IT is incredible how major decisions are taken because of this bad experts, the science community needs to find a way to properly handle this "forensic science" before someone invents a mind reader that will detect if you have bad thoughts like pedophilia or similar and destroys more lives.
Probably you will need some system similar to physics where you can claim something is true untill you have a big confidence in your experiments and the experiments are replicated.
Unfortunately, the people passing judgment (judges, lawyers, juries) are generally not scientists, and therefore are equally likely to believe the guy with the paedo-dowser as the next guy.
Unreliable witnesses are as old as the justice system - “science” gives them a veneer of respectability now, just as it has in the past.
I see two problems, neither of which have an easy solution:
1) scientific literacy is dire, and worsening. Education helps, but when anti-science sentiment runs rife in popular culture and media, as it does now, education is met with resistance. I have been reduced to a gibbering wreck trying to explain to otherwise intelligent people that science isn’t “just an opinion”, and that astrology and astronomy aren’t “just different, equally valid opinions”.
2) the concept of the jury trial is broken. It used to be that you would be tried by your peers - people who likely knew you, had a similar background to you, could empathise and make judgments based on a clear understanding of your world. Now, you’re tried by strangers who have usually been carefully selected to be as hostile as possible without an outright admission of bias. I think there’s a happy medium somewhere between the two, as there are obviously biases in both cases.
#1 is the scariest of the two in my opinion, and I think the advent of the internet has only made it easier for the "evolution is just a theory"-types to congregate and develop a siege mentality that only serves to reinforce their misconceptions.
I think the problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
"peer" in that context has only ever meant people of similar standing. In the US (and many other places) where we don't have formal or legal class distinctions it pretty much just means other citizens.
I think there's probably an argument to be made about there being benefits to smaller communities, but that argument isn't supported by legal tradition surrounding the word "peer".
> I have been reduced to a gibbering wreck trying to explain to otherwise intelligent people that science isn’t “just an opinion”, and that astrology and astronomy aren’t “just different, equally valid opinions”.
A short sarcastic laughter would probably have worked better. If people sense their status is lowering because they believe in this "equally valid opinions" nonsense, they will have a strong incentive to update their belief.
Of course, many will be offended, in which case I recommend turning the sarcastic laugh into a benevolent, condescending smile, with perhaps an appeal to their intelligence to soften the blow. Ideally though, you should spin it as if you were ridiculing a third party. This lets them avoid direct confrontation if they so chose, and you still get to make your point.
In any case, they cannot be taught as long as they subscribe to epistemic relativism. They first have to get rid of it, somehow. Doesn't matter if it's for the wrong reasons. Only then can they be taught how to properly change their mind.
Not if you have higher status to begin with. Not if you are their friends to begin with. And if you merely have power over them, they will notice that their beliefs will attract the contempt of people who have power over them. Of course, this probably won't work on public web forums. Of course, this won't work on your boss. Of course, this will not work well on strangers.
Then again, the best way to do it is to act as if you were ridiculing a third party. If they get offended, try not to notice, and direct your condescension at those other people you're pretending they're talking about. Give them a way to save face.
Whatever the means, the idea is to stress that epistemic relativism is not socially acceptable. Make them feel that thinking such thoughts has consequences.
The downvote suggests I said something unacceptable. Maybe it was this:
> Make them feel that thinking such thoughts has consequences.
I do not condone actually carrying out dire consequences, we've had enough dictatorships to show us how this plays out. I'm talking about manipulating people. A little. Because nothing more innocuous that I know of will do.
When science and the science community fails, your solution is to suggest that more -- indeed ALL -- people start valuing science more and putting more time and resources into it.
Is not only the jury though, I read about cases where a fireman is brought as an expert and his testimony was incorrect and if I remember right cost the accused his life.
So some rules must be created for this experts, what tools they use, what software ...
It seems to me that justice is in the most peril when the prosecutor is absolutely certain that the perp is guilty, but doesn't have any good evidence (which is not an unusual occurrence). So now he is faced with two possiblities, let the guy go and watch him kill/rob/rape again, or make up some bullshit that sounds good to a jury and that his public defender won't question too harshly. Something that sounds scientific even though it was never actually proven effective. Hair analysis, signature analysis, ballistic fingerprinting, eyewitness testimony, etc... There are people on death row that were convicted solely on circumstantial and unreliable evidence, and not a lot of it. Of course all this is a lot easier to accomplish if you can use the jury's inherent biases in your favor. Like you're trying to convict a 6"4' black man with tattoos all over his body and permanent sneer. Doesn't really matter if he's guilty or not, the jury is going to want to lock him up regardless.
I've read that story once before, and it is absolutely blood-curdling. I wondered while reading if a movie was made, since it seemed like such an incredible story, it could pick up many awards. Seems it's coming: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3263946/
Worse, like we know lie detectors would work for facts, "Did you do X? Yes/No"
My scenario would involve some startup creating some software that would analyze a brain scan(or worse analyze your internet activity) then it will answer for questions like this"Does this person has potential for being a pedophile? The answer would be something vague like "Strong potential"/ "weak potential" , I chose this example because I noticed that when children are involved you get much more irrational laws and the justice is applyed much stronger with less evidence
> before someone invents a mind reader that will detect if you have bad thoughts like pedophilia or similar and destroys more lives.
Polygraph is pretty much that.
