Bo102010 comments on The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom - Less Wrong

42 Post author: komponisto 13 December 2009 04:16AM

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Comment author: gwern 28 December 2009 12:53:24AM *  9 points [-]

It's clearly absurd to say that pretty girls never murder people. But allowing for the normal hyperbole and inexactitude of conversational English, I don't think that's what SforSingularity means, rather, 'pretty girls are one of the demographic least likely to be responsible for a brutal murder'.

This isn't too unreasonable.

  • First off, the number of murders so ascribable are small: females make up half the population and if we limit pretty to the top 5% or so (a reasonable guess at % for 'pretty enough that a guy will actively note and think "pretty!"'), we're already down to less than 2.5% of the population.
  • Second, women in general commit far fewer violent crimes than men. http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/jjbul2002_10_1/page4.html mentions that for juveniles, at one point, the male:female ratio was 22:1. Let's be conservative and put the young adult ratio at 5:1; now we're down to 0.4%.
  • Third, attractiveness is correlated with IQ, and IQ is well-known to correlate with lower crime rates. (see Wikipedia for a few links; IIRC, WP understates the case but I can't be fashed to dig up the stronger correlations). Let's cut another 10% off the rate, down to 0.36%.
  • Fourthly, attractiveness correlates to higher socioeconomic status through multiple mechanisms, which cuts down violent crime even further. (I don't think I need to adduce any citations for that!)

And so on. I've missed many factors (eg. maybe happier & less stressed people are more attractive, and that too is correlated to less propensity for murder; maybe pretty women have fewer violence-inducing mental diseases and substance abuse habits; etc.). But I've already knocked their murder rate way down. I suspect it has much further to go in a true reckoning.

Does his comment still look satirical to you?

Comment author: Bo102010 28 December 2009 01:14:46AM *  1 point [-]

I think the "My probability estimate of guilt was around 1%" bit is probably pretty spot on (for the reasons you state), and not absurd.

I think the "I only saw a photo of Amanda Knox's face. Girls with cute smiles like that don't brutally murder people" and "Perhaps it is confusing to people that the actual killer is probably a scary looking black guy with a sunken brow" bits are absurd-enough-to-be-satire.