Someone comes to you and says they have been sexually abused. OK. There’s a base rate of false accusations, and a base rate of real ones, so you have some prior probability p.
Then they tell you that the abuser also hacked all their devices and got them banned from the entire internet.
And then that the abuser and several confederates illegally excluded them from a will
Then they tell you that they have anxiety and they moved house 20 times in the last year
Then they tell you that they dropped out of medschool and can’t hold down a normal job
Then they tell you that they recorded a podcast with the abuser
Then they tell you that the abuser offered to buy them a house, but they declined because they “wouldn’t feel safe”
You look at the symptoms of psychosis:
Suspiciousness, paranoid ideas, or uneasiness with others
Trouble thinking clearly and logically
Withdrawing socially and spending a lot more time alone
Unusual or overly intense ideas, strange feelings, or a lack of feelings
Difficulty telling reality from fantasy
Sudden drop in grades or job performance
And the time of onset:
Psychosis often begins in young adulthood when a person is in their late teens to mid-20s
All this extra information you received after the initial abuse claim seems to be evidence that is quite strongly predicted by the psychosis hypothesis.
Now there’s an alternative explanation that the abuser really is doing all of these horrible things. But the more of them there are, the weaker the “it was real” hypothesis gets, because each extra thing that the abuser does is an extra burden for reality (like, the abuser has to actually ban this person from the entire internet without any of the other people who would be involved in that divulging details) but there really isn’t any limit to the amount of stuff someone with a psychotic delusion can come up with.
Also things like “I was offered a house but I didn’t even want to meet because I was worried that the lawyer would control me” are quite strong indicators of someone not thinking rationally.
Yo—sorry, I meant to keep this in my drafts. I was in the process of making a bunch of edits to my original post, and used this as a sort of “snapshot in time” of a certain segment of my original post to help clear out the the LW editor for my original post while I was modifying it.
Sorry your comment got wasted here.
I’ll be replying to your comment on my main post shortly (which I think is pretty rational, though I do think you may be extrapolating a bit on the MeToo-type influence.)
An exercise in Bayesian thinking:
Someone comes to you and says they have been sexually abused. OK. There’s a base rate of false accusations, and a base rate of real ones, so you have some prior probability p.
Then they tell you that the abuser also hacked all their devices and got them banned from the entire internet.
And then that the abuser and several confederates illegally excluded them from a will
Then they tell you that they have anxiety and they moved house 20 times in the last year
Then they tell you that they dropped out of medschool and can’t hold down a normal job
Then they tell you that they recorded a podcast with the abuser
Then they tell you that the abuser offered to buy them a house, but they declined because they “wouldn’t feel safe”
You look at the symptoms of psychosis:
Suspiciousness, paranoid ideas, or uneasiness with others
Trouble thinking clearly and logically
Withdrawing socially and spending a lot more time alone
Unusual or overly intense ideas, strange feelings, or a lack of feelings
Difficulty telling reality from fantasy
Sudden drop in grades or job performance
And the time of onset:
Psychosis often begins in young adulthood when a person is in their late teens to mid-20s
All this extra information you received after the initial abuse claim seems to be evidence that is quite strongly predicted by the psychosis hypothesis.
Now there’s an alternative explanation that the abuser really is doing all of these horrible things. But the more of them there are, the weaker the “it was real” hypothesis gets, because each extra thing that the abuser does is an extra burden for reality (like, the abuser has to actually ban this person from the entire internet without any of the other people who would be involved in that divulging details) but there really isn’t any limit to the amount of stuff someone with a psychotic delusion can come up with.
Also things like “I was offered a house but I didn’t even want to meet because I was worried that the lawyer would control me” are quite strong indicators of someone not thinking rationally.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9599-delusional-disorder https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/understanding-psychosis
Yo—sorry, I meant to keep this in my drafts. I was in the process of making a bunch of edits to my original post, and used this as a sort of “snapshot in time” of a certain segment of my original post to help clear out the the LW editor for my original post while I was modifying it.
Sorry your comment got wasted here.
I’ll be replying to your comment on my main post shortly (which I think is pretty rational, though I do think you may be extrapolating a bit on the MeToo-type influence.)