The explanation of the current system, and how to view it in a rationalist manner was really interesting.
The problem as you state it seems to be that the court (and people in general) have a tendency to evaluate each link in a chain separately. For instance, if there was one link with an 80% chance of being valid, both a court and a bayesian would say “ok, lets accept it provisionally for now”, but if there’s three or four links, a court might say “each individual link seems ok, so the whole chain is ok” but a Bayesian would say “taken together that’s only about 50%, that’s nowhere near good enough.”
It seems likely this is a systematic problem in the legal system—I can imagine many situations where one side just about persuades the jury or judge of a long chain of things, but the null hypothesis of “it’s just coincidence” isn’t given sufficient consideration. However, all the examples you give show the bar to introducing it is already very high, so do you have a good reason to think introducing a hard limit would do more good than harm?
It would be incredible if there could be a general principle in court that chaining together evidence had to include some sort of warning from the judge about how it could be unrealiable and when it was too unreliable to admit (although I agree putting specific probabilities on things is probably never going to happen). It would be good if such a principle could be applied to some specific genre of evidence that was currently a real problem, in order to illustrate the general principle. Hearsay is conceptually appropriate, however, would it really help? And if not, what case does exhibit systematic miscarriages of justice?
I suspect the low hanging fruit in improving the legal system is related to evaluating witness credibility and eyewitness accuracy. Judges talk all the time about how the factfinder was present when a witness testified and was in a unique position to evaluate the credibility of a witness’ testimony. But the evidence is pretty strong that people are terrible at those kinds of judgments and don’t realize how bad they are at them.
The explanation of the current system, and how to view it in a rationalist manner was really interesting.
The problem as you state it seems to be that the court (and people in general) have a tendency to evaluate each link in a chain separately. For instance, if there was one link with an 80% chance of being valid, both a court and a bayesian would say “ok, lets accept it provisionally for now”, but if there’s three or four links, a court might say “each individual link seems ok, so the whole chain is ok” but a Bayesian would say “taken together that’s only about 50%, that’s nowhere near good enough.”
It seems likely this is a systematic problem in the legal system—I can imagine many situations where one side just about persuades the jury or judge of a long chain of things, but the null hypothesis of “it’s just coincidence” isn’t given sufficient consideration. However, all the examples you give show the bar to introducing it is already very high, so do you have a good reason to think introducing a hard limit would do more good than harm?
It would be incredible if there could be a general principle in court that chaining together evidence had to include some sort of warning from the judge about how it could be unrealiable and when it was too unreliable to admit (although I agree putting specific probabilities on things is probably never going to happen). It would be good if such a principle could be applied to some specific genre of evidence that was currently a real problem, in order to illustrate the general principle. Hearsay is conceptually appropriate, however, would it really help? And if not, what case does exhibit systematic miscarriages of justice?
I suspect the low hanging fruit in improving the legal system is related to evaluating witness credibility and eyewitness accuracy. Judges talk all the time about how the factfinder was present when a witness testified and was in a unique position to evaluate the credibility of a witness’ testimony. But the evidence is pretty strong that people are terrible at those kinds of judgments and don’t realize how bad they are at them.