Posting has been light this week because I’ve been on jury duty. Pretty interesting to be a part of the process. I won’t say too much about the trial, even though it’s over and all right to talk about.
But I noticed two things.
1) Law’s not a precise science, but it demands a high standard of evidence. It was interesting to see that principle being relied on so heavily in such an everyday, seemingly subjective profession.
2) Memory is really unreliable. In this case, the events happened over a year ago, and there were a couple of times where witnesses claimed to have no memory of an event, and then were shown statements they themselves had made about that event, and had to conclude that the event must have happened. This even happened with one of the police officers called to testify — someone presumably trained in that area. All of which suggests a problem with anecdotal evidence: anecdotes shift and acquire new meanings over time.
30 May 2006 at 2:15 pm
I remember playing those memory games (or do I) with you where we would get so much time to memorise a picture and then see how many detail questions we could get right. I remember they would have us do a second round after so much time and see how much our memory had eroded. Memory is VERY unreliable.
31 May 2006 at 6:57 am
I think I remember that, but that could have been one of your experiences that I expropriated.