Adam Kucharski

So a lot of the early randomization in medicine wasn't,

about the statistical properties of the trial design.

It was just about making sure humans didn't muck things up, basically, with their internal biases.

The story of those trials by ordeal is a fascinating one as well, because they were used for a long time.

You could have trial by ordeal, like by water or by fire or whatever, and then you could also choose trial by duel.

So basically the big criminals always pick that and people start to notice like, oh, you know, if God is deciding which one's innocent, God tends to pick the bigger one, like pretty much every time, which is, I think there was that that came in.

But actually one of the reasons they stopped using them is a lot of the religious scholars became concerned that they were basically trying to,

By running those trials, you're essentially trying to get God to do your work for you.

And that felt for them a bit awkward because you're sort of on demand saying, hey, can you come and make a decision for us, which they sort of got quite uncomfortable with.

But even those early systems, I mean, early juries in England were kind of fascinating because they weren't the structure that we had today.

They kind of did their own investigations.

Often someone was accused and then they went off and accused someone else and kind of did their own thing.

And it was only over time that system kind of evolved of having...

that way and converging on something.

And I think that's, you know, we talk a lot about the sort of problem of black boxes, but to some extent, juries and talking to legal scholars was kind of interesting with this, that it's not so much about getting to the truth.

It's having a system where you can reach a decision and you've got kind of that finality or semi-finality to that decision and having a system that works rather than, you know, you're 100% convinced of that.

And I think we see that

kind of across different fields of that emergence of truth.

And as you said, what's kind of obvious and what's self-evident.

I mean, one of the other things that I found