May 21, 2024

Reading: "Murderous nurse" Lucy Letby in the New Yorker

I found this New Yorker longread super-troubling, especially with this setup early on:

Anyone working with data on a day-to-day basis should be worried about selection bias, randomness, or both when looking at such a diagram.

The overall article is highly recommended. I’m not sure what to think about it after finally finishing it, other than the feeling like humans continue to be terrible pattern-matchers, searching for meaning where there may be none. I tried Googling for other sources but this was the least salacious source I could find, perhaps because of British contempt-of-court laws. I wonder what else has been written that’s worth reading?