The following is a nitpick on an 18 year old blog post.
This fable is retold a lot. The progenitor of it as a rationalist mashal is probably Yudkowsky's classic sequence article. To adversarially summarize:
1. It's the beginning of the second world war. The evil governor of California wishes to imprison all Japanese-Americans - suspecting they'll sabotage the war effort or commit espionage.
2. It is brought to his attention that there is zero evidence of any subversive activities of any kind by Japanese-Americans.
3. He argues, rather than exonerating the Japanese-Americans, the lack of evidence convinces him that there is a well organized fifth-column conspiracy that has been strategically avoiding sabotage to lull the population and government into a false sense of security, before striking at the right moment.
4. However, if evidence of sabotage would update him towards believing in the presence of opposition among Japanese Americans, then a lack of evidence necessarily must update him away from that belief.
5. There's no way that a lack of evidence for a conspiracy could ever cause you to be more worried about said conspiracy.
6. So the governor is a stupid evil cringe idiot with incoherent beliefs.
I agree with the broad takeaway. The provided heuristic seems useful for detecting when you might be not updating coherently. The governor in question probably wasn't well-founded in his beliefs, and probably was a bad person. From a quick skim of the wikipedia article, Japanese-American internment seems like it was absolutely horrific, unjustified, unreasonably inhumane, and shouldn't have been done.
That aside, this specific example is critically flawed.
Let's model the governor's reasoning explicitly. We have three disjoint hypotheses:[1]
* H1: There is no significant anti-war action by Japanese-Americans.
* H2: There is significant anti-war action, but it's not well coordinated.
* H3: There is significant anti-war action, well coordinated and