6 ms·

>“We’re suppose to take some ‘hacking company’’s word for it that they’re doing everything forensically correctly, and the prosecution expects us to just trust

>“We’re suppose to take some ‘hacking company’’s word for it that they’re doing everything forensically correctly, and the prosecution expects us to just trust them?” You'd be surprised. The courts are not scientific debate arenas. Burn forensics? Pseudoscience. Bite mark forensics? Pseudoscience. Lots of DNA-based forensics? Totally unreliable. Firearms ballistics forensics? Laughable pseudoscience. Polygraph tests? Laughable pseudoscience. Field sobriety tests / "drug recognition expert" certifications? Lol, lmao even. All of this nonsense has been successfully used to convict people in court. Turns out, putting someone with PhD after their name or a white lab coat or a phony certification on the stand tends to work for prosecutors.

sgarland 3y ago
How is ballistics forensics unreliable? Genuinely curious, I’ve never heard that.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  Some of it (e.g. what bullet type) is real, but angles and distances are largely impossible to reliably.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- foooorsyth 3y ago
  It’s pretty much just complete non-replicable BS. The claim is that the rifling on gun barrels differs from gun to gun, and that they can examine grooves made in the bullets by the rifling and compare them to other rounds shot through the same barrel and find a match. It doesn’t stand up to independent scrutiny, and I would imagine that with modern machining the gun to gun differences in rifling on the same mass produced guns are minimal. Perhaps there are differences in fowling in well-used guns, but the notion that they’re gonna match a flattened bullet to a specific barrel is ridiculous. Basically a few kooks across the country wear white coats and claim that they can do this “science” and prosecutions pay them to be expert witnesses. Juries eat it up. It’s really nuts. The only legitimate analysis they’re doing is ammo brand matching. “Hey, there was a Sellier & Bellot 380 Auto casing at the murder scene. The suspect had S&B 380 in his gun safe. We got him.”
  - Modified3019 3y ago
    This reminds me of another bit of psudeo-science bullshit, claims that bullet wounds can be matched to close bullet size, like saying someone was hit by a 9mm vs .45 cal vs .40 cal if there is no bullet to recover.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    You should see the games they play with statistics. Find some 1 in 1000 match. Find another 1 in 1000 match. Claim they're independent, so the chances of both of these are 1 in a million. What they don't say is that there are 5000 things you can test that each have a 1 in 1000 chance, so you should expect to find ~5 at random if you test them all. The 1 in a million chance is if you choose 2 of the 5000 at random, test only those and they both match; not if you systematically run tests that only notify you when they find one of the matches.
- trowawee 3y ago
  Radley Balko has a great overview on the fundamental flaws with ballistics forensics[1]. The tl;dr is that the core claim of ballistics forensic analysis, that it is possible to reliably differentiate between two models of the same gun using just casings and shells fired from those guns, has never been proven to be valid. [1]: https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-case-against https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-...
  - klabb3 3y ago
    Great read, had no idea it was so incredibly bad! Definitely like pseudo-science, with extremely poor reproducibility. And a lot of dishonest massaging of words to make it seem much more certain than it is, benefiting the prosecution only. Imagine being innocent and having an “expert” take the stand and say it’s a “practical impossibility” that the bullet was fired from any other gun. The analogy with the tarot cards seems appropriate. Seems like markings can be exculpatory at best, for instance that casings or bullets clearly don’t match, but that the “unique markings” of an individual barrel is complete BS, especially with precision mass production of modern firearms. But in practice, it seems to rarely exonerate suspects, even if the evidence exists.
- zer8k 3y ago
  There's really no way to relate rifling/etc to a specific gun. Unless it was forged in some bespoke process that can also be accessed and replicated the rifling pattern will look like 100,000 different guns. Other analysis is also bunk (blood spatter, gunpowder stuff, etc). Ammo matching can provide circumstantial evidence but is likely defeated by just shutting your mouth. Most criminals subject to this are probably caught because they loaded the magazine without gloves and left a fingerprint on the casing that gets completely etched into it on firing. Or, you know, police do actual police work and pressure the right people into narc'ing on the suspect.
alsetmusic 3y ago
Polygraph is inadmissible in court. It’s used for interrogation as a prop.
- foooorsyth 3y ago
  The US Federal government still uses polygraph in the security clearance process today. In 2013, they indicted several people for teaching others how to beat the test. Here’s the DOJ press release (prepare to lose brain cells): https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/owner-polygraph-indicted-allegedly-training-customers-lir-during-federally-administered https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/owner-polygraph-indicted-alle... Clearly our government and legal system think highly enough of the technique to include it in interview processes. The NSA even has an entire production video rebuking the criticisms of polygraph. It’s not just a tool (in the eyes of the government) used to trick dumb criminals into spilling the beans.
