quiet_NaN
1mo ago
"A technicality" is a fuck-up big enough by police or prosecution that a judge believes or the law says that guilt can not be established with legally obtained evidence or that some behavior was so beyond the pale that the best response is to let the guilty walk free to disincentivise similar misconduct in the future.
We are generally not talking about 'prosecution made a few spelling mistakes' here. A defense attorney who gets their client of the hook, even with some far-fetched technicality, is doing their job. If you don't like the common law trial system imported by the founding fathers, there are plenty of jurisdictions where a defense attorney is always just a figurehead, consider moving there perhaps?
Yes, a good lawyer might get their criminal client to walk away freely by playing the role society has assigned for them to play, and that criminal might commit further crimes. But I don't see a big difference from a doctor saving a criminals life.
Of course, a line would be crossed if the lawyer themself break the law to ensure their client is aquitted, like bribing witnesses or tampering with evidence, and anyone who engages in this is a scumbag. But just pointing out why your client should not be convicted due to a matter of law is their fucking job.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
bad for overall messaging
I very much disagree with that. Generally, I am very much in favor of treating your audience like people capable of following your own thought processes.
If Big Yud is worried about x-risk from ASI, he should say that he is worried about that.
One should generally try to make arguments one believes, not deploy arguments as soldiers to defeat an enemy. (In the rate case where the inferential distance can not be bridged, you should at least try to make your arguments as factually close as possible. If there is a radiation disaster on the far side of the river, don't tell the neolithic tribe that there is a lion on the far side of the river, claim it is evil spirits at least.)
I think you have a disagreement about what aspects of AI are most likely to cause problems/x-risk with other doomers. This is fine, but don't complain that they are not having the same message as you have.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think there is a vast gulf between 'I don't want to have kids for whatever reason, and if a sufficient number of people feel the same way, I am fine with humanity slowly fading' and 'fuck all humans, launch the nukes'.
At the worst, it is more like driving an ICE car in a world where climate change is a thing than personally melting the ice caps.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
If you live in a society of laws, you are already not optimizing for preventing victimization. Our loss function is not the sum of innocent police victims and crime victims. If we gave police the powers to kill on sight anyone who they were reasonably sure was a reasonably bad person, it could well be that the number of crime victims saved would be higher than the number of innocents summarily executed by police. But such police states tend to devolve into dictatorships in pretty short order, because there is little in the way of safeguards. This frequently leads to a much higher loss of life down the road.
While it is not commonly admitted, I will grant you that the price we pay for living in a non-totalitarian society where laws impose restrictions on the state is paid (among other things) in victims to crimes which would technically be preventable if we tapped every device and abolished due process.
If we accept that this is the way society sets its priorities, then sacrificing a few more future crime victims to safeguard due process against prosecutorial misconduct just seems more of the same.
Of course, we can debate the exact boundaries for throwing a court case out. Fucking your co-council is generally not the sort of misconduct which sees the defendant walk free, but tampering with witnesses or evidence would be different.
Generally, there are some professions in society where unprofessional conduct can result in innocents losing their lives. We rely on physicians, truck drivers, electricians and so on to do their job reasonably well. The only difference with police and prosecutors is that society would technically be in a position to prevent loss of life due to their fuck-ups after it becomes apparent. But again, this is a price consistent with the priorities of a society of laws.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The US has a tradition of "punishing" prosecutorial doofusery by letting guilty criminals go rather than, say, getting the marshall to paddle the delinquent prosecutor in open Court.
This is the part I genuinely like best about the US justice system. It is a brilliant work alignment which penalizes a partisan investigative and prosecutorial system for misconduct in a way which really hurts their utility function.
If you imposed some penalty on misconduct, the result will be that people who cut corners to secure the conviction will be regarded as heroes who sacrificed their career, money, or liberty to put a murderer behind bars. With 'evidence becomes inadmissible' etc, these people are more likely to be considered assholes who ruined a lengthy team effort and enabled the murderer to get off 'on a technicality'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Perhaps I have read too much Heinlein, but that non-citizens clause feels utterly bizarre. An alien might be forced to commit treason against his country if he is drafted by the US. As an intuition pump, consider an American civilian working in Moscow. If Putin decided to send him to fight Ukraine, I am very sure that the US government would consider that some kinds of rights violation.
