army1987 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: Eugine_Nier 19 February 2012 09:55:26PM *  2 points [-]

known widespread racial bias on the part of police, prosecutors and judges.

Can you cite evidence for this?

Most of the evidence for this is based on arguing that P(conviction|African descent) > P(conviction|Eurasian descent) and dismissing anyone who points out that P(guilty|African descent) > P(guilty|Eurasian descent) as a racist.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 February 2012 11:27:58PM 0 points [-]

P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) alright, but that kind of evidence is easily screened out. For any non-trivial amount of forensic evidence E, P(guilty|E, African descent) ought to be approximately the same as P(guilty|E, Eurasian descent). (For example, if E points toward the defendant being guilty, even though you'd assign a higher prior probability of guilt for a black person than for a white person, you'd assign a higher prior probability of E for a black person than for a white person too, so that in the posterior probabilities those cancel out.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 February 2012 11:35:20PM 1 point [-]

P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) alright, but that kind of evidence is easily screened out.

Agreed, however, I fail to see what this has to do with my point.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 February 2012 12:06:33AM *  1 point [-]

Never mind. I had misunderstood your point.