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brazil84 comments on Amanda Knox: post mortem - Less Wrong
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I can't remember exactly what I said in the last thread, but I think my opinion is basically the same now. I am reasonably confident that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the murder and very confident that Guede was.
What evidence did you collect since that last post, and how shifted it your views (rather, how did it fail to shift them)?
The main evidence was that the appeals court in Italy reversed the convictions of Knox and Sollecito. This undermined my confidence a bit. On the other hand, arguing that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the murder has made me a bit more confident in my beliefs. I hope that this is because arguing has given me the opportunity to think more carefully about the case, but it may also be the false confidence which comes from emotional investment in a position. Either way, I doubt it's made much of a difference since I was pretty confident from the beginning.
Did you at any point update on your fellow Less Wrong posters' estimates?
I'm not sure what you are asking, but the opinions of other posters here has not had much of an impact on my own.
Well, the judgment of people here is evidence just like anything else. Lets say I initially predicted Knox's guilt with p=0.01, Since I think my beliefs track the truth and the beliefs of other Less Wrong posters track the truth I should expect other posters to agree with my assessment if my belief is accurate. The majority of posters disagreeing with me is far more likely if I'm wrong than if I'm right. So upon learning that the vast majority of posters disagree with me I should be more uncertain about my prediction.
How uncertain I should be is a difficult question-- in many cases in that thread it was resolved by discussing evidence. Many people with initially high probabilities shifted their estimates downward after evidence they missed was pointed out to them. If you think you have evidence other Less Wrong posters don't have then it makes sense to not take their opinions seriously. Alternatively, if you think Less Wrong posters are irrational or poorly calibrated and don't expect their beliefs as a group to track the truth well then it makes sense to more or less ignore their opinion. I suppose one could also ignore the opinions of the Less Wrong posters on the ground that the opinions of random people reading about the case are swamped by the opinions of people who have studied the case for months-- and thus make very little difference. But now Knox and Sollecito have been released-- if your trust in the experts was what lead you to ignore Less Wrong you should update on the new court decision.
So why didn't you update on the opinions of Less Wrong posters?
I wonder. The opinions of members of a given community are not independent events. There's influence by high status members, and by perceived community consensus (note how in a previous post, brazil84 got downvoted just for admitting, when asked, that this consensus didn't move his own opinion much - I don't know, but to me that's ominous). So isn't there's a risk of counting the same evidence (the arguments and facts that convinced the "first movers" in forming this community consensus) multiple times?
What you say, that if others of my group disagree with me and I'm in a strong minority, then I'm probably wrong - how far does that go? The majority of humanity is probably wrong about a lot of things that we on Less Wrong are probably right about, by virtue of our greater rationality, and we don't seem to be updating in their direction, are we? Well, if brazil84 is a lawyer, then similarly, by virtue of his expertise, it seems reasonable to me that he should not easily let his opinion be influenced by that of laymen.
That might make sense if the question under discussion were a legal question (e.g. how a statute is likely to be interpreted by a court). But that isn't the case here. In fact, even if the domain that brazil84 is claiming expertise in -- determining whether people are telling the truth or not -- were one in which lawyers were more likely to have expertise (and frankly I know of no reason to believe this), the fact is that it has precious little relevance to this case. This case is not about which human statements to believe. Instead, it's about applying Occam's Razor to physical evidence.
Point taken.
It's a combination of having little respect for the opinions of anonymous internet posters as well as faith in my own ability to look at incomplete evidence concerning real world disputes and draw reasonable conclusions. As an attorney I do this every day. In fact, my livelihood depends on doing it. All day long people call me up and spin tales and I have to guess at what happened in their case based on limited evidence. I've been wrong many times over the years, both in believing people who turned out to have been BSing me as well as being skeptical of people who turned out to have been telling the truth.
Pseudonymous. There are many similarities, but having a long-standing name does have significant differences, even if the name isn't tied to one's "real-life" name.
There seems to be a certain disjoint between the second half of this paragraph and the first.
