[oldcynic]

Do not underestimate the ability of juries to be swayed by impressive sounding claims. Nor their ability to be swayed, and dismiss clear mitigations, by one dominant or eloquent individual.

"Our facial recognition has over 90% accuracy" from the prosecution's expert can easily become "clearly guilty" in the jury room.

[coaxial]

> 90% accuracy

I found this article helpful to understand why 90% accurate isn't as good as it sounds: https://www.badscience.net/2009/02/datamining-would-be-lovel...

He goes I to more detail in his book, bad science with a more detailed explanation. It fools everyone because it is counterintuitive.

[DanBC]

A good book on this is Reckoning With Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer, who uses several examples from healthcare.

Often these numbers are given as percentages, and he says that most people (even the doctors and nurses administering the tests) don't really understand them, and that we should use natural numbers (as Ben Goldacre does in the example you provide).

He uses examples from cancer screening and HIV testing.

[delinka]

Please be sure to attend every jury trial for criminal cases and communicate this to the jury.

[oldcynic]

Snark aside, it's important. There probably should be someone adequately numerate on every jury.

Most juries will have around half, perhaps more, who've done nothing at all mathematical since school 10-45 years previously and think percentages are in the difficult part of maths (ie it's more than basic arithmetic). HN is going to be very unrepresentative for numeracy. :)

You want them to achieve "beyond reasonable doubt" conclusions from probabilities, percentages, false positive rates and perhaps standard deviations, well you may as well be making your case in French or Ancient Greek that they can pick a few part-understood bits from.

Or hope for an eloquent statistician on the jury!

[darpa_escapee]

> Do not underestimate the ability of juries to be swayed by impressive sounding claims. Nor their ability to be swayed, and dismiss clear mitigations, by one dominant or eloquent individual.

This. You will have a hard time contending with pretty graphs, confusing numbers and a guy with an impressive title/badge/degree explaining why you're guilty.