  - zer8k 3y ago
    Not a justification and only pure speculation but what if there's another reason? You can't think that the NSA and CIA are stupid. They know its bunk science that has been disproven 1,000 times over. But the psychological effects of being on the machine are very, very measurable. Perhaps its being used as a tool to evaluate a person in other ways. For example, you're generally not arrested for admitting to crimes like smoking weed or stealing candy bars from a gas station. But admitting to crimes, or morality divergence (such as adultery), can mean with enough effort a smart intelligence organization could manipulate you.
    - foooorsyth 3y ago
      > You can't think that the NSA and CIA are stupid Au contraire
      - ch4s3 3y ago
        You’d be surprised what you can’t get a man of Yale to believe when honor is on the line.
scarface_74 3y ago
Don’t forget that eyewitness testimony is also pseudoscience- especially cross race identification
- culi 3y ago
  Hell why not add juries themselves to the list? A widely cited 2011 study[^0] found that the probability of a jury granting parole was around 65% at the start of a session but dropped to nearly 0% right before lunch. After having lunch the probability again jumps to ~65% What kind of justice system do we have where whether or not people have had lunch is the biggest factor in outcomes? [^0]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1018033108 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    And yet I bet that study would fail to reproduce so it to is pseudoscience!
    - culi 3y ago
      Haha that would be fitting, but it's an observational study not an experiment
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    1. The study you link is the famous one about judges. It doesn't mention juries, nor are juries involved in the study. 2. Whether or not people have had lunch is not the biggest factor in outcomes. The most important thing you can read about this study is Daniel Lakens' commentary: > I appreciate that people have tried to think about which mechanism could cause this effect, and if you are interested, highly recommend reading the commentaries (and perhaps even the response by the authors). > But I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism. As psychologists, we shouldn’t teach or cite this finding, nor use it in policy decisions as an example of psychological bias in decision making. > If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal. If a psychological effect is this big, we don’t need to discover it and publish it in a scientific journal - you would already know it exists. > I think it is telling that most psychologists don’t seem to be able to recognize data patterns that are too large to be caused by psychological mechanisms. There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is. ( https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-... ) If you do read the other commentary, it is clear that the reason the rate drops to zero before breaks is that cases are scheduled with an eye toward not running into the break. The 0% grant rate causes the just-before-the-break timing, not the other way around.
_gabe_ 3y ago
While I appreciate a fair dose of skepticism, why should I trust your claims that these are all pseudoscience as opposed to the people that claim to be experts in those fields? How are you sure that your understanding isn’t simply a dunning Kruger effect and you truly do have knowledge that debunks all these fields? Once again, I’m skeptical of many supposed sciences as well, but I’m just as skeptical of internet commenters that claim entire fields of expertise and science are all pseudoscience and made up.
- alluro2 3y ago
  It should not be about who is presenting the argument, but the weight of the argument itself. For example, for balistics: the debate falls onto whether each individual weapon's barrel would leave a uniquely matching trace that can be analyzed from the fired casing. The argument against this method is that machining precision today is so high that there will be no huge differences between each 2 barrels, that make any match valid as unique and as evidence. For all the other claims (e.g. polygraph), you can easily search for more information online. The point is that authority or lack there of should not be a part of your evaluation of the claims, on either side.
  - _gabe_ 3y ago
    I can just as easily make the counter claims to all the proposed areas of pseudoscience and then make the same argument you just did: “it’s not about the authority of the person making the argument, it’s about the weight of the argument itself”. And then I can tell you how you can just look up the counterclaims and find supporting evidence (which you probably can). Just because you can find supporting evidence for your view doesn’t mean it’s right, and I like to know all sides of the story before I make a decision. The point I’m making is I’m definitely not qualified to analyze all these claims that you’re making in support of these being pseudoscience. Sure your claims sound reasonable, but people also thought the earth being the center of the universe sounded reasonable. The thing I like about hacker news is people usually don’t just make unsubstantiated claims, and when they do they usually get gut checked by opposing views, which is a good thing. And OP didn’t really make any claims, they just listed a bunch of fields and said they were all pseudoscience. I appreciate the fact that you’re at least giving an explanation as to why it’s not considered science.