But what I got out of reading about these issues too, a lot of forensic science is not science and has its own community different from academic community.
Just believe the parents seems like it may not always be the best policy either. There's some really terrible parents out there. I don't know off hand whether the numbers suggest more people are affeted by bad science and government overreach, or bad parents and government indifference, but I feel this blog is probably on the wrong side of the argument, even if there's areas everyone should agree on (no junk science for example).
Though the blogger doesn't actually say believe the parents, they say believe the mother (well, they say "don't automatically discount the mother" which in context appears to be a weaselly way of saying the same thing) which is a bit more specific. One of the cases seems to involve an accusation from a husband, that the test backed up. So even if the lab was tossing coins to come up with their results, we also have to assume a husband and father lied about his child's mother's behaviour.
Ultimately you're talking about breaking up two people who have probably lived together for some time and working out a sharing agreement with two people who don't really want to be around each other anymore. It's hard to imagine a scenario where there isn't friction or hurt feelings in this case.
Best case scenario the couple wasn't married very long and doesn't have much in the way of joint possessions and no kids and they both work so you don't have alimony concerns you still need to decide who has to move out.
Taking a child away from a family is one of the worst violations a government can subject someone to, all the way up there with imprisonment. The argument isn't a binary choice between trusting the mother or not, it's to raise the bar for evidence significantly - which is what I take don't automatically discount the mother" to mean.
This should be treated like a criminal matter, with the same standards of evidence. If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt. Or at the very least, the parents in question should have a court appointed defence lawyer.
If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt.
The difference is that in one scenario it’s about punishing something that happened and is done and in the other it’s to prevent ongoing/future harm. If you’ve seen some of the things parents are willing to do to their own kids, you would see why it’s not that simple.
> The difference is that in one scenario it’s about punishing something that happened and is done and in the other it’s to prevent ongoing/future harm.
Letting a criminal go free (think serial-murderer, rapist) is just as valid an argument for future harm.
I don't see why you treat these 2 cases differently.
The legal requirements to restraining an individual to prevent some future violence with a known specific potential victim (eg. restraining order, arrest) are lower than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.
The rights of a child to be abused and the rights of a parent to not have their child be taken away are both very important. It’s my subjective impression that the “child abused” case is much more common than the “child taken away where no abuse occurred” case. I see no reason that our laws should be biased in favor of letting that case occur.
There already exists mechanisms to remove people from opportunity to do harm without due process if there is overwhelming, immediate risk. It's very tightly controlled and very temporary. The same could be applied here.
If a child has been living with a mother that (apparently) has 18 drinks a day (getting to 18 drinks a day while still being a functional human is not something you get to overnight, it's a long process) without obviously suffering, this is cause for grave concern, it is a significant risk, but it's not an immediate risk. In this context it's also important to keep in mind that removing a child is possibly the correct answer in many cases, but it hurts the child 100% of the time. That hurt must be less, by a very significant margin, than the hurt of staying put.
>The argument isn't a binary choice between trusting the mother or not, it's to raise the bar for evidence significantly - which is what I take don't automatically discount the mother" to mean.
We could start by adding Fathers back into the equation, and not automatically assuming that a child is in danger if they're not in their Mothers' sphere.
I think this is the worst thing that governments have done for families: the idea that a single-parent (Primarily the Mother) family is anything less than ideal for the children needs to attain mainstream acceptance. Dads need to stay, and Mothers need to move over and make way for it.
>According to the report, a married father spends on average 6.5 hours a week taking part in primary child care activities with his children. The married mother spends on average 12.9 hours. Since two-income households are now the norm, not the exception, the above information indicates that not only are mothers working, but they are also doing twice as much child care as fathers.
Society has to make it okay for Fathers to play this role. Right now, it is "expected" that Mothers are the primary caregivers - this is entirely cultural, and must change.
Fathers stepping in is one way it'll change. Mothers stepping out is another. To find the balance we have to make room for it.
I think there is definitely a proclivity towards staying at home, as a cultural norm, while sending ones partner off to work - and I don't think this is really balanced, no. The idea that there is one parent that is more 'ideal at the home' than the other is what needs to change.
It is certainly not "entirely cultural". We are still part of the animal kingdom. There is actual biology and evolution at play. Ignoring that is pseudoscience.
Zero. If the choices are to leave a child in a bad situation vs. destroying a family for no reason, I would err on leaving a child in a bad situation. Neither option is great, of course, but in the absence of perfection...
Well perfection at predicting the future is impossible. While I don't know what level would be acceptable, your option of never removing a child to safety doesn't seem right either.
Even in other applications, you wouldn't just come up with an acceptable false-positive rate. You'd consider that as part of a larger process.
How often do you test? What other tests are available? What's the cost/benefit tradeoffs?
So for example in some medical tests they tell people of certain ages to just come in for tests. They review and change that age based on evidence. Some tests may give borderline results so people get asked to come back sooner than average if they only just pass. Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.
False-positive rates (of the multiple different tests available) are only one factor.
I would guess almost all of these things are already done in the current case under discussion, e.g. as mentioned before one case involved accusations from a husband. Now maybe that's just two false signals that happen to agree, but already you're talking about two false-positive rates you need to consider. Judges and social workers are probably making snap decisions based on gut instinct and rules of thumb as well that factor in. Presumably a case needs to be pretty serious before removal is even considered.
