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[GoblinCookie]

You could also do the opposite: cherry-pick false positives. Are you sure that is not what you are doing?

There really isn't any symmetry here.  They aren't false positives until you prove they are, but producing negative results in studies is entirely compatible with a positive reality, which means that you cannot use negative results elsewhere to prove that positive results are false.  You have to demonstrate why, given the methodology used a false positive would be produced; in effect "proving things is hard, disproving things is harder". 

The reason is that if there are two things that are connected, it is effortless to fail to detect a connection between the two things, you just have to make a study that is so flawed that it will always fail to detect anything.  You can produce as many of these false negative studies as you like because you just replicate the flaws of your original study forever.

I think much of this discussion kind of misses the point. It may be more constructive to think about the specific forms discrimination could take in the game, and consider their merits/demerits on a case-by-case basis. Toady has already ruled out racism (though what that means may be open to interpretation), so debate over that is purely academic.

Since this thread is about sex discrimination, perhaps we could keep it to that?

Also note positive discrimination is also possible. It may not be that men are banned from being priests of the goddess of bismuth, but rather only women are permitted due to some theological belief specific to that deity. There could be bans on breastfeeding women undergoing active military service to protect their babies (if you're reading Toady, please implement this).

There could also be differences in the baseline stat distribution between genders, which could lead to emergent discrimination (though that is unlikely). A more detailed implementation of genetics could actually produce discrimination naturally post economy, as low attribute individuals (of either gender) would settle at the bottom of society.

They would not settle at the bottom of society if there *is* no bottom of society.  Sex discrimination is really a subset of discrimination in general and fairly inseparable. 

I'm just passing through, here, but a couple of things jumped out at me.

     Put aside, for the moment, the fact that "dramatic social revolution" is not currently implemented in DF, because of course it isn't. What is implemented, however, are quests to stop a ruthless gang of bandits, or put together a war party to go slay the dragon that's been terrorizing the countryside. Do you not save dozens, even hundreds of lives in this way? Do you not dramatically alter the future of the whole region? Do you not become a hero, whom other men will follow? Does this not satisfy the Great Man Theory? And what's all this having to be in the right place at the right time? Was Martin Luther able to shatter all of Christendom just because he happened to post his theses precisely when Europe was already at the tipping point anyway? Of course not, he sparked a revolution because his ideas were different, and a foreign adventurer character is very well positioned to point out what he sees as glaring flaws in a society, particularly if he's riding the popularity wave of just having saved a town or two. Your little quibble over "the moment he arrives" is pure misdirection--the only reason the player can't do that sort of quest is because that sort of quest simply hasn't been written (yet), and you know it. Face the facts and argue correctly.

Bandits and dragons fit into the category of what I would call anti-social oppression.  I was talking about societal oppression (oppression approved of by society), not anti-social oppression.  A great man can fairly easily deal with anti-social oppression because society is prepared to give him the means to do so and also the rewards/motivation.  Societal oppression on the other hand is basically the situation backwards, *if* you challenge the oppression then your 'greatness license' will be revoked. 

Many people like Martin Luther (people with different ideas) came before him and ended up being roasted over a fire.  Martin Luther however turned up at exactly the point when the authority of the Catholic Church had basically already collapsed, so he avoided the fiery fate that others like him had faced.  There is a slow process of decay of the Church's authority, by which people gradually start passively ignoring it's authority and Martin Luther's success is the symptom not the cause of this.  Other heretics over the millennia earlier had not been so lucky as to arrive at the right time. 

     People trying to claim video-game violence causes real-world violence always seem to gloss over the innumerable atrocities throughout all history, and in places/societies that simply have no exposure to such games. And as for your report that violent crime is on the rise--if, as you imply, it is prompted by video games, then which game? Isn't the Grand Theft Auto craze long past its peak, at least until its next installment? Personally, I find it much more likely that this surge of real-world nastiness is caused by . . . real-world nastiness, what with the right-wing nationalism, intolerance, and violent rhetoric on the upswing again in Britain & other parts of Europe, Brazil, and of course America. People don't hurt, kill, or oppress people because someone on their screen tells them it's okay--they do it because they already had a latent desire to do so, and someone in their own culture shows them that it's okay. Blaming video games/movies/etc. for society's various ills has never made sense.

