You make an assumption that the 100 viewers of the film did not talk to each other.
No. I make the assumption that the five did not all agree to lie in the same way. Even if some or all of the five had talked to each other, it is unlikely they would enter into a conspiracy to lie, especially absent some reason to lie about what they had seen. It is much, much, much more likely that at least two of them actually recalled seeing what they said they saw.
But how could you know that? How do you know the witnesses at Dealey Plaza did not influence each other?
I don't know if they were all free from outside influence. It appears unlikely that they received information about the shot pattern but they could have heard about the number of shots from others. But receiving information from others does not mean they are not independent - that they were not reporting what they actually recalled observing. Studies show (Loftus) that while information from others may affect some witnesses' recollection, it does not affect most and is much less of an influence when the witness is interviewed soon after the events, as most of the witnesses were (in relation to the shot pattern and the number of shots. )
You admit that sometimes, this ?Find the Truth by seeing what the majority thinks? breaks down.
I have never said that the what the majority thinks is a reliable method of determining what happened. It is a matter of the statistical significance of specific observations by a number of observers. What the majority thinks may or may not be statistically significant.
But it doesn?t matter, because you can use your judgement to tell when it did, or it likely did, break down. You can tell that if 95 people don?t recall a man in a gorilla suit, but 5 do, that this is a special exception.
It is not a matter of judgement. It is a matter of probability of independent observers reporting the same observation. That does not happen by random chance.
Even if this is true, this Great Principle is not a great principle, if the majority of the witnesses can be way off in some cases. How can we tell which examples violate this great principle? Can we rely on your intuition?
It is not about intuition. It is about mathematics. The majority of witnesses are rarely way off in their observations of salient facts. Where large numbers of witnesses have been wrong is where their ability to observe or compare is limited and they are effectively giving opinions of what they observed rather than simple describing what they observed. This is particularly so with respect to facial comparisons (eg. witness tries to identify a person that they do not know from a photo line) or a witness tries to compare a sound to something they have heard before.
Let?s take the gorilla film example. You say you can tell what happened, because if 95 people don?t recall a man in a gorilla suit, but 5 do, you can logically conclude that there must have been a man in a gorilla suit. Because it is unlikely that 5 people would see something so off the wall and all saw the same thing.
So at least you agree with me on the gorilla observation. That's a start....
But does this work in general? Suppose there wasn?t a man in a gorilla suit. The film showed two teams, one in white basketball uniforms, the other in black basketball uniforms. In the middle of the practice, a man in some black clothes with a black hat walked across. If 5 people reported that one of the men was not wearing a basketball uniform, would this be so off the wall that we could expect you to conclude that the 95 witnesses were wrong and the 5 witnesses were right?
The short answer is : if the observations were independent, yes. Let's assume that in the group of 100 people there were 5 liars. A man walking through with a hat is not the only thing a person would make up. But let's say there was a 1/10 chance that a liar who wanted to make up a story would make up a story about a man wearing a hat. If they are independent, the probability that 4 liars would independently make up the same story as the first liar is 1 in 10,000. The conclusion has to be that it is extremely unlikely that there was not a man with a hat in that video.
Or let?s go with the original gorilla film. 95 views report nothing unusual but 5 report there was a black gorilla. Can we really deduce there must have been a man in a gorilla suit? Maybe one the views thought he saw a gorilla in the last second of the film. And he told other people that he saw a man in a gorilla suit. He could be so convincing, that some other people might believe him. In interviews taken down later that day, 5 people might report seeing a man in a gorilla suit. What you assumed was 5 independent events weren?t really independent events at all. The error of all 5 people was caused by the error of just one man.
Then they would not be independent. If 5 people said there was a gorilla in the film and there really wasn't, you would know that the witnesses were not independent. If they were really independent, it is virtually impossible that even two witnesses would report seeing a gorilla if there was no gorilla.
And in the Dealey Plaza witnesses, you conclude the majority in a list of witnesses reporting the limousine stopped or almost stopped, you just claim the list is faulty. Without providing us with a better list.
Not true.
Here is my analysis of all the witnesses who observed the limo. 8 said it stopped. Most said it slowed or almost stopped. This is more an illustration of witnesses who were not in a good position to observe whether it actually stopped providing an inference rather than an actual observation.
It seems that whenever a failure of the ?Majority must be right? witness theory, you do special pleading with each example. The gorilla film is not a problem because you can use your special analysis to spot a special exception. The majority of the witnesses report the limousine stopping or almost stopping, contradicting the Zapruder films, and all other films, is just the case of a bad list. That is what your judgment tells you. While your judgment tells you that the list of the ?Spacing of the Shots? witnesses is a good list and should be trusted.
All I am assuming is that at many of the witnesses(I don't have to assume all) were providing independent honest recollections of what they recalled hearing. That is all.
No. I would not be comfortable with going with either the 95 ?non-gorilla? witnesses nor the 5 ?gorilla? witnesses. I do not trust witnesses.
Fine. You could decline to draw the conclusion that there was a gorilla in it. But you can't conclude that the 5 witnesses were wrong unless you have evidence that the 5 were not independent. Not just a possibility but actual evidence that they all colluded. There are only two reasonable possibilities: the five were right or they all colluded.
But a man who relies on the ?Majority opinion of the witnesses? would be wrong. Unless he had some special intuition that told him when to apply this principle and when not to.
The observers of the gorilla film failed to do what one would think they should easily do, spot the gorilla. Because they were concentrating on something else, counting the number of passes the white team made to each other. Similarly, the Dealey Plaza witnesses may have failed to do what one would think they should easily do, tell us how many shots were fired, the spacing of the shots, the speed of the limousine. Because they were concentrating on something else. Hoping to catch the eye of the President or the First Lady. Trying to remember their likely one and only close up view of a President and First Lady.
As a final aside, how could the shot spacing witnesses be explained? Perhaps the witnesses were distracted, but not during the entire event. After the fatal headshot, they realized something terrible happened. The remembered the previous 5 seconds pretty well, from 5 to 10 seconds not so well, and over 10 seconds not well at all. The could have forgetting the first ?backfire? or ?firecracker?, remembered the second shot vaguely, the last shot rather well, with it?s ?Crack-Thump?. Hence becoming a ?3 shot ? last two shots close together? witness.
That is speculation. One cannot draw conclusions from speculation. Without evidence that such influence actually occurred and was widespread, the likelihood that they were all influenced to provide the wrong pattern of shots is much, much, much smaller than the probability that they actually observed the 1......2...3 pattern.
