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Comment by azernik | Hacker News Reader

It was created that way because of the extreme consequences of criminal conviction. Civil suits, which deal in money or injunctive relief, have a much lower standard of proof. Social opprobrium rightly has a standard lower than that.

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I'd say the standard in civil suits is the lowest ethically possible in judging people. It merely requires the claim to be more likely to be true that not. Below that, you're saying the claim is most likely false based on the evidence, but for reasons of extreme caution you will presume it is true. I certainly agree that happens in social media where the outcome of letting a "guilty" person get away with something is judged to be more unacceptable than the outcome of destroying an innocent person.

1) Lower than preponderance of evidence?

I believe you about it having such a standard (we can call it presence of evidence or presence of suspicion), but not on it being right.

2) Preponderance of evidence makes sense on civil suits because they are kinda inherently simmetrical. Either A loses or B loses. We would probably do better in using the standard of evidence for, say, a traffic violation, in the case of social "lets get this guy fired and try to make sure he never gets a job again" -- might not be enough of a standard, but better

The only standard mentioned in this thread was "beyond a reasonable doubt", to which someone replied that it should absolutely be the standard.

Did you mean to say "social opprobium" (aka, lets get this guy fired and kicked out of places) should have a lower standard of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt"? Because reading your post I understood that it should be lower then the civil standard (i.e.: "preponderance of evidence")

Which I believe it *has*, but absolutely should not have

It's no longer mere "opprobrium". These days it's losing your career (or at least your current job) and getting incessantly harassed. The calculus has very much changed.

(I'm not claiming that I have a solution for the problem, besides people individually waking up and realizing that it's a bad idea to rush to judgement. No amount of censorship or similar tactics could possibly solve this problem even if our benevolent tech overlords wanted to)

To clarify:

What do you think the highest and lowest standards of evidence should be for "social opprobium"?

And what is the maximum damage to ones life that "social opprobium" should ideally entail?

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