I can't find the clip from yesterday where I tried a new approach to debunking Trump's big lie conspiracy about the election, but I'm going to try to write it in here. (thread)

The problem with trying to debunk conspiracy is that (as I've said so many times) it's a "self-sealing narrative." Meaning no evidence is allowed to count against it. You can neither prove or disprove conspiracy.

If you say "there's no proof," they say "they hide it."
If you say "the evidence disproves," they say "they made that up."

Of course motivated reasoning & confirmation bias are at work here. What's worse, conspiracy makes heroes out of the accuser and the believers--they aren't stooges, they know the truth, etc.
So I said all of that in this interview and then they asked what I would say to students about this in 10 years. I said in 10 years it will be easier to talk about then it is now. Now is hard because no one knows for sure. BUT, what if we used Occam's Razor?
(Occam's Razor says that the simplest solution is usually the correct one). Conspiracy is like this guy, right?
Trump's election fraud conspiracy asks you to believe there was a coordinated plot among states, Governors, Secretaries of State, courts, voting machines, and the everyday Americans who run elections. Many of these supposed plotters are Republicans, Trump supporters & appointees.
Trump lost 60 court cases about this alleged plot because there was no evidence to support it. But Trump asks you to believe that those 60 courts were in on it too. Including Republican courts. Including the Supreme Court, which has three Trump appointees on it.
That's a lot going on, a lot of pieces to put together into one giant conspiracy. How did they coordinate? Why wasn't the plot leaked with so many knowing about it?

Isn't there a simpler answer? There is. Trump lost.
It is far more likely that Trump just lost. Trump is an unpopular president. He's never had more than 44% approval. He's the least popular person to run for president in US history, isn't it more likely that he just LOST? It is.
Occam's Razor would say it's more likely that "Trump lost because he's unpopular & always has been" is true than that the "Trump election conspiracy" is true.

This way of framing it might cause some cognitive dissonance in conspiracy supporters.
Their brains will fight back--we reason much more like lawyers building a case to prove what we think is true than as scientists open to believing what the facts lead us to believe is true.
They will think: "the plot is real, I know it!" "the Dems cheated, I know because they're cheaters!" "Everyone loves Trump!" And, etc.
But, they don't know it. Occam's Razor--did all these Republicans throughout the US really get together with the Dems to do this? Really? What about the regular Americans who run elections? How did they coordinate to do this? Does that really seem likely? The Republican judges?
Trump's conspiracy has offered no proof. Instead he offers a toxic mix of sleight of hand, conspiracy, suspicion, emotion, & distraction. It makes people who want to believe, believe.

Perhaps Occam's Razor can cause enough doubt that his followers wonder if they should believe.
(I'm not sure if the reporter appreciated this explanation, she stopped the interview right after and didn't engage with anything that I said. 😂😳)
Oh, and remember you can't disprove conspiracy. So this approach is "meta"--I can't disprove that the conspiracy happened, but what I can do is introduce doubt that causes the believer to question the reasonableness of their belief. They may then abandon their belief.

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"3 million people are estimated not to have official photo ID, with ethnic minorities more at risk". They will "have to contact their council to confirm their ID if they want to vote"

This is shameful legislation, that does nothing to tackle the problems with UK elections.THREAD


There is no evidence in-person voter fraud is a problem, and it wd be near-impossible to organise on an effective scale. Campaign finance violations, digital disinformation & manipulation of postal voting are bigger issues, but these are crimes of the powerful, not the powerless.

In a democracy, anything that makes it harder to vote - in particular, anything that disadvantages one group of voters - should face an extremely high bar. Compulsory voter ID takes a hammer to 3 million legitimate voters (disproportionately poor & BAME) to crack an imaginary nut

If the government is concerned about the purity of elections, it should reflect on its own conduct. In 2019 it circulated doctored news footage of an opponent, disguised its twitter feed as a fake fact-checking site, and ran adverts so dishonest that even Facebook took them down.

Britain's electoral law largely predates the internet. There is little serious regulation of online campaigning or the cash that pays for it. That allows unscrupulous campaigners to ignore much of the legal framework erected since the C19th to guard against electoral misconduct.

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.
@franciscodeasis https://t.co/OuQaBRFPu7
Unfortunately the "This work includes the identification of viral sequences in bat samples, and has resulted in the isolation of three bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are now used as reagents to test therapeutics and vaccines." were BEFORE the


chimeric infectious clone grants were there.https://t.co/DAArwFkz6v is in 2017, Rs4231.
https://t.co/UgXygDjYbW is in 2016, RsSHC014 and RsWIV16.
https://t.co/krO69CsJ94 is in 2013, RsWIV1. notice that this is before the beginning of the project

starting in 2016. Also remember that they told about only 3 isolates/live viruses. RsSHC014 is a live infectious clone that is just as alive as those other "Isolates".

P.D. somehow is able to use funds that he have yet recieved yet, and send results and sequences from late 2019 back in time into 2015,2013 and 2016!

https://t.co/4wC7k1Lh54 Ref 3: Why ALL your pangolin samples were PCR negative? to avoid deep sequencing and accidentally reveal Paguma Larvata and Oryctolagus Cuniculus?