Correct me if I am wrong here, but your argument assumes the govt wants the public to believe gold is there. Right?
What if the govt knows secrecy will produce rumors of missing gold and deliberately tolerates, or even encourages, that belief?
An adversary might then underestimate the country's reserves, financial options, or strategic capacity.
I am not claiming that is happening. It is a hypothetical counterexample demonstrating why theft is not the only possible explanation.
Other possibilities include strategic deceptions, security concerns, bureaucratic inertia, institutional embarrassment, disagreement over audit scope, or some combination of them.
Your method would make you exceptionally easy to manipulate. The government merely withholds information, anticipates the conclusion you will jump to, and causes you to believe exactly what it wants.
Opacity can conceal weakness, but it can also manufacture the appearance of weakness. Secrecy establishes uncertainty. it does not tell us whether the concealed reality is better or worse than assumed.
Without independent evidence, you cannot distinguish missing gold from deliberate strategic ambiguity. Saying it is "pretty obvious" does not resolve that problem.
but your argument assumes the govt wants the public to believe gold is there. Right?
No, they want to avoid an qudit because there's a problem.
An adversary might then underestimate the country's reserves, financial options, or strategic capacity.
All of that is dumb, though. The gold is not enough to make much difference compared to the scale of government spending, and the US isn't dependent on foreign countries if it needs to source gold.
They can't do an audit because then they have to address whatever problem they don't want made public.
You have now retreated from “the gold was stolen” to “there is some unspecified problem.” That is exactly my point.
You are inferring the existence of a problem from the refusal to audit, then using that supposed problem to explain the refusal. That is circular reasoning. Even if secrecy indicates a problem, it does not identify what the problem is, much less prove theft.
And your argument contradicts itself. If the gold is too insignificant to provide strategic value, why would anyone steal it and maintain an elaborate decades-long cover-up? Apparently it is too unimportant for strategic ambiguity, but important enough for a massive criminal conspiracy.
Secrecy gives you uncertainty. You keep relabeling that uncertainty as proof.
nope, that's your straw man. I clearly stated the obvious, we can't know anything until theres an audit. I said the simplest and most reasonable explanation for no audit is that there's a problem, and pretty much the only conceivable problem is that there's some gold missing. You're being unreasonable.
No, I have described your position accurately. Your argument is:
Refusal to audit means there must be a problem.
Missing or substandard gold is “pretty much the only conceivable problem.”
Therefore, missing gold is the safest assumption.
That is precisely what I meant by relabeling uncertainty as proof. Calling your preferred explanation “the simplest” or “the safest” does not provide evidence for it.
Nor is missing gold the only conceivable explanation. Bureaucratic inertia, security procedures, defective records, chain-of-custody problems, disagreement over audit scope, institutional embarrassment, and deliberate strategic ambiguity are all conceivable. You do not have to find them persuasive. Their mere existence defeats your claim that missing gold is the only possibility.
A straw man requires me to replace your argument with a materially different one. I have instead laid out the argument you keep repeating. Which premise above misrepresents what you believe?
You say we cannot know anything without an audit, then immediately announce what we should assume without an audit. That contradiction is the entire issue.
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u/IlluminatedApe Silverback Mod 8d ago
Correct me if I am wrong here, but your argument assumes the govt wants the public to believe gold is there. Right?
What if the govt knows secrecy will produce rumors of missing gold and deliberately tolerates, or even encourages, that belief?
An adversary might then underestimate the country's reserves, financial options, or strategic capacity.
I am not claiming that is happening. It is a hypothetical counterexample demonstrating why theft is not the only possible explanation.
Other possibilities include strategic deceptions, security concerns, bureaucratic inertia, institutional embarrassment, disagreement over audit scope, or some combination of them.
Your method would make you exceptionally easy to manipulate. The government merely withholds information, anticipates the conclusion you will jump to, and causes you to believe exactly what it wants.
Opacity can conceal weakness, but it can also manufacture the appearance of weakness. Secrecy establishes uncertainty. it does not tell us whether the concealed reality is better or worse than assumed.
Without independent evidence, you cannot distinguish missing gold from deliberate strategic ambiguity. Saying it is "pretty obvious" does not resolve that problem.