[DanBC]

Vs all the other pilots with mental health problems who don't kill all their passengers.

It's really weird seeing such obviously fallacious thinking on HN but it happens everytime mental illness and violence comes up.

When you want to predict if a person poses a risk of violence to other people knowing whether that person has a mental illness or not gives you very little predictive power. Knowing if that person is addicted to alcohol, or has had a previous episode of violence, gives you much more predictive power. And if you combine those, or either or both of them with mental illness you get a better predictor. But mental illness itself is not a predictor.

[kaybe]

Yes, of course, and it's being extensively discussed in the link. However, it is still relevant to know that some people draw this conclusion, IMHO, since it increases the quality of my model of them.

(Or, lets say, it is another parameter to watch for when discussing with new people, to help understand their point of view and ponder all the arguments, even the ones with more than sufficient counter arguments to outright dismiss them; this excercise might have to be shown to some discussion partners as well so they can see where I am coming from.)

[derrida]

Further to what DanBC said, the fallacy is this:

    The guy who plunged his plane into a mountain had depression.
    The Unabomber was a mathematician.
    Hitler was an artist.

Artists are evil!