Witness Evidence

[robvalue]

Let's say I'll instantly believe any anecdotes you want, thus seeing if this discussion has a point at all.

What anecdotes do you want me to believe, and more importantly, what difference do you think it should make now that I believe them?

I'm not sure if this got missed or is being worked up to, so I repeated the above.

Also, I'm fine to say that a certain percentage of eye witness testimony may well be accurate enough to be meaningful. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that 50% of anecdotes can be trusted to contain enough and correct detail to faithfully deliver the actual events that occured. (That's extremely generous, but let's go with it to examine this issue. If you think it's significantly higher than this, then I'm going to have to seriously disagree and this example will no longer apply.)

Now. We have a pile of 50,000 anecdotes that people have sent in. Statistically, 25,000 of these are likely to be accurate, and 25,000 are likely to contain at least some details that are inaccurate. How do we determine which anecdotes are accurate, and out of those that are not, how much of it is accurate?

If you have no answer to this, without referring to other forms of evidence to back up the testimony, then this whole discussion is entirely pointless in my opinion. Just stating that testimony can be accurate is of no practical use if you can't find out whether it is accurate.