I vaguely recall a scene from a civil war movie where an immigrant on a pier in NY was first given a certificate of citizenship and then a draft order, which is IMHO the proper way to do it.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think one adult, one vote is a Schelling point we should not break away from without any need.
It is true that most US citizens would not be effective in a civil war. But even among the people who would be able to fight, most are not willing to fight a war over the issues of US politics. Dobbs or Obamacare or Immigration might infuriate people, but not to the point where they would be willing to murder their neighbors or die in some trench over it.
If we give the special forces rifleman the franchise even though it it unlikely that he would decide to support a side in a civil war, should we not also give the arts student the franchise given that it is unlikely, but possible that she would become an excellent drone pilot?
Ruthlessness is helpful in winning military conflicts, so you should award extra votes for the psychopaths who would be willing to nuke NYC over Dobbs.
The price to pay for having voting power proportional to military might is that you have civil wars sometimes, whenever both sides feel that they are stronger than the other one. Expect elites to form their own loyal armies in preparation. We know the end result of that, it is called feudalism. Of course, while medieval societies could survive the odd civil war over some election dispute or succession, industrialized warfare is much worse.
The present system is a much more civilized alternative. Violent gangs and jihadists don't get an over-sized share of the votes. Instead of spending billions in nuclear weapons programs and stealth bombers, elites can just spend their money on TV ads to influence the outcome of the election. Given how bad nuclear war would be, even the psychopaths are better of that way.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
"Progress" is very much not a linear spectrum. It is more like a tree of decisions which society navigates. Was the criminalization of drugs progress? Is their decriminalization progress? Who should get locked up for which sex acts? How do we balance fundamental rights against each other? In what ways should developing countries become more like Western societies? Should the US intervene to prevent atrocities or not? How do we balance rights between children/youths and their parents? Should adults be required to wear seat belts? Fossil fuels drove the engine that abolished serfdom, industrialization seems a requirement for any non-terrible society. How do we balance that against not exacerbating climate change? How much should we care about biodiversity?
Of course, there are some big milestones of progress which can be put in something like a linear order. Slavery bad. State discrimination by gender or skin color bad. Rape bad (even when in marriage). Locking up adults for consensual sex acts generally bad (but views differ in case of prostitution). Hurting kids bad (in most cases). Hurting non-human animals bad.
But this is not something you can fit a straight line through and extrapolate: "In 2200, people will think we were monsters because we killed plants" does not sound right.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I generally think that both nice, harmonious and disturbing, disharmonious works of art can be appreciated. Some people like classical music, some like punk rock. Some watch My Little Pony, some watch Chernobyl.
With texts (now that I am out of school), audio, video, paintings, theater, opera, sculptures, video games I can mostly decide what I want to consume.
Not so with architecture, in most cases. I mean, if I don't like Disney castles, I can stay away from Disneyland. Perhaps it is even feasible to stay away from a shopping mall if I think it is a crime on good taste.
But most of the buildings I visit are not this way. Picking a school and employer uses complex scoring functions, and 'do I like the building?' is not gonna be in the top ten deciding factors. For living accommodations in cities, there is even less slack to spend on architectural taste: if by some miracle I find a place which fits my other criteria, I will not care if the facade is raw concrete or if some sick fuck decided that the outer walls should weep blood like in some horror movie.
So in my point of view, most big buildings should not strive to be expressive in the same way as literature or video games are. Making them extra ugly is uncalled for, but making them extra nice from the outside is also not necessarily: schools are places were we store kids so they don't distract their parents from working, making them super nice looking would simply sugar-coat that fact. The kid getting thrown in the trash can by some bullies will not be very appreciative of the scenery. Nobody visits the DMV because they really like it there. Of course, buildings should be comfortable from the inside, have good light, short walking distances etc, but this is a rather straightforward optimization problem.
So my gist is, if it is not a new art museum or opera house or villa for some rich guy, you probably don't want a fancy artsy architect who has read Heidegger, just tell some civil engineer what your constraints are and let them optimize.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Well, the current minimum residency for EU citizenship is Malta with 'just move here and invest'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Of course, almost any system that allows for absentee voting seriously struggles on this point
One way to avoid this would be to have voting booths in place where people are likely to vote -- embassies, military bases, hospitals, nursing homes. Just say that a mail-in envelope has to have a stamp certifying booth usage. Of course, state officials would have to rely on the testimony of federal institutions like embassies and military branches, but these are surely more trustworthy than relying on their citizens being truthful when they certify that they have not shown their ballot to another person.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Well, in her youth, she was a member of the MSI, which was explicitly neo-fascist. Her current party, the FdI shares a lot with them in both membership and logo.
