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MarkusRamikin comments on Amanda Knox: post mortem - Less Wrong
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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.