Well, it's an empirical question whether current dis-rationality is more caused by cognitive bias or bounded-rationality with the bound set "too low." If it's the latter, then increasing the baseline will improve the correlation between political decisions and truth.
And I know it's seldom wise to bet against motivated cognition, but if there really were more effective dark arts techniques that could be implemented by the average lawyer, then I would expect that the techniques would already be implemented. There's already lots at stake in the average lawyer's job.
What is the difference between a cognitive bias and a bound on rationality? I thought those were two ways of framing the same phenomenon.
I like your theory of efficient dark arts. (I hope you call it the efficient-darkart hypothesis.) I think you're right that lawyers are already strongly motivated to exploit all effective dark-arts techniques. I was not suggesting the existence of unexploited yet effective techniques. I was suggesting that changing the "baseline" (is this a specific application of raising the sanity waterline?) may increase the ...
I'm interested in how courts and juries might use rational techniques to arrive at correct decisions on guilt.
In a complex case, it would seem to sensible to assess each component of the prosecution and defence case, and estimate the relative likelihood. If the prosecution case is (say) 100 times more likely than the defence case, then you can say the defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
I never heard of this being done though. I recently made an analysis of the Massei report into the Amanda Knox case. It looked like this ( see http://massei-report-analysis.wikispaces.com/ for the entire analysis and some insight into the numbers below ).
This is perhaps a bit vague. It's not a great example, because in the end I didn't find any credible prosecution evidence. It's not entirely clear what the "probability" numbers here actually are, and whether two columns are needed. But hopefully it shows that the Massei's account of the murder is quite improbable, and there is considerable doubt.
I'm interested in possibly devising a more complete framework for how such an assessment should be done, the pitfalls that need to be guarded against (how uncertain are the probability estimates?), and even views as to how "reasonable doubt" should be quantified.
Perhaps readers would like to make an assessment of other interesting cases, to explore the issues.
Or how would you approach this problem?