I am worried that in environments that it is important to take ques to act it is often also important not to take the wrong cues to act. In the spirit of equal and opposite advice I propose The Law of Escalating Indiscrimination: The more important a topic is the less people are willing to tolerate ambiguity. The only way to make sure your problem goes away is to nuke it from orbit. With sufficient will to make things go away there is less conditioning to external circumstances. It doesn’t matter to determine whether the problem is big or small if you want to be super sure it is fully away you are still going to nuke it either way. Only if lesser options such as “kill it with fire” or “detain it” would sometimes be selected is there a need to resolve whether we are in world A or B. “Shot first, ask questions later” is not stricly superior to the other way around.
I would imagine that headlines that focus on the level of proof would read like “Rumored serial killer still not caught readhanded” or “Witchhunt still bears no fruit”. There are different thesholds for people on what it enough to act on and it is never going to be 100% certainty nor 100% arbitrariness. Even in a trial “guilty” and “not guilty” is mostly how we are going to handle the situation. “not guilty” by sowing resonable doubt is still a “did not happen” outcome. In pleading there is a special plea of no contest, Nolo contendre, “I didn’t do it but you can prove that I did” when we want to tease out the question of whether events happened according to accused or not. I guess a plea of “I did it, but you can’t prove it” is not a thing because self-admission would be sufficient to go the usual guilty route. However prosecutors have the power of dropping the prosecution to do a nolle prosequi “they might have done it but we can’t prove they did”. Usually we assume and the system strivers for prosecutors to be more pushy than the court overall would be, ie it should next to 0 rare that a case that would have resulted in a conviction if it went into court did not do so because the prosecution was not pushed (so the prosecutional discretion is more supposed to be about hopeless vs hopeful prosecutions).
As a random aside: In Scotland court cases can have 3 possible outcomes, “Guilty”, “Not Guilty” and “Not Proven”. Where the last one (as I understand it) basically translates to “The jury are confident that you are guilty, but reluctantly admit that their isn’t enough legally admissible evidence to get a fair conviction.” I think that, legally “Not proven” is equivalent to “Not guilty”. Although while “Not guilty” should (ideally) undo any reputational damage from the accusation, “Not proven” will not.
I am worried that in environments that it is important to take ques to act it is often also important not to take the wrong cues to act. In the spirit of equal and opposite advice I propose The Law of Escalating Indiscrimination: The more important a topic is the less people are willing to tolerate ambiguity. The only way to make sure your problem goes away is to nuke it from orbit. With sufficient will to make things go away there is less conditioning to external circumstances. It doesn’t matter to determine whether the problem is big or small if you want to be super sure it is fully away you are still going to nuke it either way. Only if lesser options such as “kill it with fire” or “detain it” would sometimes be selected is there a need to resolve whether we are in world A or B. “Shot first, ask questions later” is not stricly superior to the other way around.
I would imagine that headlines that focus on the level of proof would read like “Rumored serial killer still not caught readhanded” or “Witchhunt still bears no fruit”. There are different thesholds for people on what it enough to act on and it is never going to be 100% certainty nor 100% arbitrariness. Even in a trial “guilty” and “not guilty” is mostly how we are going to handle the situation. “not guilty” by sowing resonable doubt is still a “did not happen” outcome. In pleading there is a special plea of no contest, Nolo contendre, “I didn’t do it but you can prove that I did” when we want to tease out the question of whether events happened according to accused or not. I guess a plea of “I did it, but you can’t prove it” is not a thing because self-admission would be sufficient to go the usual guilty route. However prosecutors have the power of dropping the prosecution to do a nolle prosequi “they might have done it but we can’t prove they did”. Usually we assume and the system strivers for prosecutors to be more pushy than the court overall would be, ie it should next to 0 rare that a case that would have resulted in a conviction if it went into court did not do so because the prosecution was not pushed (so the prosecutional discretion is more supposed to be about hopeless vs hopeful prosecutions).
As a random aside: In Scotland court cases can have 3 possible outcomes, “Guilty”, “Not Guilty” and “Not Proven”. Where the last one (as I understand it) basically translates to “The jury are confident that you are guilty, but reluctantly admit that their isn’t enough legally admissible evidence to get a fair conviction.” I think that, legally “Not proven” is equivalent to “Not guilty”. Although while “Not guilty” should (ideally) undo any reputational damage from the accusation, “Not proven” will not.