I can't help but think that that represents a serious privileging of the hypothesis - given a little black notebook claiming such absurd powers, you shouldn't carefully devise 20 different studies which try to falsify your various theories and inferences about its powers & limitations.
Unless you mean that after he verified that the Death Note did in fact kill supernaturally as claimed (after the biker and hostage-taker, I suppose), he should have gone into scientist mode?
In that case, my first thought is that from Light's perspective, delay is massive waste (all those dead people murdered by people who should be dead, eg.) and he thought he could handle any challenges that came his way. Which he was almost right about, after all.
not as big a waste as getting caught. given the power to change the world one should carefully think about how this power could be taken away before you start doing low utility things like eliminating criminals.
I don't know if this is a little too afar field for even a Discussion post, but people seemed to enjoy my previous articles (Girl Scouts financial filings, video game console insurance, philosophy of identity/abortion, & prediction market fees), so...
I recently wrote up an idea that has been bouncing around my head ever since I watched Death Note years ago - can we quantify Light Yagami's mistakes? Which mistake was the greatest? How could one do better? We can shed some light on the matter by examining DN with... basic information theory.
Presented for LessWrong's consideration: Death Note & Anonymity.