I will grant you that if she is following the classical fascist playbook, she is doing a piss-poor job of it (not that she could get away with it), so describing her government as fascist is probably not helpful.
Still, I think that it is helpful to keep peoples political ancestry in mind a bit, and her roots are not in some moderate Christian conservative right, but in the fascist far right.
If we reserve the phrase 'far right' for parties who are explicitly campaigning on building death camps, then it will not be a very useful phrase because almost nobody, including the NSDAP would qualify.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I suppose that by 'blood' you mean ethnic heritage, not service in the foreign legion or occult rituals.
I think ethnostates are overrated. Italy is not genetically uniform, and there is certainly no neat genetic cut-off between German-speaking South Tyrolese and the people living north of the Austrian border. The Sards form their distinct ethnic cluster. None of this matters very much, and few would think that Italy would benefit by granting South Tyrole to Austria and give independence to Sardinia so that Italy can get closer to being an ideal ethnostate.
Being an ethnostate is compatible with being a static agrarian society. Defend your borders, don't let the filthy foreigners in, raise a lot of pure-blooded kids to carry your ethnicity forward. (Take care not to get conquered, though.)
Being an ethnostate does not seem feasible for empires (Rome, Britain, US were/are all notably multi-ethnic), nor does it seem very beneficial for modern globally competitive information societies. Even societies in East Asia which we might perceive as ethnically homogeneous, such as Japan, South Korea or Singapore (not a bastion of wokeness) have naturalization laws requiring residency of 5-10 years. Technically, you don't have to let in foreigners to become technologically advanced, you can also just grant professorships to your own citizens who studied abroad, but this will reduce your applicant pool by ~90%. And societies which are seriously xenophobic might place little value in young people living among foreigners for a few years.
The adjective to describe the gulf states is not 'successful', but 'rich'. The smallish populations inhabiting them simply won the geological lottery, and used their undeserved wealth to import serf while denying them the wealth tied to citizenship. (Political participation is reserved strictly for the elites, of course.) This makes some cruel sense from the point of view of the native population. But unless you are suggesting that being an ethnostate affects the odds of fossil fuels being found in your land, their example can hardly be adapted to other states who have to compete for their GDP. Also, money can prop up a lot of things which would not be stable otherwise, it bribes their own citizens to stay quiet and also buys a lot of fancy tanks which can keep the serfs in check. I am not convinced that Saudi Arabia will be a good place to be twenty years after the oil is gone.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that exhuming any suspected graves on residential school grounds where name and date + cause of death are uncertain is obviously the correct thing to do.
Many forms of murder would be still visible on the skeleton. Some signs of severe abuse might also be preserved.
Given what I know about Catholics, I think it is highly unlikely they ran death camps. They almost certainly employed violence against their wardens, probably of a severity for which today's society would feel that you should never have power over any kids ever again. I would not be shocked if an investigation discovered poorly healed fractures linked to child abuse. Very likely there was also some sexual abuse going on (a common outcome when men have a lot of power without oversight, even when not specifically selecting for men who decided to forswear church-sanctioned sex), but that will rarely be provable from the forensic record.
I also presume that the white staff had a higher caloric intake than the indigenous kids, and that the latter were much more devastated by infectious diseases. All in all, it was a terrible human rights abuse and might technically qualify as genocide.
The way I model Catholics, the kids were probably baptized before they had their first warm meal. And putting the bodies of your fellow Christians (even if they are of a 'lesser race') into anonymous, unmarked mass graves is not usually done. Of course, they likely would not have paid for tombstones either, so what was a marked grave in 1940 could very well be an unmarked grave in 2020 because wooden crosses don't last that long.
I have no sympathy for people who embellish atrocities. Typically, the historical consensus is damning enough. Adding "did we mention that the perpetrators lived on a diet of murdered babies?" is strictly counter-productive (unless true, of course) -- instead of just having the people against you who like to deny or diminish the atrocity for political reasons, you are suddenly opposed by all the people who care about the truth.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Reaching the threshold of signatures will likely just be enough to put the proposal on the ballot. The Italians still have to vote on it. Given that they have elected a far-right prime minister running on an anti-immigration platform, I think I know which way that vote would go.
