Well aware of the Hitler fallacy, it’s quite common among (us) Jews. “Someone said Y X” is still a shitty standard of evidence to begin with. Considering that people are not emotionally neutral to Jews in general hearsay is even worse. In this case the undercurrent of meaning is quite possibly “greedy Jews woud rather die than part with their pianos”. I suspect that Daniel is too refined of a person to catch that; it’s still not epistemically hygienic.
“Someone said Y X” is still a shitty standard of evidence to begin with. [...] it’s still not epistemically hygienic.
Most people just say “Y X”. Explicitly saying “Someone said Y X” is relatively good epistemic hygiene, because it communicates something about the evidence for the claim, not just the claim itself.
Agreed, it’s better than “Y X”, but still relatively worthless, especially when someone is looking for quotable examples for an article. Repeating stories like this is sum negative since it adds social proof to things of very low probability. This is what I meant by hygiene.
“someone claimed Jews X” is pretty much the standard of evidence the Germans used (I know you don’t mean it this way of course)
And if Hitler did it it must be bad! (On the subject of ‘standard of evidence’...)
Well aware of the Hitler fallacy, it’s quite common among (us) Jews. “Someone said Y X” is still a shitty standard of evidence to begin with. Considering that people are not emotionally neutral to Jews in general hearsay is even worse. In this case the undercurrent of meaning is quite possibly “greedy Jews woud rather die than part with their pianos”. I suspect that Daniel is too refined of a person to catch that; it’s still not epistemically hygienic.
Most people just say “Y X”. Explicitly saying “Someone said Y X” is relatively good epistemic hygiene, because it communicates something about the evidence for the claim, not just the claim itself.
Agreed, it’s better than “Y X”, but still relatively worthless, especially when someone is looking for quotable examples for an article. Repeating stories like this is sum negative since it adds social proof to things of very low probability. This is what I meant by hygiene.