juanani 3y ago
[dead]
AmVess 3y ago
You are right on the money. Many of the tools law enforcement uses are straight up hocus pocus, and they lack the training or ability to question their methods. New York's main crime lab completely blew DNA testing, and thus rendered all of their results worthless. This went on for many years. Instead of rectifying their mistakes, they swept it under the rug and forgot about it. To this day, thousands of people are in jail based upon wildly incorrect "science". It is rather unsettling to know that nearly everything the criminal justice system uses is no better than voodoo, and you are not far away from getting thrown behind bars for little more than the whimsy of people who are empowered to do so.
- saghm 3y ago
  > Many of the tools law enforcement uses are straight up hocus pocus, and they lack the training or ability to question their methods. I suspect that the real issue is the lack of incentive; it doesn't matter whether they know (or are capable of figuring out) that their science is bunk if there's no consequences for the status quo to continue.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > Instead of rectifying their mistakes, they swept it under the rug and forgot about it. Yeah, that should be a crime. Their fraud led to false imprisonment
- buran77 3y ago
  The pseudoscience of those forensics is powerful because if has a lot of technobabble that makes it sound well supported by evidence, and because it can pass as a science to the jury and even judges. The crime series that people eat up rely on dishing that technobabble step by step so the average person feels like they're being educated in detail about something that can apparently be replicated by anyone because "it's science". Science is for everyone and people can peer behind the curtain to see how the sausage is made. But Cellebrite is unambiguously a private, for profit enterprise. They haven't established themselves as a "science" like authority in the average person's eyes, they actively avoid explaining the processes. They're just a company paid by a customer to deliver what the customer wants. So in the average person's eyes the difference should be obvious: this isn't science, it's not for everyone (just for the Police), and the people are not allowed to peer behind the curtain. And like authorities like to say "honest people don't need to hide things". So as far as jury trials go there may still be a fighting chance.
duped 3y ago
"Forensics" is pseudo science. Little, if any of the "science" is peer reviewed. And what is is not convincing to anyone who has an undergraduate experience in a chemistry, biology, or physics classroom and lab. Circumstantial evidence is a lot more convincing than physical evidence, but the TV shows convince us otherwise. There's really no incentive for forensic science to be a science at all, at the end of the day. You're either working for cops, and paid for evidence to convict their suspect, or working for the defense, and paid to convince us the cops are wrong. There's no one paid to tell us what reality we're in.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  Peer-reviewed science have less than a hundred years of history. Even today, Large scale experimental science seldom get review from outside their lab. (Because the lab literally hire every expert in that sub-field) Calling something "not science" because it is not peer reviewed is just ignorant
  - FridayoLeary 3y ago
    The entire edifice of modern science is based on the bedrock of every result being reproducible. In fact it is supposedly the only way any discovery becomes acceptable. The fact that it's no longer considered necessary says more about the state of the industry then it does about the reliability of the scientists.
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    This misses the point. Peer review is just one of many processes that can be used to ensure that good science is more likely to have happened through intentional external analysis and critique. And the idea here is that forensics is not based on good science to begin with, not that lack of peer review is what makes it not good science, but that peer review might have been able to catch the falseness before it entered mainstream judicial use.
- CryptoBanker 3y ago
  Peer reviewed studies have a roughly 50% replication rate… that’s not ver good either
riedel 3y ago
It is IMHO a very bad adverse effect of a good thing after all: a world where people decide is probably a better one than one where only science and technology decides (I guess there are enough dystopian novels about this one). The judicial system represents society: I do not think the believe in pseudoscience is any worse or better . Still there is certainly problems relating to the fact that people without money cannot easily produce counterargument and let "real" scientists present counterhypotheses. Further there are incentives to sell products to law enforcement that produce simple truth (I would by a product from a critical scientist). Also I think it is human rights problem, if states do not have to fully compensate the damages produced by applying known faulty technology as many other actors would have to.
the-dude 3y ago
You forgot about the dogs.

