I have a friend who works in legal administration. A couple of months ago he asked me to explain Bayesian statistics. I made a little internal “woop!” noise, since I’d been waiting for years for someone to ask that question.
His reason for asking was because he’d been working on disclosure correspondence between prosecution and defence, and some of it basically said “here’s a Bayesian analysis of this particular bit of evidence, which I’m including for completeness, but it’s going to be removed from the documentation before being handed to the court, c.f. precedent case”.
His take on the practise was that it amounted to a Mexican stand-off with statistics, whereby if one side brought in an authority on statistics, the other side would follow suit, and it would become incomprehensible to the jury and make the whole trial intractable.
Given the number of intelligent, numerate people I know who nonetheless fail to get statistics, I have at least some sympathy with the notion of not trying to sell a case to a jury on a Bayesian ticket.
It is not uncommon for one side in a legal dispute to have no objective other than to stall for time. It would seem in that case they should just go ahead and “go nuclear”.
I have a friend who works in legal administration. A couple of months ago he asked me to explain Bayesian statistics. I made a little internal “woop!” noise, since I’d been waiting for years for someone to ask that question.
His reason for asking was because he’d been working on disclosure correspondence between prosecution and defence, and some of it basically said “here’s a Bayesian analysis of this particular bit of evidence, which I’m including for completeness, but it’s going to be removed from the documentation before being handed to the court, c.f. precedent case”.
His take on the practise was that it amounted to a Mexican stand-off with statistics, whereby if one side brought in an authority on statistics, the other side would follow suit, and it would become incomprehensible to the jury and make the whole trial intractable.
Given the number of intelligent, numerate people I know who nonetheless fail to get statistics, I have at least some sympathy with the notion of not trying to sell a case to a jury on a Bayesian ticket.
It is not uncommon for one side in a legal dispute to have no objective other than to stall for time. It would seem in that case they should just go ahead and “go nuclear”.