Ontario wrongly separated families on results of Motherisk hair-testing program

Maybe submit multiple controls in the same request.

These labs are private businesses. Prosecutors and police can choose which ones to use and they will use, and they'll likely make that choice based on who gives them the results they want rather than the results that are accurate.

In the case of the Motherisk program, the discredited physician was affiliated with a local university hospital.

many of the government labs won't take samples from private parties, and the ones that do frequently don't advertise the fact.

the private labs, sure, you could spike (or not) some blood samples and pay for them to be tested.

This was a failure of the court itself to enforce proper standards of evidence. For once you can't blame parliament.

You're assuming there aren't any other problem labs that haven't or won't be discovered. How expensive are these tests? How much of the police's budget is it? Surely you know these things if you are talking return on investment, because you must know these things to actually know what your return on investment is.

25 years is a long time to be improperly ripping apart families. Is there a point at which it becomes a problem? Death tardily solves all your problems after only 80 years, so I assume somewhere between 25 and 80.

The essentially free solution cost 25 years worth of bad results.

Bad execution can and should be improved upon. Bad science (eg, matching bullets to guns) needs to be thrown onto the trash heap of history.

The former can be debunked on a case by case basis. The latter needs to be categorically banned from judicial proceedings.

It implies a difference in what their attitude ought to be the next tine they hear about 'hair testing' being used elsewhere...

From a systemic perspective, we can't correct for bad science until better science disproves it and becomes common enough knowledge. Unless you're both a parent and a cutting edge scientist in the field being employed against you, this is true at an individual level too. Incompetent application can, with transparent processes, be investigated by the defending party/parent/lawyer and be argued against. Or if the investigation can't be completed until after the children have been seized, corrections can be made and damages can be pursued.

This isn't that kind of hair analysis - determining which person a hair found at the scene is from. This is looking for markers of drug and alcohol use in hair samples from a known person.

> I have been reduced to a gibbering wreck trying to explain to otherwise intelligent people that science isn’t “just an opinion”, and that astrology and astronomy aren’t “just different, equally valid opinions”.

A short sarcastic laughter would probably have worked better. If people sense their status is lowering because they believe in this "equally valid opinions" nonsense, they will have a strong incentive to update their belief.

Of course, many will be offended, in which case I recommend turning the sarcastic laugh into a benevolent, condescending smile, with perhaps an appeal to their intelligence to soften the blow. Ideally though, you should spin it as if you were ridiculing a third party. This lets them avoid direct confrontation if they so chose, and you still get to make your point.

In any case, they cannot be taught as long as they subscribe to epistemic relativism. They first have to get rid of it, somehow. Doesn't matter if it's for the wrong reasons. Only then can they be taught how to properly change their mind.

"peer" in that context has only ever meant people of similar standing. In the US (and many other places) where we don't have formal or legal class distinctions it pretty much just means other citizens.

I think there's probably an argument to be made about there being benefits to smaller communities, but that argument isn't supported by legal tradition surrounding the word "peer".

It seems to me that justice is in the most peril when the prosecutor is absolutely certain that the perp is guilty, but doesn't have any good evidence (which is not an unusual occurrence). So now he is faced with two possiblities, let the guy go and watch him kill/rob/rape again, or make up some bullshit that sounds good to a jury and that his public defender won't question too harshly. Something that sounds scientific even though it was never actually proven effective. Hair analysis, signature analysis, ballistic fingerprinting, eyewitness testimony, etc... There are people on death row that were convicted solely on circumstantial and unreliable evidence, and not a lot of it. Of course all this is a lot easier to accomplish if you can use the jury's inherent biases in your favor. Like you're trying to convict a 6"4' black man with tattoos all over his body and permanent sneer. Doesn't really matter if he's guilty or not, the jury is going to want to lock him up regardless.

When science and the science community fails, your solution is to suggest that more -- indeed ALL -- people start valuing science more and putting more time and resources into it.

Is not only the jury though, I read about cases where a fireman is brought as an expert and his testimony was incorrect and if I remember right cost the accused his life.

