stuff in the article might be hard to stomach, since you seem emotionally closer to the issue than I do. I believe a lot of it is very unlikely to stem from Russian propaganda.
Some of the stuff you attributed (eg you mentioned tribalism and spite) to Russia isn't unique to them or their politics; it's just a very primitive part of human nature that we still struggle with.
And to close with a tangent: it's always good to keep in mind that nobody (neither you or I) is immune to propagand; especially when it's pushed by state actors with a larger agenda. This is why I often indulge in reading stuff I don't agree with (within reason). Does give me a bit of cognitive dissonance occasionally, but alas.
There's zero excuse for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I don't even see how this is semi-debatable.
Edit: oops, I missed that your question wasn't to me. Sorry!
Also saying Hersh only writes this kind of thing supports the idea that Hersh is biased enough to be taken for a ride by a source with an agenda.
I do appreciate you replying! Thanks!
I realise it's an incredibly difficult question to answer because of the what-ifs, though.
I would also like to think you'd have the same stance... And for what it's worth I do believe you would.
I'd argue that your stance is currently harder to uphold since it makes the whole situation a lot morally murkier, and also because it goes against popular opinion (one can only be immune to it so much).
As far as I can see your position evaluates to ‘dang trusts Hersh‘.
Since it’s 2023 and we use machines to do our thinking now, I consulted ChatGPT about this. I draw your attention to the last paragraph.
—————
strawpeople: Can Seymour Hersh’s reporting always be trusted?
chatgpt:
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has had a long and storied career. While he has been praised for his investigative reporting and his ability to uncover important stories, it is important to note that not all of his reporting can always be trusted. Like any journalist, Hersh is human and may make mistakes or have biases that affect the accuracy of his reporting.
Additionally, some of Hersh's reporting has been called into question, and he has faced criticism for making claims that are not supported by evidence or for relying on sources that are not credible. For example, in 2017, Hersh faced criticism for his reporting on the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria, which some experts said was based on unreliable sources and was contradicted by a large body of evidence.
In conclusion, it is important to approach Hersh's reporting with a critical eye and to carefully evaluate the evidence and sources he relies on. While some of his reporting has been praised for its accuracy and impact, it is not always reliable and should be independently verified.
It should still be approached critically, though.
People here seem largely seem dismissive of this story because they don't like it (or the author).
I've addressed in another thread why the sources are unnamed, but it's plausible it's to protect their safety, and lack of presentable evidence could also be the same reason. Information could be somehow fingerprintes to identify leaks. Hollywood did/does it; printers do it too.
---
> Since it’s 2023 and we use robots now, I consulted ChatGPT about this
On a lighter note, this made me laugh. Somehow makes it seem like we're in 3023, not 2023... but also like it's 2023. What a time to be alive.
I’m not putting words in anyone’s mouth.
Given that it’s clear he wouldn’t give this post special treatment if it wasn’t from Hersh, we can reasonably infer that dang trusts Hersh more than a random poster as you suggest he should.
I don’t think you represent dang, and at question here is dang’s reasons for giving the story special treatment, which unless you are a dang sock puppet you don’t have special insight into.
... And since we're indulging in unnecessary snide comments: They've outlined their reasoning already in a few places. Maybe if you read this thread instead of conversed with ChatGPT, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with.
If that is what you are up to, let’s end at this point.
Wasn't Watergate also reported relying on a single source (deep throat)?