Intense press interest in missing people

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Grumble
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Intense press interest in missing people

Post by Grumble » Mon Feb 20, 2023 6:38 pm

Anyone from the U.K. must be aware of the disappearance and subsequent finding of the body of Nicola Bulley, I think it raises several points that we would be wise to think about as sceptics.

Quick overview for non-U.K. people. Nicola went missing while walking her dog along a riverside path. Her dog was there, and her phone was found unlocked and still connected to a work Teams call. The police said their working hypothesis was that she had fallen in the river, and drafted in a diving team and conducted searches in the area. Media interest and speculation about tiny details (no slip marks on the bank, for example) was endless. The diving team said after a couple of days that she definitely wasn’t in the stretch of river they had examined. Tourists turned up, taking photos of the bench, the path, “investigating” surrounding buildings (including breaking in). It must have been horrendous not just for the family but also other local residents. Her body has now been found, sadly, entangled in some reeds which were outside the divers’ search area.

The main thing to say is that the media coverage sensationalised this beyond all proportion. Associated experts, in particular the diving lead, seem to have given the media quotes which were possibly unwise, leading to headlines (so many headlines) along the lines of “Four things which don’t add up”. Reading the actual quotes I don’t think he said much wrong, but in the febrile atmosphere of press speculation I don’t think he necessarily couched his comments enough in terms like “we haven’t looked at this area over here, because it’s choked with reeds.” The media furore also seems to have pressured the police into saying things that they wouldn’t normally. Again, not necessarily incorrect, but possibly unwise, and all getting sucked in to the media shite.

I think we all know that the media can amplify the absolute worst of a situation and make it worse just by their coverage. This case has been a sorry example of that, and a reminder not to get caught up in hype.

The police were proven right to think that the simplest explanation was the most likely. I don’t know the area or river at all so I don’t know why it took well over a week to find the body, but presumably if it was easy it wouldn’t have taken so long.
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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by lpm » Mon Feb 20, 2023 6:44 pm

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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by IvanV » Tue Feb 21, 2023 12:12 pm

Grumble wrote:
Mon Feb 20, 2023 6:38 pm
Nicola went missing while walking her dog along a riverside path. Her dog was there, and her phone was found unlocked and still connected to a work Teams call.
As this was happening, by chance I was reading Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, in the completion by Leon Garfield, where there is a similar scenario - in 19th century terms. Edwin Drood goes missing, and all that is found is his watch, chain, and tiepin, caught on the weir of the river. An excellent basis for an early mystery novel.

Many people go missing every day, but few make the national news, or even the local news. Many of them never turn up again, or not for a very long time. Some of them have got fed up of their life and disappeared of their own accord, and succeed in keeping themselves well separate from their old lives. Some of them have got trapped in people smuggling and exploitation networks. Some of them have died by misadventure and never been found. Some of them have been murdered, or otherwise found their death by the negligent or unlucky intervention of a second party, and their body hidden.

What very few of them achieve are the kind of mysterious circumstances of disappearance, similar to those found in a mystery novel, that excites the media and creates a very newsworthy item. And that is what explains the intense press interest on this occasion.

I confess I was a little enchanted by this story, because I thought the went-in-the-river theory didn't quite add up. But that's because I was unaware of, or had failed to register, what I underlined, until you wrote that. All I was aware was that her phone was found on the bench. I was thinking, why would someone put their phone down on a bench, and then walk away from it such that they end up in the river? That seemed unlike what people do to me. Now that I know she was in a work Teams call, it makes perfect sense she would put her phone down and walk a short distance away from it.

We don't know what "happened" in Edwin Drood, because Dickens died with precisely half the contracted installments written, and no notes outlining the plot - he didn't tend to write such plot sketches. But we do know he had said to various people - publisher, son, etc - that it was a murder, and who the perpetrator was. But it is left very considerably to any completionist as to how they might implement that. The finding of the watch is the only visible clue in the part that Dickens wrote, though people have found a faint scattering of other suggestive details that might have been deliberately placed there as part of the construction of the dénouement. I really enjoyed the Garfield completion. Real Dickens is notable for long boring bits of padding, precisely because he had been contracted to write so many pages for the magazines where they were published in instalments. Whereas Garfield, inauthentically but wisely, avoided that. Garfield's Dickensian writing is like a condensation of the best bits of Dickensian writing. It is only half the length of what Dickens was contracted to write, which is also a good thing.