From just reading a libertarian blog that focusses on goverment intrusion into child-rearing though, you may think people are having their hair snipped randomly in the street and finding their children gone when they get home. A false-positive for that hypothetical case would obviously need to be much, much lower to be acceptable than in tests used as part of a bigger process.
>How often do you test? What other tests are available? What's the cost/benefit tradeoffs?
I don't disagree wit you, but none of what you say gets around the fact that once you start removing children from the custody of their parents, a non-zero FA rate sets in.
>Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.
Case in point: this is also a signal-detection problem.
You can certainly try to build a more sensitive detector, but the infamous tradeoff doesn't magically go away.
As such, you have to have at least some idea of what kinds of FA-odds you're wiling to tolerate, else you're just flying blind.
And I must insist on this point: the universe doesn't care how disturbing one finds the Hit/FA trade-off. It's still there, even if one doesn't want to look at it.
If the test was a coin flip then the result coveys no information. That means the only information to base the decision on was the husband’s accusation and the wife’s counter. What should be done in that situation?
Did anyone else think this article is saying that hair testing is "junk science"?
That's not what the report [1] actually says. The independent review actually found specific flaws in the way the Motherisk laboratory was performing these tests, such as failure to wash hair samples, non standard hair lengths, misinterpretation of test results, failure to communicate the limits of the tests, and the lack of proper forensic procedures such as adequate records, oversight, and chain of custody.
To a lay person in a situation like this, how does the distinction you make (between bad science and an incompetent application) imply an actual difference? Parents got stripped of their children because of some "scientific" process that the court relied upon.
From a systemic perspective, we can't correct for bad science until better science disproves it and becomes common enough knowledge. Unless you're both a parent and a cutting edge scientist in the field being employed against you, this is true at an individual level too. Incompetent application can, with transparent processes, be investigated by the defending party/parent/lawyer and be argued against. Or if the investigation can't be completed until after the children have been seized, corrections can be made and damages can be pursued.
Parent's had their children wrongly taken away from them. Depending on the age of the children, even if they're returned, that trauma will have a lifetime affect on them.
Who cares what those people think about "hair testing".
I don't know if that's what OP is saying, but it seems fair to say that it's at least enough bullshit that it should probably never be used as evidentiary.
The states who pioneered its adoption (New York and Maryland) have both abandoned it for being costly and ineffective. The FBI has abandoned comparative bullet lead analysis for similar reasons[1]. The National Academy of Sciences found the tests to be "full of holes", and that not enough study was being done to ensure its reliability, which was a finding that the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under Obama concurred with.
The general consensus now seems to be this[2]:
> An understanding of the metallurgical principles operative in the melting/casting process as well as the data acquired for this study, indicate that any forensic conclusions which associate unknown bullets with the “same source”, and/or “same box” should fail most or all Daubert criteria.
>Further criticism came from the 2009 NAS report on the current state of various forensic fields in the United States. The report's section on firearm examination focused on the lack of defined requirements that are necessary in order to determine "matches" between known and unknown striations. The NAS stated that, "sufficient studies have not been done to understand the reliability and repeatability of the methods."[23]:154 Without defined procedures on what is and what isn't considered "sufficient agreement" the report states that forensic firearm examination contains fundamental problems that need to be addressed by the forensic community through a set of repeatable scientific studies that outline standard operating procedures that should be adopted by all firearm examiners.[23]:155 Another report issued in 2016 by the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology confirmed the NAS's findings, finding only one appropriately designed study that examined the rate of false positives and reliability amongst firearm examiners.[40]
Someone can do junk science irrespective of the field and it has no bearing on the field. There's junk science dna testing. Junk science physics. Everything and anything can be junk science if you apply yourself and try real hard.
Hair analysis has been proven to be largely junk science.
That's a separate issue because Hair analysis is not inherently worthless. It was just assumed to be vastly more accurate than it actually was.
You can for example tell from a hair sample is not from the same person. IE blond hair vs black hair. You can't do the reverse and tell it is from the same person without DNA testing.
This isn't that kind of hair analysis - determining which person a hair found at the scene is from. This is looking for markers of drug and alcohol use in hair samples from a known person.
That was my point, but rereading my comment it really did not come across.
Basically, a different thing had been discredited in the past also involving testing hair. Which IMO is why people though testing hair was junk science vs. the lab not doing their job properly.
That said, I also think testing hair for drugs is so inaccurate to basically be worthless.
There is one simple technique that would allow nearly any forensic analysis technique to be assessed. It would detect the difference between good science (DNA) and junk science (forensic hair matches). It would work down to the level of the individual laboratory (as in this example) or individual laboratory researcher (Annie Dookhan). And it would only cost 10% extra.
That technique is blind testing with published results. 10% of all submissions to the testing lab would be test samples -- a mix of a bunch of known negative samples (from individuals completely unrelated to the crime in question) and a few known positive samples (perhaps from someone already convicted with overwhelming evidence). The lab would not be told which samples were tests and which were "real", and the test samples would be evenly distributed (10% of the submissions from each department; 10% of the "rush" submissions, etc.). Finally, the results reported on these test samples would be made publicly available.
