A tragedy.
BTW, I think in the OJ Simpson case, the fallacy was the reverse, the defence attorney's fallacy. As that impeccable (ahem!) source wikipedia puts it:
"A version of this [defence attorney's] fallacy arose in the context of the OJ Simpson murder trial where the defence was prepared to argue that as only a small fraction of men who abuse their wives go on to kill them, evidence that Simpson had beaten his wife was of little consequence. The correct reasoning was to observe that a far smaller fraction of men who don't beat their wives go on to kill them."
Its all about pretest probability, and a more Bayesian approach, isn't it?
"If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken/ twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools..."
Andy
Andy Hutchinson
email: [log in to unmask]
tel: 07824 604962
web: www.npc.co.uk or www.npci.org.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: Evidence based health (EBH) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Feddern-Bekcan, Tanya
Sent: 09 October 2009 14:15
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: information request
It appears that Sally Clark passed away in 2007; only 4 years after she was released from prison after being falsely accused. She had passed away during the night: http://www.sallyclark.org.uk/
Take care,
Tanya
Tanya Feddern-Bekcan, MLIS, AHIP, MOT, OTR/L http://www.geocities.com/nqiya/libraryarticles.html formerly Tanya Feddern
305.243.3999 - [log in to unmask] - 305.325.9670 (fax) EBM Theme Director & Reference and Education Librarian Louis Calder Memorial Library University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
-----Original Message-----
From: Evidence based health (EBH) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jean Levasseur
Sent: Friday, October 09, 2009 7:27 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: information request
In fact I believe the fallacy you are referring to is known as the
Prosecutor's Fallacy.
Sir Roy Meadow calculated the odds of 2 SIDS in the same family to be
73 million to 1. Sally Clark (the accused) was later released from
prison when a mathematician estimated the relative likelihood of
murder VS SIDS in the same family to be quite different. He concluded
that 2 infants sre 9 times more likely to be SIDS victims than murder
victims.
I also think that the Prosecutor's Fallacy was also used by O.J.
Simpson's attorney. What a mess...
Jean Levasseur MD, MSc
Joliette, QC, Canada
Le 09-10-09 à 06:42, Ronan Conroy a écrit :
> On 8 DFómh 2009, at 17:14, Maconochie, Ian K wrote:
>
> This is not necessarily true - see Prof Meadows, paediatrician in Uk
> on the probablity of serial cot deaths! There may be predilections
> to their occurence which negate the routine estimation of risk.
>
> This is exactly the fallacy of Prof Meadows - he argued that cot
> deaths were so rare that the chances of a second one happening to
> the same family were utterly remote, so some factor other than
> chance had to be at work. His argument is flawed for three reasons:
>
> 1. The fact that you have had a cot death in the house does not
> alter your chances of having another one. If you have a son, your
> chances of your second child being a son are 50%, the same as they
> were when you had no children. More formally, the events are
> independent, so the probability of one event is uninfluenced by the
> occurrence of the other (but see 3 below)
> 2. Prof meadows argued that two cot deaths are so unlikely that they
> cannot simply be a coincidence, but actually one cot death is so
> unlikely that, were we to follow his argument, we would declare foul
> play each time a cot death happened. The fact that something is
> unlikely does not prevent it from happening.
> 3. He ignored the possibility of a common underlying mechanism. Many
> conditions cluster in families due to shared genes and environment.
> For this reason, the argument that the events are independent is
> hard to sustain. And the effect of shared mechanism is to make
> multiple events more likely, not less.
>
> The whole case was a dreadful example of the utter failure of the
> legal system to understand probabilistic reasoning.
>
>
> Ronan Conroy
> =================================
>
> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
> Epidemiology Department,
> Beaux Lane House, Dublin 2, Ireland
> +353 (0)1 402 2431
> +353 (0)87 799 97 95
> +353 (0)1 402 2764 (Fax - remember them?)
> http://rcsi.academia.edu/RonanConroy
>
> P Before printing, think about the environment
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