[throw0101d]

See also:

> The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the "Woman Without a Face", was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The six murders among these included that of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, in Heilbronn, Germany on 25 April 2007.

> The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries. In late March 2009, investigators concluded that there was no "phantom criminal", and the DNA had already been present on the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples; it belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

[bradyd]

There was also the case where a DNA test of a woman's children showed that they did not share any of her DNA. Social Services was threatening to take them away from her. When she had another child, the court ordered an officer to be present during the birth and collect DNA from both of them at that time. Even still the DNA "proved" she was not the mother. It was only after another similar case was discovered that they were able to determine that she was a chimera, basically that she was her own twin, and had two different DNA strands.

https://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/shes-twin/story?id=2315693

[robocat]

  Lydia Fairchild was told that her two children were not a genetic match with her and that therefore, biologically, she could not be their mother. The state accused Fairchild of fraud and filed a lawsuit against her. Researchers later determined that the genetic mismatch was due to chimerism.

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/case-lydia-fairchild-and-her-ch...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)

[KMag]

> There was also the case where a DNA test of a woman's children showed that they did not share any of her DNA.

The DNA information did show relation, but suggested that she was the aunt rather than the mother of the children. In some sense, due to mosaicism, the mother was her own sister. One "sister" showed up in the cheek swabs, and the other "sister" produced the eggs.

[jansan]

"Trust the science" always must be taken with a grain of salt.

[jerf]

This is another example of the "probability noise floor" I mentioned yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39112610

You can't be one-in-a-trillion confident about any particular DNA result, even if that's what the nominal probability from the DNA analysis itself seems to say, because it is objectively observable that there are plenty of other sources of errors of all sorts. You can only get down to that "noise floor" of probabilities. This can still be a very useful result, but it's important to not let it be any more important that it deserves.

Even if you have a magic machine that you can point at someone and it goes "boop" if they are guilty, you still must consider the probability that someone faked the "boop", or has swapped in a different shell that looks the same but makes the same "boop" when someone remotely triggers it or that the speaker was broken so even though the magic machine tried to "boop" nobody could hear it. All of these are quite realistic and of a much higher probability than the magic machine existing in the first place.

(This is also arguably the root problem with the still-popular "The computer said it so it must be true". Even if you assume the computer really is 100% accurate, which itself is a transparently false proposition when examined in daylight, there's still plenty of other reasons why one should not give the computer too much confidence.)

[BobaFloutist]

It's almost a corollary to how a lot of magic tricks work. Sure, you probably could sneak a card from one place to another, but why not just have a second card?

You could predict someone's behavior, but why not simply hedge against every possibility?

Magic does involve a good amount of sleight of hand, but it mostly relies on getting people to accept flawed premises. The most essential part of any given trick is the bit where you tell them what's going to happen: even as they reject it and try to bring skepticism to bear, they're often working off of (carefully placed) incorrect assumptions.

[looofooo0]

One saterical German book about about a communist cangoroo introduced the idea of a dirty bomb. Basically you collect as many hair, skin cells and other human remains of as many humans as you can find. And at the end of your crime you let it explode.

[jacquesm]

It depends on the strength of the science and this is a real problem with unsettled science: it is routinely used to sell pipe dreams and silver bullets to officials without further qualification or caveats. That's why you see AI used in law enforcement right now when it really isn't even close to reliable enough to be used in such a potentially life changing setting.

[SilasX]

I'd say it should be more like, "Trust the science, while also being aware of what model and assumptions drive the conclusion, and which inference the science is supporting vs agnostic on." Doesn't fit as well on a t-shirt though.

[graemep]

I think part of the problem is that people in general have a very poor understanding of what science is, or how to evaluate evidence, so they regard it as received wisdom, handed down by a special caste, and not to be questioned.

So they trust experts without even knowing what questions to ask, or how to assess evidence, or evaluate certainty, or when they should get more opinions.

Not unlike the Post Office convictions. Then there were the Roy Meadows convictions. Many others, and I am sure many other people who have not been able to prove their innocence.

