How does "more likely than not" compare to "beyond a reasonable doubt"?
Is this like studying bowling? Which pin falling in which fraction of a direction makes it more likely that "other pins" would fall? Which pins and when?
(What would take this out of the math world into the visual world?)
What do bowling pins have to do with DNA anyway? What analogy in the visual world is close to DNA analysis of "X defendant did or didn't do it"?
Apologies, just read your article once. I will try a second time!
"More likely than not" is generally equated to the preponderance of the evidence standard.
I like your bowling pin analogy - I think it can work because the measurements are getting at the likelihood that all of these same things would occur at the same time. A statistician would probably have serious criticisms of this analogy, but I think you can approximate what the statistics are getting at by considering different combinations of certain traits, some common and some rare. Take, for example, a brown-eyed blonde-haired female with progeria. Being female isn't all that rare, having brown eyes isn't all that rare, having blonde hair is a bit more rare, and having progeria is extremely rare. So if you calculate the odds of having all those traits in combination, you're going to get a very rare condition. But that doesn't mean there aren't two brown-eyed blonde-haired females with progeria in the world, and it doesn't tell us how likely it is that there is another one out there. If you knew, for example, that our subject had 5 sisters, you could conclude that this combination of traits is less likely to be unique to our subject than if the subject is an only child.
Exclusionary vs Inconclusive. Words matter - thank you for highlighting the distinction and its impact, especially in a death penalty case. I'm up to my eyeballs in these defense motions - thanks for helping make sense of things. 🤯
How does "more likely than not" compare to "beyond a reasonable doubt"?
Is this like studying bowling? Which pin falling in which fraction of a direction makes it more likely that "other pins" would fall? Which pins and when?
(What would take this out of the math world into the visual world?)
What do bowling pins have to do with DNA anyway? What analogy in the visual world is close to DNA analysis of "X defendant did or didn't do it"?
Apologies, just read your article once. I will try a second time!
"More likely than not" is generally equated to the preponderance of the evidence standard.
I like your bowling pin analogy - I think it can work because the measurements are getting at the likelihood that all of these same things would occur at the same time. A statistician would probably have serious criticisms of this analogy, but I think you can approximate what the statistics are getting at by considering different combinations of certain traits, some common and some rare. Take, for example, a brown-eyed blonde-haired female with progeria. Being female isn't all that rare, having brown eyes isn't all that rare, having blonde hair is a bit more rare, and having progeria is extremely rare. So if you calculate the odds of having all those traits in combination, you're going to get a very rare condition. But that doesn't mean there aren't two brown-eyed blonde-haired females with progeria in the world, and it doesn't tell us how likely it is that there is another one out there. If you knew, for example, that our subject had 5 sisters, you could conclude that this combination of traits is less likely to be unique to our subject than if the subject is an only child.
Actually, progeria is a terrible example because it's from a mutation and not a heritable condition. Let's go with myoclonic epilepsy.
Exclusionary vs Inconclusive. Words matter - thank you for highlighting the distinction and its impact, especially in a death penalty case. I'm up to my eyeballs in these defense motions - thanks for helping make sense of things. 🤯