Although this simple, effective, and cheap method would completely transform forensic practice, it will not be implemented. The reason is incentives. The parties involved in forensics are the police or prosecutors and the labs. Both have an incentive to identify the guilty. The accused have a countervailing interest (in correctly determining innocence), but they are not part of the transaction, so their interests are not represented. In fact, the entire system is incented to find people guilty, not to correctly assess people's guilt. So most in the system are actually DISincented to discover and debunk junk science.
>That technique is blind testing with published results. 10% of all submissions to the testing lab would be test samples -- a mix of a bunch of known negative samples (from individuals completely unrelated to the crime in question) and a few known positive samples (perhaps from someone already convicted with overwhelming evidence). The lab would not be told which samples were tests and which were "real", and the test samples would be evenly distributed (10% of the submissions from each department; 10% of the "rush" submissions, etc.). Finally, the results reported on these test samples would be made publicly available.
And not only would it let you weed out the pseudoscience but it would let you weed out the labs that are practicing the real science well from the ones that are sloppy (which in my opinion is an equally large problem).
That, and the labs should not be a branch of law enforcement or prosecutors' offices. They should be more like a weights and measures department, and be at the service of both prosecutors and defendants.
These labs are private businesses. Prosecutors and police can choose which ones to use and they will use, and they'll likely make that choice based on who gives them the results they want rather than the results that are accurate.
So there is incentive for corruption with both public and private labs. The solution will require something far more drastic, which I'm not sure the population is willing to support given how many people don't like to use science when it disagrees with their emotional stances. As long as the population wants tough on crime stances, and are willing to dehumanize anyone charged (much less wrongly convicted), then the system is giving them what they want. So how can we change the voters so that they demand a more just legal system?
The Massachusetts state crime lab is an actual madhouse, and the state government is shockingly corrupt. The following article is one of the more detailed descriptions of how the lab scandals were managed
Shocking to the blind and deaf maybe. If it's under the executive branch it's a dumping ground for political appointees. That's just how it works in MA. More law, more bureaucracy to enforce it, more dumping, more bad outcomes, more laws, more bureaucracy...
I've lived in three other states and none of them were as bad.
that's largely not what motivates law enforcement's choice (prosecutors aren't generally the ones choosing the testing laboratory; it isn't what motivates them, either); keep in mind that contracts have to go through the accounting/legal department.
they care about cost, and turn around time. availability to answer their questions, and some level of treating them with basic respect are up there, too (by "basic respect" i mean avoiding things like "i don't have to explain shit to you, you're a dumb cop and i'm the fancy scientist").
if you're regularly telling the DREs that they're wrong, you're going to have some arguing/explaining to do, but it is unlikely to lose you the contract.
the labs that go rogue usually do it for stranger self-motivated reasons than "gotta give the cops the exact results they want"
Yes, these ones are, but the ones that are part of law enforcement offices (particularly, the FBI’s lab) have been even more notorious problems (like the complete junk science of hair comparison) driven by a clear conflict of interest.
I think that secret shopping is a great idea for forensics, but I worry that in areas of criminality, just pushing fake requests over to forensics won't work unless it's accompanied by the usual pleas from the cops and DAs actively working the cases to which those data are associated.
Similarly, a rush order is a rush order, but a rush order with a group of people carping on how it's a rush order tends to get more rushed. When the queues are effectively bottomless, stamping 'rush' on an order without the associated pressure seems likely to relegate its status to regular.
Something could trivially be done to the same effect. A private party, say an investigative journalist, could submit a number of samples and report on the results (perhaps that happened in this case and that's why we know about it?). But to keep costs under control, instead of testing like this on every lab on a regular basis, that private party could randomly select labs for testing. While they're at it, they'd probably prefer to select labs with complaints, rather than a random sample. And at that point, you have something resembling the system we currently operate under, which has--to be fair--been completely successful (if a bit later than ideal) in identifying this problem lab. But as taxpayers, is it worth instituting a new regulated program over this essentially free solution?
Besides, this seems like a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Successfully identifying a problem lab--albeit tardily--is a signal the system is working; not that it needs a complete overhaul. Rather consider what completely unrelated problems would benefit from regulatory oversight at a higher return on investment. Focus on those, not on a solved problem.
You're assuming there aren't any other problem labs that haven't or won't be discovered. How expensive are these tests? How much of the police's budget is it? Surely you know these things if you are talking return on investment, because you must know these things to actually know what your return on investment is.
25 years is a long time to be improperly ripping apart families. Is there a point at which it becomes a problem? Death tardily solves all your problems after only 80 years, so I assume somewhere between 25 and 80.
I'm not saying it isn't a problem, only that we need to pick and choose where our dollars go. Is this really a better investment than, say, increased funding for public broadcast programming that might discover this kind of thing in a less directed way? That way you don't end up with yet another obsolete program hanging around costing money when this problem is no longer relevant.
And I think the onus is on the suggester to provide data to prove ROI.
It is different in Canada. These kinds of things will be fixed because the SCC will rule that the laws enabling it are without force and the government will get a year to fix it. It
It is really sad that it took over 30 years and the person is still working, albeit in Israel. But wouldn't the Evidence Act(provincial and federal) set the standards that allowed this?
The Evidence Act can further restrain the court but in a scenario that is ambiguous the court will rely on case law (e.g. law the court itself made up based on prior decisions). Should parliament disagree with the decisions of the court they may amend the law to force a change in future trials.
