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The large number of people willing to take Brian Hamacheck's word (without response or evidence) on the "who's here" versus "who's near me" dispute seems relevant to me. The number of people offering to donate is even more disturbing.

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What's even more disturbing is reading the comments of the arrest section on local newspapers. 95% of the people commenting seem to make up these elaborate fantasy scenarios of what happened in their heads and then decide people's guilt or innocence based on that.

Welcome to the human condition. Evidently, the human imagination predicts well in the context of small family groups in the wilderness. Have a society with enough complexity to merit laws, and the imagination isn't so finely tuned.

What makes you think it works on small family groups? All we can conclude from ev-psych is that making stuff up didn't cost the imaginers much reproductive success personally - we have no idea what it did to the actual victims having stories made up about them.

I suspect that in small family groups in the wilderness, much more of our imaginings concern the environment and non-human agency, and fewer concern the actions of the group.

I said much the same thing about the Megaupload debacle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047683

I see it here all the time, by users with extremely high karma.

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