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I Went on a Twitter Rampage for #TheTriggering

#TheTriggering

Fellow SFU student and accomplished internet troll Lauren Southern started a hashtag called #TheTriggering. The idea is that every March 9th, everyone tweets out all their non-PC opinions and jokes at the same time under this hashtag in defense of free speech.

I’m usually not big on participating in the culture war, but what the heck? Might as well have fun with this hashtag while it lasts. I started with the most controversial statement I could think of:

Typing that, I noticed something strange. Even though #TheTriggering was the top trending hashtag, it wouldn’t auto-complete when I typed it. Other people noticed it too.

It’s strange that a company like Twitter would take a side in the culture war. After all, the harder the culture war rages, the more people flock to Twitter to complain about it.

Oh well, I just typed in the whole hashtag. Nice try, Twitter! Your disapproval only fuels my desire to spark controversy, which in turn drives more traffic to…Twitter. Wait, was that the plan all along?

Recalling that the hashtag is about free speech, I resolved to speak out for researchers who study controversial subjects and face backlash for even daring to ask the “wrong” questions.

Take THAT anti-science left!

Not content to merely participate in the culture war, I figured I’d comment on it on a meta level:

Having reached the point of meta-commentary, I realized I was scraping the bottom of the controversy barrel:

But then I thought of some more controversial things to say:

Yeah, take that modern art!

The anti-immigration right was not spared from my Twitter wrath:

This actually generated some pushback:

From there, I moved on to summarizing recent economic research:

Some people started objecting to the hashtag campaign by arguing that Twitter, as a private company, has every right to censor whoever it wants on its platform. I agree with their interpretation of property rights, but I still think that Twitter should not exercise its property rights in this way:

Lauren’s response was less measured:

I rounded off my rampage with a Mencken quote and a joke about grad school:

This reminded me that I am, in fact, in grad school, and I do, in fact, need to grade a stack of undergraduate midterms. End of rampage!

The post I Went on a Twitter Rampage for #TheTriggering appeared first on The Economics Detective.

A Minor Correction to Richard Posner

I quoted the following passage from Richard Posner in my recent article on Scotland’s three-verdict system:

When . . . judges and juries are asked to translate the requisite confidence into percentage terms or betting odds, they sometimes come up with ridiculously low figures-in one survey, as low as 76 percent, see United States v. Fatico, 458 F. Supp. 388, 410 (E.D.N.Y. 1978); in another, as low as 50 percent, see McCauliff, Burdens of Proof: Degrees of Belief, Quanta of Evidence, or Constitutional Guarantees?, 35 Vand. L. Rev. 1293, 1325 (1982) (tab. 2). The higher of these two figures implies that, in the absence of screening by the prosecutor’s office, of every 100 defendants who were convicted 24 (on average) might well be innocent.

See if you can spot the error in this reasoning. (more…)

The post A Minor Correction to Richard Posner appeared first on The Economics Detective.

A Minor Correction to Richard Posner

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I quoted the following passage from Richard Posner  in my recent article on Scotland’s three-verdict system:

When . . . judges and juries are asked to translate the requisite confidence into percentage terms or betting odds, they sometimes come up with ridiculously low figures-in one survey, as low as 76 percent, see United States v. Fatico, 458 F. Supp. 388, 410 (E.D.N.Y. 1978); in another, as low as 50 percent, see McCauliff, Burdens of Proof: Degrees of Belief, Quanta of Evidence, or Constitutional Guarantees?, 35 Vand. L. Rev. 1293, 1325 (1982) (tab. 2). The higher of these two figures implies that, in the absence of screening by the prosecutor’s office, of every 100 defendants who were convicted 24 (on average) might well be innocent.

See if you can spot the error in this reasoning.

I’m not entirely sure what Posner means by “screening by the prosecutor’s office” but it is not true that a jury system that convicts everyone whose guilt they are at least 76 percent sure of will convict an average of 24 innocent defendants for every hundred convictions. The marginal convict will have a 24 percent chance of innocence, but the average convict will generally have a lower chance of innocence than that.

For instance, suppose that there are only two convicts, one who was caught red handed (100 percent chance of guilt), another who was 76 percent likely to be guilty. Then the average chance of a convict being guilty is (76+100)/2=88 percent.

It’s only in the case where all convicts have a 76 percent chance of being guilty that there will be an average of 24 innocent convicts out of every 100. That’s the extreme lower bound of all possible distributions of probable guilt. In all likelihood, there will be fewer than 24 innocent convicts out of every 100, even if jurors convict everyone with a 76-percent-or-higher chance of guilt.

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