Venezuela’s PdVSA Misses $404M Payments on Bonds | Hacker News Reader

Venezuela’s PdVSA Misses $404M Payments on Bonds

wsj.com

The information about a PDVSA default spread by the enemies of the fatherland is totally false <-- there should be a word for "A denial which is phrased in such a fashion as to make listening observers think it is more likely, not less likely, that the thing being denied actually happened."

This reminds me of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi Information Minister, widely known as Baghdad Bob and Comical Ali.

Related: conjunction fallacy

That's not an example of the conjunction fallacy, as far as I can tell.

You've got a cat in a box. It was killed or not based on the outcome of a fair coin flip. Your prior for the cat being alive should be 50%. If you hear meowing and your prior stays at 50%, you are not very good at applying logic to contrived scenarios.

We have a complex financial transaction in a black box. My prior on there being a technical fudging on at least one term of it is, hmm, maybe 5%. If you tell me "A reputable observer says there was no impropriety", that goes down. If you tell me "A socialist says, while fulminating about imperialists, that there was no impropriety", my new estimate is high-nineties.

The box is meowing, loudly.

Gotcha, agreed. My first comment was based on a surface reading of your comment. Retract.

(slight quibble about your example: a fulminating socialist could just as well make that statement in the absence of impropriety. the additional information that that's the best possible report would indeed make it sound like a meow.)

Sometimes it is simply the act of denial - think Richard Nixon's, "I'm not a crook"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuspiciouslySpeci...

Apparently PDVSA said that they made the payment. http://www.reuters.com/article/pdvsa-debt-idUSL1N1DM1OK

So it was indeed an imperialist plot?

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