“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

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.

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.

  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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Judging how incredulous one should be of an author’s writing based on their reputation is something else.

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.

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)

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.

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")

     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. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Pipe

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.

Seymour Hersh's unnamed source on how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline

Likely pieces of the torpedo could be found and traced back to American manufacture.

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.

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.

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.

It's possible the tech stack for the detonator was written in Rust.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hersh is 85 and in the past decade he has already done quite a bit of damage to his prior reputation

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.

>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.