sgarland 3y ago

How is ballistics forensics unreliable? Genuinely curious, I’ve never heard that.

adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
Some of it (e.g. what bullet type) is real, but angles and distances are largely impossible to reliably.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
foooorsyth 3y ago
It’s pretty much just complete non-replicable BS. The claim is that the rifling on gun barrels differs from gun to gun, and that they can examine grooves made in the bullets by the rifling and compare them to other rounds shot through the same barrel and find a match. It doesn’t stand up to independent scrutiny, and I would imagine that with modern machining the gun to gun differences in rifling on the same mass produced guns are minimal. Perhaps there are differences in fowling in well-used guns, but the notion that they’re gonna match a flattened bullet to a specific barrel is ridiculous. Basically a few kooks across the country wear white coats and claim that they can do this “science” and prosecutions pay them to be expert witnesses. Juries eat it up. It’s really nuts. The only legitimate analysis they’re doing is ammo brand matching. “Hey, there was a Sellier & Bellot 380 Auto casing at the murder scene. The suspect had S&B 380 in his gun safe. We got him.”
- Modified3019 3y ago
  This reminds me of another bit of psudeo-science bullshit, claims that bullet wounds can be matched to close bullet size, like saying someone was hit by a 9mm vs .45 cal vs .40 cal if there is no bullet to recover.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  You should see the games they play with statistics. Find some 1 in 1000 match. Find another 1 in 1000 match. Claim they're independent, so the chances of both of these are 1 in a million. What they don't say is that there are 5000 things you can test that each have a 1 in 1000 chance, so you should expect to find ~5 at random if you test them all. The 1 in a million chance is if you choose 2 of the 5000 at random, test only those and they both match; not if you systematically run tests that only notify you when they find one of the matches.
trowawee 3y ago
Radley Balko has a great overview on the fundamental flaws with ballistics forensics[1]. The tl;dr is that the core claim of ballistics forensic analysis, that it is possible to reliably differentiate between two models of the same gun using just casings and shells fired from those guns, has never been proven to be valid. [1]: https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-case-against https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-...
- klabb3 3y ago
  Great read, had no idea it was so incredibly bad! Definitely like pseudo-science, with extremely poor reproducibility. And a lot of dishonest massaging of words to make it seem much more certain than it is, benefiting the prosecution only. Imagine being innocent and having an “expert” take the stand and say it’s a “practical impossibility” that the bullet was fired from any other gun. The analogy with the tarot cards seems appropriate. Seems like markings can be exculpatory at best, for instance that casings or bullets clearly don’t match, but that the “unique markings” of an individual barrel is complete BS, especially with precision mass production of modern firearms. But in practice, it seems to rarely exonerate suspects, even if the evidence exists.
zer8k 3y ago
There's really no way to relate rifling/etc to a specific gun. Unless it was forged in some bespoke process that can also be accessed and replicated the rifling pattern will look like 100,000 different guns. Other analysis is also bunk (blood spatter, gunpowder stuff, etc). Ammo matching can provide circumstantial evidence but is likely defeated by just shutting your mouth. Most criminals subject to this are probably caught because they loaded the magazine without gloves and left a fingerprint on the casing that gets completely etched into it on firing. Or, you know, police do actual police work and pressure the right people into narc'ing on the suspect.

alsetmusic 3y ago

Polygraph is inadmissible in court. It’s used for interrogation as a prop.