You talk about reasoning correctly and then you come up with this!  There is no glossing over anything because it does not follow that if one thing promotes something that other things do not also promote the same thing!  Total non sequitor by any standards. 

You talk about how culture shows them that it's okay, but then you forget that computer games *are* part of that culture.  We do not know that the current rise in "right-wing nationalism, intolerance, and violent rhetoric" which in effect runs directly against the general trend since WW2 ending, is not simply that the video games which promote such themes are 'bearing fruit' as it were.  The culture drew a division between them and the rest of culture, so those things were able to 'hide' in video games even as they were gradually driven out of the rest of culture. 

Then rather like Martin Luther, as soon as the right moment comes they just 'emerge' from their virtual hiding place and take the real world by storm.  But if society had censored it's video games and controlled the ideology of their content, perhaps they would not have been strong enough to emerge?

Wow, why am I bothering even engaging when you fundamentally have no idea what Dwarf Fortress actually aims to be?

Plus, that's not what I was arguing anyway, but trying to prop up what will inevitably be ignored to beat on another strawman is another waste of my time.

Indeed, I am unsure as to whether the devs even know what they want Dwarf Fortress to actually be.

I said I don't know. You made a claim. I said why I had doubts about that claim. You tried to address my doubts with some data. Both of those articles link to the same data. Attached to that data is this disclaimer:

For many types of offence, police recorded crime figures do not provide a reliable measure of trends in crime, but they do provide a good measure of the crime-related demand on the police.

(emphasis mine)
You are trying to use this data to make a claim about the trends in crime. The publishers of this data specifically say you cannot do this. You have not sufficiently addressed my doubts about your claim.

Since I was only arguing against the argument that the statistical decline in violent crime proves that video games do not replicate themselves in reality it does not matter if police crime statistics are unreliable, as that is just another argument I could have made originally. 

If you think violence is bad, and you think video games that depict violence cause violence, isn't it your moral obligation to start a suggestion thread for removing all violence from Dwarf Fortress? If you don't you are complicit in causing violence.

If this is your issue with this suggestion, I doubt I'd be able to change your mind here, so once again I'm going to just stop. If you really want to continue, DM me or start that new suggestion thread.

This whole situation is rather like a whole bunch of industrial and fossil fuels tycoons sitting in a club and one of them mentions global warming.  The other tycoons say to him, "If global warming was real then we would have to do something" therefore you should keep your mouth shut.   

If I as the player steal everyone's food and they starve to death that is that violence?  Stopping the player then from being violent if a pretty difficult task to pull off and if we can't stop the player from being violent, the rest of the world has to be capable of violence in order to stop the player. 

[KittyTac]

You could also do the opposite: cherry-pick false positives. Are you sure that is not what you are doing?

There really isn't any symmetry here.  They aren't false positives until you prove they are, but producing negative results in studies is entirely compatible with a positive reality, which means that you cannot use negative results elsewhere to prove that positive results are false.  You have to demonstrate why, given the methodology used a false positive would be produced; in effect "proving things is hard, disproving things is harder". 

The reason is that if there are two things that are connected, it is effortless to fail to detect a connection between the two things, you just have to make a study that is so flawed that it will always fail to detect anything.  You can produce as many of these false negative studies as you like because you just replicate the flaws of your original study forever.

That... makes zero sense. False positives are still compatible with negative reality. Case in point: people thought that the Earth was flat due to their lack of data and faulty logic. Isn't that a false positive?

[Putnam]

"proving things is hard, disproving things is harder". 

This is literally the opposite of correct in anything regarded as scientific. The single most important thing about any given scientific theory is that it's falsifiable, I.E. easy to disprove.

In fact, the actual phrase from a scientific perspective would be:

"Disproving things is easy, proving things is impossible".

[Dorsidwarf]

Goblincookie has repeatedly shown that he has no interest in science beyond waving it like a flag to make himself sound better, cherry-picks his pet Moral Panic studies while saying that everyone else is doing the cherry picking, previously claimed if I remember correctly that one positive result can fully contradict an indefinite amount of negative results (presumably only if it agrees with his personal opinions though), is of the opinion that 'suspension of disbelief' is the same thing as 'believing', and overall just seems interested in telling us all about their great new idea about how society really works because all the journals turned down their paper as "nonsense".