Also, I don't think getting the citizenship after five years (subject to other conditions, such as being in the country legally and passing a language and civic knowledge test) is totally unreasonable. Few conflicts people flee are over within a decade. Deporting someone after seven years of residency seems much crueler than deporting them within six months of arriving. Perhaps best reason to deport long-term residents is them being involved in serious crime, but I think the number of migrants who start raping after peacefully working in a bakery for seven years is probably not all that high.
On the flip side, dealing with the foreigner's office is terrible even for the highly qualified workers Europe needs, I have colleagues who have been in that situation. Most bureaucracy is limited in its badness in that citizens will eventually complain to their elected officials. Not so for the foreigner's office. Canada offers naturalization after three years, the US after five, even Germany after eight years. If Italy only offers the citizenship after a decade, that will be a competitive disadvantage.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
As others have pointed out, the way to stop a bad guy with a drone is a good guy with a drone.
I think disposable anti-quadcopter devices could be manufactured fairly cheaply.
One idea would be to use a hobbyist rocket motor with a camera, some steering and electronics and a small payload to build a tracking missile.
Or you could have a light quadcopter with 5 minute battery and a small payload, which could likely be faster than most quadcopters with larger battery sizes and which carry militarily relevant stuff.
Then if more expensive quadcopters wants to stay competitive in conflicts where both sides have similar resources, they would have to find a way to become immune to such cheap methods to attack drones. Or you could end up with a situation where each side deploys zillions of cheap disposable drones.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The tweet cited (and echoed) by the Guardian is literally
One million Teamsters endorse Kamala Harris
77% of the teamsters unions (weighted by members) would be fair.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Remember how previously, 58% of polled teamster union members had favored Trump?
Well, it turns out that the Harris campaign managed to convince almost 77% of the union members:
A million of the 1.3 million members of the Teamsters union have now endorsed Harris, according to Harris spokesperson Lauren Hitt, despite the union’s executive board’s decision not to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades yesterday.
Of course, this is very likely not what happened. What likely happened is that subsections of the teamster union which represent a total of 1M members have endorsed Harris.
There are spins, and there are lies. This seems to be an outright lie. If you make a claim about a decision being made by n people, this means that there were n instances of a person making that decision. In reality, you have a decision made by a handful of people on behalf of 1M people. Even if Union membership contains a terrible clause where members grant their leadership to endorse candidates on their personal behalf (as in Leader: "Union Member J. Random has decided to endorse candidate X"), that arrangement would be so surprising that it should not be reported as "1M union members decided to endorse X". Then preferred phrasing given what we know of the polling tendencies would be "Union members who claim to speak for 1M members have endorsed X".
The alternative is to classify sentences like "In 1939, 80 million Germans decided to have the Wehrmacht invade Poland" as true. With this interpretation, the Nuremberg trials would have had a lot more defendants.
And for the Guardian it was not enough to uncritically repeat the claim by the Harris campaign, they even had to top it with that highly misleading statement that the union bosses had previously decided not to endorse a candidate. In that context, this would be parsed as "Despite being favored by 77% of the union members, Kamala Harris, champion of the people was not endorsed by evil MAGA-favoring union bosses who are out of touch with their base."
From what I have read on the motte, the better paraphrasing of the situation would be: "Due to a majority of their base favoring Trump, Democrat-leaning union executives declined to endorse any candidate rather than having to follow their members into endorsing Trump. Later, subgroups of the union representing 77% of the members decided to endorse Trump, likely contrary to the majority opinion of their bases."
I would not vote for Trump if I was an US citizen, but I find this behavior by the Harris campaign and the media disgusting.
Of course, that leaning on on the union bosses and then telling the lie about 1M endorsements is very unlikely to even matter at all. The only people who might care are the 14M union members, perhaps 10% of the voters. About 13M of them will not care very much whom some other union endorses. The 1.3M teamsters who might care a bit more will have a much clearer picture what is happening between base and leadership than I could ever have from the far side of the pond. "Hey, Bob, Joe, listen up. Our Union just decided that we and 999997 other Teamsters are in fact endorsing Harris, so take off your MAGA caps and vote for her."
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.
From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.