foooorsyth 3y ago
The US Federal government still uses polygraph in the security clearance process today. In 2013, they indicted several people for teaching others how to beat the test. Here’s the DOJ press release (prepare to lose brain cells): https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/owner-polygraph-indicted-allegedly-training-customers-lir-during-federally-administered https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/owner-polygraph-indicted-alle... Clearly our government and legal system think highly enough of the technique to include it in interview processes. The NSA even has an entire production video rebuking the criticisms of polygraph. It’s not just a tool (in the eyes of the government) used to trick dumb criminals into spilling the beans.
- zer8k 3y ago
  Not a justification and only pure speculation but what if there's another reason? You can't think that the NSA and CIA are stupid. They know its bunk science that has been disproven 1,000 times over. But the psychological effects of being on the machine are very, very measurable. Perhaps its being used as a tool to evaluate a person in other ways. For example, you're generally not arrested for admitting to crimes like smoking weed or stealing candy bars from a gas station. But admitting to crimes, or morality divergence (such as adultery), can mean with enough effort a smart intelligence organization could manipulate you.
  - foooorsyth 3y ago
    > You can't think that the NSA and CIA are stupid Au contraire
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      You’d be surprised what you can’t get a man of Yale to believe when honor is on the line.

scarface_74 3y ago

Don’t forget that eyewitness testimony is also pseudoscience- especially cross race identification

culi 3y ago
Hell why not add juries themselves to the list? A widely cited 2011 study[^0] found that the probability of a jury granting parole was around 65% at the start of a session but dropped to nearly 0% right before lunch. After having lunch the probability again jumps to ~65% What kind of justice system do we have where whether or not people have had lunch is the biggest factor in outcomes? [^0]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1018033108 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
- forrestthewoods 3y ago
  And yet I bet that study would fail to reproduce so it to is pseudoscience!
  - culi 3y ago
    Haha that would be fitting, but it's an observational study not an experiment
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  1. The study you link is the famous one about judges. It doesn't mention juries, nor are juries involved in the study. 2. Whether or not people have had lunch is not the biggest factor in outcomes. The most important thing you can read about this study is Daniel Lakens' commentary: > I appreciate that people have tried to think about which mechanism could cause this effect, and if you are interested, highly recommend reading the commentaries (and perhaps even the response by the authors). > But I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism. As psychologists, we shouldn’t teach or cite this finding, nor use it in policy decisions as an example of psychological bias in decision making. > If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal. If a psychological effect is this big, we don’t need to discover it and publish it in a scientific journal - you would already know it exists. > I think it is telling that most psychologists don’t seem to be able to recognize data patterns that are too large to be caused by psychological mechanisms. There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is. ( https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-... ) If you do read the other commentary, it is clear that the reason the rate drops to zero before breaks is that cases are scheduled with an eye toward not running into the break. The 0% grant rate causes the just-before-the-break timing, not the other way around.

_gabe_ 3y ago

While I appreciate a fair dose of skepticism, why should I trust your claims that these are all pseudoscience as opposed to the people that claim to be experts in those fields? How are you sure that your understanding isn’t simply a dunning Kruger effect and you truly do have knowledge that debunks all these fields? Once again, I’m skeptical of many supposed sciences as well, but I’m just as skeptical of internet commenters that claim entire fields of expertise and science are all pseudoscience and made up.

alluro2 3y ago
It should not be about who is presenting the argument, but the weight of the argument itself. For example, for balistics: the debate falls onto whether each individual weapon's barrel would leave a uniquely matching trace that can be analyzed from the fired casing. The argument against this method is that machining precision today is so high that there will be no huge differences between each 2 barrels, that make any match valid as unique and as evidence. For all the other claims (e.g. polygraph), you can easily search for more information online. The point is that authority or lack there of should not be a part of your evaluation of the claims, on either side.
- _gabe_ 3y ago
  I can just as easily make the counter claims to all the proposed areas of pseudoscience and then make the same argument you just did: “it’s not about the authority of the person making the argument, it’s about the weight of the argument itself”. And then I can tell you how you can just look up the counterclaims and find supporting evidence (which you probably can). Just because you can find supporting evidence for your view doesn’t mean it’s right, and I like to know all sides of the story before I make a decision. The point I’m making is I’m definitely not qualified to analyze all these claims that you’re making in support of these being pseudoscience. Sure your claims sound reasonable, but people also thought the earth being the center of the universe sounded reasonable. The thing I like about hacker news is people usually don’t just make unsubstantiated claims, and when they do they usually get gut checked by opposing views, which is a good thing. And OP didn’t really make any claims, they just listed a bunch of fields and said they were all pseudoscience. I appreciate the fact that you’re at least giving an explanation as to why it’s not considered science.