So some rules must be created for this experts, what tools they use, what software ...

#1 is the scariest of the two in my opinion, and I think the advent of the internet has only made it easier for the "evolution is just a theory"-types to congregate and develop a siege mentality that only serves to reinforce their misconceptions.

I think the problem is going to get worse before it gets better.

I've read that story once before, and it is absolutely blood-curdling. I wondered while reading if a movie was made, since it seemed like such an incredible story, it could pick up many awards. Seems it's coming: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3263946/

Worse, like we know lie detectors would work for facts, "Did you do X? Yes/No"

My scenario would involve some startup creating some software that would analyze a brain scan(or worse analyze your internet activity) then it will answer for questions like this"Does this person has potential for being a pedophile? The answer would be something vague like "Strong potential"/ "weak potential" , I chose this example because I noticed that when children are involved you get much more irrational laws and the justice is applyed much stronger with less evidence

>The argument isn't a binary choice between trusting the mother or not, it's to raise the bar for evidence significantly - which is what I take don't automatically discount the mother" to mean.

We could start by adding Fathers back into the equation, and not automatically assuming that a child is in danger if they're not in their Mothers' sphere.

I think this is the worst thing that governments have done for families: the idea that a single-parent (Primarily the Mother) family is anything less than ideal for the children needs to attain mainstream acceptance. Dads need to stay, and Mothers need to move over and make way for it.

I was with you until this:

If we're comfortable letting a criminal go free of prison because guilt can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (and we should, for the record), we should be comfortable letting a child stay with its parents until the parents inability to care is established beyond a reasonable doubt.

The difference is that in one scenario it’s about punishing something that happened and is done and in the other it’s to prevent ongoing/future harm. If you’ve seen some of the things parents are willing to do to their own kids, you would see why it’s not that simple.

Are divorces in Canada contentious? I've been led to believe that USA has a uniquely dire set of divorce laws...

I'm not sure being so reductive helps.

Even in other applications, you wouldn't just come up with an acceptable false-positive rate. You'd consider that as part of a larger process.

How often do you test? What other tests are available? What's the cost/benefit tradeoffs?

So for example in some medical tests they tell people of certain ages to just come in for tests. They review and change that age based on evidence. Some tests may give borderline results so people get asked to come back sooner than average if they only just pass. Better techniques for confirming or denying the conclusion may be developed for use before doing anything drastic and irreversible.

False-positive rates (of the multiple different tests available) are only one factor.

I would guess almost all of these things are already done in the current case under discussion, e.g. as mentioned before one case involved accusations from a husband. Now maybe that's just two false signals that happen to agree, but already you're talking about two false-positive rates you need to consider. Judges and social workers are probably making snap decisions based on gut instinct and rules of thumb as well that factor in. Presumably a case needs to be pretty serious before removal is even considered.

From just reading a libertarian blog that focusses on goverment intrusion into child-rearing though, you may think people are having their hair snipped randomly in the street and finding their children gone when they get home. A false-positive for that hypothetical case would obviously need to be much, much lower to be acceptable than in tests used as part of a bigger process.

Zero. If the choices are to leave a child in a bad situation vs. destroying a family for no reason, I would err on leaving a child in a bad situation. Neither option is great, of course, but in the absence of perfection...

Family courts have different, less stringent standards than other parts of the legal system, even less than the civil part, which is why people could call them kangaroo courts.

For example, you could appeal a traffic ticket decision, but appealing a family court decision could be fairly difficult to impossible task in some jurisdictions.

"As you will learn from reading our interviews, in most states a "temporary" decision made at a 10-minute hearing is generally unappealable and, from a practical point of view, permanent. How reliable is the information that a judge receives? Judge Duncan headlines one section "Lies Usually Go Unpunished."

http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Litigation

I don't mean it actually works this way (one actually has to prove the problem is real, serious and actually affects the children to remove them), I mean it should work this way (I've taken a look at the video, the first ⅓ of it)