I just went to Wikipedia and found a more articulate version of what I’m trying to say:
Gardner-Medwin argues that the criterion on which a verdict in a criminal trial should be based is not the probability of guilt, but rather the probability of the evidence, given that the defendant is innocent (akin to a frequentist p-value). He argues that if the posterior probability of guilt is to be computed by Bayes’ theorem, the prior probability of guilt must be known. This will depend on the incidence of the crime, which is an unusual piece of evidence to consider in a criminal trial. Consider the following three propositions:
A: The known facts and testimony could have arisen if the defendant is guilty,
B: The known facts and testimony could have arisen if the defendant is innocent,
C: The defendant is guilty.
Gardner-Medwin argues that the jury should believe both A and not-B in order to convict. A and not-B implies the truth of C, but the reverse is not true. It is possible that B and C are both true, but in this case he argues that a jury should acquit, even though they know that they will be letting some guilty people go free. See also Lindley’s paradox.
I am not really a stats person and I’m not prepared to defend Garder-Medwin’s model as being correct—but right or wrong, it’s a better description than Bayesian inference of most people’s intuitive concept of the task of a juror.
In other words, when I imagine myself as a juror I’m automatically more concerned about a false positive (convicting an innocent person), and I will intuitively try to answer the question “has the prosecution proved its case” rather than “is this person guilty.”
If asked to answer the second question and quantify my odds of guilt, I’m likely to understate them, precisely because I can’t separate that estimate from the real-world effect of a guilty verdict.
Or in your terms, the “question of what probability corresponds to ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ [or whatever the equivalent standard in Italy]” can’t be completely excluded from the question when we imagine ourselves as jurors, only made implicit.
This reminds me slightly of Eliezer’s “true Prisoner’s Dilemma” article, which I really liked. Just as you can’t posit that someone is my confederate (in his case) and then ask me to consider them in a purely selfish, impartial way—you can’t tell me I’m a juror and then ask me to make a purely impartial assessment. I’m describing a much weaker effect than he was, and maybe it’s more socially conditioned than inherent to human nature, but I think the general concept is the same.
So …better to say “forget the fact that there’s even a trial going on, just imagine that tomorrow the absolute truth will be revealed and you have to bet on it now.”
I have a different objection to the premise: the presumption of innocence in modern legal systems means that the job of the jury (and by extension the legal teams) is not just to arrive at a probability of guilt but at a certain level of confidence around that probability.
I realize that these can technically be made equivalent by endless “priors”—i.e. a juror walks into the courtroom with a certain set of beliefs, ie probability .8 that someone on trial is guilty, .01 that a sex crime would have been committed by a female rather than a male, etc etc etc, and mentally revises them according to every input—but in any normal intuitive sense the job of a juror is not to answer the exact questions you’ve presented, but to judge the strength of the prosecution’s case from a skeptical viewpoint.
So when you conflate the process/outcome of the trial with an independent, rational probability estimate, I think you make it hard for anyone to give you an impartial answer. And this starts right in the title with “you be the juror”—but it extends all the way to minor points like the use of the term “guilty” which has both legal and colloquial meanings.