Probably Not

Captain James Kirk certainly was a silly sentimentalist. Imagine him keeping that old fraud Spock on the payroll despite repeated demonstrations of incompetence in his supposed expertise. Whenever a dangerous mission loomed, Spock could be depended on to pull one of his patented fake probability predictions out of his ... - usually something like a 99.99973% chance of failure. In one way I couldn't blame him - Kirk was a total klutz, always going off half-cocked and without a clue. Still, I couldn't resist my own predictions, namely that Spock was off by about 99.99973%. The poor dolt had no head for figures.

Of course this post is actually about Steve Landsburg - I think he might miss me - who has a series of posts on the question of what should constitute a "reasonable doubt" in a murder trial. There is a certain amount of amusement to be obtained by doing his arithmetic, but fundamentally he is just making Spock's mistake - assigning arbitrary numbers when there isn't any reasonable basis for doing so.

It’s been “reasonable doubt” week here at The Big Questions. We’ve talked about recognizing reasonable doubt when you see it, about what the standard should be, and about what the standard for determining the standard should be.

This raises the question: What is the standard? Here’s the weird part: Nobody knows. The judges won’t tell you and neither will the legislators. If you’re on a jury, you’re on your own.

He wants a percentage, dammit! Perhaps in one trial in a few hundred there might be a special case where a probability can be assigned to some piece of evidence - I'm thinking about the DNA match type evidence. Rest assured, though, that in such a case the lawyers will have made sure to exclude from the jury anybody who has (a)ever heard of DNA and (b) anybody who knows his times tables to 8.

So even if the mathematically competent could make it onto the jury, what are the chances that it would be reasonable to make numerical estimate of the probability of guilt? I will go with 0.3%, but I just made that up, just like Spock, and I would guess, Landsburg, if he were ever to get on a jury.

Come to think of it though, his post might actually be a cunning way to make sure that he never **does** get on a jury.