Great analysis. I am a little bit worried about adopting the idea of Bayesian logic in the criminal justice system, though, since it seems like it will just give people an incentive to commit a priori improbable crimes!
This amounts to saying that we should crank up the innocent/guilty conviction ratio for things that are improbable, which doesn’t make much sense. The only way we’d catch more low a priori criminals is by lowering our standards of evidence, which necessarily means convicting more innocents.
That’s no more helpful than saying “I’m worried that there’s going to be an incentive not to get caught because we only punish the criminals we think are guilty”. We still can’t punish someone we don’t think is guilty- but as an aside, it does mean we should punish effort spent on not getting caught.
Great analysis. I am a little bit worried about adopting the idea of Bayesian logic in the criminal justice system, though, since it seems like it will just give people an incentive to commit a priori improbable crimes!
This amounts to saying that we should crank up the innocent/guilty conviction ratio for things that are improbable, which doesn’t make much sense. The only way we’d catch more low a priori criminals is by lowering our standards of evidence, which necessarily means convicting more innocents.
That’s no more helpful than saying “I’m worried that there’s going to be an incentive not to get caught because we only punish the criminals we think are guilty”. We still can’t punish someone we don’t think is guilty- but as an aside, it does mean we should punish effort spent on not getting caught.
We could also catch more low a priori criminals by improving our methods of dealing with the evidence, like using Bayesian logic.