We do not know that the current rise in "right-wing nationalism, intolerance, and violent rhetoric" which in effect runs directly against the general trend since WW2 ending, is not simply that the video games which promote such themes are 'bearing fruit' as it were.  The culture drew a division between them and the rest of culture, so those things were able to 'hide' in video games even as they were gradually driven out of the rest of culture.

Then rather like Martin Luther, as soon as the right moment comes they just 'emerge' from their virtual hiding place and take the real world by storm.  But if society had censored it's video games and controlled the ideology of their content, perhaps they would not have been strong enough to emerge?

Nice fanfiction, but Mr Everyone But Me Needs Evidence (although their evidence is irrelevant because of the aforementioned "one positive I agree with outweight 100 negatives I dont" thing) had better buck up some support for this view?

I'm really not seeing the point in arguing with you GC. You have shown again and again that you have no interest in anything beyond peddling your own strange worldview at the expense of everything else, logic and science included.

[GoblinCookie]

That... makes zero sense. False positives are still compatible with negative reality. Case in point: people thought that the Earth was flat due to their lack of data and faulty logic. Isn't that a false positive?

I never said there *were* no false positives in a negative example, only that you cannot establish a false positive in one instance by the total number of negatives in other instances.  If you fail to detect something in other instances, it does not disprove the one instance in which you detected something. 

If you go out into the forest and fail to spot tigers 99 times over, but on the 100th time you spot a tiger the statement "there are no tigers in the forest" (the null hypothesis) is disproven by that one tiger that you did spot.  That means that we do not allow small children to go into the forest lest they be eaten by the tigers.

We don't say "well 99 times we did not see tigers and that cancels out the one time we did," because if we do people are going to die.  It is the same reason as to why people would think the world is flat, your perception is flawed so you do not notice the tigers that are there in the forest because the forest hides them.  The few people that determined the roundness of the earth were able to disprove the many thousands of people who perceived the earth's flatness.

A positive state of affairs is entirely compatible with the appearance of a negative state of affairs; people were simply unable to see it.  The reverse is not the case however, because the one that sees more has better vision than the one that sees less.  If I see something that others do not, this confirms the superiority of my vision (or in scientific terms my methodology) while the others failure to see it does not do the reverse. 

This is literally the opposite of correct in anything regarded as scientific. The single most important thing about any given scientific theory is that it's falsifiable, I.E. easy to disprove.

In fact, the actual phrase from a scientific perspective would be:

"Disproving things is easy, proving things is impossible".

Nope. 

Falsifiability only requires that something *can* be disproved, not that it be easy to do so.  The ease of doing so is irrelevant, it just requires that the hypothesis being tested have a state of affairs which could be discovered under which it is not valid.  This principle is important *only* in the sense that it is possible to invent hypothesis in which both the negative *and* the positive result confirms the hypothesis so that it literally cannot be wrong.  Unless both a positive and negative result of a study confirms the hypothesis, it is falsifiable; there is no requirement that you be able to actually falsify it (prove it incorrect), because if you were able to do so then it would make the claim false rather than falsifiable. 

In any case falsifiability is hardly an old concept and one that comes from a certain Karl Popper.  Now Karl Popper co-founded the Mont Pelerin Society, which is a right-wing organisation that includes alongside Popper such folks Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.  Put rather simply, Karl Popper is my enemy and I see him as the most devious enemy of the lot; he's the underhand one, the snake-in-the-grass.  The others lacked the subtlety he has but he is in truth little different in his real agenda to the others; it would not surprise me if the application of his principles conceal the truth and propagate errors. 

Goblincookie has repeatedly shown that he has no interest in science beyond waving it like a flag to make himself sound better, cherry-picks his pet Moral Panic studies while saying that everyone else is doing the cherry picking, previously claimed if I remember correctly that one positive result can fully contradict an indefinite amount of negative results (presumably only if it agrees with his personal opinions though), is of the opinion that 'suspension of disbelief' is the same thing as 'believing', and overall just seems interested in telling us all about their great new idea about how society really works because all the journals turned down their paper as "nonsense".

Yes, one positive result stands irrespective of the number of negative results.  That applies irrespective of whether I like the result or not, it is a basic (and very, very important) principle.  It is dangerous in the extreme to ignore this principle, as in people will die level of dangerous. 

