Mass shooting in the middle school Vladislav Ribnikar in Belgrade

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Did you investigate? You know, call the prison to find out why no one was there? Did you return to the prison on another day? Did you contact a government agency in charge of prisons to determine of the prison was closed or undergoing renovation?

 Drawing a conclusion from one piece of questionable data doesn't sound very scientific.

Boru

But testing obvious ad-hoc hypotheses is also unscientific. The hypothesis that prison was undergoing renovation is an obvious ad-hoc hypothesis, it's inventing the reasons why an experiment wouldn't work.

The renovation suggestion isn’t ad hoc - it isn’t even a hypothesis (and you didn’t conduct an ‘experiment’, strictly speaking).

If you suspect prisons may not exist, visiting one prison on one day is not a valid test of your hypothesis - it’s far too small a data set. All you demonstrated (assuming you went to the right building) is that that particular prison was empty on that particular day. Concluding from that alone that ‘prisons do not exist’ is an unjustified assumption. There are plenty of reasons why no one was at that building on the day you went (outlined previously).

Did you make any attempt to determine why no one was there? Did you visit any other prisons to see if they were empty? Did you contact the Bureau of Prisons (or whatever the Croatian equivalent is) for an explanation? Did you attempt to talk with people who claim to have been incarcerated to evaluate their testimony?

No. By your own admission, you made a sweeping generalization (‘prisons probably don’t exist’) based on one un-investigated datum (‘I visited a prison and no one was there’).

Helluva way to run a railroad.

Boru