The Charlie Kirk Killing Theories: The (Non)-Mathematics Of Conspiracy Theories 2

There is a point about bad science at the end.

I didn’t count, but I think it was less than 48, and surely less than 72, hours after Charlie Kirk was assassinated before our eyes, available in slo-mo even, before the conspiracy theories that the-guy-who-did-it-didn’t-do-it started pouring in.

The specifics of this incident are not our main interest here, and I do not pretend to have cataloged all Kirk conspiracies. We are interested in the manner of handling evidence. I did all this before, in the mathematics of conspiracy theories, but I admit that was arcane and indigestible. Today I try to put it in simple fashion about an event I wish never happened.

Our thesis: It is your duty to find arguments which do not or seem not to support your beliefs. And uncertainty is not decision.

A guy claiming to be a combat marine (with lots of followers) commented on the assassin’s .30-06 and said that it was impossible to shoot that rifle prone because of the scope placement, and that the scope was anyway bargain basement and not up to its duties.

I wondered at this, because I own a .30-06 that looks almost identical, also with a cheap scope (Savage firearms; if you know, you know). The scope is awkward, and if you’re not careful, like I wasn’t the first time I fired the weapon, you can bruise your eyebrow, which I indeed did. But I learned. And now I, even I, the worst shooter at the range, can hit a bullseye at 200 yards with it. Well, much of the time. This is farther than the distance the assassin reportedly used.

I couldn’t have expected this marine to have asked me, because he hasn’t any idea who I am, but he did consult his experience, which was likely substantial. But not, apparently, with simple, cheap hunting rifles, which are on average more accurate and with greater destructive ability at distance than an AR-15, a weapon which the marine likely did know. (The .30-06 is sometimes seen as your “granfather’s gun.” Yes, no need to tell me: many guys blindfolded standing on one leg can hit the deck of playing cards left on the moon with an AR.)

Since the marine obviously did not know much about “entry level” weapons like this, it was his duty to find out about them before declaring with finality that the gun used could not have done the job. He failed in this duty. Whether he failed because he was certain sure or because he wanted to be first to “break” the news is a separate matter. His model of the world was wrong. Because his premises were.

Another fellow posted “sound analysis” on the gun’s report, which sounds like (a mild pun) he had just heard about (another). His analysis insisted the shot had to come from much closer than we saw. Like from the crowd we also saw? I have no idea of the strengths and shortcomings of sound analysis, and I’d wager that fellow doesn’t either. Where’d he get his audio? From a processed file on some cellphone? How accurate is that sound file with respect to time, frequency response and so forth? Is there aliasing at the gun’s reverberation frequency?

What were the weather characteristics, which can affect the speed of sound? Was that cellphone much closer to the roof on which the shooter lay?

(This doesn’t seem relevant to this question, but I offer it for whatever it’s worth. A slow .30-06 bullet travels at 2700 feet per second, and fast one at some 3000 ft/s, depending on the cartridge. The assassin was said to be about 150 yards, thought that figure may have changed, or 450 feet. That’s a range of 0.15 – 0.17 seconds, which is big which measuring mere feet.)

That’s just a start.

Another guy points to a vague image to a figure right below Kirk’s stage. The figure seems to have something its hand. Must be a gun. (Or, as this fellow joked, a death ray.) And therefore, he concluded, this shadowy figure is the true assassin. Besides the obvious criticism, why? Why must it have been somebody close rather than (relatively) far? What purpose does that serve? And, once you offer that purpose, what direct evidence beyond surmise have you to support it?

Another guy said it was Kirk’s lapel mic that exploded and shot a magnet through his neck. Doubtless somebody will say they haven’t found the mic, which confirms this theory. Perhaps it got lost in the melee and hurry to care for Kirk’s body.

Another guy said that after Kirk was shot a man was seem dismantling the tent’s ceiling microphone (Kirk was under a tent). Obviously, that was to remove evidence! And not the routine dismantling of equipment no longer needed?

Many pointed to a brief glimpse a security camera offered of the murderer jumping from the roof. It does not appear he has a rifle in his hand. Therefore he is not the true murderer. The picture is grainy, at best, and offers only seconds in the escapade. It does show the man possibly throwing the gun down, at a different part of the roof, before he tried to jump. I don’t think many would attempt a jump from that height with a weapon strapped to them.

Here video cameras do us a disservice. We are so used to Hollywood/video game interactions we expect we have been shown everything we need to be shown.

