- those cameras functioned before that night, when they might as well have been broken for months and/or often broke
- moving cellmates very rarely results in not having someone else move in in the same day
- guards don't usually sleep on their shifts
If however, you assume the much more likely situation that the cameras were already broken or often broke, that guards pretty much always sleep on their shifts and don't follow procedure, and that cellmates are often moved out without a replacement, then it stops looking very unlikely. Then it's just a case of selection, the fact that Epstein succeeded in killing himself means he had the opportunity to do it, meaning the fact that we look into the situation after he has successfully killed himself implies all those things that need to happen for that to be possible likely did happen.
It's like finding bugs in complex multi-layered systems (think airplanes), it's not sufficient for one thing to fail to get a catastrophe, but a multitude of failures combined. And in this case that doesn't seem unlikely at all unless we get more data as to how statistically unlikely each of the listed conditions are normally in that prison.
That’s quite a few assumptions to make. Notably that a prison with such high profile prisoners is fine with cameras that break regularly, but don’t permanently break—just small periods of time, and nobody ever considered to get such a strange problem fixed.
If those cameras failed often, I’m sure they’d have countless hours of videos that spontaneously cut off as proof.
And that people could be put into suicide watch as a punitive measure. So suicides are rare despite all the flaws because most people on suicide watch aren’t suicidal.
- those cameras functioned before that night, when they might as well have been broken for months and/or often broke
- moving cellmates very rarely results in not having someone else move in in the same day
- guards don't usually sleep on their shifts
If however, you assume the much more likely situation that the cameras were already broken or often broke, that guards pretty much always sleep on their shifts and don't follow procedure, and that cellmates are often moved out without a replacement, then it stops looking very unlikely. Then it's just a case of selection, the fact that Epstein succeeded in killing himself means he had the opportunity to do it, meaning the fact that we look into the situation after he has successfully killed himself implies all those things that need to happen for that to be possible likely did happen.
It's like finding bugs in complex multi-layered systems (think airplanes), it's not sufficient for one thing to fail to get a catastrophe, but a multitude of failures combined. And in this case that doesn't seem unlikely at all unless we get more data as to how statistically unlikely each of the listed conditions are normally in that prison.