The way you detect a false positive is by establishing using another set of studies that the methodology of the study would produce a positive result irrespective of what was the case; then you can invalidate all positive studies using that methodology however numerous they may be. 

Nice fanfiction, but Mr Everyone But Me Needs Evidence (although their evidence is irrelevant because of the aforementioned "one positive I agree with outweight 100 negatives I dont" thing) had better buck up some support for this view?

I'm really not seeing the point in arguing with you GC. You have shown again and again that you have no interest in anything beyond peddling your own strange worldview at the expense of everything else, logic and science included.

That was not actually claimed as fact, merely as a possibility as to how violent video games could harmonise with other violent stuff.  This is the pitfalls of butting into other people's conversations, you miss the context. 

I don't peddle my strange worldview at the expense of logic and science, my 'strange worldview' is entirely logical if not scientific and I consider science inferior to logic anyway because science is based upon appearances and appearances are deceiving.  I constantly have to deal with irrational people clinging to science as a bulwark to justify their irrationality.  If you hypothesis is nonsense, then it remains nonsense even if you can scientifically prove it, since proving it only requires that it make testable predictions and nonsense can make such predictions. 

[KittyTac]

...Why am I arguing with this guy? I will not listen to your point-missing nonsense. The next time you post something derail-y in a thread, I will just ignore you and continue with the original topic.

I back out since I do not wish to listen to your nonsensical arguments.

[Putnam]

In any case falsifiability is hardly an old concept and one that comes from a certain Karl Popper.  Now Karl Popper co-founded the Mont Pelerin Society, which is a right-wing organisation that includes alongside Popper such folks Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.  Put rather simply, Karl Popper is my enemy and I see him as the most devious enemy of the lot; he's the underhand one, the snake-in-the-grass.  The others lacked the subtlety he has but he is in truth little different in his real agenda to the others; it would not surprise me if the application of his principles conceal the truth and propagate errors. 

And Hitler ate sugar. This is a literal textbook ad hominem.

[Bumber]

In any case falsifiability is hardly an old concept and one that comes from a certain Karl Popper.  Now Karl Popper co-founded the Mont Pelerin Society, which is a right-wing organisation that includes alongside Popper such folks Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.  Put rather simply, Karl Popper is my enemy and I see him as the most devious enemy of the lot; he's the underhand one, the snake-in-the-grass.  The others lacked the subtlety he has but he is in truth little different in his real agenda to the others; it would not surprise me if the application of his principles conceal the truth and propagate errors. 

And Hitler ate sugar. This is a literal textbook ad hominem.

So much for logic over science. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Dorsidwarf]

If you go out into the forest and fail to spot tigers 99 times over, but on the 100th time you spot a tiger the statement "there are no tigers in the forest" (the null hypothesis) is disproven by that one tiger that you did spot.

Let's say the following:
100 people search a forest for a tiger, one at a time, and 99 people come out saying they found no evidence of a tiger whatsoever. Halfway through, one guy comes out saying he saw a tiger.

What conclusions do you draw from this experiment? (Other than "Let's go to where the guy said he saw the tiger and look again", because the tiger's presence is not actually the point here)

What conclusions should the cohort of searchers draw from this experiment?

[GoblinCookie]

...Why am I arguing with this guy? I will not listen to your point-missing nonsense. The next time you post something derail-y in a thread, I will just ignore you and continue with the original topic.

I back out since I do not wish to listen to your nonsensical arguments.

Okay, scientific methodology is indeed not the topic of this thread.   

Question is how to get back on track?  The train went Gender>Oppression>Violence-in-Video Games>Scientific Methodology. 

And Hitler ate sugar. This is a literal textbook ad hominem.

I thought I explained how I agreed with him, so very much not Hitler eats Suger.  I just pointed out that it applies to scientific hypothesis in general, but not to experimental results; I think Karl Popper agrees with me on this.  If the methodology of a study is falsifiable (that is it would be possible to find something that would undermine it's integrity) that methodology is flawed, I don't need to actually falsify it. 

Let's say the following:
100 people search a forest for a tiger, one at a time, and 99 people come out saying they found no evidence of a tiger whatsoever. Halfway through, one guy comes out saying he saw a tiger.

What conclusions do you draw from this experiment? (Other than "Let's go to where the guy said he saw the tiger and look again", because the tiger's presence is not actually the point here)

What conclusions should the cohort of searchers draw from this experiment?

