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A comment on Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club. Parent comment

Re:Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Sa... by JoshTriplett on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:05PM (#37080381)
Absolutely true (civil cases are "preponderance of the evidence"), but the same principle still applies, just with lower numbers. 51% likely might be enough for a verdict against someone in a civil case and a legally enforceable monetary judgement. But if you have someone 30% likely to have done something (where the baseline should be close to 0%), that's still enough that reasonable risk-averse organizations may reasonably choose to not associate with them.

A court that can render legally enforceable judgements against someone should absolutely have a higher bar of certainty than an organization that is simply excluding someone from participation in that organization.

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Re:Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Sa... by mbg721 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:25PM (#37080592)
The problem with that is that if the accused is only 30% likely to have done something, then there may be an equal or greater likelihood that the accuser is maliciously lying (allowing for some likelihood of genuine misunderstanding).
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Re:Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Sa... by atakan_gurkan on Thursday August 17, 2023 @07:05AM (#37159836)
Not necessarily. Unless the presence of the accusation already was used to get that 30% number, you also need to take into account the a priori probability of someone maliciously lying (or better yet, the particular accuser to be lying in this case) and apply Bayes's theorem.
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Re:Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Sa... by mbg721 on Thursday August 17, 2023 @08:31AM (#37160578)
I should have expected Simpson's Paradox here. Nevertheless, I think the possibility of witch-hunting is high.
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Re:Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Sa... by paulddraper on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:10PM (#37080429)
The problem is that 30% is not a good estimate in the first place, because the organization doesn't have the same skills/resources/judgements to make an accurate assessment.
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Re:Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Sa... by JoshTriplett on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:18PM (#37080516)
It might well have substantial uncertainty, in either direction. Suppose it's 30% plus or minus 20%, a huge amount of uncertainty. That's still absolutely a reasonable threshold someone could use as the basis for a decision.

The exact numbers here are examples, not the determining factor here, nor do most organizations express them quantitatively.

The important point is that organizations can and do have a different threshold for action. You could absolutely argue about whether an organization has the right threshold, but I don't think there's a case for a deontological requirement that every organization's threshold for taking any action at all must be the same as the threshold for conviction in a court. (Leaving aside that that would utterly invalidate freedom of association.)

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