Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

Some centuries ago, there were periods when many people would get accused of consorting with the devil, and multiple witnesses would be brought forward to substantiate this, and many people were burned as a result.

That's not just a problem of ancient superstition; as recently as the 90s, a number of people were convicted of Satanic Ritual Abuse, with multiple witnesses, and some of the real victims (often women working in places like daycare centers) have been in jail for decades on the basis of clearly unbelievable and coached testimony.

Whenever one of these periods occurs, it's not a one-off act by some individual, nor even a matter of any specific religion. It's a clear indication that the justice system has been fundamentally compromised in the way it treats evidence and renders a final judgement.

This article might have good intentions, but its method could be applied to witchcraft or Satanic Ritual Abuse, and obtain the same kinds of conclusions: If you're accused of witchcraft by multiple people, you're probably guilty. This is still mostly true if we don't believe that witches are a separate kind of people. Increasing our certainty that witches are witches is even good for the people who are accused of being witches.

Counting up the number of accusations is clearly a wrong standard for determining that someone is guilty. The available evidence in each case matters, and accusations are not necessarily independent. The general presumption of innocence until proven guilty is still necessary and still applies to rape as to other crimes.

Exhibit A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

I remember watching the Frontline reports of this. There were several over a few years and I was just flabbergasted as to how amazingly stupid people where to believe this. That no one in the prosecutors office put the brakes on it. Really sad.

>"In order to guarantee his testimony during the McMartin case, Freeman was given immunity to previous charges of perjury."

hard to read it strait-faced.

The difference being that witchcraft and satanism were moral panics that never actually happened to anyone, and rape is something that actually happens to real people fairly often.

It is a mistake to believe that theistic Satanists or witches (ie, people who genuinely believed that they had "communed with the devil" or possessed some form of supernatural powers) did not exist. Of course there is absolutely no evidence of ritualistic satanic abuse specifically, but there is little reason to conclude that "witches" in Salem are not plausible.

That is one of the reasons why the long-established comparison between McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials is so apt. It is not beyond reason that there were people in Hollywood who were genuinely communists; there are communists in just about any profession today that you can think of, just as there were in the early 20th century. Hell, some of them may have even been Soviet agents; we know that Soviet agents operating in the US is something that happened.

The fact that communists did in fact exist does absolutely nothing to excuse the flawed methodology that was used to track down and label communists.

It is a mistake to believe that moral panics regarding sexual assault never occur. That's precisely what the satanic (sexual) ritual abuse trials were.

Because the Department of Justice says that a female is one third more likely to be raped not attending college than on a college campus I'd say it is at least possible we're in the midst of a moral panic over sexual assaults on college campuses.

The lack of reliable data, which places the number of campus sexual assaults somewhere in the wildly varying range of .08% to 20% of the population, the pseudo-religious "with-us-or-against-us" mentality, the desire to see justice done extralegally rather than in a court, and the vitriolic shaming of dissenting voices all have the flavor of a moral panic.

The mob-based tribal thinking that "if he's been accused more than once, he must be guilty" is an inherent flaw in human reasoning, of which this program is simply a mathematical model.

Mathematically, the fatal flaw of the model is that it assumes all accusations are supported by evidence of an arbitrary positive weight, and that all accusations are independent. This is never the almost never the case in real accusations. Perhaps before dropping out of school he should read up on other misuses of statistics that have manipulated juries and ruined lives, like the famous "Prosecutor's Fallacy." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy, which quite literally lead to the death of British Solicitor Sally Clark.

What saddens me most is that some casual readers are now walking around with the incredibly mistaken assumption that it is mathematically sound to assume a person accused thrice is virtually certain to be guilty.

I don't say any of this to diminish the very real problem of sexual assault, but merely to point out that people are surrendering their rights and their reason to mob mentality.

That mentality is precisely what two thousand years of legal scholarship evolved to fight. And whether executed by silicon or scythe, mob mentality is wrong. And quite frankly it is frightening to watch.

