Rachel Aviv Wrote That New Yorker Story on Lucy Letby | Hacker News Reader

Rachel Aviv Wrote That New Yorker Story on Lucy Letby

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48 pointschapulin20 comments

This is fascinating. I'm in the UK and our press coverage of the trial and verdict was extremely uncritical, and I had no idea that The New Yorker had published this piece. I need to go find it now.

Here you go! https://archive.ph/rUtAb

HN's automated removal of words from headlines making them mean something completely different strikes again.

In fairness to the filter, "How Rachel Aviv wrote that New Yorker story on Lucy Letby" doesn't say much to me either.

> Other people have received notes from police threatening consequences including imprisonment over online posts and links shared on Twitter.

Remember, this is what happens when government gets to control the media in the name of stopping “disinformation”.

Many people, largely from European countries, seem to be suspicious of American views of freedom of speech and how that prevents government efforts to fight “disinformation”.

Well, I would rather deal with the responsibility of evaluating information and its credibility, than to have government that was empowered to put people in prison over Twitter posts.

This isn't being done "in the name of" stopping disinformation.

It's being done "in the name of" not prejudicing a future jury.

Yes, but there are certainly an abundance of articles following the original storyline that could well be prejudicing a future jury. Those are not being suppressed.

It's so bizarre that journalism and governments have decided that we're allowed to publish dozens or hundreds of articles and editorials rabidly supporting some official thesis, but articles opposing or even questioning that same thesis should at best be censored through official or unofficial means, and at worst lead to spurious criminal investigations and charges. Governments and justice systems are selectively giving access to journalists who are incurious scribes, and the rest are relegated to the periphery and under constant attack.

I think it started when the US started stretching legislation it had created regarding "material support for terrorism" into "clearly expressed support for terrorism," by absurdly playing on the meaning of the word "support." e.g. if I support your kid by cheering for her at her basketball game, it doesn't mean I can claim your kid as a dependent on my taxes.

Taking the side, or even considering the arguments, of somebody officially accused either by the government or some institution, has become something like "accessory after the fact" in a lot of people's minds. Accusations have become viral. Acknowledging the defense has become dangerous for journalists, unless the subject is part of a disagreement between institutions of roughly equal power and influence.

We're heading towards a West that officially licenses (and employs) journalists, and prosecutes people for performing journalism without a license. "Disinformation" is when you're told a lie about an official story, "Malinformation" is when you're told the truth about an official story by a journalist who is evil.

Comparing the discussion of the article on r/medicine to one on r/lucyletby is shocking:

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1crg7u0/a_british...

https://www.reddit.com/r/lucyletby/comments/1crie1n/interest...

The r/lucyletby sub have lost all critical thinking ability, self-filtered for those who can never convinced otherwise about Letby's guilt, and resorted to calling everyone else a conspiracy theorist, all while insulating themselves with an embargo law that doesn't apply to reddit. It's mind-numbing.

The evidence against her is so damning - she was present for every death, she even wrote “I’m evil, I did this” on a piece of paper.

It's not as damming as you make it out to be. People "confess" to crimes they didn't commit all the time[1]. Also, taking other things she wrote into context, eg.

>I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them

it's unclear whether she wrote “I’m evil, I did this” because she murdered the babies, or she felt responsible for their deaths despite not having murdered them. The latter isn't as far fetched as you might think. For instance when people choose to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train, conductors sometimes feel like they were responsible, even if there was nothing they can do (due to the stopping distances of the trains)[2]. And this is for a train, where it's possible to rigorously prove whether the conductor were responsible or not. Imagine what it must be like for a nurse in a hectic emergency unit, with far more variables and far less certainty.

[1] https://innocenceproject.org/false-confessions/

[2] https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/itookalife/former-train-...

> she was present for every death

For every death she was indicted for, yes; for every death on the unit, no.

"[Schafer] thought that [the diagram] should have spanned a longer period of time and included all the deaths on the unit, not just the ones in the indictment."

I confess. I stole the Eiffel Tower. I'm a thief and a crook. Take me away and lock me up.

Confessing to something is evidence of guilt if a crime has occurred. It's not evidence that a crime has occurred.

Being present for every death is only evidence of guilt if those deaths were murders. It's not evidence that those deaths were murders.

Otherwise you could correlate the staff rosters with death certificates at every hospital or nursing home and find a large number of "serial killers". Especially if you get to cherry pick which deaths are suspicious.

You are committing the exact same fallacies as the r/lucyletby sub. She was present for every death that she was indicted for. Each of you and I were present for every death that we were indicted for too!

Confessions are not good evidence.

who are those people and why is this on HN, esp front page?

Lucy Letby is a nurse recently convicted in the UK of murder of a number of babies in the ward she worked on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Letby .

Rachel Aviv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Aviv wrote a piece in the New Yorker about the case that raises doubts about the accuracy of the verdict: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Letby#Doubts_about_convic... .

This article is not available in the UK due to a court order: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/15/mp-u...

The case, and the suppression of the article, is about a current event and touches on issues of censorship and the uses of statistics that are often discussed here on HN.

Censorship I guess, this can't be reported in the UK (and the New Yorker geoblocks the UK) since there is an appeal pending. Kind of silly in the age of TCP/IP.

I mean, it's on the front page because people upvoted it.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I would ask: Why did it slip off the front page so quickly? It's surely a more interesting story than yet another repost of ADSL works over wet string.

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