Witness Evidence

[Edwardo Piet]

What are you apologizing for?  I think it's a perfectly sufficient argument to counter religious positions.

I'm in an apologetic mood.

Sorry.

(see what I did there? )

[jenny1972]

Scientific evidence is strong enough to deal with reality, testimony isn't and why the fuck should supernatural B.S. be given a get out of jail free card of special pleading assfuckery and have a fucking massively low standard by comparison? Fuck testimonial evidence for the supernatural what the fucking fuckity fuck... if God was "natural" he would require evidence but because he is "super" dicksucking natural then that means he has to fucking require a load of bullshit non-evidence instead of the real valid thing? What the cunt fuck. Seriously. No, for fuck's sake tired of this shit sometimes oh my Atheos. What the fuck. Okay, so something is totally crazy and therefore it requires less evidence instead of more... okay makes perfect sense.

Theism is just when you go into denial and care more about what you want to believe, I mean seriously if you actually think about such matters it is obvious as fuck that the whole "God" concept is utter fucking bullshitty bullshit nonsense. Oh my fuck seriously what the fucking fuckity fuck.

Come on... even deism is retarded enough. Okay "god" sits on his ass for millions of years or maybe he is an alien that created the majority of the universe but he evolved in whatever tiny portion of the universe already existed making him a redundant fucker even if he is an alien?

Oh seriously deism is retarded enough theism is a load of fuckering fuckity fuck fuck fuck balls. Oh my fuck as I said and I shall say some more: OH MY FUCK.

stop believing in bullshit people.

Like seriously it's ridiculous and childish and fucking stupid as fuck. Anyhoo ummmmmmm... so yeah:

Only way I can make sense of it in a non-childish way or a non-denial of reality and wanting to believe in silly shit to feel better way is thusly:

Some people are super fucking vulnerable to bullshit logical fallacies.

But seriously. No. Still. No, just no. Logical fallacies or not: A fucking fucker creates the universe? Seriously, no, that's retarded. What the fuck. No.

/end massive rant possibly massively more ranty than usual due to inability to cope well with having had a 3 day break from the internet recently.

take that deists and theists !  ( protecting myself with a special force field that God gave me )

feel better now evie did you get that out of your system ? lol

[Edwardo Piet]

I do actually. A LOT.

[ignoramus]

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?

There are only 2 reasons why it's important that you believe.
Firstly, the more people agreeing with his belief actually validates his faith (in his mind)
And secondly, he gets brownie points from Allah for recruiting.

Both reasons are both based on very selfish reasons whether he acknowledges it or not.
If heaven was exclusive to the few in the know, how many religitards would be going around sprouting their bullshit?

[RoadRunner79]

Thank you for the replies, and particularly to the reasons I gave.   I will try to get to some in more detail tomorrow.  But I do have one question. 

I am aware of many of the studies you cited, and do not come to the same conclusion that witness testimony is unreliable. 

And you're qualified exactly how?

You're entitled to your own beliefs, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

Me, I'll take good studies over some guy on the Net. Thanks for offering your opinion.

But I do have a question for you.   Do you live believing that most of your memories of your life are largely inaccurate and unreliable to the truth?  I think we can all point to areas where we where mistaken in memory or we remember something differently from someone else.  But do you think that your picture of yourself is for the most part accurate?

For the most part, yes. But thanks to a life lived a little wildly when I was younger, I know better than to trust it completely.

Just to be clear. I don't doubt that the studies show that certain aspects of witness testimony. I only doubt the conclusion that testimony is not to be trusted at all, or is wholly or even mostly inaccurate. I'll try to write some comments on the studies provided within a few days

[Homeless Nutter]

Our perception is flawed. Our memory is even worse, and both are impaired by emotions. On top of that our imagination is overactive. And we are so proficient at lying, that we can often even fool ourselves. Witness evidence is the worst kind of evidence there is.

The worst part is, that our limited self-awareness causes us to instinctively believe it - often despite scientific evidence to the contrary - especially if it's coming from a source we're emotionally attached to.

And I find it quite symptomatic, that religion and other superstitions rely almost entirely on witness accounts.

[Silver]

I only doubt the conclusion that testimony is not to be trusted at all

Of course you do, fucking idiot.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Just to be clear.  I don't doubt that the studies show that certain aspects of witness testimony. I only doubt the conclusion that testimony is not to be trusted at all, or is wholly or even mostly inaccurate.   I'll try to write some comments on the studies provided within a few days

Keep in minf as you compose your reply:

1) No one is arguing that it cannot be trusted at all, so far as I've read;

2) No one is arguing that it is wholly inaccurate; and

3) No one is arguing that it is mostly inaccurate.

What you're being told in this thread does not pertain to the accuracy of memory, but rather, the reliability of it. It's a subtle distinction, but I'll try to explain it.

Being able to rely on the memory of a witness carries with it a lot of assumptions -- that the witness saw the important aspect of the event, that the witness understood it in the context of the surrounding events, that the witness wasn't the recipient of suggestion, and so on. Now, a witness's memory may be 95% accurate, but the thing is, we don't know which 5% is wrong. If he remembers 95% of a murder accurately, but doesn't clearly remember the perpetrator's face or the license plate of the getaway car, his testimony isn't useful. But because of the plastic nature of memory, we have no way of knowing which elements he got right or wrong without corroboration. He may think he clearly remembers the face or make and model of car, but we don't know that for a fact.

Corroboration may be from other eyewitnesses (which then introduces other problems, because they rarely match up on all details, meaning both witnesses are contradicted at certain points in each of their narratives -- the more witnesses, the better we might be able to ascertain some facts, but also, the more contradictions we encounter); or corroboration may come from physical evidence, which goes much further to strengthen the eyewitness testimony insofar as it isn't subject to the vagaries of memory.

Just some things to chew on as you think your way through this.

[abaris]

Just to be clear.  I don't doubt that the studies show that certain aspects of witness testimony. I only doubt the conclusion that testimony is not to be trusted at all, or is wholly or even mostly inaccurate.   I'll try to write some comments on the studies provided within a few days

Personal experience from back in '84. The only time I really witnessed something I had to give testimony on. Once a week, I used to drive my mom to a big mall and when we hit the parking lot, I noticed something just a little bit off. There were a bunch of people carrying sacks from a backdoor to a car. The only reason I even took note was, because they were dressed like a working crew, but the car they loaded up was a simple sedan. Not a truck or a Van.

I didn't think much of it, until I saw the news this evening. It was a high profile robbery, without any violence involved and even the police officer interviewing me later, showed a bit of admiration for their planning. Anyway, the only thing I got right, was the model of the car. Everything else I believed to remember turned out to be wrong. I even identified one of the robbers in a police allbum, but the guy couldn't have done it, since he was already doing time.

[Mudhammam]

Eyewitness testimony is oftentimes unreliable but that doesn't make it useless. Obviously one must take into account the credibility of the person making the statement along with its inherent probability as measured by the total knowledge of our past experiences. Even if it's granted that the person witnessed something extraordinary, it doesn't necessarily follow that there's justification for whatever inference they draw as to the underlying causes of their experience, i.e. they may have been deceived, without further evidence and such scrutiny as is required for confirming a particular interpretation of said phenomenon.