Howland Will Forgery Trial
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Link below [2] explains that the probability was NOT 1/2.666E21 that it was not fake, because it is more likely than that that the science of handwriting analysis is incorrect, or that the analysis was done incorrectly, or anything similar (i.e. A one-in-a-trillion chance is more likely to be incorrect than one-in-a-trillion).
Bonus round: They also commit the "Prosecutor's fallacy" [1], where they explain how likely the evidence is given the hypothesis instead of explaining how likely the hypothesis is given the evidence. Example: You are found in a store and accused of robbing it. They ruled that you were accused of robbing the store, and you being in the store fits this theory, when they should have ruled on how likely you were to have robbed a store when they only knew you were in it (not very likely, lots of people may have been in the store).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence...
Ah, but ridiculously high numbers get such a nice emotional reaction from a jury.
I once had a conversation with a guy who fiercely proclaimed that if you shuffle a deck of cards, the resulting ordering is likely to be utterly unique in the history of all shuffled decks ever, because there are <dramatic pause /> 8E67 possibilities!1! Same as the number of atoms in our galazxy!
I went on to explain that while in theory this is true, in practice there are a lot of caveats. Since brand new unopened deck of cards are usually all in the same order, and since a perfect cut and a perfect riffle shuffle (left/right/left/right/left etc) will always produce one of two orderings, depending on whether you start with the left or right decks, etc etc, it lowers the odds drastically. And it would be more proper to say that if you sloppily shuffle a deck about 7 times, then the original claim is probably true.
But I lost the crowd. They had already had an emotional reaction to the enormous number .
> The Circuit Court finally refused to admit the complainant's testimony, and dismissed the bill with costs. An appeal was taken, but withdrawn, on a settlement between the parties whereby the complainant received her expenses, costs, and counsel fees. The probate of the will of September I, 1863, therefore, remained undisturbed,
From https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refere...
Which references as the original source:
> The American Law Review (vol. 4, pages 629-54)
I wonder if it's a viable strategy to post sub-par, but interesting pages to HN in order to attract high-quality edits...
Are signatures still this valuable in court, in this day and age? Given that they should be easy enough to properly forge, instead of straight out copy.
> the probability that all 30 downstrokes should coincide in two genuine signatures was 1 2.666 × 10 21 {\displaystyle \textstyle {\frac {1}{2.666\times 10^{21}}}} \textstyle\frac{1}{2.666 \times 10^{21}}. That is one in 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000, in the order of magnitude of sextillions.
is such outrageous bullshit that I'm saddened he wasn't immediately laughed out of court.
Many counties have deed recording alerts that alert property owners to documents recorded against their name or property. However, many counties do not offer this service, leaving property owners unaware of these forged or fraudulent deeds, until they receive an eviction or foreclosure notice. As such, we are offering a Title Watch service to inform you about potential forged or fraudulent deeds recorded in your name or against your property. Please visit us at https://plathq.com
(2) Let me see if I get this right: you offer a service that simply monitors deeds and mortgages recorded against a specific plat and sends an alert to to the subscriber if something is recorded (which is an extremely rare event). And you charge $10/month/property for this service? What about the problem makes it so expensive? Why aren't you likely to be disrupted by someone like Zillow offering this $10/month service for FREE (and making money off the address list they develop from it, plus advertising to all the homeowners)?
In addition, people are (rightly) highly risk-averse about anything that affects their family, their home, or the assets that they built over years and decades. For example, real estate investors commonly put their property into an LLC (which costs $800/year in CA) or buy liability insurance, even though the probability of incurring a large liability is low.
With respect to costs, even though land records are public, machine-parseable title/recorder data is expensive. Data from the tax assessor (even machine-parseable) is relatively cheap, but is not as complete as recorder data. For example, it does not have mortgages. We intend to achieve economies-of-scale with respect to recorder data. At that point we intend to offer additional value at the same price (for example, insurance) and add a free-but-sell-leads service.
So my response would be that at a certain point, a tiny possibility does not amount to reasonable doubt.
"So vast improbability is practically an impossibility.
Such evanescent shadows of probability cannot belong to
actual life. They are unimaginably less than those least
things which the law cares not for. ... The coincidence
which has occurred here must have had its origin in an
intention to produce it. It is utterly repugnant to sound
reason to attribute this coincidence to any cause but
design."That is awesome!