Chip Smith reminded me recently of the case of Cameron Todd Willingham. Probably executed for a crime he didn’t commit, though one should expect both Type I and II error, and so doesn’t alter my support for the death penalty. I’ve been thinking again about the view among the investigators of his alleged crime that detecting the signs of arson is a craft rather than hard-science handed down as folk knowledge among police. Actual scientists claim they didn’t have a real understanding of arson and were treating their hunches as authoritative. I’ve cited Balko before on bogus forensics, but didn’t include arson there.
Since I’ve been reading James Scott, this brings to mind again the dark side of tacit knowledge. One of Scott’s books, “Weapons of the Weak“, I think is largely about obfuscation. In “The Art of Not Being Governed” he discusses the “orality” of illiterate hill peoples as a way to avoid fixed histories or identities that could reduce their flexibility. Of course similar things may benefit the literate, the strong, the authorities. One may argue that if they were sufficiently strong relative to their subjects, authorities would not have to deceive but assert their arbitrary demands and have them treated as absolute law backed solely by their personal authority. But how often is that the case?
January 27, 2011 at 12:56 am
Tacit knowledge is more real than you think. If you would like to feel how real it is, try this experiment:
(1) spend six months reading books on Judo technique and have a friend take Judo lessons for three months
(2) at the end of the six months have a Judo match against your friend
January 27, 2011 at 1:16 am
My theory is that King Hammurabi writing down the laws wasn’t a concession the King made to not rule by whim, it was a device he used to get less backtalk: So it is written, so it shall be done.
January 28, 2011 at 10:17 am
Gerald Hurst, the fire expert whose eleventh hour report might have saved Willingham’s life had anyone bothered to read it, believes that wrongful arson convictions are widespread. It would make sense. Insurance is easily cast as a motive, and there is a natural human tendency to assign blame in the wake of tragedy. This is of course Balko’s turf. Could be a big story.
January 28, 2011 at 11:57 pm
“Could be a big story.”
I don’t know why. Anybody with any intelligence knows that some innocent people have been executed. They also know that some innocent people have been sent to jail. We don’t scrap jail for this reason, so why should we scrap the death penalty?
January 29, 2011 at 10:51 am
I’m not so interested in the death penalty angle. What seems “big” is the story of systemic error resulting in false arson convictions because of a profound disconnect between traditional forensic assumptions and scientific expertise. I think it’s similar to what we saw with the memory wars a couple of decades back.
January 30, 2011 at 4:42 pm
I don’t deny the existence of tacit knowledge, but I think there is a great incentive for people to claim they have unverifiable expertise, often in combination with status which muffles skepticism. I actually like that you referenced martial arts, where some dojos still claim to teach “dim mak”.
Steve, that makes a lot of sense and is basically Mark Kleiman’s schtick in “When Brute Force Fails”. An effectively communicated and credible threat will ideally not need to be carried out.
January 30, 2011 at 9:57 pm
Agreed, which is why my example relied on Judo (which has the advantage of constant feedback during sparring) rather than Kung Fu (which typically has very little sparring).