The conclusion is that tigers exist in the forest because the one person saw it, that is because the factual existence of tigers is entirely compatible with the failure of any number of people to notice them.  The reverse is not the case, if there are no tigers then it is impossible for any to have actually been seen, the tiger must then be an illusion. 

Illusion-by-default however is a fallacy because if I have to prove that the tiger was not an illusion, everything I would use to prove it is not an illusion would itself also be an illusion, leading to an infinite regress of illusions.  Since this is the case, the burden of proof falls on the one proving the tiger is an illusion.  You have to prove the illusionary nature of the tiger in order that the absence of tigers be established in the wood, because the existence of something is compatible with the failure of any number of people to detect it.

However in the case of violence-in-video games it is less people going into the wood and randomly seeing tigers (or not) but more 99 blind people and 1 sighted person looking at the same tiger.  Once the sighted person sees the tiger, the inability of the other people to see it confirms their blindness.  The 'eyes' in this case are the methodology of the studies and we don't actually know which methodologies are correct to begin with.

There are a number of ways in which video games could promote aggressive behavior, so the correct methodology to use to detect the effect is initially unknown because we don't know which of the psychological models by which it could operates is generally correct.  In effect, we have to determine which of our people is *not* blind based upon whether they can see the tiger or not. 

If we detect something it confirms that our specific method of detection is the correct method to detect whatever it is.  If we fail to detect something what we are eliminating is possible models as to the functioning of the link, only if *all* models are proven wrong can we say that there is no connection at all. 

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Or the tiger-seer could be hallucinating, because false positives exist.

You shouldn't start with the assumption that the tiger is real and then eliminate every model that says it isn't. Some models like that are compatible with your observations.

[Dorsidwarf]

However in the case of violence-in-video games it is less people going into the wood and randomly seeing tigers (or not) but more 99 blind people and 1 sighted person looking at the same tiger.  Once the sighted person sees the tiger, the inability of the other people to see it confirms their blindness.  The 'eyes' in this case are the methodology of the studies and we don't actually know which methodologies are correct to begin with.

No.
If you start with the assumption that your favored result is right, ignore evidence to the contrary, and you are doing bad science. If you presuppose "I am right", and only seek to ask "why are people who disagree with me wrong" you will not learn anything from an experiment!

Code: [Select]

A better analogy for this new blind-person / bad-methodology scenario
"You have 100 people, an unknown number of which are blind and an unknown number of which are sighted. Each one searches the forest to find evidence of a tiger.
99 people come out of the forest saying they found no evidence of a tiger. One person comes out of the forest saying that they found evidence of a tigerIf you say "Every study that disagrees with my result must have bad methodology because they disagree with my result", what's the point of doing a study at all?
Why does the study with "bad methodology" have to be the 99 negatives and not the one positive?



also to take the scenario literally, which is a mistake because it is a metaphor but whatever, how do you know that the guy who said "i saw evidence of a tiger" saw a tiger?. Maybe he thought he saw a tiger in the bushes, but was mistaken. Maybe he found prints and thought they were tiger-prints when actually they were bear prints. Maybe he didnt see a tiger at all but didn't want to come back empty-handed after spending all that time searching a forest. Maybe someone gave him five bucks to say he saw a tiger.
Wilfully ignoring all possible scenarios then saying "the only alternative is that a wizard made an illusion of a tiger and thats impossible so the tiger must exist" is... nonsense.


By the way, you believe in Bigfoot, right? And grey aliens. And the Chupacabra. And cold fusion And the Beast of Bodmin moor. And Nessie? Because these are all scenarios where some people say "I have seen/found/proven/detected this" and then many other people have rigorously looked at the available information and come to the conclusion that no, they do not. If you feel that this is a strawman, feel free to clarify your position on the matter of "someone claims X, therefore it MUST BE TRUE"

[SixOfSpades]

No.
If you start with the assumption that your favored result is right, ignore evidence to the contrary, and you are doing bad science. If you presuppose "I am right", and only seek to ask "why are people who disagree with me wrong" you will not learn anything from an experiment!

