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Luke_A_Somers comments on Amanda Knox: post mortem - Less Wrong
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I thought that "13% innocent population in jail is wrong" was a premise, and "individual with 13% probability of innocence in jail in wrong" was the conclusion.
Which seems perfectly reasonable to me: if you have an 87% certainty threshold for conviction, it means you're willing to tolerate up to 13% of convicts being innocent, an unacceptably high number by my lights.
It gets worse - the most severe crimes face the strongest pro-conviction biases.
...which is of course exactly the opposite of how it should work.
I agree if you mean that the damage from an irrational bias is higher when the stakes are higher, but disagree if you mean that rational marginal certainty levels needed for conviction would be higher for severe crimes. The risks from letting a thief go free (more thefts) seem lower than the risks from letting a murderer go free (more murders) even compared to the damage done to a potential convicted innocent (assuming no death penalty, and also assuming higher conviction rates would actually result in fewer of the real culprits going free, which often does not seem to be the case).