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komponisto comments on Casey Anthony - analyzing evidence using Bayes - Less Wrong
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Most people haven't weighed the evidence for the same reason I'm not motivated to do so - there's nothing in it for me. It helps that none of my friends talk about the case.
As well, I don't see any obvious way to attack it with Bayesian tools. (As Hamming reminds us in "You and Your Research"*, what makes a problem important is not what consequences solving it would have (like FTL or antigravity) but whether you have any productive lines of attack on it. What questions have the highest marginal return?)
The only consideration I can think of even close to the insightfulness of komponisto's analysis of how the coverup is the only hard question in the Knox case would be to ask how often mothers cover up a murder of their children they were not culpable in. And when you ask it like that, then Anthony looks highly likely to be guilty.
* Serendipitously, I just learned there's apparently an expanded book form available online
Naturally, I greatly appreciate the compliment and the link. (Thanks!) However, I have to point out that this isn't a correct summary of that post. A correct summary would be: "the burden of proof for demostrating a coverup by Knox and Sollecito is as high as for demonstrating their guilt of murder". I don't claim that the question of whether there was a coverup is particularly hard to resolve (to the contrary, the aforementioned claim implies strongly that there almost certainly wasn't a coverup), and nor do I compare its difficulty with other aspects of the case.
As I understand it, the principal defense theory in the Anthony case is that it wasn't a homicide at all, but an accident that was covered up.
The line I was thinking of was the one about how hard work has to be done somewhere, and if the coverup implied guilt, then the work had to be done on the coverup. But OK, thanks for the correction.