"The system" includes millions of police/sheriff, and hundreds of thousands of prosecutors.

For you to say you had this one interaction and try to imply that's how a massive system with millions of actors works is just silly.

"It rained in my neighborhood yesterday, so that's how the national weather looked yesterday."

Your comment is laughably inconsequential, and that point aside, if a case sucks it's your job as the prosecutor to dismiss it or send it back for further investigation.

I'm sure he's extrapolating from that one experience alone and not at all making an indication of his general experience as a prosecutor, so you're right to call him out.

I had a choice between bumping this thread and politarding up a Probability thread. I chose the latter, but now I'm changing my mind; I think bumping a Sklansky thread is the lesser of two evils (I know, I can already hear the boooos).

I said in that thread: "David, [...] do you think this radio host, or the 90% of listeners who are convinced by his logic, should be deciding people's guilt/innocence and life/death based on whether their intuition says P(guilt) ≥ 50.001%?"

And if yes, how do you reconcile that with your advocacy of voter tests (if I'm not mistaken) and meritocracy in general? You want random juries given so much power over someone's life, but not voters who are voting on things that affect them?

Also, how are juries to determine probabilities with a low margin of error when most of the variables in a case aren't even quantitative? Laypeople are supposed to have great intuition of subjective probabilities come trial time, when the rest of the time they can't intuit that the table you're at doesn't matter, unknown random mucked cards don't matter, etc?

(I don't remember David addressing any of these things before the thread morphed into a discussion about rape trials.)

I did not mean to imply that 51% or even 70% would qualify.

I would have to decline a jury trial, if my life/liberty depends on the average voter in my district.

This would significantly increase litigation. I think the damning thing would be that this would have the opposite effect of what is intended. You would have more actually violent criminals out of prison instead of in it. This thinking is why prosecutors are reluctant to add lesser offense instructions on tough cases. Jury convicts for the lesser offense than the often appropriate higher charge.