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Not every piece of evidence (in the Bayesian sense) is admissible in every court though, polygraphs being an obvious example. That is why courts get all pissy
by woodman 10y ago
Not every piece of evidence (in the Bayesian sense) is admissible in every court though, polygraphs being an obvious example. That is why courts get all pissy when jurors go off the reservation and start doing their own research. I'd be a little surprised if the judge in this case enthusiastically endorsed this sort of analysis going on in jury deliberation, but given your background - I'm interested to hear if I'm mistaken.
- rayiner 10y agoEvidence can be excluded if it's not relevant (in the Bayesian sense), or unreliable. You might have some argument that the phone records don't make the conclusion sufficiently more likely to warrant admitting it. But the bar for relevance is not high. Moreover, this is kind of what juries do best: inferring what people did from other things they did or didn't do. While juries are subject to a lot of biases, I think humans have a good statistical model of the behaviors of other humans.
- woodman 10y agoI guess I've been mistaken in my understanding of the whole process. I was under the impression that all the controls are in place specifically to restrict the juror's natural inclination to infer, because humans really suck at logical inference (and not just because of bias). I'd always assumed that an an innovation in natural language processing and combination with formal logic would be welcome in the court room, but it doesn't sound like that would be the case if empiricism is preferred to rationality.
- SilasX 10y agoThis is just not true -- there are tons of highly informative, relevant kinds of Bayesian evidence that are excluded. For example, remaining silent, illegally-obtained evidence, hearsay, opinion of experts (in many cases).