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Why are we ignoring humongous amounts of Bayesian evidence here, exactly?
Yeah, if we just took the singular initial victim statement and judged the case based on how persuasive that was out of context, then we might judge a lot of cases differently. Probably we would find in favor of educated and well-spoken victims who know how to craft a persuasive narrative. That's not a good thing.
Because one was defamed and one wasn't?
'That didn't happen' said a few times in response to questions isn't defamation. Taking time out in a bunch of your stump speeches and social media posts to call her a whackjob and crazy liar and say you never met her and fire up your followers to attack and harass her and ruin her career is defamation.
Like a lot of cases that come up here, the reason Trump gets a harsher sentence/any punishment at all is his own behavior around the event at question. Yes, there's a difference between discovering that you accidentally held onto some confidential documents, immediately notifying the relevant agencies to turn them over and ask if there's anything else you should do, and ordering your staff to do an internal audit to make sure it hasn't happened anywhere else, vs intentionally taking dozens of boxes of confidential documents to your home, bragging about it and showing them to people, denying it and lying repeatedly when the feds inquire about it, trying to cover them up and hiding more when the feds come to get them, and etc. etc. etc. Malicious intent matters for sentencing.
Because I'm not interested in "Trump is a sleazeball and Biden is just a funny old guy" arguments over who did it and who didn't do it and why one is bad and the other is good. That's not the evidence I want to consider. I want to look at the bare accusations and see what makes them credible, implausible, or one is better than the other. Supposing Carroll hadn't accused Trump but John Nobody. Would that change the view of "yes it's true" on 'Bayesian evidence'? Same with Reade - if she had picked Republican Tom Thompson the 19th instead of Joe Biden, would she have magically been more credible?
I want to avoid that, and look at the allegations in isolation so we can decide without clouding the issue. Then we can argue over "is this just evidence that they're out to get Trump with nuisance lawsuits" or not. I wanted as unbiased as I could get (in full knowledge that there's no change of no bias at all) views on "this is the accusation here, that is the accusation there, do these seem plausible or not?" and you guys are about as good as I can hope to get on that.
Ok, I think that's illegitimate in itself - these impressions of these people don't come from nowhere, the things they are built from are legit evidence - but fine, we can ignore that.
But the trial itself contains plenty of evidence beyond that one paragraph you cite as the only thing we're supposed to judge on.
Absent literally anything other than the written statements, sure, both seems plausible, both are things that can happen. Unless you're finding logical inconsistencies, things that are actually impossible, it's a bad idea to put too much weight on a single paragraph-or-two written statement... people vary too much in how good they are at recounting things in a coherent narrative, weird or surprising things happen all the time in real life (authors always talk about how coincidences in real life wouldn't be plausible in fiction), all human memories are fallible and getting a detail or two wrong years later doesn't mean the incident didn't happen, etc.
You always need more evidence than that to make any kind of confident judgement, which is why there's an investigation and a trial where they bring out other evidence.
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