[justbees]

If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective how would you know which one to trust?

[vacuity]

Yes, then there is no way to elevate Bob above Alice, but in practice I think the assumption of external indistinguishability is too strong, and even the suspicion that Alice is sketchy (i.e. without hard proof) is meaningful.

[mannykannot]

You can phrase the same question thus: which set of traits is more likely to lead a person to stay true to prior form in a crisis?

[some_furry]

The trouble is, you can think you're dealing with a Bob, but you're actually dealing with an Alice, even after enduring multiple crises that didn't trigger their specific type of badness.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how-i-...

But as fun as this line of thinking is, my initial charitable post was only asking for a kind of "superficial" indistinguishability. As long as you don't think about it too hard, y'know?

[some_furry]

This sounds like a job for cryptography!

(No, it doesn't, actually.)