Statistics and Juries
In the video "How Statistics Fool Juries," Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly attempts to demonstrate through a number of examples how statistics, when viewed in a common manner, can be misunderstood and how this can have legal repercussions. Through a number of thought experiments, Donnelly provides the audience with examples of how seemingly simple statistics can be misinterpreted and how many more variables must be taken into account when calculating chance. Primarily he exposes the audience to the concept of relative difference, or the difference in likelihood between two possibilities in the same scenario. He then goes on to explain that without an understanding of this concept, many juries misunderstand statistics used in trials and very often convict people based on this faulty understanding.
Donnelly begins his presentation with a thought experiment involving the tossing of a coin and predicts the possibility of a certain series of results. When predicting the possibility of heads, tails, heads (HTH) or heads, tails, tails (HTT), I, like most of the audience, believed that the chance of either possibility was equal. However, I did not take into account the possibility of overlap and how HTH was more like to be achieved in an overlap. I also did not catch that the HTH could appear in clumps because of the overlapping (the third "H" in HTH is also the first "H" in the next HTH). There was...
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