Hypothesis: The muggles don't possess much gold. Most of the huge stacks of gold in places like Fort Knox are clever magical replicas, and have been for a very long time. Any wizard can easily see through the ruse, but the muggles are clueless.
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere. Or else, maybe fake magic gold is a really good conductor.
Perhaps the only difference between fake gold and real gold is magical--if there's a ritual that permanently transfigures a rock into gold, people can switch that with the gold in vaults. Of course, no one in the magical world would accept transfigured gold as payment.
If Dumbledore is Harry's legal guardian and can overrule him, should Harry's 11-year-old signature be worth anything to Lord Malfoy?
Dumbledore may be able to overrule the contract, but that would do little to stop the political effects of Harry's statement that Lucius did not kill Hermione. Since it would also reinstate the debt, it doesn't seem like a net benefit to Dumbledore.
The evidence to raise it to consideration comes from the fact that someone took the time to advocate it, not the anecdote.
Yes, it may be that the mere fact that a hypothesis is advocated screens off whether that hypothesis is also supported by an anecdote. But I suspect that the existence of anecdotes still moves a little probability mass around, even among just those hypotheses that are being advocated.
I mean, if someone advocated for a hypothesis, and they couldn't even offer an anecdote in support of it, that would be pretty deadly to their credibility. So, unless I am certain that every advocated hypothesis has supporting anecdotes (which I am not), I must concede that anecdotes are evidence, howsoever weak, over and above mere advocacy.
Here's a situation where an anecdote should reduce our confidence in a belief:
If this person were to offer an anecdote, it should reduce our confidence in his proposition, because it makes it unlikely he knows of stronger supporting evidence.
I don't know how applicable this is to actual people.
Anecdotal evidence is filtered evidence.
Right, the existence of the anecdote is the evidence, not the occurrence of the events that it alleges.
You can find people saying anecdotes on any side of a debate, and I see no reason the people who are right would cite anecdotes more.
It is true that, if a hypothesis has reached the point of being seriously debated, then there are probably anecdotes being offered in support of it. (... assuming that we're taking about the kinds of hypotheses that would ever have an anecdote offered in support of it.) Therefore, the learning of the existence of anecdotes probably won't move much probability around among the hypotheses being seriously debated.
However, hypothesis space is vast. Many hypotheses have never even been brought up for debate. The overwhelming majority should never come to our attention at all.
In particular, hypothesis space contains hypotheses for which no anecdote has ever been offered. If you learned that a particular hypothesis H were true, you would increase your probability that H was among those hypotheses that are supported by anecdotes. (Right? The alternative is that which hypotheses get anecdotes is determined by mechanisms that have absolutely no correlation, or even negative correlation, with the truth.) Therefore, the existence of an anecdote is evidence for the hypothesis that the anecdote alleges is true.
I would raise a hypothesis to consideration because someone was arguing for it, but I don't think anecdotes are good evidence in that I would have similar confidence in a hypothesis supported by an anecdote, and a hypothesis that is flatly stated with no justification. The evidence to raise it to consideration comes from the fact that someone took the time to advocate it.
This is more of a heuristic than a rule, because there are anecdotes that are strong evidence ("I ran experiments on this last year and they didn't fit"), but when dealing with murkier issues, they don't count for much.
A related mistake I made was to be impressed by the cleverness of the aphorism "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'." There may be a helpful distinction between scientific evidence and Bayesian evidence. But anecdotal evidence is evidence, and it ought to sway my beliefs.
Anecdotal evidence is filtered evidence. People often cite the anecdote that supports their belief, while not remembering or not mentioning events that contradict them. You can find people saying anecdotes on any side of a debate, and I see no reason the people who are right would cite anecdotes more.
Of course, if you witness an anecdote with your own eyes, that is not filtered, and you should adjust your beliefs accordingly.
And I expect that a human would do the same thing.
I don't see why a chicken would choose any differently. We have no reason to believe that chicken-suffering is categorically different from human-suffering.
If we were to put a bunch of chickens into a room, and on one side of the room was a wolf, and the other side had factory farming cages that protected the chickens from the wolf, I would expect the chickens to run into the cages.
It's true that chickens can comprehend a wolf much better than they can comprehend factory farming, but I'm not quite sure how that affects this thought experiment.
Anyone have a good recommendation for an app/timer that goes off at pseudo-random (not too short - maybe every 15 min to an hour?) intervals? Someone suggested to me today that I would benefit from a luminosity-style exercise of noting my emotions at intervals throughout the day, and it seems like something I ought to automate as much as possible
I should think that this is more likely to indicate that nobody, including really smart people, and including you, actually knows whats what and trying to chase after all these pascals muggings is pointless becuase you will always run into another one that seems convincing from someone else smart.
There's a bit of a problem with the claim that nobody knows what's what: the usual procedure when someone lacks knowledge is to assign an ignorance prior. The standard methods for generating ignorance priors, usually some formulation of Occam's razor, assign very low probability to claims as complex as common religions.
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Is Theodore Nott wearing his scary face because he learned it was a good idea to do so in Chaos, or because there is also a conspiracy of Green Slytherin: those who can cast Avada Kedavra, the green spell?
Harry courted the company of both Draco and Hermione. He adjusted his presentation to meet their expectations, as he understood them. Draco could be doing the same because why have one secret power base when you could have two?
I don't consider this terribly likely. It came up in that pattern-matching way, but feels like it's needlessly complicated.
Hopefully someone else can undermine it more decisively or support it better.
First-years can't cast AK for reasons of raw magical power, so an organization of first-years can't use the Killing Curse as a membership criteria.