Just speaking personally and for the sake of easing any frustrations that you might feel, I myself am able to avoid speaking in 24pt font size simply because I largely ignore GoblinCookie. I might respond to people replying to him, but he himself isn't worth the trouble. I once said that "If GoblinCookie is disagreeing with somebody, that's only because GoblinCookie is wrong," and I think I have yet to see any examples to the contrary.

By the way, you believe in Bigfoot, right? And grey aliens. And the Chupacabra. And cold fusion And the Beast of Bodmin moor. And Nessie? Because these are all scenarios where some people say "I have seen/found/proven/detected this" and then many other people have rigorously looked at the available information and come to the conclusion that no, they do not. If you feel that this is a strawman, feel free to clarify your position on the matter of "someone claims X, therefore it MUST BE TRUE"

     On a related point, in Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, the main character (Dr. Stockmann) gives a climactic monologue in which he attacks the idea of "truth by consensus, rather than fact". He paints of picture of a company of soldiers, who have been sent to occupy a town before it can be taken by the enemy, and also of a sentry, who has seen that the enemy has already taken the town, and is rushing down to warn the soldiers. Stockmann presents this question: Should the soldiers continue to follow their orders, and ignore the sentry because his is the voice of only one man? Or should they acknowledge that he is in possession of more information than they are, and adjust their opinions accordingly?
     Obviously, truth is not subjective. We can't vote on whether or not global warming is happening. Popular opinion does not dictate fact--but that doesn't mean that popular opinion is always wrong, either. The key is in the nature and qualifications of those people who we choose to believe, even when they might be in the minority, even when their views might be unpopular. Should a respected vulcanologist be listened to when he says a certain volcano is about to erupt? Yes. Should that same vulcanologist be listened to when he says that Princess Diana was abducted by aliens? No. The sentry in Dr. Stockmann's story should be listened to. Every political analyst who said that Don Trump was grossly unfit to be President should be listened to. Everyone who believes in the Chupacabra should not. And GoblinCookie should not. It's high time this very unfortunate culture of anti-intellectualism came to an abrupt halt.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

That’s sort of related, but GoblinCookie isn’t even making an argument in the same area as yours. He’s claiming that positive results should be vastly favored over negative results when considering a body of evidence. We can talk about variance in reliability, but we all agree that in the idealized “every test is as likely to have an error and false positives/negatives are equally likely” scenario, one positive result and one negative are of the same weight. GoblinCookie apparently does not.
All these tiger examples have an insidious connotation - that we are looking directly at reality. Humans are not very good at noticing their own inaccuracies. But we are inaccurate indeed.

I mean, this is the textbook example of an adaptive Type I Error! Running from rustles in the leaves is less costly than being eaten by a sneaky tiger, so we are prone to seeing costly things even when they’re not there.

[GoblinCookie]

Or the tiger-seer could be hallucinating, because false positives exist.

You shouldn't start with the assumption that the tiger is real and then eliminate every model that says it isn't. Some models like that are compatible with your observations.
+++

Earlier I said that false positives exist. 

I said that the tiger-seer could be hallucinating, only that this is not the default assumption.  Illusion as a default assumption is invalid, it has to be proven because it otherwise everything you would take to prove something is not an illusion is itself an illusion. 

I am not starting with the assumption the tiger is real, I am starting with the assumption that the tiger is not real until anyone sees it.  But the number of people who fail to see the tiger has to no weighting against the number of people that saw the tiger, that is because the existence of the tiger is compatible with the inability of any number of people to see it while the actual seeing of the tiger by anyone is incompatible with the nonexistence of the tiger. 

By this I mean that in order to sustain the nonexistance of the tiger null hypothesis you have to prove that anyone that saw the tiger is seeing things that are not there.  And as mentioned above, illusion-by-default cannot be the null-hypothesis in this case, every person is seeing what is the case unless you can prove they are not.

If you start with the assumption that your favored result is right, ignore evidence to the contrary, and you are doing bad science. If you presuppose "I am right", and only seek to ask "why are people who disagree with me wrong" you will not learn anything from an experiment!

Why would video games cause violence be anyone's favored result?

People who believe they do believe they do because they have reasons, people who don't may or may have reasons but at core they simply like video games.  I play video games (obviously), so why is this going to be my 'favoured result'?

If you say "Every study that disagrees with my result must have bad methodology because they disagree with my result", what's the point of doing a study at all?
Why does the study with "bad methodology" have to be the 99 negatives and not the one positive?

