Too Good to Be True¶
Gunn, L. J., Chapeau-Blondeau, F., McDonnell, M. D., Davis, B. R., Allison, A., & Abbott, D. (2016). Too Good to Be True: When Overwhelming Evidence Fails to Convince. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 472(2187).
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Paradox of Unanimity
- In forensic and jury deliberation, the ancient Sanhedrin rule acquitting a defendant convicted unanimously is the classical statement, with modern descendants in the scrutiny of too-perfect lineup identification.
This sourceFormalizes the non-monotonic posterior and the unanimity sign-flip, using witness identification and the Sanhedrin acquittal rule as motivating cases.
SupportedVerified against the work's full text
Gunn et al. cite the Sanhedrin acquittal of unanimous convictions and model why many unanimous line-up identifications can lower confidence in guilt.
“a defendant unanimously condemned by the judges would be acquitted”
- In forensic and jury deliberation, the ancient Sanhedrin rule acquitting a defendant convicted unanimously is the classical statement, with modern descendants in the scrutiny of too-perfect lineup identification.
Mechanisms¶
- Blind Pattern Comparison Round
- That inversion is the point: in genuinely noisy independent observation, perfect unanimity is less likely than modest disagreement, so flawless agreement often signals a hidden common cause rather than a strong signal.
This sourceShows probabilistically that, when observations are subject to even rare systemic failure, sufficiently unanimous results can be less credible than modest disagreement and can indicate a hidden failure state.
- That inversion is the point: in genuinely noisy independent observation, perfect unanimity is less likely than modest disagreement, so flawless agreement often signals a hidden common cause rather than a strong signal.
- Corroboration Ladder
- Sometimes suspiciously unanimous agreement should lower confidence, not raise it, because it signals a common cause or systematic error rather than independent convergence: the paradox of unanimity.
This sourceShows that unanimous evidence can reduce confidence when observations may share a systemic failure rather than being independent.
- Sometimes suspiciously unanimous agreement should lower confidence, not raise it, because it signals a common cause or systematic error rather than independent convergence: the paradox of unanimity.
Verification¶
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