As I said, I don’t really have any real evidence, and I believe it’d be very hard to collect. That said:
Now update on the amount of people who call somebody "a weirdo" who does not end up murdering anyone.
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by this. Let H=(did something horrible), S=(really suspicious), W=(just a bit creepy, weird, etc.).
I suspect that (H & S) > (H & W & !S) > (H & !W & !S) and that 1 > H/S >> H/(W & !S) >> H/(!W & !S). All fractions are low, but I’m not sure what you mean to say by that.
And add the negative halo effect, and fundamental attribution fallacy, from knowing in hindsight that the person you're talking about has recently murdered someone.
I’m pretty sure such effects are not linearly additive. Especially when there’s a conflict (friend/non-hated-family, did something bad), I don’t think you can determine the result just by logic, you have to see what people actually do.
Notice how media narratives tend to become either “I always knew he was up to no good” or “I’d never have thought he would do something like that”, but you almost never hear something in the middle. I’m even having trouble finding a concise wording for a middle case other than “meh”.
I’m sure the media has a lot to do with that, showing just the witnesses with the most “interesting” story, but I’m almost sure people also do this more-or-less automatically in their heads.
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by this.
You said,
if you could interview the same people before the something horrible [...] a lot of answers would be of the “he’s kind of a weirdo” type.
What I meant was: you should also consider the amount of cases where people said the same "he's kind of a weirdo", but that person did not go on to do something horrible. And also the amount of cases where people did not say it, and yet the person did something horrible. All three are necessary to calculating the strength of the evidence "...
The new discussion thread (part 15) is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 82. The previous thread passed 1000 comments as of the time of this writing, and so has long passed 500. Comment in the 13th thread until you read chapter 82.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
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