Yes, that all seems fair. I was just struck by the parallels.

(It is not entirely clear to me exactly what if anything Kelly is claiming about the state of mind, and motives, of Festinger and his colleagues. He does say near the start "that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false", but I don't see much evidence in his article that the authors knew their central claims were false. He does offer evidence that the authors interfered more than they admitted, but that isn't really the same thing.)

If Kelly's account of things is correct, then one could describe the events as follows.

Leon Festinger and his colleagues made a dramatic and surprising prediction. When they had the opportunity to test that prediction out, things didn't in fact go the way they had predicted. In response to this, they falsified the evidence, interpreted things tendentiously, and went ahead with a vigorous campaign to spread their theory and get lots of other people to believe it; their theory prospered and remains widely believed to this day.

So it seems like Kelly's critique is kinda self-defeating. If Dorothy Martin's little UFO cult isn't really an example of the mechanism Festinger popularized, in the way Kelly describes, then Festinger and his colleagues themselves are an even better example of it.

Kelly's paper kinda acknowledges this: "If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow." But if he appreciates just how thoroughly he's portrayed Festinger's own behaviour as a perfect exemplification of the very theory he's skewering, he doesn't show it.

(My impression, as very much not any sort of expert, is that Kelly seems to be somewhat overselling the discrepancy between Festinger's account and reality. But I haven't read When Prophecy Fails, I haven't read the recently-unsealed documents Kelly is citing, and I could well be all wrong about that.)

If I am reading things correctly, section 2 of the Voting Rights Act says:

(a) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 10303(f)(2) of this title, as provided in subsection (b).

(and subsection (b) clarifies this in what seem like straightforward ways).

It seems to me that if this "asymmetrically binds Republicans" then the conclusion is "so much the worse for the Republicans" not "so much the worse for the Voting Rights Act".

As for "the unfair advantage Democrats have had nationally for decades":

• https://www.cookpolitical.com/cook-pvi/2022-partisan-voter-index/republican-electoral-college-advantage says that the Electoral College gives Republicans a ~2% advantage in presidential elections
• https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/ says that "the Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole"
• https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/ says that "The Electoral College’s Republican bias in 2020 thus averaged out to 3.5 points".

Why different years (2022, 2020, 2020)? Because each of those was the first thing I found when searching for articles from at-least-somewhat-credible outlets about structural advantages for one or another party in presidential, Senate, and House races. I make no claim that those figures are representative of, say, the last 20 years, but I don't think it's credible to talk about "the unfair advantage Democrats have had nationally for decades" when all three of the major national institutions people in the US get to vote for have recently substantially favoured Republicans in the sense that to get equal results Democrats would need substantially more than equal numbers of votes.

I've no idea, but I think you should collaborate with someone named Duenning to find out.

Wait, there's something very strange about those two claims. 75% got more than half their calories from animals. 15% got more than half their calories from not-animals. So what did the other 10% do? (Exactly 50% from each, obviously :-).)

You write "you can buy it here" but there is no link.

However, you can do better: the whole thing is available for free online. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html on the author's website is a good place to start; it has links to various versions of the book and also a little bit of explanatory material.

Nitpick: This post alternates between using "ontological cluelessness" to mean a certain sort of state of ignorance ("Ontological cluenessness is a state of knowledge that humans could be in, in which they haven't yet discovered ..."), and using it to denote the belief that we are in that state of ignorance. ("Ontological cluelessness is distinct from radical skepticism, pyrrhonism, and mysticism".) I think it would be better not to do that.

I think it's probably true that most political violence done to rightists is done by other rightists (but I haven't attempted to check; surely there must be some statistics out there) and that it was dead wrong for a bunch of right-leaning commentators to assume that Kirk's killer was an extreme leftist. (I think it would have been dead wrong for them to do so even if, say, 70% of political violence done to rightists were done by leftists.) I was just pointing out that it isn't enough just to point to statistics saying that a large majority of political-violence-as-a-whole is done by rightists.

(Gruesome example: in the ongoing Gaza horror, the IDF has killed a lot more people than Hamas, but if you find a violently-dead Israeli soldier there then "Hamas did it" is a better hypothesis than "the IDF did it".)

I think there's something a bit off about your discussion of the right's leap-to-conclusions about the guy who murdered Charlie Kirk. I do basically agree with you -- they were absolutely not entitled to talk as if they knew he was some sort of radical leftist before any evidence was in -- but I don't think I buy that the relevant base rate is the fraction of all domestic terrorists or all extremist murderers, because your typical right-wing domestic terrorist isn't trying to murder a right-wing propagandist like Kirk, he's trying to blow up a mosque or an abortion clinic or murder a Democratic congressperson.

The appropriate prior for "guy who shot Charlie Kirk is a radical leftist" certainly wasn't anything like the 99% that might have justified the immediate see-how-the-left-persecutes-us rhetoric from people on the right. But it also wasn't the 5% or whatever you would guess just from the fraction of domestic terrorism that's perpetrated by leftists.

(My understanding of the current state of the evidence is that the killer wasn't in any useful sense a radical leftist, but that his motives for murdering Kirk were more left than right. On the other hand, I suspect that his more-right-than-left background helps to explain why the course of action he chose was shooting Kirk rather than anything else.)

My political leanings are similar to yours and I agree that the Trump administration is a disaster, and that many people around here seem not to have predicted this, and that its disastrousness gives some evidence for Team Left over Team Right (which suits me fine since Team Left is my team). But I have some concerns about your presentation here, and in particular about how you set forth your claim that Team Left's doing better at making correct predictions than Team Right.

First, looking backward, your "ledger" of implicit predictions. (1) I am not sure you get to ascribe predictions to people who didn't actually make those predictions. (2) These look cherry-picked, in that you've picked specific bad things that turned out to happen and complained that people didn't expect them, without showing predictions of those specific bad things from your side of the table. I think if you'd asked me about several of those things before Trump took office I'd have said "I wouldn't put anything past those guys but I don't know whether they'll do that in particular" rather than "yes, a Trump administration will definitely do that".

And then you say "look at those probabilities". Those probabilities which ... you just made up? If you'd picked smaller numbers, would the case against some LWers' past complacency magically be much stronger?

Second, looking forward, your "forward predictions" are unfortunately not such as to provide much evidence for or against your position whatever happens. The odds ratio for "David is right about everything" versus "David is wrong about everything" is only .65/.35 .6/.4 .6/.4 .75/.25 .55/.45 or about 15:1, and the biggest factor there is from your prediction that the Deputy Director of the FBI will not be replaced, within a year, by someone with a better background; what do the base rates look like on that? (My guess: much the same as your prediction.)

At least one of them doesn't seem like it's "about" the relevant political issues. "At least 2 additional states formalize independent public-health compacts beyond current ones": if this happens, as you predict with probability 0.6, I don't see how that's evidence that the Trump administration is worse than if it didn't (it's a matter of how people who are very much not the Trump administration behave), nor evidence that leftish political views are more accurate than rightish ones (it's maybe evidence that the Trump administration's treatment of healthcare is disastrous, but I doubt many people around here would dispute that anyway).