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Comment by bkor | Hacker News Reader

The Netherlands had various high profile cases where the investigators focussed on one or more individuals. This despite it making no sense at all. At least two people ended up in jail for 10+ years after multiple years of being investigated. Various of these cases were shown on a television program, see https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_R._de_Vries#Bekende_zake... (Dutch). It often took enormous effort to get these people out of jail, see e.g. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttense_moordzaak (Dutch).

I noticed that I forgot the details a bit. It's worse if you read above links. Anyway, you really do not want to become a suspect!

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“People have been mistakenly incarcerated in the past so fuck having laws and cops and shit”

That's clearly not what they are saying.

He's pretty fairly mocking this answer, though. Anecdotes are not an answer when it comes to something this prevalent. I can find an anecdote for almost anything to make it look bad.

An anecdote is a logically valid response to "This isn't happening". "Yes it is, because here's a case where it did" is a valid counter. It doesn't prove that it's happening systematically, but it does prove it has happened, and from there it is valid to discuss whether it might happen again.

> An anecdote is a logically valid response to "This isn't happening".

Well, choosing to respond to a claim that wasn't asserted isn't a valid argument against the original assertion.

> and from there it is valid to discuss whether it might happen again.

This again is working at 'anecdote scale'. Unless you can show that the costs of these anecdotes are anywhere near the collective benefits, then it's worthless. Keep in mind, it's equally worthless to assert there actually are benefits in this system without support, but that's why I'm not asserting that. I'm just saying an isolated argument on one side or the other, especially when it just a fucking anecdote, is functionally meaningless.

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