Get the latest tech news

Rachel Aviv Wrote That New Yorker Story on Lucy Letby

"So much of the media coverage — and the trial itself — started at the point at which we’ve determined that [Lucy] Letby is an evil murderer; all her texts, notes, and movements are then viewed through that lens."

The case made me curious about the way that our statistical intuitions play out in criminal investigations and trials — specifically, the kinds of unexamined beliefs we have about the nature of chance, and our tendency to attribute causality to random events. You write, for example, that many news outlets published excerpts of notes found in Letby’s home and a chart shared by police linking the nurse to two dozen “suspicious” events without much in the way of analysis or context. There are so many ways in which the fact-checkers, Nina Mesfin and Daniel Ajootian, improved the piece, but even on a social level it is very nice, after being immersed in a subject alone for many months, to be assigned companions who become equally invested in the same minutiae.

Get the Android app