We're used to hearing about the supreme court restraining the actions of parliament by declaring something unconstitutional but in actuality the parliament exercises far more control over the court than vice versa. Even in the case of the court declaring something unconstitutional parliament could overrule them by changing the constitution itself (although that is extremely unlikely given the political climate).
accredited labs already have to do some of that. the organizations chosen (college of american pathologists, for example) to administer the tests are fucking garbage.
so it's a bit harder to get this kind of validation going than just deciding to test the labs.
> ...a mix of a bunch of known negative samples (from individuals completely unrelated to the crime in question)
haaah. you have no idea how many people are on something. getting known blank samples is nontrivial.
> Although this simple, effective, and cheap method would completely transform forensic practice, it will not be implemented. The reason is incentives. The parties involved in forensics are the police or prosecutors and the labs. Both have an incentive to identify the guilty.
there are independent labs that work for prosecution, defense, civil cases, etc etc every form of case you can imagine, and basically throw away all case information for the middle part of the testing process, so the folks who could hypothetically swing things one way or the other don't even know which way they'd be throwing cases if they tampered with it.
Feynman gave a talk once which included a by-the-way remark like "this is not a scientific age". It stuck in my mind because of course that wasn't the common view of the 1950s or 60s when he said it. The obvious reason to say it is that some people still consume astrology, etc. But I came to realize that this is the sort of non-scientific-ageness that stands out. About all sorts of important things in daily life we don't collectively act as if we're curious about the truth and ready to do what it takes to learn it. If this were a scientific age then not routinely checking practices like this would stand out. Everyone would wonder if they had something to hide.
Programming was less routinely scientific like that in my own experience earlier in my career when automated testing was less common.
I think the Feynman talk was the one that turned into his posthumous book The meaning of it all, though I'm not sure.
Even if true, the lone fact that a person had abused a substance (or not abused but used - taking a substance without a prescription doesn't imply abusing, there actually are some people capable of conscious and constructive substance usage) means nothing and should never be used against the person in any way. Separating families for just this alone is ridiculous. You still are to prove that the person has developed actual addiction/habit, aggressive behavior and really harms anyone but him/herself in any way (more than the sanctions will harm them).
I don't mean it actually works this way (one actually has to prove the problem is real, serious and actually affects the children to remove them), I mean it should work this way (I've taken a look at the video, the first ⅓ of it)
There's also shaken baby syndrome that has come under scrutiny recently:
> “Our main finding is that there’s very low-quality scientific evidence for the claim,” says Niels Lynöe, a specialist in general medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and leader of the team, whose report was published last month. “You can’t use these studies to say that whenever you see these changes in the infant brain, the infant has been shaken – it’s not possible according to current knowledge.”
The "family court" system in Ontario is provided by Social Justice Tribunals Ontario, a system of kangaroo courts set up to handle all the icky things Ontarians would rather not think about deserving a fair trial.
Family courts have different, less stringent standards than other parts of the legal system, even less than the civil part, which is why people could call them kangaroo courts.
For example, you could appeal a traffic ticket decision, but appealing a family court decision could be fairly difficult to impossible task in some jurisdictions.
"As you will learn from reading our interviews, in most states a "temporary" decision made at a 10-minute hearing is generally unappealable and, from a practical point of view, permanent. How reliable is the information that a judge receives? Judge Duncan headlines one section "Lies Usually Go Unpunished."
i'm more involved in forensics than, uh, apparently the rest of you.
i suggest that when thinking about the various forensic "sciences", a good way to think about their reliability is "was this concocted for purely legal reasons, or is this a bunch of normal scientific/medical techniques bent to forensic purposes?" that will quickly let you divide things up into "bullshit" and "not bullshit".
bite marks, tool marks, firearm testing? all concocted to generate convictions; bullshit. nobody uses any of those things for anything except legal cases.
forensic toxicology, drug chemistry, dna? normal science bent to forensic purposes; not bullshit. those were all developed elsewhere, by scientists doing real science, and then later applied to legal cases.
can the folks doing the testing go bad? yes. the best and only way to address that is for the defense in cases to bring in their own independent experts, and do their own testing if enough sample remains.
at least in the US, the best way to make that happen is to fund public defenders better, which solves all sorts of other problems, too.
Just as an FYI, Motherisk is a much larger program than just it's drug testing lab (which is closed as of 2015). It's primary purpose is teratogen (study of abnormalities of physiological development) information service providing up-to-date information about the risk and safety of medications and other exposures during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
Translation: Info distribution on the pharmacology of medications on kids. I.e. is it safe to take Advil while breastfeeding? This kind of information changes as the latest studies are done and motherisk has people take studies and translate them to opinions mothers can use.
I've personally used their info and it's been very useful. Their drug testing lab scandal is a travesty and should be condemned, but other offerings of motherisk are scientifically sound. Did you know cough syrup for children is ineffective and shouldn't be given? It's a new thing apparently.
Off-Topic: Why the hell motherisk decided to run a drug testing lab is beyond me. It has nothing to do with its original MO.
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[ 1977 ms ] story [ 2798 ms ] threadProbably you will need some system similar to physics where you can claim something is true untill you have a big confidence in your experiments and the experiments are replicated.
Unfortunately, the people passing judgment (judges, lawyers, juries) are generally not scientists, and therefore are equally likely to believe the guy with the paedo-dowser as the next guy.
