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komponisto comments on Inherited Improbabilities: Transferring the Burden of Proof - Less Wrong
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Okay, so we seem to be in complete agreement about how the math works out. If so, then I'm confused as to why you object so strongly to the prosecution's argument on purely mathematical grounds; I haven't read their argument myself, so it's entirely possible that the argument itself is weak in some way, but I think that right now we're just talking about the math.
If we ignore their specific language, the plan of coming up with ~20 pieces of moderate evidence is a perfectly reasonable strategy for correctly establishing guilt, assuming that there is absolutely no mitigating evidence. Your complaint seems to be that they use different language/notation than you and I do to talk about evidence, which seems hardly fair.
Although I would also note that since humans are bad at intuitively distinguishing between moderate evidence for and moderate evidence against a hypothesis, trying to find many pieces of weak evidence is probably not a good strategy if the goal is to get humans to correctly decide the accuracy of an assertion.
ETA: By the way, I've been working under the assumption, based on the tone of the original post, that you think there are serious mathematical flaws in the prosecutions argument. If that's not the case, and you just wanted to use this case as a point of illustration, then I apologize for the confusion.
If I may presume to diagnose your confusion, it seems that you're compartmentalizing between "mathematical" aspects of an argument and "other" aspects. But I'm not. I'm taking it for granted that "the math" is the argument. Probability theory is a mathematical formalization of the process of argument and inference. It isn't just a cool gadget that one throws in on special occasions.
So, I don't object to Massei and Cristiani's argument on "purely mathematical grounds". I simply object to it, period -- and in this post I have used mathematical language to describe, in precise terms, what my objection is.
(And I expected readers to assume, given my previous writing on the case, that this particular point was far from my only objection to Massei and Cristiani's 427-page argument that Knox and Sollecito killed Kercher; hence I was not expecting replies of the form "well, but they might have other good evidence that Knox and Sollecito are guilty". They don't; we've already covered that.)