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CCC comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - Less Wrong
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I mean it's not like a good legal team has ever allowed a guilty man to get away with it. Also, presumably the person knows whether he is guilty.
A highly competent legal team may allow a guilty man to get away with a crime, yes. And an incompetent legal team may allow an innocent man to get convicted.
But a very competent legal team which normally takes cases where the defendant is guilty will do very badly by this metric; while an incompetent legal team might get a lot of innocent clients might do very well by the same metric.
If I wish to select a lawyer to defend me in a trial, then I know whether or not I am guilty of whatever I am being charged with. I do not know how many of the lawyer's previous clients were guilty; nor how many were wrongfully convicted, or wrongfully released. Thus, a mere count of previous victories in court is potentially a poor measure of the lawyer's effectiveness.
Yes, and the same problem can exist for plumbers, car mechanics, and doctors.
Academics also.
You have a point - a man who takes on only easy problems, in any field, will have a higher success rate than a man who takes on only hard problems, irrespective of actual skill level.
I think that what makes evaluating a lawyer in particular difficult is that it is very hard for a non-lawyer to easily distinguish easy from hard problems. For car mechanics, I know that replacing the oil is a much simpler job than replacing the engine; but when looking over a lawyer's history, I can't easily evaluate the relative difficulty of his previous successes.
On the other hand, if I come in complaining that the car is making funny noises, it's a lot harder to see whether this is an easy or hard problem. Another example, I come in for a routine inspection and he tells me that some part I've never heard of needs replacing and it's going to be expensive. I have no way to check short of going to a different mechanic and then some figuring out who to trust.