France is a close economic ally and Germany has a few big joint ventures with them, so I would expect most of the French in Germany are not drug mules or the like. Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.
For immigrants from European countries much poorer than Germany, my priors would be that higher prosperity attracts a lot of small-time criminals. Breaking and entering is likely more lucrative in Germany than in Romania. I would also assume that Switzerland has more small-time German criminals than their native base rate for exactly the same reasons.
A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals. Especially with crimes where no party has an incentive to report them, like the drug trade, police reports are only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know how much people are using, analyzing the wastewater is much more reliable. Murder is a good tracer, by comparison, because most murders get detected (unless they get misclassified as a natural death or stuck at the level of disappearance because no corpse surfaces) and solved.
Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.
Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault. Of course, IT-shy justice system is likely utterly incapable of aggregating the convictions for crimes committed in 2015 by nationality.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
There is a case to be made that few if any people treat anything Trump says as being on simulacrum level 1. This may be the typical mind fallacy, but if Trump makes noises which sound like a factual statement of the world (i.e. level 1, 'Haitians are eating our pets'), I just don't parse it that way. Likely it is not even level 2 ('I want you to believe that they are eating pets (irrespective if it is true) so that you will vote for me') because that would assume that a significant fraction of listeners will mistake it for a level 1 statement. It is either level 3 ('I am anti-immigrant. Nobody is as anti-immigrant as me!') or level 4 ('I make sounds which I think will help me get elected').
If I am running through the streets saying "The sky is green, plants are orange, Elvis is alive, I am Elvis, 4 is prime, ...", then I an telling a lot of lies, but I will not deceive anyone, because most people will conclude 'based on past statements, that person is so unreliable a source of information that I should not update on their claims'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
So we are talking about mitigation of effects, not getting rid of GHG, I guess?
I have not done the math, but I can see that kind of money building a lot of dams to counter rising see levels. I don't really see how it is enough to combat the expected heat waves, though. It will not buy half of Africa air conditioning for their homes.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that any method of warfare comes down to statistics. Just about any attack has a risk of collateral damage.
For some attacks (such as targeting a wedding reception with a hellfire missile, which I am generally against), you know the exact amount of dead civilians beforehand. For some, you only have an estimate of the distribution beforehand.
I would argue that the correct thing to worry about is the expected count of civilians killed (or QALY lost, if you are into that). 'The pager blows up a crowded gas station' is on the far tail, high body count but also unlikely.
It helps that the pagers were extraordinary weak explosives, not enough to kill the person holding them in their hands in most cases. If instead they had the deadliness of a fragmentation grenade, obliterating any unarmored target within a six meter radius, then the calculation would be quite different.
The context of the attack is that the IDF is fighting Hezbollah's sister organisation Hamas in Gaza, and the collateral damage there is abysmal (because IDF killing Palestinian kids are a great outcome for Hamas). In one case the IDF killed a high-ranking Hamas commander and 50 bystanders in a refugee camp (which was a bad call to make, IMO).
I will assume that out of the nine killed by the pagers, only the girl is an obvious civilian -- if there were more dead kids, Hezbollah would be sure to tell the world. Likely they were the intended targets. Let us say that the tail risks of vehicular accidents and causing larger explosions amount to another expected civilian death.
An enemy:civilian ratio of 4:1 is not bad for an enemy who is likely to fight an asymmetrical style of war a la Hamas. It is sad that civilians were killed and injured, but if you need to kill your enemies, you can do a lot worse.
Of course, one can debate if Hezbollah needs killing, or if they were in the middle of deradicalization, building hospitals and slowly forgetting that there was something about destroying Israel in their mission statement. Extrapolating from Hamas, I think it is likely they need killing, though.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that tackling climate change is hard because it is a massively collective action problem.
The payoff matrix of anyone likely to drown when the ocean level rises basically does not depend on how much CO2 she emits, only how much CO2 the rest of the world emits. Thus, even she does not have skin in the game in the sense that she will personally benefit from any choices she makes regarding limiting her CO2 emissions. She will drown or not depending on the actions the rest of the world take, but her own consumption choices only influence how much she has to pay for her car.
