site banner

not-guilty is not the same as innocent

felipec.substack.com

In many discussions I'm pulled back to the distinction between not-guilty and innocent as a way to demonstrate how the burden of proof works and what the true default position should be in any given argument. A lot of people seem to not have any problem seeing the distinction, but many intelligent people for some reason don't see it.

In this article I explain why the distinction exists and why it matters, in particular why it matters in real-life scenarios, especially when people try to shift the burden of proof.

Essentially, in my view the universe we are talking about is {uncertain,guilty,innocent}, therefore not-guilty is guilty', which is {uncertain,innocent}. Therefore innocent ⇒ not-guilty, but not-guilty ⇏ innocent.

When O. J. Simpson was acquitted, that doesn’t mean he was found innocent, it means the prosecution could not prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. He was found not-guilty, which is not the same as innocent. It very well could be that the jury found the truth of the matter uncertain.

This notion has implications in many real-life scenarios when people want to shift the burden of proof if you reject a claim when it's not substantiated. They wrongly assume you claim their claim is false (equivalent to innocent), when in truth all you are doing is staying in the default position (uncertain).

Rejecting the claim that a god exists is not the same as claim a god doesn't exist: it doesn't require a burden of proof because it's the default position. Agnosticism is the default position. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim.

-2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Okay, fair play, you at least didn't get anything horribly wrong in this one. It wasn't good, but you didn't get the basic premise of your article fatally wrong.

Ah, perhaps my above post would come off as a bit strange without context. The last two times I read felipec's crossposts, they made catastrophic mistakes in understanding the topic, but the tone was rather smug. I said that the next time he wrote a post and linked it here, if he was smugly wrong again I would stop reading his posts.

So I'm acknowledging that he did better this time. His engagement in the thread is also a bit better.

I was not smug, you believed I was smug. Big difference.

Technically speaking, he said the tone was smug.

if he was smugly wrong again

Doesn't that claim that I was smug?

Are you really going to start a second branch off this conversation in the exact same direction?

It's not the same direction. In subthread a I'm talking about why I don't believe it's good to elevate options to facts, I'm not talking about who/what was claimed to be smug anymore.

In this subthread b I'm asking a simple question: doesn't that say that I was wrong?

In fact before I started subthread b I was going to make a comment in subthread a that I don't believe if I had said "the tone was not smug, you believed it was smug" my point would not have changed at all, even if more technically correct, your initial comment (he said the tone was smug) would not have applied, and I'm pretty sure I still would have been downvoted.

I removed that comment because I didn't want to muddle my point, and I believe it's relatively unimportant what might have happened had I said something else. If you really believe it would have made a difference, I can edit the comment, but I don't think anything would change.

Then I read that he did in fact called me smug a few sentences later, so even if I'm not talking about "my tone"/"the tone" in subthread a anymore (I'm talking about something more important: my original point), I wonder if you still believe he didn't call me smug, when in fact he straight up did. You don't have to answer.

My actual point is in subthread a.

Definition of smug: "highly self-satisfied". If he said the tone was smug, it's because he believed the person writing such prose was "highly self-satisfied".

No, I don't think you can make that assumption. Writing is hard, people come across in unexpected or unintended ways all the time, and people can intentionally fake tone that they don't actually feel.

If somebody is writing in an angry tone, it means that person is acting angry. You can say that you can't assume that just because a person is acting angry it means that person is actually angry.

But everyone assumes that if somebody says "you seem angry", that carries an implication that the person is claiming that you are indeed angry.

Sure, technically the person did not claim that you are actually angry, but I find it extremely curious that you bend over backwards to defend /u/magic9mushroom's claim that "the tone was rather smug", and explore what could have been the target, but you don't extend even a fraction of the same generosity to my prose.

Did my prose actually had a smug tone? That is the question that matters, not what was the target of /u/magic9mushroom's comment. He made the claim that "the tone was rather smug", that's not a fact, that's a subjective opinion which he is presenting as fact. If it seemed smug to him, that's fine, he could say "the tone seemed rather smug", and that would be accurate (according to him).

But just because a tone seemed smug to a person doesn't mean the tone was actually smug, just like if somebody seems angry that doesn't mean the person is actually angry: that's just your perception.

Why aren't you generous towards that distinction as well?

Did my prose actually had a smug tone?

Yeah, honestly.

Pretty much everything you write comes across as extremely smug. To me, at least, I can't state how anyone else feels. But it absolutely does to me.

I dunno if that's your intention, but if it's not your intention, I recommend revisiting your writing style.

He made the claim that "the tone was rather smug", that's not a fact, that's a subjective opinion which he is presenting as fact. If it seemed smug to him, that's fine, he could say "the tone seemed rather smug", and that would be accurate (according to him).

Technically, yeah. But at some point there's the fact that we all speak as to our own opinions, and you just gotta read a little bit of that in implicitly. From a recent ACX post:

. . . Take the InfoWars birth certificate one: in addition to all the claims about layers and so on, it says "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax". That is a factual claim which is false. They offer support for that claim which isn't actually convincing, and the support they offer happens to be true but out of context, and I'm with you on calling the supporting evidence "not lies". But "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax" is in fact flatly false, and is asserted by the article itself, not just "someone said".

This seems wrongheaded to me. Reposting from my own comment there: when I say "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery", I'm not tapping into the Platonic realm and reading the truth directly. I'm saying that I have seen a lot of evidence that makes me think Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery, and have inferred the conclusion "it's real and not a forgery" from that.

If later it turned out it was a forgery - say there was some amazingly vast conspiracy theory that I completely missed - I wouldn't have been lying when I said the words "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery". I would have been stating the conclusion I had inferred from my facts (which, in this hypothetical, would have been wrong, because I'm bad at reasoning).

I do strongly encourage people to couch their words as opinions if they're diving into areas that are highly controversial and sensitive, and I've pushed to the point of warning (and maybe even bans) if people keep doing it. But this (1) isn't sensitive, and (2) is phrased specifically as "the last time [he] read your posts".

More comments