Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia • Hacker News Board

Re: Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia

#81

Post by tripzilch » Thu, Sep 06, 2012, 2:03 PM UTC

It would have been nice if TorrentFreak would've quoted a few of the references made in the discussion here, namely:

1) how much of an increase this is compared to the regular yearly foreign aid of Sweden to Cambodia (I understand it's 150%, so "just" 20M extra, and that the yearly foreign aid to Cambodia has very little variance.

2) when this increase was decided upon.

3) since when Svartholm was wanted, and known/expected to flee to Cambodia.

Those answers still don't quite rule out the two events are connected, but it would definitely make TorrentFreak's article quite a lot more balanced. Besides, it's easy enough to expose the big entertainment lobbies and their copyright watchdogs without making things up.

It also shows that HN is better at doing proper journalistic research ;-)

Re: Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia

#82

Post by tripzilch » Thu, Sep 06, 2012, 2:04 PM UTC

aaron695 wrote: post #71

It’s sad the trolls seem to have gotten hold of this. Torrent Freak has not even gone close to saying Sweden has bought him. When countries give foreign aid, it is often, at least in part, for power plays. Japan regularly does this in the pacific islands and uses their support to continue whaling. To argue the amount of money they give (quite large) is so they can continue whaling is also ridiculous. In fact most Jap…

> The story here is why they have chosen this as one of them.

I suppose they would have preferred to obtain Assange, but he wasn't in Cambodia? ;-)

Re: Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia

#83

Post by mistercow » Thu, Sep 06, 2012, 3:45 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #76

This is nonsense. It is easy to make up a conspiricy, and very hard to disprove it. Nevertheless... Sweden's foreign aid policies are well respected internationally[1]. For TorrentFreak to try and imply that aid to Cambodia - one of the poorest countries in the world - was in any way linked to their coincidental arrest of a person with an international warrant out for his arrest is shameful. If nothing else, the fore…

Viewed through Bayesian lens, the problem with this article is pretty obvious. You could almost define "speculative" as "giving an observation for which the priors are unclear and only vaguely gestured at".

Here, we have the observation that Sweden gave $60 million foreign aid to Cambodia, but we are given no clear idea of the prior probability that Sweden would give this much and at this time (but we are given the implication that the evidence is significant). We don't need a hard probability estimate (few of us are actually going to rigorously apply Bayes' rule), but we do need enough information to come to a basic idea of the probability on our own. What does Sweden usually give to Cambodia? When is this usually announced? If this is an unusual amount of money, are there other good explanations for this besides corruption?

The problem is that the data in the article leaves us to use a relatively uninformed prior. $60 million is not that much money for a nation with Sweden's economy. It seems fairly likely that some kind of diplomatic news mention would happen regarding Sweden and Cambodia within any given two week period (close enough to appear associated with any given event), and since Sweden and Cambodia are on friendly terms, that mention is likely to be positive. Supposing that this is an unusually large amount of aid, there are plenty of possible reasons that Cambodia, often plagued with both droughts and floods, might have been hit particularly hard in the last year and needed more, so even if this is an unusual amount of aid. This all puts the prior for the observation pretty high, which cuts its evidential weight down very very low. As you illustrated, that prior gets higher as we add information, further weakening the evidence.

Re: Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia

#84

Post by naturalethic » Thu, Sep 06, 2012, 6:14 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #77

naturalethic wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

Sweden's foreign aid program is one of the best in the world[1], and doesn't fund rich people as you are implying here. If you have proof otherwise I'd like to see it. Otherwise - it's is way to easy to smear something in an off-hand way like that. [1] http://www.thelocal.se/16158/20081205/

I read your article and surfed around for better information, but couldn't find much. So here's a bunch of conjecture, feel free to skip it. Link me better stuff if you find any.

First, you can't go giving away other peoples money and call it 'charity', or measure it against actual charitable activity.

As far as I can tell, the 'best in the world' status relates only to the fact that they 'give' (redistribute) a higher percent of GDP than any other nation. They still sell or give arms to despots (as even your article points out). Much of their aid is in the form of government purchase of Swedish products, then given away, which surely leads to some crony backroom deals with industry leaders, as all protectionist measures do, you know, pork barrel politics.

My assumption, and the reason that it's easy to smear, is that people with power aren't angels, and taking money from locals to deliver off to some foreign land may be for reasons that are less than scrupulous or benevolent, that there is inherent conflict of interest (conditions for corruption) in every government expenditure.

Of course all such matters will be offset by very visible donations to the humanitarian effort of the day, in this case, Syria. Whatever form their aid to the 'refugees' takes there, unless it's going straight into the mouths of the needy, you'd better bet some of it will be redirected into winning the fight.