Unreliable witnesses are as old as the justice system - “science” gives them a veneer of respectability now, just as it has in the past.
I see two problems, neither of which have an easy solution:
1) scientific literacy is dire, and worsening. Education helps, but when anti-science sentiment runs rife in popular culture and media, as it does now, education is met with resistance. I have been reduced to a gibbering wreck trying to explain to otherwise intelligent people that science isn’t “just an opinion”, and that astrology and astronomy aren’t “just different, equally valid opinions”.
2) the concept of the jury trial is broken. It used to be that you would be tried by your peers - people who likely knew you, had a similar background to you, could empathise and make judgments based on a clear understanding of your world. Now, you’re tried by strangers who have usually been carefully selected to be as hostile as possible without an outright admission of bias. I think there’s a happy medium somewhere between the two, as there are obviously biases in both cases.
I think the problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
I think there's probably an argument to be made about there being benefits to smaller communities, but that argument isn't supported by legal tradition surrounding the word "peer".
A short sarcastic laughter would probably have worked better. If people sense their status is lowering because they believe in this "equally valid opinions" nonsense, they will have a strong incentive to update their belief.
Of course, many will be offended, in which case I recommend turning the sarcastic laugh into a benevolent, condescending smile, with perhaps an appeal to their intelligence to soften the blow. Ideally though, you should spin it as if you were ridiculing a third party. This lets them avoid direct confrontation if they so chose, and you still get to make your point.
In any case, they cannot be taught as long as they subscribe to epistemic relativism. They first have to get rid of it, somehow. Doesn't matter if it's for the wrong reasons. Only then can they be taught how to properly change their mind.
Acting condescendingly will only serve to make people think you are a condescending git.
Then again, the best way to do it is to act as if you were ridiculing a third party. If they get offended, try not to notice, and direct your condescension at those other people you're pretending they're talking about. Give them a way to save face.
Whatever the means, the idea is to stress that epistemic relativism is not socially acceptable. Make them feel that thinking such thoughts has consequences.
> Make them feel that thinking such thoughts has consequences.
I do not condone actually carrying out dire consequences, we've had enough dictatorships to show us how this plays out. I'm talking about manipulating people. A little. Because nothing more innocuous that I know of will do.
So some rules must be created for this experts, what tools they use, what software ...
My scenario would involve some startup creating some software that would analyze a brain scan(or worse analyze your internet activity) then it will answer for questions like this"Does this person has potential for being a pedophile? The answer would be something vague like "Strong potential"/ "weak potential" , I chose this example because I noticed that when children are involved you get much more irrational laws and the justice is applyed much stronger with less evidence
Polygraph is pretty much that.
But what I got out of reading about these issues too, a lot of forensic science is not science and has its own community different from academic community.
They would've known their tests were being used in a court of law. They could've stopped this and they didn't. I hope they face consequences.
Though the blogger doesn't actually say believe the parents, they say believe the mother (well, they say "don't automatically discount the mother" which in context appears to be a weaselly way of saying the same thing) which is a bit more specific. One of the cases seems to involve an accusation from a husband, that the test backed up. So even if the lab was tossing coins to come up with their results, we also have to assume a husband and father lied about his child's mother's behaviour.
Given that we’re talking about a clearly contentious divorce, it’s sadly not entirely unjustified to assume this might happen.
Best case scenario the couple wasn't married very long and doesn't have much in the way of joint possessions and no kids and they both work so you don't have alimony concerns you still need to decide who has to move out.
This should be treated like a criminal matter, with the same standards of evidence. If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt. Or at the very least, the parents in question should have a court appointed defence lawyer.
If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt.
The difference is that in one scenario it’s about punishing something that happened and is done and in the other it’s to prevent ongoing/future harm. If you’ve seen some of the things parents are willing to do to their own kids, you would see why it’s not that simple.
Letting a criminal go free (think serial-murderer, rapist) is just as valid an argument for future harm.
I don't see why you treat these 2 cases differently.
The rights of a child to be abused and the rights of a parent to not have their child be taken away are both very important. It’s my subjective impression that the “child abused” case is much more common than the “child taken away where no abuse occurred” case. I see no reason that our laws should be biased in favor of letting that case occur.
If a child has been living with a mother that (apparently) has 18 drinks a day (getting to 18 drinks a day while still being a functional human is not something you get to overnight, it's a long process) without obviously suffering, this is cause for grave concern, it is a significant risk, but it's not an immediate risk. In this context it's also important to keep in mind that removing a child is possibly the correct answer in many cases, but it hurts the child 100% of the time. That hurt must be less, by a very significant margin, than the hurt of staying put.
We could start by adding Fathers back into the equation, and not automatically assuming that a child is in danger if they're not in their Mothers' sphere.
I think this is the worst thing that governments have done for families: the idea that a single-parent (Primarily the Mother) family is anything less than ideal for the children needs to attain mainstream acceptance. Dads need to stay, and Mothers need to move over and make way for it.
>According to the report, a married father spends on average 6.5 hours a week taking part in primary child care activities with his children. The married mother spends on average 12.9 hours. Since two-income households are now the norm, not the exception, the above information indicates that not only are mothers working, but they are also doing twice as much child care as fathers.
Fathers stepping in is one way it'll change. Mothers stepping out is another. To find the balance we have to make room for it.
