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brazil84 comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Am I allowed to assume that pretty people are far more sociopathic than others by pretty much every measure of sociopathy, and even from simple observation? And that prettiness is known to be 100% genetic in origin? And that sociopathy is known to be strongly influenced by genes?
Only if you also assume that there are many robust factors with long histories contributing to do the following:
1) Encourage you to think of pretty people as an out-group
2) Strongly bias you towards considering garden-variety not-niceness in pretty people indicative of sociopathy, while doing no such thing about garden-variety not-niceness in ugly people
3) Prompt pretty people to act more sociopathic in a variety of circumstances due to psychological factors working on them
4) Make examples of pretty sociopaths dramatically more accessible in media and public cached thoughts than examples of ugly sociopaths or pretty non-sociopaths
In that case, the proof which would convince me is if the sociopathy gap were universal and intractable in time and space while the factors you list were not.
Those variables are not changed in this hypothetical - the only variable that changes is that I propose that "pretty people are more likely to carry genes for sociopathy" in all seriousness, rather than counterfactually.
I think you are saying "yes," in which case the proof which would convince me is if the sociopathy gap were universal and intractable.
No, I am not. I don't know how to explain it - what I am trying to describe is the number and variety of bits of evidence you need to overwhelm the beliefs of those who are disagreeing with you here. You need to present the kind of proofs which would convince you that something you currently doubt for good reasons, something which is not a simple slam-dunk "this happens" but a complicated "the statistical distributions have different means and variances" claim, is decisively true.
The example is of less than zero importance - it's the standards of evidence I am trying to describe.