[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Snowman

You and I approach these sorts of things differently. You seem to be strongly influenced by people you trust. You know so-and-so is a good guy, and he wouldn't lie to you, and he told you x, y, and z are happening over at company ABC, so you know it's true. Then person B, who you also know and trust, knows that this and that are going down over at ABC too, so it builds on the narrative. You get enough of these stories going around, and then you come across a thread like this and it all just fits so well. You see this as evidence. Throw another snowball on the hill. Then another thread pops up about eBay buyer 'a***1' which has to be so-and-so because their masked eBay ID is also 'a***1', PLUS it fits with the narrative, so throw another snowball on the hill. Rinse and repeat enough times and eventually, you cause an avalanche on the hillside. This is textbook confirmation bias.

Meanwhile, someone like me comes along and says, "I don't care at all what your friend said about company ABC. That doesn't mean anything to me. I'm not saying your friend is a liar, I'm merely pointing out that he might just be misinformed or mistaken and that in order for me to believe something is true, I need to see actual evidence of the claim itself. And the holes I've been poking in all this data that keeps getting posted aren't just minor details or semantics. These are major, major issues that render the entire experiments and their conclusions invalid.

I guess in your world you would exclude human witnesses from trials. Not my world or the real one. If what people I trust say is credible and is corroborated by other people, other evidence, and my common sense, then yes I might believe it. You have zero context and all you're doing is playing divide and conquer with each successive piece of evidence.