As such, there is necessarily a tradeoff between the rate of hits (correctly identifying "bad" parents) and false-alarms.
The question then becomes: what's an acceptable false-positive rate?
Then you cannot, under any circumstances, remove a child from his or her parents.
I mean this in the strictest, most mathematical sense.
Are you sure that's what you want?
Even in other applications, you wouldn't just come up with an acceptable false-positive rate. You'd consider that as part of a larger process.
How often do you test? What other tests are available? What's the cost/benefit tradeoffs?
So for example in some medical tests they tell people of certain ages to just come in for tests. They review and change that age based on evidence. Some tests may give borderline results so people get asked to come back sooner than average if they only just pass. Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.
False-positive rates (of the multiple different tests available) are only one factor.
I would guess almost all of these things are already done in the current case under discussion, e.g. as mentioned before one case involved accusations from a husband. Now maybe that's just two false signals that happen to agree, but already you're talking about two false-positive rates you need to consider. Judges and social workers are probably making snap decisions based on gut instinct and rules of thumb as well that factor in. Presumably a case needs to be pretty serious before removal is even considered.
From just reading a libertarian blog that focusses on goverment intrusion into child-rearing though, you may think people are having their hair snipped randomly in the street and finding their children gone when they get home. A false-positive for that hypothetical case would obviously need to be much, much lower to be acceptable than in tests used as part of a bigger process.
I don't disagree wit you, but none of what you say gets around the fact that once you start removing children from the custody of their parents, a non-zero FA rate sets in.
>Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.
Case in point: this is also a signal-detection problem. You can certainly try to build a more sensitive detector, but the infamous tradeoff doesn't magically go away.
As such, you have to have at least some idea of what kinds of FA-odds you're wiling to tolerate, else you're just flying blind.
And I must insist on this point: the universe doesn't care how disturbing one finds the Hit/FA trade-off. It's still there, even if one doesn't want to look at it.
That's not what the report [1] actually says. The independent review actually found specific flaws in the way the Motherisk laboratory was performing these tests, such as failure to wash hair samples, non standard hair lengths, misinterpretation of test results, failure to communicate the limits of the tests, and the lack of proper forensic procedures such as adequate records, oversight, and chain of custody.
1: https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs...
Who cares what those people think about "hair testing".
The former can be debunked on a case by case basis. The latter needs to be categorically banned from judicial proceedings.
The states who pioneered its adoption (New York and Maryland) have both abandoned it for being costly and ineffective. The FBI has abandoned comparative bullet lead analysis for similar reasons[1]. The National Academy of Sciences found the tests to be "full of holes", and that not enough study was being done to ensure its reliability, which was a finding that the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under Obama concurred with.
The general consensus now seems to be this[2]:
> An understanding of the metallurgical principles operative in the melting/casting process as well as the data acquired for this study, indicate that any forensic conclusions which associate unknown bullets with the “same source”, and/or “same box” should fail most or all Daubert criteria.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037907380...
Doesn't this also apply to eyewitness testimony, if not many other forms of evidence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_firearm_examination
>Further criticism came from the 2009 NAS report on the current state of various forensic fields in the United States. The report's section on firearm examination focused on the lack of defined requirements that are necessary in order to determine "matches" between known and unknown striations. The NAS stated that, "sufficient studies have not been done to understand the reliability and repeatability of the methods."[23]:154 Without defined procedures on what is and what isn't considered "sufficient agreement" the report states that forensic firearm examination contains fundamental problems that need to be addressed by the forensic community through a set of repeatable scientific studies that outline standard operating procedures that should be adopted by all firearm examiners.[23]:155 Another report issued in 2016 by the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology confirmed the NAS's findings, finding only one appropriately designed study that examined the rate of false positives and reliability amongst firearm examiners.[40]
That's a separate issue because Hair analysis is not inherently worthless. It was just assumed to be vastly more accurate than it actually was.
You can for example tell from a hair sample is not from the same person. IE blond hair vs black hair. You can't do the reverse and tell it is from the same person without DNA testing.
Basically, a different thing had been discredited in the past also involving testing hair. Which IMO is why people though testing hair was junk science vs. the lab not doing their job properly.
That said, I also think testing hair for drugs is so inaccurate to basically be worthless.
John Oliver did a special about forensic science. The skit at the end is hilarious.
That technique is blind testing with published results. 10% of all submissions to the testing lab would be test samples -- a mix of a bunch of known negative samples (from individuals completely unrelated to the crime in question) and a few known positive samples (perhaps from someone already convicted with overwhelming evidence). The lab would not be told which samples were tests and which were "real", and the test samples would be evenly distributed (10% of the submissions from each department; 10% of the "rush" submissions, etc.). Finally, the results reported on these test samples would be made publicly available.
Although this simple, effective, and cheap method would completely transform forensic practice, it will not be implemented. The reason is incentives. The parties involved in forensics are the police or prosecutors and the labs. Both have an incentive to identify the guilty. The accused have a countervailing interest (in correctly determining innocence), but they are not part of the transaction, so their interests are not represented. In fact, the entire system is incented to find people guilty, not to correctly assess people's guilt. So most in the system are actually DISincented to discover and debunk junk science.
And not only would it let you weed out the pseudoscience but it would let you weed out the labs that are practicing the real science well from the ones that are sloppy (which in my opinion is an equally large problem).