Because that is the way it works.  It does not matter if the positive is something I like or not.  Science is not some kind of democracy by which we line up our for and against studies to see which one gets 51% of the vote. 

also to take the scenario literally, which is a mistake because it is a metaphor but whatever, how do you know that the guy who said "i saw evidence of a tiger" saw a tiger?. Maybe he thought he saw a tiger in the bushes, but was mistaken. Maybe he found prints and thought they were tiger-prints when actually they were bear prints. Maybe he didnt see a tiger at all but didn't want to come back empty-handed after spending all that time searching a forest. Maybe someone gave him five bucks to say he saw a tiger.
Wilfully ignoring all possible scenarios then saying "the only alternative is that a wizard made an illusion of a tiger and thats impossible so the tiger must exist" is... nonsense.

Yes those are possibilities, but you have to prove them. 

By the way, you believe in Bigfoot, right? And grey aliens. And the Chupacabra. And cold fusion And the Beast of Bodmin moor. And Nessie? Because these are all scenarios where some people say "I have seen/found/proven/detected this" and then many other people have rigorously looked at the available information and come to the conclusion that no, they do not. If you feel that this is a strawman, feel free to clarify your position on the matter of "someone claims X, therefore it MUST BE TRUE"

I very much doubt anyone rigorously looked at any information.  They simply dismissed what was seen based upon cultural prejudice without any real investigation.

Just speaking personally and for the sake of easing any frustrations that you might feel, I myself am able to avoid speaking in 24pt font size simply because I largely ignore GoblinCookie. I might respond to people replying to him, but he himself isn't worth the trouble. I once said that "If GoblinCookie is disagreeing with somebody, that's only because GoblinCookie is wrong," and I think I have yet to see any examples to the contrary.

Funny thing that I don't feel the same way about you.  Perhaps I should. 

     On a related point, in Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, the main character (Dr. Stockmann) gives a climactic monologue in which he attacks the idea of "truth by consensus, rather than fact". He paints of picture of a company of soldiers, who have been sent to occupy a town before it can be taken by the enemy, and also of a sentry, who has seen that the enemy has already taken the town, and is rushing down to warn the soldiers. Stockmann presents this question: Should the soldiers continue to follow their orders, and ignore the sentry because his is the voice of only one man? Or should they acknowledge that he is in possession of more information than they are, and adjust their opinions accordingly?
     Obviously, truth is not subjective. We can't vote on whether or not global warming is happening. Popular opinion does not dictate fact--but that doesn't mean that popular opinion is always wrong, either. The key is in the nature and qualifications of those people who we choose to believe, even when they might be in the minority, even when their views might be unpopular. Should a respected vulcanologist be listened to when he says a certain volcano is about to erupt? Yes. Should that same vulcanologist be listened to when he says that Princess Diana was abducted by aliens? No. The sentry in Dr. Stockmann's story should be listened to. Every political analyst who said that Don Trump was grossly unfit to be President should be listened to. Everyone who believes in the Chupacabra should not. And GoblinCookie should not. It's high time this very unfortunate culture of anti-intellectualism came to an abrupt halt.

I am the one arguing against the notion of science as a democracy here.  The distinction between the sentry in your story and the person who saw the Chupacabra is just an arbitrary societal prejudice, there appears to be no justification for it that you have made here.

All these tiger examples have an insidious connotation - that we are looking directly at reality. Humans are not very good at noticing their own inaccuracies. But we are inaccurate indeed.

I mean, this is the textbook example of an adaptive Type I Error! Running from rustles in the leaves is less costly than being eaten by a sneaky tiger, so we are prone to seeing costly things even when they’re not there.

Most human beings are reasonably good at noticing innacuracies, even their own.  Certain powerful people who are committed to false ides and false reasoning made up the nonsense about people being unable to notice innacuracies to explain the power of ordinary individuals to defy the authority of their claims, backed up by supposed credentials.  In effect, the powerful invented credentials, used their credentials to impose their nonsense on the masses and then when the masses refused to accept the nonsense came up with another nonsense about how people are unable to notice their own innacuracies. 

The purpose of this particular nonsense is to convince us to not have faith in ourselves and be strong but to be weak putty to be shaped.  In effect "don't have faith in yourself, have faith in me because I am a special man unlike you, unworthy thing,".