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You are presuming they were maliciously making up evidence. The story isn't super clear but it seems like the examiners were overstanting certainty and that the
by rhino369 11y ago
You are presuming they were maliciously making up evidence. The story isn't super clear but it seems like the examiners were overstanting certainty and that they were using dubious statistics.
People do that sort of thing all the time, not out of maillice , but out of ignorance or bias.
The article doesn't even talk about what the actual problems were. Was the forensics based on wrong assumptions or research later proven inaccurate.
There is a difference between being wrong in good faith, being wrong because of bias, and straight up lying.
Even the statistics in this article reek of bias. 95% of reports overstated the matches. By how much? Are we talking about 99.9% matches being called 100%. Or are we talking about 30% chance being called 100%. How many times was it substantially overstated?
The biggest problem is that there isn't really an academic field for most of forensics. Which is pretty odd.
- Zigurd 11y agoMalice hardly ever feels like malice to the malicious. If the results are deeply malicious, why try to excuse them?
- rhino369 11y agoResults aren't malicious. Malice is about intent. The reason you should care about the distinction is because many people think bad things only happen when people purposely act badly. But a lot of bad is done by people acting with good intentions or neutral intentions. This ironically leads people to falsely trusting systems to do the right thing. A bunch of well meaning FBI examiners can end up jailing innocent people if they are all using the same text book that got some facts wrong. Plus like I said, it's not even clear that innocent people were sent to jail because of this. At least it's not clear from the article, I haven't looked for the report that is mentioned.
- Zigurd 11y agoDo you think lie detector operators are "well meaning" or are they knowing frauds?