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The prisoner’s dilemma works for getting convictions at all, not necessarily fair and balanced ones. The state often needs defectors to prove their cases beyond

The prisoner’s dilemma works for getting convictions at all, not necessarily fair and balanced ones. The state often needs defectors to prove their cases beyond reasonable doubt, and I would take this over the alternatives of a stronger surveillance state or a relaxed “beyond reasonable doubt” standard.

bilbo0s 7y ago
The big issue with Prisoner's Dilemma is that people lie. Just as a for instance, consider: https://www.oxygen.com/martinis-murder/link-between-debra-carter-denice-haraway-murder-cases-terri-holland https://www.oxygen.com/martinis-murder/link-between-debra-ca... So all across the US, in a very real way, there are times that the state puts innocent people in prison in exchange for lies told by guilty people. Worse, the state then allows those guilty people back out onto the streets to commit more crimes. This causes no end of problems in society. From crime, to the complete and total nonexistence of trust between certain communities and law enforcement. (Think about it, they know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. So if you are letting a guilty bad guy send an innocent good guy to prison, they understandably intuit that there's likely an unflattering reason that you are doing that.) For all these reasons, and more actually, the practice should be stopped. Your post sets up a false dichotomy. You have essentially said, "We can't have a non-corrupt system. So we should have a system where the guilty are encouraged to lie and go free rather than a system where we have surveillance everywhere catching everyone all the time." Here's the thing though, we can have a less corrupt system. A system free of both of those practices. That's a perfectly reasonable alternative. We can have prosecutors either prove their cases with actual data based evidence rather than tainted anecdotes, or not. That's what the adversarial system intended.
- mattnewton 7y ago
  I was actually hoping to not frame it as an exhaustive listing of options - just the ones I had seen in practice working. I certainly hope there aren’t more working options; I just haven’t seen them tested.

bilbo0s 7y ago

The big issue with Prisoner's Dilemma is that people lie. Just as a for instance, consider: https://www.oxygen.com/martinis-murder/link-between-debra-carter-denice-haraway-murder-cases-terri-holland https://www.oxygen.com/martinis-murder/link-between-debra-ca... So all across the US, in a very real way, there are times that the state puts innocent people in prison in exchange for lies told by guilty people. Worse, the state then allows those guilty people back out onto the streets to commit more crimes. This causes no end of problems in society. From crime, to the complete and total nonexistence of trust between certain communities and law enforcement. (Think about it, they know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. So if you are letting a guilty bad guy send an innocent good guy to prison, they understandably intuit that there's likely an unflattering reason that you are doing that.) For all these reasons, and more actually, the practice should be stopped. Your post sets up a false dichotomy. You have essentially said, "We can't have a non-corrupt system. So we should have a system where the guilty are encouraged to lie and go free rather than a system where we have surveillance everywhere catching everyone all the time." Here's the thing though, we can have a less corrupt system. A system free of both of those practices. That's a perfectly reasonable alternative. We can have prosecutors either prove their cases with actual data based evidence rather than tainted anecdotes, or not. That's what the adversarial system intended.

mattnewton 7y ago
I was actually hoping to not frame it as an exhaustive listing of options - just the ones I had seen in practice working. I certainly hope there aren’t more working options; I just haven’t seen them tested.