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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

What they meant is wrong.

I can consult Merriam Webster, which agrees with what I said. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circumstantial%20...

Or Britannica

https://www.britannica.com/topic/circumstantial-evidence

Or Cornell

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/circumstantial_evidence

Or basically any single law firm or courthouse

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/legal-defenses/circumst...

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/circumst...

https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/1-General/CJI2d.Circumst...

Yes, inferences must be made. But as a lot of those links mention, direct evidence (the other kind of evidence) is often worse as it's usually eyewitness accounts.

Lazy television writers have done us all a disservice by repeated implication that circumstantial evidence isn't good enough.

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circumstantial

1. belonging to, consisting in, or dependent on circumstances

2. pertinent but not essential : incidental

The original comment used the word correctly. Because dictionaries describe how people actually speak, not prescribe rules on how to use words. That's why they get updated every so often as word usages change.

> how people actually speak

To counter that point, "circumstantial" has a legal meaning that does not change as easily.

Yes. But this thread isn't a legal document and is mostly written by people that aren't lawyers.

A lot of words have specific meanings, yet we don't complain and cite dictionary definitions when people use the word "or" as exclusive-or.

But this is a word that has a technical meaning and a colloquial meaning. It doesn’t make sense to apply the colloquial definition when a term is being used in the context of a technical discussion.

In other words, the appropriate definition of a term of art is... circumstantial. ;)

The Cornell Law dictionary that you cited is a good summary of what lawyers and judges are likely to think: Evidence that implies a person committed a crime, (for example, the person was seen running away from the crime scene). There must be a lot of circumstantial evidence accumulated to have real weight. Compare to direct evidence.

Putting aside the very first paragraph ("What they meant is wrong"), this post makes some sound points.

It is also the case that the alleged new evidence for Poste being the killer is, in fact, circumstantial with respect to the issue of who committed the murders in question.

So, returning to that first paragraph, to establish whether what mauze meant is wrong, we must establish both that mauze meant something other than what was written, and that the intended meaning was wrong.

I do not see any conclusive evidence as to what mause meant. Furthermore, bena's reply to mause suggests that the intended meaning was 'weak'. That strikes me as plausible, but as far as I can tell, it would not be an obviously wrong characterization of the new evidence.

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