[jMyles]

"Trust the science", a refrain we of course heard over and over again used to justify questionable (and often coincidentally highly profitable) interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic, is already a contradiction in terms.

The entire basis for being so enamored with science, as so many of us are, is that it provides a method for establishing facts without needing trust.

Despite the noise to the contrary, we live in a highly literate age, and are a species filled with curiosity and compassion. There's no reason that scientific findings - especially those used to underwrite public policy - cannot be made easy to understand and straightforward to replicate.

[cmiller1]

> justify questionable (and often coincidentally highly profitable) interventions

What interventions might those be? I'm only aware of the interventions that time and time again have been proven to be highly effective that were implemented here, masking, improved guidelines for hygiene, distancing, and vaccination.

[exoverito]

The unprecedented surge in money printing which pushed nearly all asset prices higher, causing major inflation. The mandated vaccines, paid for by taxpayers. Lockdown policies which effectively forced most people under house arrest, sending tech stocks like Amazon, Google, Facebook to all time highs. There was also a clear conflict of interest between companies like Google which benefited from lockdowns, and their content policies which censored criticism of the response to covid. Needless to say it's creepy to have the vast majority of information controlled by a handful of companies.

[someuser2345]

> vaccination.

One of the vaccines was recalled due to causing potentially fatal blood clots: https://www.pfpdocs.com/jj-vaccine-recall

[jMyles]

I mostly mean lockdowns, which were a spectacular failure - they caused both a delay in endemic equilibrium in the low-risk tier and also an increase in household transmission, which put the high-risk tier at increased likelihood of contracting the virus early. This is not even to mention the collateral damage, which is being studied by Suneta Gupta and other epidemiologists here: https://collateralglobal.org/.

Lockdowns were roundly rejected by an enormous chorus of the top experts in relevant fields, and yet somehow the messaging was spun to make it sound like there was significant debate. And of course, no actual data was ever made available by proponents for the rest of us to even consider, let alone replicate. This is what I mean by the "trust the science" message being a contradiction in terms.

Of the interventions you mention: masking was not shown "time and time again" to be highly - or even moderately - effective. The dearth of rigorous study on the matter is bizarre. The Bangladesh study showed no statistically significant effect for cloth masks, and very modest effects for others - certainly nowhere near enough to justify mandates.

I'm not very aware of the literature on distancing - can you provide sources to research which you think shows that it has "time and time again proven to be highly effective"?

Vaccination of course appeared incredible out of the gate, but we now know that there was significant unblinding during phase III, and the real-world results have not lived up to either the safety or efficacy claims. So, while the vaccines are a great achievement, I'm not sure we can draw the conclusions that the scientific method was as rigorously adopted as we might hope in the context of this discussion about the pitfalls of "trust the science" in matters of public policy. Instead, profit seems to have motivated a relatively shoddy series of rollouts. Moreover, the fallout over the disastrous booster approval cost us a number of experts who resigned in protest (obviously Gruber and Krause are the most notable, but there were many others both at FDA and in academia). So I think it still belongs in the 'loss' column as science-based policy goes.

[cmiller1]

Clicked that link, it's full of rightwing conspiracy nonsense, is that the kind of place you usually get your information?

[huytersd]

The tiniest of grains because chimeras are effectively non existent in the society. This literally works for 99.999999% of people.

[graphe]

How would you know if it isn't tested? It only matters because it was birth related. You could be a chimera your whole life and not know it.

[hilux]

This is of my favorite science stories ever!

[LiquidSky]

Plot Twist: this woman WAS a prolific serial killer and, after realizing that she had left DNA behind at early crime scenes, got a job at the cotton swab factory to cover her tracks.

[asdfasdfjlk234]

Thank god an innocent person didn't get caught up in this. Imagine getting swabbed with bad technique and then the contamination coming back on you. In fact, that was exactly how they found out-- some man got swabbed and it came back with this woman's DNA.