I think that for some topics, it is very hard to find a person who has something riding on the outcome which is proportional to what society has riding on the outcome. Climate change is one such topic. Geostrategic matters are another, perhaps. You have a bunch of military leaders who recommend this or that action, buy an aircraft carrier, invade Russia in the winter, get out of Afghanistan, whatever. Their pensions do not depend on how well their country does with their advice. In fact, their personal interests may lie diametrically opposed to that of their country sometimes: large scale conflict is generally bad for the general population and has bad outcomes for at least half of the countries who engage in it, but for general it can be their chance to shine. Of course, the incentive of a grunt who does not want to die in some ditch is also sometimes misaligned to the incentives of a country.
We could mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change in the next decade
"Could" can mean a lot of different things.
For example, we could likely put a 100 people on Mars within a decade (if we made that the global focus of our economy to the detriment of every other goal).
Or NATO could invade and occupy Switzerland (i.e. it is technically possible but nobody has any incentive to do it).
Or we could build a Tesla with six instead of four wheels (if we pay Musk a few billions, he will likely design a prototype for us).
Or I could pass you the salt over the table (i.e. just ask and I will do it, no trouble for me).
Where on this spectrum do you think 'mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change' falls?
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest, and the central type of domesticated species is perhaps the goat, whose precursor today lives in a region from the south of Turkey to Pakistan. Or take the genus Oryza from which rice was derived is found in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia.
Classical targets for domestication are generalists who thrive under a wide variety of conditions. Of course, for luxury food we might domesticate less resilient plants such as cocoa (which was doing ok in South America but can not really claim being native on multiple continents) or spices or drugs.
The other thing is that we don't have a long memory. I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them. As you say, capitalism goes on, and if I can't buy the tastiest bananas any more, I sure want the next tastiest.
In general, I would say that there is a big difference accidentally between extincting a domestic species through monoculture+infection and the typical 'depraved-heart' extinction of a wild species through loss of habitat. I am sure that the former can happen to specific cultivars, but are unlikely to affect the important staples where we have some diversity. I place the odds of a virus which wipes out all domestic rice plants at even lower odds than a virus which wipes out all the humans.
Your essential point is well received: the jury had an opportunity to consider the evidence pointing towards innocence, and we should take the jury verdict and do Bayes updates on evidence which they already considered, and we should also remember that post trial, the probability of any evidence surfacing is strongly dependent on the direction is pointing, 'not only is he guilty, but we have found evidence for another 100:1 update towards that conclusion' does not make for a terribly exciting podcast.
However, I would set my threshold a bit lower than you. You basically say to update away from the 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt' verdict, you would require evidence for 'innocent beyond reasonable doubt'. I think this is a bit of a high bar. If new evidence pointing to innocence 10:1 is surfacing after the trial, then that might already call the verdict into question, because juries tend not to give out numerical probabilities (not that they would be qualified to do so), and reasonable doubt is not a fixed probability value either.
Personally, I have stronger faith in jury verdicts reached using forensic evidence. I think juries have a tendency to over-update on eyewitness accounts. Here, two key pieces of evidence are not only eyewitness accounts, but hearsay. (Permissible hearsay, but hearsay still.) I don't like that at all. Not only have you all the usual unreliability of eyewitnesses, but one of the key checks on outright fabrications by witnesses, the fact that such fabrications will land you in prison for a lengthy stay, is completely missing. If you claim that Alice shot when you in fact saw Eve shooting, you have to consider the possibility that other evidence will surface which will prove you wrong. "He confessed to me" is the ultimate he-said-she-said situation. Even if evidence later surfaces which clears the accused beyond any reasonable doubt, he might still have confessed to you, people lie all the time. Nailing you for that will basically be impossible.
The second account, plus the knowledge of the damning details of the crime make a malicious witness unlikely. If any shenanigans were going on, it would have to be on the investigative or prosecutorial side. That is unlikely, but not impossible. Plenty of people here seem to believe that defense attorneys who try to get guilty clients acquitted are immoral. From that, it is not a huge distance to 'prosecutors who know the defendant is guilty should subvert due process to get a guilty verdict'. I hope that these attitudes are less common among lawyers, though.
Without diving deeply into the case, I will however not say that the verdict was incorrect.
IIRC, the Guardian mentioned that a prosecutor wanted the case reopened, which would be unusual because prosecutors are rarely anti-death-penalty activists. However, given their usual spins, it likely just means that the prosecutor wanted to identify the DNA on the weapon before the execution, and the outcome 'it got there due to bad evidence handling' was embarrassing but acceptable and they were fine with the execution proceeding.
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