It is a department of the state police, and, obviously enough, is structurally incentivized to make state police performance look good.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/did-falsified-drug...
Shocking to the blind and deaf maybe. If it's under the executive branch it's a dumping ground for political appointees. That's just how it works in MA. More law, more bureaucracy to enforce it, more dumping, more bad outcomes, more laws, more bureaucracy...
I've lived in three other states and none of them were as bad.
they care about cost, and turn around time. availability to answer their questions, and some level of treating them with basic respect are up there, too (by "basic respect" i mean avoiding things like "i don't have to explain shit to you, you're a dumb cop and i'm the fancy scientist").
if you're regularly telling the DREs that they're wrong, you're going to have some arguing/explaining to do, but it is unlikely to lose you the contract.
the labs that go rogue usually do it for stranger self-motivated reasons than "gotta give the cops the exact results they want"
Yes, these ones are, but the ones that are part of law enforcement offices (particularly, the FBI’s lab) have been even more notorious problems (like the complete junk science of hair comparison) driven by a clear conflict of interest.
Similarly, a rush order is a rush order, but a rush order with a group of people carping on how it's a rush order tends to get more rushed. When the queues are effectively bottomless, stamping 'rush' on an order without the associated pressure seems likely to relegate its status to regular.
Besides, this seems like a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Successfully identifying a problem lab--albeit tardily--is a signal the system is working; not that it needs a complete overhaul. Rather consider what completely unrelated problems would benefit from regulatory oversight at a higher return on investment. Focus on those, not on a solved problem.
25 years is a long time to be improperly ripping apart families. Is there a point at which it becomes a problem? Death tardily solves all your problems after only 80 years, so I assume somewhere between 25 and 80.
And I think the onus is on the suggester to provide data to prove ROI.
We're used to hearing about the supreme court restraining the actions of parliament by declaring something unconstitutional but in actuality the parliament exercises far more control over the court than vice versa. Even in the case of the court declaring something unconstitutional parliament could overrule them by changing the constitution itself (although that is extremely unlikely given the political climate).
the private labs, sure, you could spike (or not) some blood samples and pay for them to be tested.
so it's a bit harder to get this kind of validation going than just deciding to test the labs.
> ...a mix of a bunch of known negative samples (from individuals completely unrelated to the crime in question)
haaah. you have no idea how many people are on something. getting known blank samples is nontrivial.
> Although this simple, effective, and cheap method would completely transform forensic practice, it will not be implemented. The reason is incentives. The parties involved in forensics are the police or prosecutors and the labs. Both have an incentive to identify the guilty.
there are independent labs that work for prosecution, defense, civil cases, etc etc every form of case you can imagine, and basically throw away all case information for the middle part of the testing process, so the folks who could hypothetically swing things one way or the other don't even know which way they'd be throwing cases if they tampered with it.
Programming was less routinely scientific like that in my own experience earlier in my career when automated testing was less common.
I think the Feynman talk was the one that turned into his posthumous book The meaning of it all, though I'm not sure.
But, yes, without actually proving that there was drug abuse, those children should not have been removed.
Nope.
If you get a minute, I would watch this video on child protective services:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETfgoSmTHI
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/07/white-house-report-concl...
> “Our main finding is that there’s very low-quality scientific evidence for the claim,” says Niels Lynöe, a specialist in general medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and leader of the team, whose report was published last month. “You can’t use these studies to say that whenever you see these changes in the infant brain, the infant has been shaken – it’s not possible according to current knowledge.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230994-100-evidence...
For example, you could appeal a traffic ticket decision, but appealing a family court decision could be fairly difficult to impossible task in some jurisdictions.
"As you will learn from reading our interviews, in most states a "temporary" decision made at a 10-minute hearing is generally unappealable and, from a practical point of view, permanent. How reliable is the information that a judge receives? Judge Duncan headlines one section "Lies Usually Go Unpunished."
http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Litigation
i suggest that when thinking about the various forensic "sciences", a good way to think about their reliability is "was this concocted for purely legal reasons, or is this a bunch of normal scientific/medical techniques bent to forensic purposes?" that will quickly let you divide things up into "bullshit" and "not bullshit".
bite marks, tool marks, firearm testing? all concocted to generate convictions; bullshit. nobody uses any of those things for anything except legal cases.
forensic toxicology, drug chemistry, dna? normal science bent to forensic purposes; not bullshit. those were all developed elsewhere, by scientists doing real science, and then later applied to legal cases.
can the folks doing the testing go bad? yes. the best and only way to address that is for the defense in cases to bring in their own independent experts, and do their own testing if enough sample remains.
at least in the US, the best way to make that happen is to fund public defenders better, which solves all sorts of other problems, too.
Translation: Info distribution on the pharmacology of medications on kids. I.e. is it safe to take Advil while breastfeeding? This kind of information changes as the latest studies are done and motherisk has people take studies and translate them to opinions mothers can use.
I've personally used their info and it's been very useful. Their drug testing lab scandal is a travesty and should be condemned, but other offerings of motherisk are scientifically sound. Did you know cough syrup for children is ineffective and shouldn't be given? It's a new thing apparently.
Off-Topic: Why the hell motherisk decided to run a drug testing lab is beyond me. It has nothing to do with its original MO.