CharlieSheen 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: CharlieSheen 16 February 2012 06:00:14PM *  11 points [-]

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.

This is by far your weakest point.

Men commit more crime than women. Young people commit more crime than the elderly. Black people commit more crime than white people.

Ergo yes young black males are probably one of the most criminal groups in the developed world. I bet Japanese American grandmothers are among the least, I can't imagine why,but somehow it just seems overwhelmingly likley.

If you want to quibble that government is more likley to make things that men, the young and black people do, illegal feel free to, but considering all three opening statements are also true for violent crimes and that victim reports basically match arrest ratios on all of them. I think all three are blatantly obviously true, but somewhat impolite to state.

Violent crime is something that for understandable reasons catches attention more than say white collar crime. It causes greater psychological distress to notice it or suspect you are vulnerable to it. This translates into greater pressure on politicians to make laws against it and provide law enforcement more resources to target it.

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