Desrtopa comments on Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Mass_Driver 16 February 2012 10:31PM

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Comment author: taw 16 February 2012 09:44:57AM 1 point [-]

A few observations:

  • Literally 100% of people who ever lived have done multiple things which unfriendly legal system might treat as crimes, starting from simple ones like watching youtube videos uploaded without consent of their copyright owners, making mistakes on tax forms, reckless driving, defamation, hate speech, and going as far as the legal system wants to go.
  • Vast majority of suspects in US do not get any trial whatsoever, they're forced to accept punishment or risk vastly higher punishment if they want to take their chance of trial.
  • There are good reasons to believe few trials that happen are extremely far from any kind of fairness, and they're stacked to give persecution an advantage. Just compare massive funding of police and prosecutors with puny funding of defense attorneys.
  • US has extraordinarily high number of prisoners per capita. Looking at crime rates alone, it does not have extraordinarily high levels of serious crime per capita. There's no way most people in prisons can be anything but innocent (or "guilty" of minor and irrelevant "crimes" pretty much everybody is "guilty" of and persecuted on legal system's whims).
  • Unless you believe that young black men in US are the most criminal group in history of the world, most of them who are in prisons must be innocent by pure statistics.
Comment author: Desrtopa 16 February 2012 03:15:59PM 9 points [-]

Literally 100% of people who ever lived have done multiple things which unfriendly legal system might treat as crimes

Entirely for the sake of being pedantic, I'll point out that many people have avoided this, if only by dying very shortly after being born.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 16 February 2012 04:37:12PM 3 points [-]

taw was only reporting to one significant digit :P

Comment author: MixedNuts 16 February 2012 04:38:25PM 4 points [-]

I see three.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 February 2012 05:57:59PM *  3 points [-]

Still, I'd bet that at least 99.5% of people alive now have done something which is technically illegal in their jurisdiction. (Not sure about “who ever lived”, though.)

Comment author: MileyCyrus 16 February 2012 05:05:13PM 3 points [-]

100.% (with a decimal before the percent sign) would be three. 100% with no decimal is one.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 February 2012 06:00:13PM 6 points [-]

I'd consider numbers such as “100” to be ambiguous between one, two or three significant digits. As for “literally”...