Someone wrote me saying:
"Next week, I'm going to be giving a talk on scientific reasoning to a group of judges and attorneys for the ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ Bar Association. More frequently than ever, judges are being asked to take judicial notice (a process where evidence is admitted to a trial and accepted as fact beyond dispute, without a hearing - I'm well aware of how frightening this must sound to an actual physicist!) of scientific principles. Most of these judges do not come from a scientific or mathematical background, but they are nevertheless trying to learn to competently weigh what is presented before them. If you have a moment, would you be willing to share any thoughts on what judges should look out for when attempting to sift through scientific reasoning?"
Any suggestions, anyone? Is there a good *book* about this for lawyers or judges? That might be better than trying to convey wisdom in a few words.
I can't think of any book to recommend, other than maybe statistics textbooks for nonmathematicians.
There's are two things that come to mind: formulating questions precisely and concepts in simple statistics and hypothesis testing. Former I'd expect judges to be good at anyway (maybe modulo not having the expectation that things that should always be true should actually literally always be true). In later I'd expect the most important part to be understanding of distinctions between concepts that are tied together by base rates (e.g. conditional probabilities in different directions).
