HN user
I wish that people would understand that people who disagree with them are not 'liars' but are instead people who disagree with them.
It is possible to honestly disagree on a technical issue, you know. And it is good professional and personal practice to only accuse someone of lying when you are quite sure that they are deliberately telling you something they know to be false...
When lawyers go drinking together they laugh at stories of criminals who don't even understand the basics of evidence law.
When doctors have coffee breaks they share stories about how modern people don't even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria and demand antibiotics for the common cold.
Latin professors share hilarious pictures of people who have tattooed themselves with incoherently mistranslated latin tags.
Every profession thinks that the general population is full of dunces who don't understand the basics of the highly important body of knowledge that they are experts in...
God am I sick of tedious gloomy post-apocalyptic stories. I had them in school when they were about nukes. Now they're about the environment but they're the same boring gloomy defeatist stuff. Between those two dates, of course, we had tens of millions of Chinese and Indian people being lifted out of poverty, the fall of apartheid and the Soviet Union, democracy in Eastern Europe, the Internet...
The future is the Jetsons, baby, not this shit.
As computer people, scientists etc you should all be aware of the dangers of untrained outsiders who believe that they can not only understand a complex field with a minimum of logic, rationality and commonsense but understand it better than the trained professionals in that field. As a practicing lawyer, this analysis really sounds to me like the analysis of an intelligent climate skeptic or an intelligent arts graduate sounding forth on AI.
Criminal justice systems are hard. They're right up their with the hardest things humanity has to deal with. They deal with ambiguous facts, necessarily inadequate rule systems and with intelligent human actors constantly trying to game the system - what's more the stakes are terrifyingly high, up to and including the life or death of the participants.
Sure, errors tragically occur. But we should really pause before pronouncing --- based on Bayes, blogs and journalists --- that the cursory judgement of a non-profesional who wasn't in the court is superior to the considered judgement of judge and jury made in full cognisance of the likely outcome of conviction after listening to all the evidence including first hand witness testimony.
And no, throwing in an offhand comment about how Occam's razor disproves God and therefore a little logic wielded with "courage and a certain kind of ruthlessness" enables superior thinkers to do better than the hidebound judge and jury (who were probably irrational Christians anyway) doesn't make the argument any more convincing.