All of Matt_Heath's Comments + Replies

The I found the main points of the article interesting and fairly convincing but you seem to over-correct for correspondence bias when you say "If the allegations about Wikipedia are true, they're explained by ordinary human nature, not by extraordinary human nature". Even if normal human behaviour leads to cultishness, why assume that individual psychological quirks didn't have a relevant effect in a specific case?

2pnrjulius
It's certainly possible to overcompensate for the fundamental attribution error. This is what I think happens when people say things like "Stalin was just a product of his circumstances." No, he was a manipulative, sadistic psychopath; his circumstances are what made him a world leader and mass murderer instead of a corrupt banker or serial killer. But in this case, I do think that the admins of Wikipedia are humans of at least normal---if not in fact above-average---moral character, falling prey to their circumstances. Their behavior does not seem SO extreme, SO cruel, that it can't be fit with what we know about normal human beings.

"One word for probability one is "certainty" and a word for probability zero is "impossible"." I think you should be cautious about using these words like this, at least if you might be talking about uncountable probability spaces. Using your definitions it is certain that (say) a normally distributed variable takes a value in the real numbers but impossible for it to take any such value.

I hope this isn't unfairly pedantic to point out. I can see that one could argue that for decision making in the real world you only assign probabilities to finitely many outcomes.