In particular notice that any deviations from Poisson are going to be in the direction that makes Rolf’s argument even stronger.
No, they’re not, not without even more baseless assumptions. The Poisson is not well-justified, and it’s not even conservative for Rolf’s argument. If there was a selection process in which the best pilots get to combat the most (a shocking proposition, I realize); then many more would cross the threshold of at least 1 kill than would be predicted if one incorrectly modeled kill rates as Poissons with averages. This is the sort of thing (multiple consecutive factors) which would generate other possible distributions like the lognormal, which appear all the time in human performance data like scientific publications. (‘...who swallow the camel of the likelihood function’.)
And this still doesn’t address my point that you cannot write off data you have not seen with a fully general counterargument—without very good reasons which Rolf has not done anything remotely like showing. You do not know whether that extremely low quoted rate is exactly what one would expect from pilots doing their level best to kill others without doing a lot more work to verify that a Poisson fits, what the rate parameter is, and what the distribution of pilot differences looks like; the final kill rate of pilots, just like soldiers, is the joint result of many things.
Rolf addressed that point:
In particular notice that any deviations from Poisson are going to be in the direction that makes Rolf’s argument even stronger.
No, they’re not, not without even more baseless assumptions. The Poisson is not well-justified, and it’s not even conservative for Rolf’s argument. If there was a selection process in which the best pilots get to combat the most (a shocking proposition, I realize); then many more would cross the threshold of at least 1 kill than would be predicted if one incorrectly modeled kill rates as Poissons with averages. This is the sort of thing (multiple consecutive factors) which would generate other possible distributions like the lognormal, which appear all the time in human performance data like scientific publications. (‘...who swallow the camel of the likelihood function’.)
And this still doesn’t address my point that you cannot write off data you have not seen with a fully general counterargument—without very good reasons which Rolf has not done anything remotely like showing. You do not know whether that extremely low quoted rate is exactly what one would expect from pilots doing their level best to kill others without doing a lot more work to verify that a Poisson fits, what the rate parameter is, and what the distribution of pilot differences looks like; the final kill rate of pilots, just like soldiers, is the joint result of many things.