The ‘Strike a balance between dismissing accusations and witch-hunting people’ is about how to act given that accusations have some small (but non-negligible) chance of being false. If we instead learned that the true rate differed strongly from this, it seems reasonable that the advice would also change. (E.g. if it turned out that there were never any false accusations, we could act much more strongly on the basis of accusations).
I also think generally if a piece of writing states a fact you think is false, it is reasonable and should be encouraged to bring it up in the comments, even if it is not central to the argument’s conclusion.
It mentions them, but does it make any points based on the assumption that there are too few of them?
The ‘Strike a balance between dismissing accusations and witch-hunting people’ is about how to act given that accusations have some small (but non-negligible) chance of being false. If we instead learned that the true rate differed strongly from this, it seems reasonable that the advice would also change. (E.g. if it turned out that there were never any false accusations, we could act much more strongly on the basis of accusations).
I also think generally if a piece of writing states a fact you think is false, it is reasonable and should be encouraged to bring it up in the comments, even if it is not central to the argument’s conclusion.