He doesn’t need to. He relies on juries and judges to reach that decision.

Naturally, when he assumes that judges are right more often than juries, and fudges the distinction between procedural guilt and omniscient guilt, he finds that a significant number of the juries’ guilty decisions must be mistakes. (Actually a higher percent even than the judges disagreed with, under the assumption, as I understand it, that if there is a given level of mistake found by the judge, there is probably a comparable level missed by the judge.)

See, this is what i’m trying to correct. These idiotic total assertions. Its connected to reality as much as the assumption that judges are as accurate or more than juries. Its as connected to reality as the real data he uses on how judges and juries ruled. Its not unconnected to reality. Its data, plus assumptions (including proposing and going through various models) plus arithmetical manipulations. Its as connected to reality as those models and assumptions (i’m assuming you don’t find arithmetic unconnected to reality).

Anyway, it looks like you want to keep your narrow total view, and there’s no way to fix it. Who knows. Maybe god made you this stubborn.

Whats the argument? That this estimate of probability is not the objective truth? We know that. We know that from the fact that its called an estimate.

he makes enough assumptions (including model choice) and has enough data to calculate an estimate of probability. I don’t understand his equations perfectly, but they involve things like assuming what sorts of effect independence of results would have, as well as what to use to model the probabilities.

“And don’t give me this “you couldn’t understand because you don’t know math” excuse. If you do that, I’ll consider it a dodge and discount it utterly.”

Thats ridiculous. I don’t fully understand his math. I’m just trying to convince you that this isn’t absurd or godlike.

“But on what basis does he claim to compute this probability based on evidence heard in the courtroom?”

As far as I can tell he doesn’t base it on evidence heard in court at all. Though he does have data on the relative strengths the evidence.

“If you look at that limited and subjective data and assume that it contains his claimed objective truths which can be wrung out with statistical study, you will be able to come up with such an objective-looking conclusion”

It contains an estimate of objective truth. You don’t know that the objective truth of a coin flip is that the chance of heads and tails is .5. But you can estimate it for a whole bunch of coins and several people flipping them. Subjectively.

The accuracy is indeterminable, because the key source of inaccuracy is not the sample size, or otherwise calculable. The key source of inaccuracy is the unwarrantedness of the assumptions.

In addition to assuming that judges are somewhat more apt to be right than juries (which right there brings him most of the way to his shocking conclusion about errors), the author also assumes that the data is meaningful, that the strength-of-evidence question is answered in a consistent way by all parties, and that disagreement over whether the burden of proof has been met means a comparable level of error in the verdict by the omniscient definition.

His data is the 2 x 2 matrix of whether the judge and the jury found the defendant guilty or not; and for the NCSC cases, whether the judge and the jury believed the evidence to be weak, medium or strong. If you look at that limited and subjective data and assume that it contains his claimed objective truths which can be wrung out with statistical study, you will be able to come up with such an objective-looking conclusion. That doesn’t make it accurate. GIGO.

To me, it is obvious that such data cannot contain the objective truths claimed for it, and that no amount of statistical modeling can make it otherwise. Perhaps that is my own arrogance speaking. But notably, and as I have mentioned earlier, there is nothing in the data inconsistent with the model of rational juries consciously working with a 99% certainty (or any other) standard for a guilty verdict, which by definition would mean that somewhat more (perhaps 99.5%) of the convicted are in fact guilty under the omniscient standard.