Confidence isn't really about evidence?
Keep in mind that you are yourself an anonymous internet poster dealing with other anonymous internet posters with confidence in their ability to look at incomplete evidence concerning real world disputes and draw reasonable conclusions. I would say this is a situation where consideration of the outside view is warranted.
Well to me, I'm not anonymous. But anyway, I also try to go by peoples' actual arguments. I think this is a reasonable amount of consideration.
Which is a very tenuous basis on which to put yourself in a separate reference class.
You should adjust your confidence according to the strength of others' arguments relative to what you would expect given your prior confidence value, and you should also adjust your confidence according to the fact of others' belief weighted according to your confidence in their mechanisms for establishing truth.
If I believe proposition A, and someone gives me argument X for disbelieving it, and I find argument X weak, I should adjust my confidence little if at all. But if a large population of people whose judgment I have no reason to believe is less sound than my own for cases in this class tells me that proposition A is wrong on the basis of argument X, and I'm just not getting it, I should significantly decrease my confidence, on the likelihood that I really am just not getting it.
So, to summarize why you didn't update:
Boy was Upton Sinclair ever right.
I'm not sure that's the way to put it, but let me ask you this: How much stock do you put in the unsupported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet?
Please quote me where I made that assertion.
Well I need to be decent at a minimum. But basically yeah. I assess cases day in and day out. That's a huge advantage. I know that I'm much better than I was 15 years ago, even though I was just as smart then as I am now.
Sure, getting this kind of feedback is a good way to improve one's judgment. Do you seriously disagree?
:shrug: I agree, but employment is sadly not the only motivator for self-deception. Let me ask you this:
Do you agree that the tone of your post is a bit nasty?
To the extent that you don't think that you're more reliable than those people, you're engaging in a treatment of evidence that is simply wrong. The fact of someone's belief is evidence weighted according to the reliability of their mechanisms for establishing belief. That's the principle behind Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
How much stock do you put in the supported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet? I think that's a more relevant question here. To what degree does a poster's anonymity detract from his argument?
Yes. It's a combination of having little respect for the feelings of typically-wrong pseudonymous internet posters as well as faith in my own ability to look at incomplete justifications for sloppy reasoning and draw snarky conclusions.
Nobody seems to have answered this question directly, though it seems easy...
See the direct parent of the post you were replying to (which I think should have been obvious since it was presented as a summary):
Also, don't you at least see the tension between:
It seems the logical conclusion is that you've lost your job.
And here we have a case study on what not to do and why.
If you want to make an argument for why I should put more weight on other posters' opinions about Knox and Sollecito, I'm happy to consider it.
I'm afraid this is a lesson for others to learn by observation and not one which you can learn yourself (without changing your mind). The reasoning goes along the lines:
Note that this is both an somewhat opposing but also complimentary lesson to the one Eliezer notes.
I vaguely recall that you got pretty annoyed at me a year or so ago when I pointed out a contradiction in your reasoning. I suspect that your anger at me over that incident is informing your commentary.
But anyway, if there really are any lurkers reading this, feel free to look back at the actual arguments I made concerning Knox and draw whatever you conclusion you like. Also pay specific attention to my exchange with wedrifid.
I've had no interaction with you on this site at all, but I have read your posts on the previous Amanda Knox threads, and while I believe I have a far greater aversion than wedrifid to making statements so likely to antagonize others, I have to say I find your judgment in this case in conjunction with your position as a lawyer downright frightening.
Wedrifid is just like that. All the time.
I don't recall any conversations with you. (Mind you I expect I would have if I believed you then. Actually being wrong is embarrassing.)
No, from the premise "brazil84 is blatantly and obviously wrong despite paying attention to the topic" "don't do what brazil84 did" is a reasonably good inference to make. But as I noted you don't share that premise so naturally you should not be expected to believe it. This is why you were not the intended audience.
Are you referring to the 'exchange' that starts around here and continues from there? If so... I'm not so sure bringing this to people's attention is in your best interests.