“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

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.

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.

> I can claim that you destroyed the pipeline and it would be equally as valid at this point.

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.

> Maybe time will tell.

This article shouldn't be allowed here until that time.

Reputation is not evidence.

  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.

an incredible amount of tech is involved in these pipelines, building them, blowing them up, figuring out who blew them up, etc.

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?

Reputation absolutely is evidence. I think you mean it’s not “proof”.

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.

Blowing them up requires either a shaped charge or C4 or some other explosive. Hardly high tech.

Topics with unknown or unknowable answers are regularly discussed here. Curiosity in the face of uncertainty is pretty much what this place is about.

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.

> (...) and his reputation is evidence that there is substance to the claim.

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.

It’s still an evidence based stance, but temporarily substitutes one form of evidence for another. The notion of reputation is itself built on evidence, e.g. we observe that someone is generally truthful, so we are later justified in concluding that they might be telling the truth.

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 looks like an Appeal to Authority.

If I were claiming that I agreed with the article and found it to be convincingly true, and so should you, I’d agree. I am not doing any of those things.

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

The social & physical infrastructure is the story here, not the fact that explosives go boom - although if you don't think explosives are technologically interesting, perhaps that means you just don't know much about them.

I know you can throw C4 into a camp fire without any risk of it going boom, does that count?

> I can claim that you destroyed the pipeline and it would be equally as valid at this point.

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")

I did read the article. Because I at first thought news finally broke on who blew the pipelines up. And news didn't break, becasue the article, if it wasn't for the author, should just be dismissed as conspiracy BS.

How about a torpedo? I seriously doubt:

     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. 

When you ask yourself who hates the Russians more than anyone else in the world, and when that coincidentally happens to be the same as who benefits economically the most from NS1 & NS2 destroyed, there's only one answer[1], and it isn't Norway, and it isn't Denmark, and it can't be the US. Russia annoys the US, but the US and its citizens do not hate Russia. And US benefits exactly nothing economically from this, and in a global economy, it probably hurts US.

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

Somewhat, but I still think you're being overly dismissive. The story is not expressing wonder at how a thick metal cylinder could be damaged by a relatively small explosion or how a bomb could go off under water where it's hard to light a fire.

> How about a torpedo?

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

>This article is remarkable for how different it is from Hersh's Syrian gas claims.

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.

> 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.

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

Likely? If Russia spends the considerable resources to send down their own deep sea divers, they can just as easily find trace residues of the C4 or whatever was used and trace that to its origin as well. And how would they trace a Russian torpedo?

I would be incredulous of any author who doesn't provide evidence. Do you agree that the burden of proof should be applied equally to all authors regardless of reputation?

Ad (a): because tech relies on energy and related delivery networks?

> Do you agree that the burden of proof should be applied equally to all authors regardless of reputation?

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.

>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.

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

This is not standard operating procedure, but it's not very different to what happened with the similar Sigonella affair.

It looks like most of what you're objecting to is the style of the storytelling.

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.

>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?

I think we're back to an Appeal to Authority.

good point, we gotta keep discussion of this topic hidden, so people don't get any weird ideas about questioning our blessed three letter agencies or the holy MIC.

It’s still not an appeal to authority because Hersh’s status is not being invoked as evidence that this story is true - only as evidence that we should withhold judgement until it can be corroborated with hard evidence. These are very different stances.

No one is claiming that a journalist’s reputation removes the burden of proof.

Appeal to Authority is an argument that what they say is automatically true.

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.

While I understand that you're not equivocally saying that their claims are true, but you are absolutely appealing to someone's reputation as an authority on the topic to suggest what they say is "worth paying attention to in the absence of any other useful information".

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.