shokwave comments on The Sin of Underconfidence - Less Wrong

55 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 April 2009 06:30AM

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Comment author: shokwave 29 September 2012 12:19:04AM 0 points [-]

assign a high probability (like ~90%)

A cursory search suggests 54% is more accurate. source, seventh bullet point. Also links to a table that could give better priors.

Comment author: Nornagest 29 September 2012 01:42:44AM *  0 points [-]

I'm reading that as 54% plus some unknown but probably large proportion of the remainder: that includes a large percentage in which the victim's relationship to the perpetrator is unknown, presumably due to lack of evidence. Your link gives this as 43.9%, but that doesn't seem consistent with the table.

If you do look at the table, it says that 1,676 of 13,636 murders were known to be committed by strangers, or about 12%; the unknowns probably don't break down into exactly the same categories (some relationships would be more difficult to establish than others), but I wouldn't expect them to be wildly out of line with the rest of the numbers.

Comment author: mfb 29 September 2012 12:46:24PM *  0 points [-]

I agree with that interpretation. The 13636 murders contain:
*1676 from strangers
*5974 with some relation
*5986 unknown

Based on the known cases only, I get 22% strangers. More than expected, but it might depend on the region, too (US <--> Europe). Based on that table, we can do even better: We can exclude reasons which are known to be unrelated to the specific case, and persons/relations which are known to be innocent (or non-existent). A bit tricky, as the table is "relation murderer -> victim" and not the other direction, but it should be possible.