It seems the jury was basing their faith in the profiler on another famous crime drama, namely Sherlock Holmes. >The driver’s-side window of the victim’s car h

It seems the jury was basing their faith in the profiler on another famous crime drama, namely Sherlock Holmes. >The driver’s-side window of the victim’s car had been lowered several inches, suggesting to the profiler that the teen had rolled it down when someone who looked trustworthy approached. And her tube top was askew — a sign, the profiler said, of a botched sexual assault. In Sherlock Holmes stories, that is a fairly reasonable inference. Here, for example, is an exert from the story "The Hound of the Baskervilles": >The address, you observe is printed in rough characters. But the Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated. We may take it, therefore, that the letter was composed by an educated man who wished to pose as an uneducated one, and his effort to conceal his own writing suggests that that writing might be known, or come to be known, by you. The issue is in real life, this sort of inference is absolutely absurd. There are a dozen other possible explanations that fit the evidence, and to make such wild speculations gets you nowhere except chasing dead ends and accusing innocent men. It works in Holmes' stories because, and this is very important, they are fictitious. Doyle can have Sherlock spout any kind of insane gibberish, and still have him be right in the end. Though I can't fault lay persons for not understanding why this technique is faulty, both because pop culture treats it as valid and because it's a classic instance of sampling bias: Say 100 profilers failed spectacularly, and 10 succeed and produce perfect profiles. The 100 failures aren't interesting or worth talking about, some stranger not being correct one time is not a good story. The 10 successes get talked about endlessly at conferences, at the local bar, when people give advice to each other. Old veteran cops 20 years later still talk about that one time a profiler solved a cold case in a snap. So, over years, a mythology is built up and the objective abysmal quality of profiling is hidden by the fact everyone everywhere has heard of the 10 successes while the 100 failures are lost to the dustbin of history. Rather, appropriately, like Doyle's own real life attempts to play detective - the dozens of times he was humiliated are (mostly) forgotten, while the handful of successes are the stuff of (nerdy) legend.