4 ms·

>You could publish a dozen similar anecdotes every day for a decade. What's unusual about this one is that the girl was stupid enough to later admit she'd been

>You could publish a dozen similar anecdotes every day for a decade. What's unusual about this one is that the girl was stupid enough to later admit she'd been lying. So? Once again, they are anecdotes. I can similarly provide thousands of anecdotes showing presumption of innocence. It means nothing except that those cases happened. Do you have any proof "it is not a set of beliefs that people are willing to put into practice" on a systematic scale?

thaumasiotes 4y ago
>> You could publish a dozen similar anecdotes every day for a decade. > So? Once again, they are anecdotes. "Anecdote" doesn't just mean "something I'd prefer not to have to think about", you know. Being very common makes the event systematic. > Do you have any proof "it is not a set of beliefs that people are willing to put into practice" on a systematic scale? Yes, we've been talking about it for a while. > I can similarly provide thousands of anecdotes showing presumption of innocence. It means nothing except that those cases happened. That's... not how logic works. On the one hand, we have hundreds of thousands of cases of people being railroaded for crimes they didn't commit based on no solid evidence. On the other hand, we have tens of millions of cases of people being railroaded for crimes they did commit, also based on no solid evidence. But let's assume that second group consists only of convictions where the defendant's guilt was somehow actually proved. That wouldn't mean the system operates on the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty -- that claim is already falsified by the existence of the first group. It would mean that proof of guilt is often provided even though it isn't required.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > Being very common makes the event systematic. The thing is that when dealing with something on the scale of the justice system even a hundred examples don't mean it occurs more than a fraction of a percent of the time. When assessing anecdotes to try and determine event frequency you need to understand how the anecdotes were sampled.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

>> You could publish a dozen similar anecdotes every day for a decade. > So? Once again, they are anecdotes. "Anecdote" doesn't just mean "something I'd prefer not to have to think about", you know. Being very common makes the event systematic. > Do you have any proof "it is not a set of beliefs that people are willing to put into practice" on a systematic scale? Yes, we've been talking about it for a while. > I can similarly provide thousands of anecdotes showing presumption of innocence. It means nothing except that those cases happened. That's... not how logic works. On the one hand, we have hundreds of thousands of cases of people being railroaded for crimes they didn't commit based on no solid evidence. On the other hand, we have tens of millions of cases of people being railroaded for crimes they did commit, also based on no solid evidence. But let's assume that second group consists only of convictions where the defendant's guilt was somehow actually proved. That wouldn't mean the system operates on the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty -- that claim is already falsified by the existence of the first group. It would mean that proof of guilt is often provided even though it isn't required.

concordDance 4y ago
> Being very common makes the event systematic. The thing is that when dealing with something on the scale of the justice system even a hundred examples don't mean it occurs more than a fraction of a percent of the time. When assessing anecdotes to try and determine event frequency you need to understand how the anecdotes were sampled.