Comment by qualeed

Comment by qualeed 4 days ago

4 replies

The options are you assume people are innocent unless proven guilty, or guilty unless proven innocent.

Going through life treating everyone as guilty until proven innocent sounds like an exhausting and negative way to treat everyone, and harms more people overall.

burkaman 4 days ago

Those are not the only options, those are the two extremes of a spectrum. Most people fall in the middle with something like "assume people are innocent unless you see convincing evidence of guilt". This is a reasonable philosophy unless you have power over someone, in which case proof is much more important.

  • qualeed 4 days ago

    >"assume people are innocent unless you see convincing evidence of guilt".

    So... base assumption is innocent.

    That's all I was saying.

    • burkaman 4 days ago

      Ok, I think you may have misinterpreted some other comments then. The argument was that "proven" in "innocent until proven guilt" is too high a bar for a low-stakes internet discussion.

    • eru 4 days ago

      No. Base assumption doesn't have to be binary.

      Just get some background rates, and assume that people are guilty with eg 0.1% probability. (Just a made a up number. Real priors should depend on a lot more context.)