Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era by Daniel J. Levitin

Author:Daniel J. Levitin [Levitin, Daniel J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-06T22:00:00+00:00

In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power; and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggests that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments.

What they failed to consider was that, during those intervening thirty-two years, many Catholics would leave the Church, and many would use birth control in spite of the Church’s prohibitions. Alternative scenarios to their view in 1968 were difficult to imagine.

Social and artistic predictions get upended too: Experts said around the time of the Beatles that “guitar bands are on their way out.” The reviews of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on its debut included a number of negative pronouncements that no one would ever want to hear it again. Science also gets upended. Experts said that fast-moving trains would never work because passengers would die of asphyxiation. Experts thought that light moved through an invisible “ether.” Science and life are not static. All we can do is evaluate the weight of evidence and judge for ourselves, using the best tools we have at our disposal. One of those tools that is underused is employing creative thinking to imagine alternatives to the way we’ve been thinking all along.

Alternative explanations are often critical to legal arguments in criminal trials. The framing effects we saw in Part One, and the failure to understand that conditional probabilities don’t work backward, have led to many false convictions.

Proper scientific reasoning entails setting up two (or more) hypotheses and presenting the probabilities for both. In a courtroom, attorneys shouldn’t be focusing on the probability of a match, but the probability of two possible scenarios: What is the probability that the blood samples came from the same source, versus the probability that they did not? More to the point, we need to compare the probability of a match given that the subject is guilty with the probability of a match given that the subject is innocent. Or we could compare the probability that the subject is innocent given the data, versus the probability that the subject is guilty given the data. We also need to know the accuracy of the measures. The FBI announced in 2015 that microscopic hair analyses were incorrect 90 percent of the time. Without these pieces of information, it is impossible to decide the case fairly or accurately. That is, if we talk only in terms of a match, we’re considering only one-sided evidence, the probability of a match given the hypothesis that the criminal was at the scene of the crime. What we don’t know is the probability of a match given alternative hypotheses. And the two need to be compared.

This comes up all the time. In one case in the U.K., the suspect, Dennis Adams, was accused based solely on DNA evidence. The victim failed to pick him out of a lineup, and in court said that Adams did not look like her assailant.

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