Lucy Letby: Difference between revisions

:— Peasant, ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail''}}

====“There are ways of telling she’s a witch”====

BBC Reporter Judith Moritz (reviewing social media posts on a ostentatiously product-placed MacBook): {{quote|

“Sparky, full of fun, popular — she looks like the life and soul of the party in these photos. I don’t know what Britain’s most prolific child killer should look like. ''I’m pretty sure it’s not this, though''.}}

{{Quote|“She comes across as — mousy; a bit ''normal'' — you can’t really marry that with the enormity of what she’s been accused of.”}}

This fits two profiles: either this is some cold, callous, monstrous psychopath — or ''a perfectly ordinary young woman''. You know — a sparky, fun, popular young woman. The life and soul of the party.

====On herd minds, groupthink and narrative bias====

{{drop|L|ucy Letby’s case}} is in the news. Those internet citizens who have taken more than a passing interest have divided into opposing camps: a large preponderance for whom she is a cold-blooded monster and a small band who, based on advanced statistical techniques, have questioned the safety of her conviction. Those have tended to quickly spill over from scepticism about the strength of a positive case into the full-throated conviction about a negative one: they are certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Lucy Letby is positively innocent of all charges.

JC has his opinions, which we will get to, but the first step is to keep an open mind. Innocence and guilt beyond reasonable doubt leave a wide range of ambivalent attitudes between.

Bu humans like our narratives to tell us meaningful things about the world, and that means ruling other things out. A narrative that says, “huh, who knows?” is not wildly instructive. It doesn’t tell us much about the world. It offers little intellectual satisfaction.

But it may be the best we can reasonably expect.

The problem with “conviction” and “innocence” narratives is that they become self-fulfilling. Once you form a view you can panel-beat a great range of subsequently occurring information so it suits your view. Especially ambivalent information that doesn’t really help one way or another.  

The mechanisms by which we do this are ''biases'' — either  [[confirmation bias]] — a well-documented logical fallacy — or its less-understood converse: [[ignore|''ignorance'' bias]],<ref>JC made this term up.</ref> whereby we ''ignore'' information that does not support our theory, or tends to contradict it.  

Both can serve either certainty: that Lucy Letby is a serial killer, or the victim of a grave injustice. Both standpoints are equally ''emotive''. There is no comfortable centre to hold here.

We are at the intersection of at least four discrete fields of intellectual enquiry here: law, medicine, statistics and ethics. They  are not commensurate — they each have their own rules, customs and institutions and authority in one does not commute to the others. In a perfect world their outcomes would converge, but the world is not perfect. There will be circumstances in which the correct legal outcome is not morally right, the correct moral outcome is not borne by the statistics, the statistics are at odds with our knowledge, and vice versa. There is little wonder good people get upset.