It makes perfect sense to me. Presumably the women in question are actually uncomfortable turning someone down in an elevator. If you turn out to be desirable, you dodged a bullet, but it still had the chance of being bad.

It always has the chance of being bad. But once you accept that it's okay for hot men to do it, then you have to allow for the possibility that some men will honestly overestimate their hotness to you.

Similarly, if I point an unloaded gun at you, I'm breaking basic rules of gun handling, but you could argue that "it's okay" because you're not in any danger, in much the same way that "it's okay" to proposition women who think you're hot in an elevator.

The analogy doesn't work. It is unconditionally bad to point a gun at someone -- "every gun is loaded" as the saying goes -- so you still violated protocol even if it's unloaded. In contrast, propositioning someone in an elevator retroactively becomes okay merely on the basis that you're not part of the rabble.

A consistent policy would be that elavator propositioning is wrong, regarless of how desireable you are, AND that these places {...} are acceptable for propositioning. As it stands, the complaint reduces to "How dare the rabble think they have a chance with me!" ... which, again, I can't really sympathize with.

To avoid any confusion, can you tell me what you mean by "burglary"? Sorry to be pedantic, but the term apparently means different things to different people. To me, it means breaking into a structure for the purposes of committing a serious crime.

If I can tell you what I'm doing and it still works, it's influence.

If my telling you would make it ineffective, it's manipulation.

Take 1000 typical males, 1000 typical females, 1000 transexual males, 1000 transexual females, 1000 typical males tasked to pretend they are female and 1000 typical females tasked to pretend they are male. Then you let each of these talk anonymously over text chat with 100 randomly chosen of the others and assign probabilities of them being in each of these categories. Then you run statistics to determine the general ability to distinguish each of the categories from each of the others.

I'd expect that {typical!male, trans!male, and troll!male} would be almost complexity distinguishable from {typical!female, trans!female, and troll!female}, that it often would be possible to distinguish typical!X from trans!X, but that trans!X are very rarely mistaken for troll!X... this matrix of possibilities is kinda huge so I wont bother filling it out more unless you specifically request it since you probably get my point by now.

Same general counterargument as the other people who've posted:

1) If this anecdote is all you have to base your theory on, you have essentially no more chance of being right than I would be making up random theories in quantum mechanics.

2) If you say "I think men can find jars easier because male hunter-gatherers hunted", you are likely some random crank who has just enough experience in the field to think of the idea. Once you suggest a method to test it, you prove that you are familiar enough with the idea and with the rest of the field to know what would prove it which elevates you from "some random crank" to "guy with a strange idea".

Obviously the other two need to be bowdlerized, but what's wrong with attracting Kibo? I think he'd fit in well here.

1.False 2. False 3. True 4. True

Why am I giving (most of) these in boolean terms rather than probabilities? Bayesian probabilities aren't useful in cases where the most probable scenario for (AK guilty) is something like "Two of the perpetrators were secretly ninjas". There really is no rational way to convict someone for leaving no forensic evidence in a room whatsoever.

I have to admit here though that I peeked at your article before posting this. And incidentally, predicted what it would say pretty damn well. (AK not guilty with a probability that reduces to 0, with the other two probabilities also expressible in boolean terms, and on the whole contradictory of the opinion of the jury)

I also have to admit I skipped straight to Wikipedia after reading your article, and found mostly that the facts you gave were correct and thus your argument was sound. My prior probability for any of them being guilty was very low however; around 10%ish. Jury decisions are pretty worthless before an appeal.

I think the Ten Plagues of Egypt is more likely to be a fiction than to be based on a real event.

Same general counterargument as the other people who've posted:

1) If this anecdote is all you have to base your theory on, you have essentially no more chance of being right than I would be making up random theories in quantum mechanics.

2) If you say "I think men can find jars easier because male hunter-gatherers hunted", you are likely some random crank who has just enough experience in the field to think of the idea. Once you suggest a method to test it, you prove that you are familiar enough with the idea and with the rest of the field to know what would prove it which elevates you from "some random crank" to "guy with a strange idea".

I don't see why you think that 3 extra people, no matter if they're honest or not, amount to any significant amount of evidence when you can see the diagram yourself.

Sure, maybe they're good enough if you can't see the diagram; 3 people thinking the same thing doesn't often happen when they're wrong. But when they are wrong, when you can see that they are wrong, then it doesn't matter how many of them there are.

Also: certainly the odds aren't high that you're right if we're talking totally random odds about a proposition where the evidence is totally ambiguous. But since there is a diagram, the odds then shift to either the very low probability "My eyesight has suddenly become horrible in this one instance and no others" combined with the high probability "3/4 people are right about a seemingly easy problem", versus the low probability "3/4 people are wrong about a seemingly easy problem", versus the high probability "My eyesight is working fine".

I don't know the actual numbers for this, but it seems likely the the probability of your eyesight suddenly malfunctioning in strange and specific ways is worse then the probability of 3 other people getting an easy problem wrong. Remember, they can have whatever long-standing problems with their eyesight or perception or whatever anyone cares to make up. Or you could just take the results of Asch's experiment as a prior and say that they're not that much more impressive than 1 person going first.

(All this of course changes if they can explain why C is a better answer; if they have a good logical reason for it despite how odd it seems, it's probably true. But until then, you have to rely on your own good logical reason for B being a better answer.)