Do this. A lesson from air crash investigations: wait a week. Until then, discount everything.
> story would look the same no matter who did it
This is not true. Too many countries with disparate motivations had eyes on the area. We haven’t had time for intelligence to be scrubbed for public release. Again, give it a week. In the meantime, observe the meta story; who concludes what with high confidence.
I’m not sure what your second comment means exactly, can you elaborate?
One, the people who think before speaking will start talking. Two, intelligence will start being released.
The hardest part is that we are all that way, and we naturally love to see things that confirm our knowledge, biases, suspicions, etc; and hate to be challenged.
I mean, I agree with you. But from 10,000ft, it's going to be mostly the same voices, going one way or the other. Conflicting views will remain prominent. The information war is crazy.
U.S. (and other third party nations) intelligence services may or may not have legitimate knowledge and may or may not be truthful about it and that’s unlikely to change in a week.
What usually happens in these situations is a week later the stories are the same and we still don’t really know what happened.
But the prevailing view is that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad accidentally blew up a hospital -- not Hamas, not the IDF.
Week later, still don’t know anything.
I suppose if there’s an admission against interest I’d be more inclined to believe it, such as if Jordan says Hamas did it. But I don’t imagine they’d do that.
If the runup to our invasion of Iraq taught me anything, it’s that intelligence can be incorrect or misrepresented to the public for quite some time.
https://x.com/dimitrilascaris/status/1715137246431449451?s=2...
Unless you want to make money in prediction markets - then help out humanity by reading as much information as possible and moving the price so that people who don't have time to do that can have better information.
A week is a long time in a fast moving conflict, and the ambiguity favours the defenders if it slows down any attack.
An explosion at a hospital doesn't need a golden rule of 100% discount rate for 1 week. That's insane. Anyone telling you 100% of anything is incorrect because the world doesn't work like that.
Presumably people in your proposed situation have an idea on what's believable haha.
I think it's pretty clear where the smart money is on who is lying at every stage here lol.
He says wait a week. I actually used to wait a month - at the beginning of the month I would catch up on all the news. Compared to when I would follow things on a daily basis, I got more accuracy, and less haze. When you go through your RSS feed all at once for a month, you'll see how crazy often things are inaccurate in the first few days - something I didn't notice until I looked at it from on high.
The truth of some things may never get clear. Those are in the minority. For most events, it does by a large margin.
You may also enjoy browsing old microfiches.
Thankfully, I've rid myself of the "must follow news" curse. But yeah, looking at decades old newspapers it's fun to see the stuff there.
Your advice is really easy to give when you have no dog in the race, as a commenter said. I'm confident that once you have a problem with something and you felt you are not being heard, you're going to be caught with your pants down, rooting for the narrative that gives your grievance some space.
Let me share a story when I didn't wait. This is meant to be a stylized comment.
Months ago, a programmer got murdered in San Francisco, by what most people jumped to conclude was a homeless guy.
My best friend, personally, made national news by being murdered by a homeless person.
So in light of the facts shortly after the murder and my personal experience, I wrote the city supervisor and asked, what has to happen? Can you do something about "this?"
It turns out that this programmer was murdered by a person known to him. Why? The news suggests something about the victim's relationship with the perpetrator's sister, which people don't get murdered over all the time, instead of the far more idiosyncratic and too-many-coincidences fact that the victim developed a huge pump and dump cryptocurrency called MOB that affected a lot of powerful people, that funny enough I was also a victim of. That's another tale though.
I jumped to conclusions because I had a legitimate grievance. My government officials are much more responsive to social-media-viral outrage, perhaps rationally so because of its impact on voting, than something scientific, secular or wonky.
While I disagree with their primary grievance, I sympathize with social media users who read the hospital violence story and reacted to it aligned with their primary grievance.
We are replaying the circumstances behind Obama's comments here, which I found very striking: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/us/obama-says-movements-l...
> [Obama:] "The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room..." When some activists at that meeting said they felt that their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, “You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States.”
The people you're telling to "wait a week" haven't had their meeting with the president yet. It's the same energy as complaining about people blocking highways. My dude, they fucking get in the news, it works! So what do you want? How do people with legitimate grievances but are simply not numerous enough to matter politically in their communities, how do they get at the table exactly?