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What I find totally amazing about this whole scandal is that they ignored one of the most obvious and overwhelming examples of Ockham's razor I've ever seen. O
by nextos 6y ago
What I find totally amazing about this whole scandal is that they ignored one of the most obvious and overwhelming examples of Ockham's razor I've ever seen.
On the one hand, you had the possibility of hundreds of sub-postmasters committing fraud in many different unrelated locations. There was zero evidence of them taking any money even after really deep scrutiny.
On the other hand, there was the possibility of software being buggy.
How could they happily conclude it was the first and not the second option is impossible to understand, and leaves me deeply worried about the UK legal system.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In order to support the existence of such a distributed fraud scheme, they should have brought convincing evidence. There was zero. Furthermore, they happily ignored an option that is several orders of magnitude more likely. Namely, that badly built software fails and management was deliberately hiding this to save their face.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago> you had the possibility of hundreds of sub-postmasters committing fraud in many different unrelated locations It is unfortunately fairly common. I have a friend who has been working for the USPS for over twenty years; way back when he got started, a co-worker was busted for pocketing cash from stamp sales. He was my roommate at the time, and was freaking out because she was trying to pin it on him, had to talk to the FBI, etc; the investigators figured out that she had been running the scam over 10+ years (something like $130k if I remember correctly (pocketing about 25 bucks a day, adds up!)). Retail scams just aren’t very unusual. But you are correct in that evidence is, like, kind of important in a trial…