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Mycroft65536 comments on Privileging the Hypothesis - Less Wrong
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Good post.
I'm not sure that 'privileging the hypothesis' deserves to be called a fallacy, though. It's only a bad idea because of the biases that humans happen to have. It can lead to misconceptions for us primates, but it's not a logical error in itself, is it?
It's most definitely a fallacy. It puts forth a conclusion without sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion. Just like an argument from authority or a gambler's fallacy.
It's not actually putting it forth as a conclusion though - it's just a flaw in our wetware that makes us interpret it as such. We could imagine a perfectly rational being who could accurately work out the probability of a particular person having done it, then randomly sample the population (or even work through each one in turn) looking for the killer. Our problem as humans is that once the idea is planted, we overreact to confirming evidence.