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The first time I remember running across this was /Innumeracy/ (1988) by John Allen Paulos. It's been discussed for decades, and as best I can tell hasn't reall

by lkbm 3y ago

The first time I remember running across this was /Innumeracy/ (1988) by John Allen Paulos. It's been discussed for decades, and as best I can tell hasn't really been addressed at all. I don't know the solution. Ideally, everyone would be good at math, but I don't see that happening in the near future. My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. I would hope big law firms are already doing this, but you should get a mathematically-sound judgement even if you have to depend on an underfunded and overworked public defenders. (More recently, I've been wondering this about scientific publishing. Misusing statistical tests--or choosing the wrong once seems--like a fairly common source of error in peer-reviewed science. It feels like there, too, we need expert statisticians carefully reviewing every paper of note. Given the amounts charged by some journals, it feels like a reasonable service to demand of them.)

pc86 3y ago
> My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?
- twisteriffic 3y ago
  Expert witnesses can be cripplingly expensive. Having a gratis sanity check sounds like a great idea, assuming you can find some way to insulate them from influence.
  - claytonjy 3y ago
    Can confirm. I worked at a small statistics consultancy where the owner did some expert testimony, and you have to reveal what you charge. The opposing side was often paying 500+/hr for shoddy work! I think we've seen stories of Ivy League professors charging thousands per hour, and making the bulk of their income this way. Not sure how high it goes in the most high-profile cases.
- Thrymr 3y ago
  Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial, like the court system itself. There is no "neutral" evaluation of the reliability of a piece of evidence. If one side hires an expert to evaluate something, they are under no obligation to have the expert testify in court if the evaluation doesn't help their case.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial In the UK, expert witnesses are "servants of the court". Sure, they're paid by one side or the other; but they're witnesses, and they're required to give true, unbiased testimony, on pain of a perjury charge. Is it not the same inthe USA?
    - 0xffff2 3y ago
      The gulf between truish, biased testimony and perjury is immense. The entire reason to have an expert witness giving testimony is that no one else in the courtroom is fully qualified to determine the truthfulness of the testimony.
qingcharles 3y ago
> My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. Anyone paid by the government is always going to know which way their bread is buttered. They would always be looked on with extreme suspicion. Even public defenders have this problem defending their clients when they are paid by the same government that is prosecuting the defendant.
stult 3y ago
It would help if the legal profession (at least in the US) did not actively select against numeracy. The running joke in law school is that everyone who was a decent student but bad at math goes to law school because the LSATs do not have a math component, unlike the GREs. I’m an engineer and former lawyer, and when I was in law school I actually ended up taking a really disproportionate number of tax law classes because I was so much better than my average peer at basic arithmetic that I could always beat the curve in classes that required basic calculations. And we’re not talking about even intro level algebra, just basic arithmetic. Addition, subtraction, some multiplication and division. By ignoring math skills altogether, the legal profession necessarily ends up selecting for individuals who on average have a poorer understanding of anything quantitative or statistical, and often that also correlates with poorer understanding of all technical and scientific matters, because the same innumeracy means those individuals don’t make it far any sciences at all, even in their secondary or tertiary education. So they often don’t even have strong fundamentals on the basic concepts in those areas. As an engineer, it was maddening to witness and absolutely pervades every aspect of the US legal system. Which both translates into reaching false factual conclusions as in OP, but also infects legal reasoning with a ridiculous lack of rigor (a point which lawyers often dispute vigorously, but they have no concept of just how much rigor they lose by eschewing mathematical and especially statistical reasoning), and it also translates into poorer operational efficiency and administrative efficiency in the legal system, and poorer outcomes from the regulatory system, which, while often informed by technical concerns, remains a primarily legal- and lawyer- driven process. That opens up regulatory bodies to subjective political concerns where there is absolutely no reasonable technical case to be made. This phenomenon is most obvious in recent history with climate change related regulations, but is pervasive throughout the US policy making establishment, and contributes substantially to our challenges with special interests and regulatory capture.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

by lkbm 3y ago

pc86 3y ago

> My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?

twisteriffic 3y ago
Expert witnesses can be cripplingly expensive. Having a gratis sanity check sounds like a great idea, assuming you can find some way to insulate them from influence.
- claytonjy 3y ago
  Can confirm. I worked at a small statistics consultancy where the owner did some expert testimony, and you have to reveal what you charge. The opposing side was often paying 500+/hr for shoddy work! I think we've seen stories of Ivy League professors charging thousands per hour, and making the bulk of their income this way. Not sure how high it goes in the most high-profile cases.
Thrymr 3y ago
Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial, like the court system itself. There is no "neutral" evaluation of the reliability of a piece of evidence. If one side hires an expert to evaluate something, they are under no obligation to have the expert testify in court if the evaluation doesn't help their case.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial In the UK, expert witnesses are "servants of the court". Sure, they're paid by one side or the other; but they're witnesses, and they're required to give true, unbiased testimony, on pain of a perjury charge. Is it not the same inthe USA?
  - 0xffff2 3y ago
    The gulf between truish, biased testimony and perjury is immense. The entire reason to have an expert witness giving testimony is that no one else in the courtroom is fully qualified to determine the truthfulness of the testimony.

qingcharles 3y ago

> My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. Anyone paid by the government is always going to know which way their bread is buttered. They would always be looked on with extreme suspicion. Even public defenders have this problem defending their clients when they are paid by the same government that is prosecuting the defendant.

stult 3y ago

It would help if the legal profession (at least in the US) did not actively select against numeracy. The running joke in law school is that everyone who was a decent student but bad at math goes to law school because the LSATs do not have a math component, unlike the GREs. I’m an engineer and former lawyer, and when I was in law school I actually ended up taking a really disproportionate number of tax law classes because I was so much better than my average peer at basic arithmetic that I could always beat the curve in classes that required basic calculations. And we’re not talking about even intro level algebra, just basic arithmetic. Addition, subtraction, some multiplication and division. By ignoring math skills altogether, the legal profession necessarily ends up selecting for individuals who on average have a poorer understanding of anything quantitative or statistical, and often that also correlates with poorer understanding of all technical and scientific matters, because the same innumeracy means those individuals don’t make it far any sciences at all, even in their secondary or tertiary education. So they often don’t even have strong fundamentals on the basic concepts in those areas. As an engineer, it was maddening to witness and absolutely pervades every aspect of the US legal system. Which both translates into reaching false factual conclusions as in OP, but also infects legal reasoning with a ridiculous lack of rigor (a point which lawyers often dispute vigorously, but they have no concept of just how much rigor they lose by eschewing mathematical and especially statistical reasoning), and it also translates into poorer operational efficiency and administrative efficiency in the legal system, and poorer outcomes from the regulatory system, which, while often informed by technical concerns, remains a primarily legal- and lawyer- driven process. That opens up regulatory bodies to subjective political concerns where there is absolutely no reasonable technical case to be made. This phenomenon is most obvious in recent history with climate change related regulations, but is pervasive throughout the US policy making establishment, and contributes substantially to our challenges with special interests and regulatory capture.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]