I’ve seen many patsy arguments. The murderer didn’t really know what he was doing. Or he did but was in the direct knowing pay of foreign entities. To explain the evidence of his chats with the man pretending to be a woman who was the shooter’s (um) friend, we have some saying these were either written by AI or that some high person in the employ of some spy agency, well versed in literary prose, constructed the texts.

Very well, then. Some writer employed by Spy Inc. wrote the texts. That is our theory. What evidence is there for it? The text’s existence, and that the language used in them was readable. And not littered with emoji and abbreviations. But that same evidence fits to the same degree the theory the shooter and his male friend wrote the texts. The emotional context and tense situation would, I think, incline anybody away from glibness.

I’ve even seen—and this is the best of all—Kirk faked his own death! Even if he didn’t, the FBI was surely involved, juicing the assassin or paving his way or covering up the evidence.

And this is all before the really dim-bulb theories, like the execrable Michael Mann’s claim Kirk was “Head of Trump’s Hitler Youth” (just as accurate as any of his “climate change” science).

Whatever theory people are using, even the theory that the man arrested did the deed in the manner claimed, must be backed by solid evidence. That theory too must be challenged by those defending it, which we have done here by considering the alternate theories.

This is, of course, precisely what the shooter’s lawyer will do, too. We (not coincidentally) return to that subject this Thursday.

The kiddies like to say you ought to steelman, as opposed to strawman, an opponent’s theory. That is right. It is your duty to do so. Anybody can find evidence to support a beloved theory, but the more you love it, the less able most are at finding evidence which goes against it.

Point is this: there will be at a given point in time some number of theories you entertain about this, or any, question. To these you must assign some uncertainty (not necessarily quantified, as in Part 1). Naturally, as evidence changes and theories come and go, the uncertainties can change. You can remain at these uncertainties, doing nothing about them except contemplate them. But–any move from less than certainty to claiming or acting like there is certainty is a decision. A decision discards all remaining uncertainty, as it were.

Decisions are not uncertainty, though they use it. Once you decide, you can be “locked in”, and must in some cases reject new evidence, as in, say, sports or stock betting. Or in trials. Or in becoming a full-time conspiracy theorist, where you become unwilling to hurt your “brand” by admitting some past even you first ascribed to a conspiracy was instead revealed to have been due to mundane causes. Another name for this kind of conspiracy theorist is “academic scientist”.

There is great temptation in the conspiracy field, given there have been some whopping conspiracy theories that have proved true (you can yourself easily extend this to the academic scientist example). We saw several in the covid panic alone. Just one instance: the bug’s origin. Discovering and exposing Experts’ and rulers’ bold lies, and their conspiracies to hide their lies, is heady. Especially when those rulers are beholden to an outrageously demonic ideology. The temptation is to thus conclude they are always lying, that all untoward events are caused by an occult cabal. Which is unwise. Even the Devil, it is said, quotes scripture.

As in all things, there is a Golden Mean between uncertainty and decision.

You often must act, again as in trials. The jury has to come to a decision. You yourself endlessly must make decisions. You cannot remain forever at uncertainty on all questions. You can always run away from responsibility by inventing new theories. Hypothesis generation is endless. Indeed, I have not exhausted the many theories I saw about the Kirk murder, and doubtless many more will arrive. There will always be an infinite number of alternate theories to explain any set of observations. (We have proved this many times: here is my favorite.)

That is why, again in legal terms, the trial decision is based on deciding only when there is no reasonable doubt. Because new doubt can always be generated. But most of the time much of it isn’t reasonable. Which means the premises of those new theories cannot themselves move anywhere toward certainty. You can say an alien space ray did the deed, because of a bright flash seen in the crowd, but this is not reasonable because the premises of that theory given our background information make those premises incredibly unlikely.

As in Part 1, you can make math of all this. It’s not necessary to do so, of course, and most of the time we do not. It is only in formal decisions math creeps in.

I go over this again in a legal context in Class on Thursday, to emphasize that decision is not uncertainty. (Yet another reason not to use P-values, which conflates the two.)

BAD SCIENCE

Bad scientists have the bad habit of pointing to a mass of “research” into some area, and using the size of the pile as confirmation their views are correct. We saw this yesterday. It’s the same with habitual conspiracy theorists. They point to the mass of theories above (and the many I missed) as proof that their theory is right. That they are all mutually contradictory, as in science (where it is usually subtler), never seems to matter. The activity is itself proof “something” is going on.

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