The first theory is falsifiable as long as you're willing to let enough people die. Collect blood samples from everyone before they take the medecine. Sequence their full exome and put it on file.

once you have a few thousand dead and a few thousand survivors you should be able to narrow candidates down to a few dozen genes.

Make predictions about who will die out of the next few hundred who take the pill, bam.

Turns out it's an eye color gene having some weird effect on a vital pathway that the drug is linked to.

Alternatively if it's not genetic at all, if single members of pairs of twins taking the drug died at rates inconsistent with the expected numbers of mutations between twins then we could be pretty sure it's not genetic.

or perhaps it's only partially genetic, again twins and siblings would let us work this out.

Seems pretty falsifiable.

In reality, not very surprised. I'd probably be annoyed/infuriated depending on whether the actual stakes are measured in billions of human lives.

Nevertheless, that merely represents the fact that I am not 100% certain about my reasoning. I do still maintain that rationality in this context definitely implies trying to maximise utility (even if you don't literally define rationality this way, any version of rationality that doesn't try to maximise when actually given a payoff matrix is not worthy of the term) and so we should expect that Clippy faces a similar decision to us, but simply favours the paperclips over human lives. If we translate from lives and clips to actual utility, we get the normal prisoner's dilemma matrix - we don't need to make any assumptions about Clippy.

In short, I feel that the requirement that both agents are rational is sufficient to rule out the asymmetrical options as possible, and clearly sufficient to show (C,C) > (D,D). I get the feeling this is where we're disagreeing and that you think we need to make additional assumptions about Clippy to assure the former.

Breaking #24 of the Evil Overlord List makes me wince, too, even if it's a jester doing it. Not sure if that's the main point, though, but then, none of the proposed explanation for how the king could pull his "riddle" off without at any point lying feel entirely right to me, so, unless someone offers to help me, I shall have to take your advice and not let myself get entangled in the "complex and detailed logic", when the answer might as well be "BS".

The world is fair.

Hmm. Then we shouldn't be able to find someone who was rubbish at maths and music at the same time. Or good at both. Easily falsifiable.

Couldn't Spottiswood make a gene-detector by feeding the medicine in tiny tiny amount and seeing whether you just died a bit? Could be way useful.

Couldn't Spottiswood make a gene-detector by feeding the medicine in tiny tiny amount and seeing whether you just died a bit? Could be way useful.

I think it would be great to start with a theory that sounds very scientific, but is unfalsifiable, and therefore useless. Then we modify the theory to include an element that is falisfiable, and the theory becomes much more useful.

For example, we have a new kind of medicine, and it is very good for some people, but when other people take the medicine it kills them. Naturally, we want to know who would be killed by the medicine, and who would be helped by it.

A scientist has a theory. He believes there is a gene that he calls the "Spottiswood gene". Anyone who has the proper form of the Spottiswood gene will be safe, they can take the medicine freely. But some people have a broken version of the Spottiswood gene, and they die when then they take the medicine. Unfortunately the scientist has no way of detecting the Spottiswood gene, so he can't tell you whether you have the gene or not.

Now this theory sounds very scientific and it's got lots of scientific words in it, but it isn't very useful. The scientist doesn't know how to detect the gene, so he can't tell you whether you are going to live or whether you are going to die. He can't tell you whether it is safe to take the medicine. If you take the pill and you survive, then the scientist will say that you had the working version of the gene. If you take the pill and you die, the scientist will say that you have the broken version of the gene. But he cannot say what will happen to you until after it has already happened, so his theory is useless. He can explain anything, but he can't make predictions in advance.

Now another scientist has a different theory. She thinks that the medicine is related to eye color. She thinks anyone with blue eyes will die if they take the medicine, and she thinks that anyone with brown eyes will be okay. She's not sure why this happens, but she plans to do more research and find out. Even if she doesn't do any more research, her theory is much more useful than than the first scientist's theory. If she's right, then blue-eyed people will know that they should avoid the medicine, and brown eyed people will know that they can take the medicine safely. She has made predictions. She predicts that no brown eyed person will die after taking the medicine, and she predicts that no blue eyed person will live.

Of course, the second scientist might be wrong. But the interesting thing is that if she's wrong, then we can prove that she's wrong. She predicted that no one with brown eyes will die after taking the medicine, so if lots of people with brown eyes die, then we will know that she's wrong.

If her theory is wrong, then we should be able to prove that it's wrong. And then if the results don't prove that she's wrong, we accept that she's probably right. That's called falsifiability.

But the first scientist doesn't have falsifiability. We know that even If he's wrong, we'll never be able to prove it - and that means we'll never know if he's wrong or right. More importantly, even he is right, his theory still wouldn't do anybody any good.

I'm not sure this is a single fallacy. It's more a mix of affective fallacy (things I don't like are false) and strawmanning an argument so you can disagree with the easy part.

Mixed in with the human tribal instinct to reinforce their own conclusions rather than looking for reasons to change (confirmation bias), this leads to making the un-persuasive arguments. This is because politics isn't about policy - most people making these bad arguments aren't actually planning or even hoping to persuade. They're hoping to reinforce their position.

Hmm. Maybe I'm saying "this isn't a fallacy". It's not an actual false belief that anyone has - almost nobody has a reflective belief that this is the reason someone on the other side disagrees. It's more a bias - a mode of behavior based on heuristics and unstated goals, rather than a common reasoning falsehood.

We have a pretty stupid banking system if you can cancel a transaction after the target has had time to make a transaction back to you. Or it should be straitghforward and fee-less to cancel that second transaction as a consequence.

I am not an American, and the American ways of transferring money are mysterious to me. When I want to send money from point A to point B, I log into a web page, fill in the required data, confirm the data, and in a day or two the money is there. If I understand it correctly, the American way to do this is to personally go to the bank, take a paper form, write the data on the paper, deliver the paper to the target, and the target must take the paper to their bank.

It was a huge surprise to learn this, because I automatically assumed that the American ways of dealing with money must be more advanced and more convenient, just because of having more experience with internet and capitalism in general. But now I guess that the American system is simply a victim of its own inertia: these methods were invented and became a norm before the internet, and now people are resistent to the change, because no one wants to experiment with the new methods when their own money is involved.

Still, I agree that the second transaction should be cancellable after the first transaction was cancelled. Not sure what is the trick here. Maybe the scammer wants the part of their money returned using a different method (one that does not allow cancelling, or has shorter deadlines). Maybe the plan is that most people will not notice the cancelling of the first transaction, or be busy enough that they miss the deadline for cancelling the second one. Maybe there is some psychological trick preventing the victim from cancelling. Really, I don't know (and not being familiar with the American system, even if I read an explanation, there is a chance I would misunderstand it).