If the goal is to figure out how murderous the Mormons are, comparing their murder rate to the murder rate of non-Mormons, or some other reasonable base rate, is exactly what you would do. Surely this would be obvious in any other context.

It's striking that these numbers are always stated alone, and never compared to the number killed by capitalist governments using a similar methodology. (Which is clearly not zero, just two examples off the top of my head put it well into the millions [1] [2])

I think this is fundamentally not possible, because the world does not come pre-labeled with rules and win/lose conditions the way a sport or game does. Any attempt to do this would require you to take certain concepts as presumptively valid and unquestionable, but the main point of being an intellectual is to question accepted concepts and develop new ones.

Should be fixed now. Evidently EA forum doesn't (yet?) support comment threads on tags.

See also: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject

But a bird warning other birds that there is a snake in the grass does reveal a fact about the bird: that it is a good bird who will risk its life for the other birds, and therefore is helpful for the other birds to keep around, perhaps even with bribes.

What would be an example of energy not being conserved in a closed system?

If a spinning overbalanced wheel without additional energy input spun faster and faster instead of slowing down and stopping.

Does the law of thermodynamics even mean anything?

The laws of thermodynamics don't seem to have the same problem of vagueness. It's easy to tell whether a given situation would violate them or not.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, so it would probably be better to just state your point plainly.

I'm trying to figure out what you mean when you talk about EMH.

Like anything else, the EMH is useful insofar as it generates testable predictions about the world. One of the most useful predictions, as johnswentworth puts it: ‘you shouldn’t expect to make money trading stocks’.

Obviously some people have made money trading stocks. Does the EMH simply mean that less than 50% of people who trade stocks make money? That doesn't seem to support the grandiose conclusions that are usually made on the basis of the EMH. The same would be true of a poker game, for instance, or simply a bet between 3 people where only one of them can be right.

What would be an example of asset prices not reflecting all available information?

If this kind of behavior is entirely consistent with EMH, does EMH even mean anything?

This seems like something that's likely to be idiosyncratic and even if high quality studies exist, trying to mimic what works for the notional “average person” may not be a good idea.