Justice and false positives vs. false negatives

[nminusone]

False positives and false negatives exist in a trade-off balance. In almost any real-world situation the price for decreasing one is increasing the other. For instance the criminal justice system is not perfect. It allows some guilty people to go free (false negatives), and convicts some innocent people (false positives).

Poll The trade-off between false positives and false negativesAssume that the false

Comments

[wotw]

Impossible to answer without more data than I have at my fingertips (though
the data are certainly available), but I expect the answer might be very
different for different crimes, and for different severities of punishment.

For murder/capital punishment, where the deterrent effect is known to be large,
I'd be willing to make three or four "oops, we fried an innocent" mistakes
in order to avoid one "oops, we released a guilty"---IF the innocents were
chosen randomly. But my fear is that in a world where that many innocents are
executed, they WON'T be chosen randomly---they'll tend to be people whom the
authorities don't like. And that way lies much peril.

So my gut feeling is that this should be skewed the other way---maybe be
willing to release two or three 'guilties' in order to avoid frying one
'innocent'----but on a different day I might have a different gut feeling.

For robbery I think things would be very different, because I'm willing to
endure a lot more robberies than murders in order to avoid a chance of
being wrongfully convicted of something.

[nminusone]

Yeah, it is somewhat unfair in that I don't think anybody in a position to make this sort of decision would be asked to do so without a lot more information. For a start I'd want to know the absolute rate of the crimes involved, and I'm sure a lot more facts and figures once I got to thinking about it.