I will agree that multiple accusations of sexual assault are unlikely to be independent. One of the biggest reasons victims come forward is when they realize that their rapist has raped other people in the past and will continue to rape other people in the future. Is there any such reason for false rape accusations to be joined?

Moral panics very rarely involve people coming forward and accusing an individual person of attacking them. It's possible for one or two deranged nut jobs to go around saying that (eg) Bill Clinton raped them. Over a dozen people accusing someone like Bill Cosby who isn't widely hated the way Clinton was, and recounting their individual experiences? Is there any precedent for something like that happening?

Yes, many. See e.g. The McMartin Preschool Trial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

>"By spring of 1984, it was claimed that 360 children had been abused."

All of these linked allegations later turned out to be complete fabrications, creations by the investigators invented out of whole cloth, and targeted against the same specific individuals.

In fact false accusations from multiple individuals are a common police tactic. Perhaps the individual has slept with several others, and the encounters ended non-violently but non-amicably. Suddenly consensual encounters retroactively become remembered as non-consensual after questioning by investigators, the very purpose of which is to elicit accusations. As a representative at these hearings, and student advisor, I've witnessed this happen to students many times.

See also the DSK trial, where a French author from years before brought charges that were similarly dismissed. The bandwagoning effect occurs regardless of whether the allegations are true or false. People want money, power, special treatment, and attention, and sadly, false allegations are often an easy mechanism used to get them.

So yes, both false allegations and true allegations are unlikely to be made independently. Not to mention the truly crazy people who are completely uninvolved and will jump in for no discernible reason whatsoever, or in criminal cases CIs who are transformed into additional "victims" to secure convictions.

This isn't a story of math to the rescue. It's a store of bad statistics and not paying enough attention in class, where they usually teach some variant of the prosecutor's fallacy, since this type of falsity comes up often enough to warrant consistent reinforcement that statistics aren't magic, and they can ruin people's lives.

Well children in specific are far easier to manipulate. As for DSK, I conceded the possibility of "one or two deranged nut jobs", which is pretty much all that happened in his case.

Agreed that the statistics don't tie out.

Yeah, I'm debating off the top of my head. I've seen it happen enough, I'm sure there's a good exemplar case involving adults, but bandwagoning of false allegations is a very real phenomenon.

If you don't believe in the correlation of false accusations, perhaps a Bloom Filter could give us some help. Thinking through the details, but check this weekend for a github implementation. Reply or PM if interested in helping out.

https://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assa...

There is a lot of grey in this area, and there are lots of opinions that can sway people one way or the other.

I was raped, but not violently raped. I've heard arguments from both sides. Can you imagine being a rape victim trying to determine whether they were actually raped or not? It sucks. I don't like talking about it with people outside of the internet. I've seen thousands of facial reactions to people reacting to a blank description of it, because I'm still too ashamed to describe it. Counselors aren't supposed to judge, but they do. I was called a pathological liar, in counseling, years after the rape had happened. The people you think are supposed to be there for you the most, can sometimes understand you the least. I have been argued with and screamed at over whether I was raped or not. It just makes me feel kind of dead inside. I don't have anything to say to you aside from the fact that determining what 'real rape' is, can be as complicated as determining whether witches exist or do not exist, or anything else you think is really complicated. You can't really prove it either way, and all you are really doing is convincing a group of people to think like you, without them having to be you. How many times do I have to tell myself whether I was raped or not, until I believe it? I don't really care. I just know that shit is complicated, and there aren't easy answers to anything that is complicated.

I agree. A large count at best proves non-independence (or contamination). It really doesn't address if the contamination is a guilty party, a smear campaign or self-correlating accusations. The original article gave too much credence to the possibility of calculation solving this by even trying to work things as far as it did.

That was my first thought on reading the title: a million accusations is no better than one unless you can prove they are independent.

Legal evidence has to be more strict than Bayesian evidence - even if you've seen enough to be convinced that they probably committed some crime, you need to have a system where proof is required. The alternative is that it gets trivially easy to railroad people with the justice system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality

You're onto something - there's a correlation between variables when coaching (intentional or not) is involved.

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