What can we learn from the Post Office scandal publicity (including TV)?

I keep thinking back to this post: https://www.s4me.info/threads/focus...instead-of-mind-versus-body.30417/post-446962

which in it I found an article that (back then) was saying that 'the system is right/the truth' replaced the truth of the subpostmasters

https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/116949/1/Lacey_criminal_justice.pdf

e.g. on page 7 of the pdf:
While perhaps less obvious than the upshot of material injustices, the implications of epistemic injustice for criminal justice are no less radical. The recent overturning of the convictions of dozens of postmasters for a ‘fraud’ which was in fact caused by a software failure is a case in point. 3 Probably the most extensive miscarriage of justice case in English/Welsh legal history, it is horrifyingly eloquent testimony to the difficulty which members of social groups with lower social standing – in this case, many of them working class, and many of minority ethnicity – encounter in having their narratives accepted – indeed, even listened to – in criminal justice settings. In effect, these defendants’ agency was effaced through the criminal justice authorities’ grant of epistemic preference to an IT programme.4
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From an ME/CFS point of view what I witness when you equivilate the post office computer system with what the bps keep trying to create as 'the system' that is doing the measuring and totalling for me/cfs it seems exactly the same issue.

I think what I mean is that certainly one part of what has/is being done is actively right now going on where it's distorting the literature so that what comes out of the system or is 'adding up' gives an answer they want rather than one that is accurate to how academic literature and science is supposed to work. And some of the papers and reviews seem to be quite transparent on this being the aim (to change what is counted and what gets to be 'added up' etc)

I think this is now well-acknowledged as the issue/excuse used by those who perpetuated the harms with the post office scandal and the excuse as to why it was enabled to continue for so long without justice.

And I think that change, so that people understand 'it was the computer system' and that 'not even contemplating that system could be errant or at fault or even one that was just set up to do what those who asked for it to be set up asked for it to do, rather than being some perfect thing' is an important finding and move forward.


For me/cfs what is that 'system' and who/how do we define it as, because I think there very much is one. Except that the parts are being assembled and not dropped etc (when it had been found to be inaccurate or harmful or a problem) before our eyes, with things like

'how it is measured' and the push from CRawley et al (2013) to introduce a PROMS when that trial (same time as the PACE trial) failed to produce any effect

the ongoing non-withdrawal of the Cochrane Larun review and all the blocks that have been obvious in honest conclusions being added for that paper or for any sort of proper other review that had the Patient Group involved being thwarted, then relabelling the review that was withdrawn in what 2018 (and protested about by eg Gerada) but 'reinstated' then being relabelled to infer it was 2024.

a distortion of terms that really are well-understood like what the term 'evidence' really should mean and be limited to. A refusal by certain subject areas to use proper methodology or peer review. so it isn't just garbage-in-garbage-out but filibustering of the literature.

bps and bacme just PRing the same old ideologies pretending that because they use different words, brands and slurs they somehow don't understand it is just the same issue instead of 'treatment' or 'help' it just being harmful and wrong

I think it must be pretty clear to most who have watched what has happened over the years that any time developments are undertaken back room undermining is allowed to happen.

The FOIs from what happened or was attempted around the time of the Nice Guideline 2021 is surely exactly this when you consider the email sent by someone from the Royal COllege of Pyschiatrists address saying something along the lines of 'but you can change the evidence'.


It feels there are some basic, acknowledged by all norms standards that science and medicine would go through, including for example the newer inrtoduction of patient consultation and involvement and PPI and co-production being brought in having well-known and acknowledged norms that particularly those who are staff engaging in it know full well but choose to thwart or side-step or come up with something that manipulates and uses such promises to extort input from patients that is then used errantly or just their presence, without being heard, is used to tick boxes etc.
 
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And of course the other thing which is relevant is the question/point about as long as any new staff brought on were hired by and stepping into the same system nothing really seemed to change, or their ability to do so became more limited or conflicted even if who knows what their intention might have been before being in said position.

To me it seems clear that certainly with the same people in place there is/was no hope of much truly changing too. So people involved just don't tend to have it in them to not be tempted to sneak around accountability or admitting things or putting something truly right where they feel that doing a bare minimum in case it can be gotten away with, or delay the full thing needing to be done seems to be what we can expect from the type of people who would oversee something like that happenning in the first place and hadn't themselves swiftly been able to apparently see the obvious in front of their eyes for so many years. people like that don't change, and they don't change what they do unless they are forced to etc?
 
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