Comment by renewiltord

That's okay. I understand why you need to apply a near zero multiplier on what I told you but I'm unwilling to get any family member blackballed over outing anyone.

Your epistemological strategy is correct. And for all I know you are more correct. After all, given any random arrangement of points there will be clusters. And assuming you draw circles randomly, some circles will coincidentally appear full of points. But if the circle is the space of visibility of a sapient being, they will mistakenly determine that all of space is full of points simply based on their own circle.

So just because my immediate circle has encountered this enough may not mean that this is common.

Unfortunately, there is no true way for us to safely exchange information on this front for the positive case (there is fraud), only for the negative case (there is no fraud). So I guess we each act as if this circle is the entire plane and maybe the world will apply sufficient pressures to tease out who is right.