"I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer

“I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer

  Ethics, Ethics: Scientist, General Information, In The Courtroom, by Justin J. McShane

I was read­ing an arti­cle. It got me to think­ing about tes­ti­fy­ing expert wit­nesses. Basi­cally, the premise of the arti­cle is that “I don’t know” is a per­fectly accept­able answer. It is. It is a beau­ti­ful answer. It should be our default posi­tion in foren­sic sci­ence. We should start out with no pre­sump­tions or assump­tions. We should start with no ideas. We test and retest and accu­mu­late data. Only if the data is clear, clean and indis­putable should we offer an opin­ion. Oth­er­wise, it fits the pat­tern of the old joke: “What do you call an opin­ion with no data to sup­port it?” The answer is: “A guess.”  I sug­gest that too many times in the Court­room experts truly offer guesses or they give us any kind of answer as opposed to telling the sci­en­tific truth that the answer is unknown given what is known.                                                                                                       more>>