I have to think that there is another question to be considered: What are the odds that Japanese-Americans would commit sabotage we could detect as sabotage? If the odds are very high that detectable sabotage would occur, then the absence of sabotage would be evidence in favor of something preventing sabotage. A conspiracy which collaborates with potential saboteurs and encourages them to wait for the proper time to strike then becomes a reasonable hypothesis, if such a conspiracy would believe that an initial act of temporally focused sabotage would be effective enough to have greater utility than all the acts of sabotage which would otherwise occur before the time of the sabotage spree.
That is a good question, but it doesn’t help Warren’s reasoning.
His reasoning was not that there was a high probability that they had committed acts of subversion that were undectectible. His reasoning was that because there was no evidence of subversion, this was evidence of future subversion.
This line of reasoning invalidates itself as soon as the first evidence of subversion is discovered, since the reason subversion was imminent was because there was no evidence of subversion.
In its most simple form, Warren was saying: “Because there is no evidence that the ball is blue, the ball is blue.”
I don’t make any claims about undetected sabotage, I believe it to be statistically meaningless for these purposes. The detection clause was intended to make my statements more precise. Undetectable sabotage only modifies the odds of detectable sabotage, because it’s clearly preferable to strike unnoticed. The conditional statement “If the odds are very high...” eliminates all scenarios where those odds are not very high, which brings this down to Warren assuming an ordering factor in the absence of random events. If you’d like to include undetected sabotage, then you also need to consider the odds that untrained saboteurs would be capable of undetectable sabotage.
Warren wasn’t saying “Because there is no evidence that the ball is blue, the ball is blue.” He was saying “The sun should be in the sky. I cannot see the sun. Therefore, it has been eaten by a dragon.” He was wrong, as it turned out, the eclipse was caused by the moon, and the dragon he feared never existed. But if the dragon he predicted did exist, the world might look much like it did at the time of the predictions.
I have to think that there is another question to be considered: What are the odds that Japanese-Americans would commit sabotage we could detect as sabotage? If the odds are very high that detectable sabotage would occur, then the absence of sabotage would be evidence in favor of something preventing sabotage. A conspiracy which collaborates with potential saboteurs and encourages them to wait for the proper time to strike then becomes a reasonable hypothesis, if such a conspiracy would believe that an initial act of temporally focused sabotage would be effective enough to have greater utility than all the acts of sabotage which would otherwise occur before the time of the sabotage spree.
That is a good question, but it doesn’t help Warren’s reasoning.
His reasoning was not that there was a high probability that they had committed acts of subversion that were undectectible. His reasoning was that because there was no evidence of subversion, this was evidence of future subversion.
This line of reasoning invalidates itself as soon as the first evidence of subversion is discovered, since the reason subversion was imminent was because there was no evidence of subversion.
In its most simple form, Warren was saying: “Because there is no evidence that the ball is blue, the ball is blue.”
I don’t make any claims about undetected sabotage, I believe it to be statistically meaningless for these purposes. The detection clause was intended to make my statements more precise. Undetectable sabotage only modifies the odds of detectable sabotage, because it’s clearly preferable to strike unnoticed. The conditional statement “If the odds are very high...” eliminates all scenarios where those odds are not very high, which brings this down to Warren assuming an ordering factor in the absence of random events. If you’d like to include undetected sabotage, then you also need to consider the odds that untrained saboteurs would be capable of undetectable sabotage.
Warren wasn’t saying “Because there is no evidence that the ball is blue, the ball is blue.” He was saying “The sun should be in the sky. I cannot see the sun. Therefore, it has been eaten by a dragon.” He was wrong, as it turned out, the eclipse was caused by the moon, and the dragon he feared never existed. But if the dragon he predicted did exist, the world might look much like it did at the time of the predictions.