IS UNANIMITY AN INDICATION THAT SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG? I came across a link to this article by Lisa Zyga about statistics in the twitter feed on the Baseball Prospectus blog about the White Sox. (Yes, it was on a baseball blog, and, in fact, on the blog that Nick writes for.)
The article describes mathematical research on “how too much evidence can be a bad thing”. The article has a great beginning: “Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted.”
Zyga describes a paper (by Lachlan J. Gunn et al.) which is going to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A. The paper investigates what it calls “the paradox of unanimity”. The idea is that because the probability of a number of people agreeing on anything is small, unanimity raises doubts.