I would say that sending an individual with 13% probability of innocence to jail is clearly wrong, because 1 out of 10 of them would be innocent.
One wonders how many of those are people the jury correctly thinks have done other crimes, or subjectively think deserve more punishment for past crimes. That would be a different malfunction from the expressed intent of the system and would imply the system otherwise does much better than the 87⁄13 ratio.
I see. It’s a little more obvious to spell out “more than 1 out of 10 innocent” instead of “only 87% probablity of guilt” but if you see them as immediately equivalent then indeed the argument will do nothing for you.
I would say that sending an individual with 13% probability of innocence to jail is clearly wrong, because 1 out of 10 of them would be innocent.
So the premise instead is: adding a 13% innocent population of any subset or category of individuals to jail is clearly wrong
leading to the conclusion: sending an individual with only 87% probability of guilt to jail is wrong
One wonders how many of those are people the jury correctly thinks have done other crimes, or subjectively think deserve more punishment for past crimes. That would be a different malfunction from the expressed intent of the system and would imply the system otherwise does much better than the 87⁄13 ratio.
Yes, that’s what I meant by what I said. But the problem is that, at least to me, the premise is no more obvious than the conclusion.
I see. It’s a little more obvious to spell out “more than 1 out of 10 innocent” instead of “only 87% probablity of guilt” but if you see them as immediately equivalent then indeed the argument will do nothing for you.