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Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

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Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#111

Post by cmiller1 »

jMyles wrote: post #104
cmiller1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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/ . Lock…

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

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#112

Post by jMyles »

cmiller1 wrote: post #111
jMyles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ . Lock…

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

I admit, I hadn't looked at it in a while, and it has become much busier / flashier. But I don't immediately see anything that I'm able to identify as rightwing conspiracy nonsense - to what are you referring?

(The founders were of course criticized as being too left wing; have they over-corrected?)

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#113

Post by picadores »

dylan604 wrote: post #33
picadores wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full Process Surveilance is needed to make evidence admissable. If it aint filmed the whole way, it aint valid.

I think the searches need to be done with full body camera back up to be sure. This would be an attempt at my partner planting evidence when arriving at the location for me to find. It also should find the situations where the person that planted the evidence from suggesting for someone else to look where he planted it. Of course, this does nothing for planting evidence before the search, but would hopefully stem the…

No complete record - no case..

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#114

Post by jihiggins »

dylan604 wrote: post #97
jihiggins wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everything you listed is still better than giving it to the cops. "these random examples sound bad" isn't really a good argument for doing nothing.

random examples are necessary because we were walked to the edge of the cliff with no actual solution provided, so hyperbole felt like an appropriate response to encourage moving the train further down the tracks. it's not a bad idea, but it's obviously ripe for just an additional layer of bureaucratic waste. clearly, there is a lack of trust that the police could handle evidence properly. so the natural follow up is…

it feels like there are two main categories of reaction to big societal issues: one starts with "this is unacceptable, so we will find an alternative," the other says "everything else sounds iffy so we shouldn't even try"

our current system is so broken and evil that i wonder if just getting rid of it entirely wouldn't actually be better and more ethical. even with the problem of releasing however many violent offenders back in the wild. "it might be even more beaurocratic" isn't really going to convince me of anything.

i dont know what the best alternative solution is, im a software engineer. i just know that the current solution is depraved and should be torn down and replaced.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#115

Post by rokkitmensch »

bborud wrote: post #56

DNA evidence is scary because we have decades of experiences and milestones saying that it isn't as simple and clear cut as we think it is, and still we treat it is hard, inarguable truth. Even though history teaches us we should know better. It is one of those things that reminds me that most people with a science degree do not actually practice science.

The American "justice" system is a poorly-disguised vengeance system in practice. One that doesn't particularly care about the correctness of its processes, so long as it can claim to have prosecuted and made miserable its victims.

The rot has metastasized into plain view with hokum like "911 call psychology", maliciously incompetent evidence handling, arson analysis, bullet analysis, civil forfeiture, and has even compromised previously honorable and integrity-backed professions with embarrassments like shaken baby syndrome.

Bring any of this up and you'll get excluded from jury duty at /voir dire/.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#116

Post by loup-vaillant »

psunavy03 wrote: post #88
loup-vaillant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inquisition was effectively a judicial body. They were religious representatives and burned witches for questionable reasons, but their… questioning did force quite a few false confessions if I recall correctly. This has little to do with your Sunday Priest.

See above. What people did 400 years ago is not relevant to my point about how things are today.

OK, back on topic then: do you even dispute the main point, that today false confessions are being coerced out of suspects in Western precincts?

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#117

Post by bborud »

mrguyorama wrote: post #98
bborud wrote: post #56

DNA evidence is scary because we have decades of experiences and milestones saying that it isn't as simple and clear cut as we think it is, and still we treat it is hard, inarguable truth. Even though history teaches us we should know better. It is one of those things that reminds me that most people with a science degree do not actually practice science.

No, the scientists behind DNA testing absolutely understand the limitations. The people who don't understand the limitations of science and possible errors in certain methods are clueless jurors and the cops who pay a random person $800 to sit on the stand, say they are "and expert" and claim there's a trillion to one odds that two people could have "the same" DNA, even though that isn't even remotely what was tested…

That has not always been the case. They were dead wrong about the population size needed to produce false positives for the number of sites usually compared in the 1990s. These were _scientists_.

Thinking that scientists have always known the limitations kind of proves my point about even most highly educated people not understanding science.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#118

Post by cmiller1 »

jMyles wrote: post #112
cmiller1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I admit, I hadn't looked at it in a while, and it has become much busier / flashier. But I don't immediately see anything that I'm able to identify as rightwing conspiracy nonsense - to what are you referring? (The founders were of course criticized as being too left wing; have they over-corrected?)

> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning

The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank that dedicates all of his time to his hatred of reasonable responses to a disease.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#119

Post by jMyles »

cmiller1 wrote: post #118
jMyles wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit, I hadn't looked at it in a while, and it has become much busier / flashier. But I don't immediately see anything that I'm able to identify as rightwing conspiracy nonsense - to what are you referring? (The founders were of course criticized as being too left wing; have they over-corrected?)

> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank that dedicates all of his time to his hatred of reasonable responses to a disease.

Your critique... strikes me as hostile and reactionary (and you are fingering others as rightwing?).

> The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank

I presume the "single crank" to whom you refer here is the author of the piece whose headling you've partially quoted, Kevin Bardosh, who is a professor of public health, expert and front-line responder on arbovirus epidemics (the threat of which still loom large), and widely regarded as an up-and-comer in this field.

The actual founders are unassailable - Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan are Oxford powerhouses, among the top minds in the world on the subject matter, and have published many of the most influential and enduring pieces over their decades of professorship. Other than crude trolling, I cannot fathom what might drive you to the conclusion that their are either invisible (per your use of the word "single") or that they lack the expertise required to take the positions they take.

You'll note that the editor in chief (who happens to be a friend of mine) is a professor of epidemiology at Stanford and a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution. In addition to his work at CG, he has also worked closely throughout the pandemic in his publishing and advocacy with professors from the other three of the top 5.

Like... I hate credentialism too, but if that's your angle, it seems bizarre to attempt to smear the top professors at the world's top medical schools as cranks.

As for your quote:

> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning

...this strikes me as roundly true. Fauci was a respected professional in his field, albeit surely a PITA bureaucrat for those who depend on NIH grants for research (and perhaps already with one strike given his half-assedness and homophobia early in the AIDS pandemic, but that was fashionable then I guess).

He threw it all away in the past 3 years. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been almost all wrong at almost every moment. He misinterpreted the significance of the Diamond Princess dataset. He misled the public about the empirical foundations of social distancing. He unambiguously lied to Congress about the presence of gain-of-function research, which he personally greenlit. I mean... that's pretty bad.

He's not going to be sitting at the cool kid's table anymore. And yeah, he is facing a long road of reckoning ahead for what he's done.

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