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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by noggins » Tue Feb 21, 2023 2:10 pm

I think its a different problem: its that we dont easily grasp what the simplest solution is and are too easily led into variants of the prosecutors fallacy.

Eg there are twice as many murders as drownings: most women victims are killed by a partner or ex: so therefore the husband done it. The actual scenario: whats the chance someone who has dissappeared next to water is dead in that same water is harder to grasp and speculate ( and i may well have myself failed to pose the correct probability riddle)

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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by TopBadger » Tue Feb 21, 2023 2:46 pm

I thought the news coverage was overdone... I get the circumstances were mysterious but I can't seem to convince myself that the same coverage would have been given to, say, a non-white male anyway.
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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by IvanV » Tue Feb 21, 2023 3:15 pm

noggins wrote:
Tue Feb 21, 2023 2:10 pm
I think its a different problem: its that we dont easily grasp what the simplest solution is and are too easily led into variants of the prosecutors fallacy.

Eg there are twice as many murders as drownings: most women victims are killed by a partner or ex: so therefore the husband done it. The actual scenario: whats the chance someone who has dissappeared next to water is dead in that same water is harder to grasp and speculate ( and i may well have myself failed to pose the correct probability riddle)
There are many, many more missing persons than (known) murders or drownings. Missing People observe that about 170,000 people per year are reported missing. Since some of them are repeatedly reporting missing, the number of incidents is typically around double that, though it has been lower recently with lockdowns, etc. The great majority turn up. Just 2% of children and 5% of adults are still missing after a week. These figures are is still considerably more than the number of (known) homicides, unless there is some huge level of unidentified homicides.

So, if the prosecutor's fallacy starts with failing to give proper weight to prior probabilities before new information is introduced, by far the most likely explanation of a missing person is that they are missing and will turn up. With 5% of adults still missing after a week, even after a week it is more likely that they are still missing rather than murdered or drowned, if we know nothing else.

Probabilities clearly change when you have a missing person next to a dangerous water body, and having left a phone and an unrestrained dog on the bank. But it may be hard to say how they change. The police claim that a missing person next to a watercourse is most likely in the water, rather than just a missing person, that could be a prosecutor's fallacy. How it changes when we can't find any evidence of exit from the area, and we have the mobile phone and the dog, that's starts to get tricky.

Another interesting conditional probability calculation starts with the observation that we don't (quickly) have a body. Most murder investigations start with finding a body. So, without a body, what now is the probability of murder? For all that we see on television detective programmes, attempts to hide a body are relatively uncommon. Rather there is a fatal assault, and the outcome is left there. But we are next to a watercourse, and it seems obvious to a murderer to chuck the body in the water...

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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by noggins » Tue Feb 21, 2023 3:54 pm

Is there a primer for dummies on how to determine what information is valid in the construction of prior probabilities, or is it inhernetly a conundrum philsophers and statisticians with a zillion phds between them will fight bitterly over?

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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by dyqik » Tue Feb 21, 2023 4:30 pm

noggins wrote:
Tue Feb 21, 2023 3:54 pm
Is there a primer for dummies on how to determine what information is valid in the construction of prior probabilities, or is it inhernetly a conundrum philsophers and statisticians with a zillion phds between them will fight bitterly over?
I think the correct answer to that is "yes".

I think the solution is to state your priors carefully, and to see whether your conclusions change under variations within the uncertainty of your priors, or inclusion or removal of your priors.

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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by Tessa K » Sat Feb 25, 2023 12:28 pm

The news cycle has moved on. The latest interest is in the woman claiming to be Madeleine McCann.

Spoiler:

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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by Grumble » Sat Feb 25, 2023 3:27 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Sat Feb 25, 2023 12:28 pm
The news cycle has moved on. The latest interest is in the woman claiming to be Madeleine McCann.

Spoiler:
If someone comes forward and actually turns out to be Madeleine McCann then I want to know about it. If there is any evidence at all then it might be newsworthy, but someone saying they are is no evidence at all.
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Re: Intense press interest in missing people

Post by Tessa K » Sat Feb 25, 2023 3:45 pm

Grumble wrote:
Sat Feb 25, 2023 3:27 pm
Tessa K wrote:
Sat Feb 25, 2023 12:28 pm
The news cycle has moved on. The latest interest is in the woman claiming to be Madeleine McCann.

Spoiler:
If someone comes forward and actually turns out to be Madeleine McCann then I want to know about it. If there is any evidence at all then it might be newsworthy, but someone saying they are is no evidence at all.
Since when did the press need actual evidence?

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