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ciphergoth comments on You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event - Less Wrong
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I'm inclined to believe that in general it's very strong - that if all you know about X is that they were convicted of rape and murder, then the likelihood that they raped and murdered someone is vastly greater.
In this particular case, adding it to the other things I've skimmed about it, I'm coming to something like a .20/.20/.70 estimate, but that's after reading the comments here.
Yes...but that's never all you know, unless you visit a prison. Otherwise, something has drawn your attention to the particular person, which is a lot of information. In particular, my prior for the innocence of people whose conviction is a cause celebre is 75%.
How do you get that figure ?
It seems even harder to estimate the rate of "cause celebre wronful convictions" than to estimate wrongful convictions in general.
Moreover, I'd be concerned that this particular reference class leaves you vulnerable to availability bias. You're more likely to remember cases where a convicted person was eventually proven innocent; we never see newspaper headlines proclaiming "Conviction of X still not overturned".
The one big example that comes to my mind of a cause celebre conviction that turned out to be proper is Alger Hiss, though I note from Wikipedia that many still dispute his guilt.
Also, in general, the Communist Party USA really was trying to get secret allies in high government positions and really was under the control of Soviet intelligence.
Genuine question: were there a lot of people who were not supporters of the CPUSA but who argued that one or both of these were not true?
I actually can't remember how much non-leftist resistance the red scares got while they were going on. But certainly after the fact they have been portrayed as merely irrational, politically motivated witch hunts.
Edit: And there were definitely members and allies of CPUSA who had no idea they were part of or working with a Soviet front and defended the Party because of that belief. CPUSA did whole lot of solid civil rights organizing-- work that no one else (at least no other groups with significant white participation) was doing at the time. When I say the CPUSA was a Soviet front that doesn't mean that it was exclusively a Soviet front.
I'd be interested to read more about this if you have any good pointers - thanks!