juanani 3y ago

[dead]

AmVess 3y ago

You are right on the money. Many of the tools law enforcement uses are straight up hocus pocus, and they lack the training or ability to question their methods. New York's main crime lab completely blew DNA testing, and thus rendered all of their results worthless. This went on for many years. Instead of rectifying their mistakes, they swept it under the rug and forgot about it. To this day, thousands of people are in jail based upon wildly incorrect "science". It is rather unsettling to know that nearly everything the criminal justice system uses is no better than voodoo, and you are not far away from getting thrown behind bars for little more than the whimsy of people who are empowered to do so.

saghm 3y ago
> Many of the tools law enforcement uses are straight up hocus pocus, and they lack the training or ability to question their methods. I suspect that the real issue is the lack of incentive; it doesn't matter whether they know (or are capable of figuring out) that their science is bunk if there's no consequences for the status quo to continue.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> Instead of rectifying their mistakes, they swept it under the rug and forgot about it. Yeah, that should be a crime. Their fraud led to false imprisonment
buran77 3y ago
The pseudoscience of those forensics is powerful because if has a lot of technobabble that makes it sound well supported by evidence, and because it can pass as a science to the jury and even judges. The crime series that people eat up rely on dishing that technobabble step by step so the average person feels like they're being educated in detail about something that can apparently be replicated by anyone because "it's science". Science is for everyone and people can peer behind the curtain to see how the sausage is made. But Cellebrite is unambiguously a private, for profit enterprise. They haven't established themselves as a "science" like authority in the average person's eyes, they actively avoid explaining the processes. They're just a company paid by a customer to deliver what the customer wants. So in the average person's eyes the difference should be obvious: this isn't science, it's not for everyone (just for the Police), and the people are not allowed to peer behind the curtain. And like authorities like to say "honest people don't need to hide things". So as far as jury trials go there may still be a fighting chance.

duped 3y ago

"Forensics" is pseudo science. Little, if any of the "science" is peer reviewed. And what is is not convincing to anyone who has an undergraduate experience in a chemistry, biology, or physics classroom and lab. Circumstantial evidence is a lot more convincing than physical evidence, but the TV shows convince us otherwise. There's really no incentive for forensic science to be a science at all, at the end of the day. You're either working for cops, and paid for evidence to convict their suspect, or working for the defense, and paid to convince us the cops are wrong. There's no one paid to tell us what reality we're in.

j16sdiz 3y ago
Peer-reviewed science have less than a hundred years of history. Even today, Large scale experimental science seldom get review from outside their lab. (Because the lab literally hire every expert in that sub-field) Calling something "not science" because it is not peer reviewed is just ignorant
- FridayoLeary 3y ago
  The entire edifice of modern science is based on the bedrock of every result being reproducible. In fact it is supposedly the only way any discovery becomes acceptable. The fact that it's no longer considered necessary says more about the state of the industry then it does about the reliability of the scientists.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  This misses the point. Peer review is just one of many processes that can be used to ensure that good science is more likely to have happened through intentional external analysis and critique. And the idea here is that forensics is not based on good science to begin with, not that lack of peer review is what makes it not good science, but that peer review might have been able to catch the falseness before it entered mainstream judicial use.
CryptoBanker 3y ago
Peer reviewed studies have a roughly 50% replication rate… that’s not ver good either

riedel 3y ago

It is IMHO a very bad adverse effect of a good thing after all: a world where people decide is probably a better one than one where only science and technology decides (I guess there are enough dystopian novels about this one). The judicial system represents society: I do not think the believe in pseudoscience is any worse or better . Still there is certainly problems relating to the fact that people without money cannot easily produce counterargument and let "real" scientists present counterhypotheses. Further there are incentives to sell products to law enforcement that produce simple truth (I would by a product from a critical scientist). Also I think it is human rights problem, if states do not have to fully compensate the damages produced by applying known faulty technology as many other actors would have to.

the-dude 3y ago

You forgot about the dogs.