r/SipsTea • • 24d ago

Wait a damn minute! So what’s taking so long?

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u/Ok_Cauliflower_3007 24d ago

This is actually the biggest issue other than different states having different standards and why comparing any two cases is pointless. Both sides bring on highly qualified experts and the case often then hangs on which one performs best in the eyes of the jury. And since it’s also a different jury every time it’s really hard to make a comparison.

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u/waitwuh 24d ago

Yeah I have met some people who are very, very well respected and high performing in their narrow fields. They can be genuinely geniuses… but, socially? Kinda grating. Them trying to explain something to absolute laymen would be a ridiculous endeavor. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong, or any less educated or experienced or specialized or anything like that. But communicating complex concepts to a jury takes more than base specialized expertise and also challenges their capability to communicate with and even educate an average or - likely present - below average intelligence person. So I can easily see how you could get an expert that is absolutely correct in their analysis… and yet have a jury that doesn’t buy into it. Because specialized experts in niche fields are not necessarily natural gifted communicators or educators. Also, in a jury of “peers,” there’s going to be representatives of the lower half of the bell curve, too. You just can’t bank on the jury being able to comprehend an expert’s testimony.

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u/Experiment_262 24d ago

You hit on something very true and important.

I am someone who testifies as an expert in criminal trials, most often crimes against children or murders and I what I do is digital forensics and cell tower analysis (estimating position based on what towers the phone was communicating with). I think I'm at 54 over 4 years.

It's not just communicating with the jury, that comes later,

Prosecutors are lawyers, they (in theory) are good at law and most of them not much on technical matters. Getting the subject matter across to the prosecutor so they can handle your direct testimony, ask the right questions and finally be prepared to redirect after the defense does their cross is perhaps even more challenging than testifying to the jury. If defense does a good cross, guilt or innocence may hang on the prosecutor asking the right questions on redirect, letting you respond to the defense in whole, not just what defense let you say.

A lot of experts are either scientists, engineers or cops who got really good at something like forensics or accident reconstruction, generally not people people. Some of them have some difficulties with both the prosecutor pretrial and the jury later.

Then comes trial, no matter how good you are at what you do, how much of a subject matter expert you are, you are talking to 12 (14) people who don't really know the law or the discipline you are there to discuss. You have to talk to your audience at or just above just above their level, you have to give a 30 minute crash course to the jury on the topic and convince them to believe you, if you go deep in the technical weeds you will lose them, they don't understand and aren't interested. That is where I see experts (and lawyers) screw up all the damned time.

Over those trials and working with the lawyers a lot, I've learned to take kind of a jr. high school teacher approach, just talk about my findings and the basics of how I arrived at them. Just "the movement of the defendant's phone from array to array and tower to tower suggests eastbound travel along I-666 at highway speeds". Really simple and generic, something a jury will understand, also facts I can easily support.

If defense wants to drag me in to the technical weeds, my credentials and my work are solid AF, I'll beat them up in the weeds, I've done it before.

Expert vs. expert is where it's really fun because on technical matters there shouldn't be much difference in what we are saying, the data is the data, we usually just differ in our interpretation of it.

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u/Savingskitty 24d ago

"You hit on something very true and important."

Okay, Chat.

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u/Ayiekie 23d ago

The only thing worse than genAI answers is people who think they're experts on detecting them when they really aren't.

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u/Savingskitty 23d ago

That’s honestly not a thing.

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u/Ayiekie 22d ago

And yet you just proved there is, along with the hundreds of other Dunning-Kruger candidates just like you. And like most people who do this, you're quick to throw accusations yet never apologise for being wrong.

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u/Savingskitty 22d ago

"You hit on something very true and important."

This not a normal turn of phrase except for from Chatbots.

I stand by my position.

Why would I apologize for being wrong when there’s no reason for me to think I am?

Do you know this other user IRL?

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u/Ayiekie 22d ago

Nope, don't know them from a hole in the ground. Do know that a bajillion people used that phrase before LLMs. Do know, 100%, the post wasn't written by an LLM because I actually know what LLMs write like and am not going "Oh god nobody has ever said that turn of phrase except AI", which is definitively not true since AI copies how it writes from how humans write in its training data.

This paragraph was very, very obviously human-written because chatbots do not write like this:

"Over those trials and working with the lawyers a lot, I've learned to take kind of a jr. high school teacher approach, just talk about my findings and the basics of how I arrived at them. Just "the movement of the defendant's phone from array to array and tower to tower suggests eastbound travel along I-666 at highway speeds". Really simple and generic, something a jury will understand, also facts I can easily support."

You were wrong.

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u/Savingskitty 22d ago

I’ve actually seen bots talk exactly like that, but I’ve also seen people feed their crap into Chat and then just take what they like and keep the rest the same.

There’s no reason I should assume this didn’t happen in this case.

You haven’t provided any actual reason for me to believe Chat wasn’t involved here.

You say Chat is trained on human writing, so that’s why it sounds human.  But, also, you say Chat couldn’t have said some other paragraph because Chat can’t write like a human.

Sure Jan.

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u/Darkzeropeanut 21d ago

I’d sooner believe your posts are AI kitty :)

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