I will randomly select a subset of participants to form a survey panel. Make a trade or like the market to be eligible to be selected. At a future point in time, they will answer the following poll question:
What is your credence (the probability of your belief) that Seymour Hersh's account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is more accurate than the official US account?
Resolves to the median response.
Context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Killing_of_Osama_bin_Laden
On May 10, 2015, Hersh published the 10,000-word article "The Killing of Osama bin Laden" in the London Review of Books (LRB) on the fourth anniversary of the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear). It immediately went viral, crashing the LRB website.[37]
Hersh's story drew harsh criticism from reporters, academics, media commentators and officials.[38][39][40] Politico's Jack Shafer described the story as "a messy omelet of a piece that offers little of substance for readers or journalists who may want to verify its many claims".[41][42] Peter Bergen disputed Hersh's contentions, saying they "defy common sense";[43] Hersh responded that Bergen simply "views himself as the trustee of all things Bin Laden".[44] A similar dismissal of Hersh's account came from former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell.[45] A former intelligence official who had direct knowledge of the operation speculated that the Pakistanis, who were furious that the operation took place without being detected by them, were behind the false story as a way to save face.[46]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Alternative_accounts
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden
Motivation for this poll method is so that the selected respondents can potentially spend more time reading up about it, and less just based on people's initial impressions.
(If you have thoughts/feedback/suggestions on how best to run a question like this, please let me know!)
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There are 4 traders with positions on this market: myself, @SG, @harfe, @jacksonpolack. I will exclude myself as long as at least 2 people give responses.
Please take a look at the evidence about the article www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden and discuss in the comments here. The goal is to answer the question:
What is your credence (the probability of your belief) that Seymour Hersh's account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is more accurate than the official US account?
When the group has concluded its discussion, I will resolve the market based on the probabilities you assign. (If you want, you can freely update your probability and the latest one will be used.)
Odd thing about the phrasing - let's say the US had nordstream destroyed, but in a way unrelated to Hersh's account. Is hersh's account, accidentally correct on the broadest but most important part but filled with fabricated (probably by his source) details, more accurate or less accurate than the official account (we didn't do it), which has no fabricated details but is wrong on the most important part?
Even then, oalexanderdk's debunkings seem pretty convincing, and even without those the story wasn't really credible, tom clancy novel, how does one source have insight into the workings of 10 different agencies, etc.
I think the first objection isn't really in the spirit of the market, so I'll go with (but feel free to argue) 5%.
oh i'm retarded. ignore that. i didn't even remember I had bet on this market and assumed it was https://manifold.markets/jack/will-we-believe-seymour-hershs-acco this one. deleting comments would be nice.
Anyway, I read that lrb story when hersh's nord stream thing came out and debated it a bunch, so my answer for that is also 5%.
@jacksonpolack Thanks for the comments. You could copy your comment on the Nord Stream story to the other market, I'll respond to it there.
For hersh generally, the "tom clancy detail" / "number of sources" ratio seems incredibly high, and much higher than 'good reporting' generally.
this was more or less convincing on bin laden specifically.
@jack I'll go with your Option A: that Hersh is "correct on the broadest but most important part but filled with fabricated (probably by his source) details" on both this story (bin Laden) and the Nord Stream pipeline. Nothing in that Vox article makes doubt that bin Laden's capture did not come with substantial Pakistani knowledge/oversight, which I take to be the most important claim even if all the details are incorrect or exaggerated. I think that nets out to 50% credence in his account.
@jacksonpolack I suspect it's mostly well-founded. Journalists of Hersh's stature really do have access to decent anonymous sources, even he if still feels the need to embellish / sensationalize / uncritically report their statements.
Hmm, but if all of the details are incorrect, does the reporting give us substantially more reason to expect the central claim to be correct? There's always some chance that the central claim happens to be correct just by coincidence, and I think what we're interested in is how much additional probability weight we can assign to the broad aspects of the story compared to our prior baseline.