Esar comments on The Martial Art of Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (38)
I mentioned it only because it seems to have been a unique triumph for Less Wrong. I'd read about the case, and thought nothing of it particularly. And then people here started saying "Look at it from a probabilistic point of view", and so I did, and after a few hours head-scratching and diagram-drawing I realized that it was almost certainly a miscarriage.
I mentioned this to a few people I know, and they reacted pretty well as you'd expect to a middle-aged man suddenly getting a bee in his bonnet about a high-profile sex murder case involving pretty girls.
When she was eventually acquitted, various people said "How did you do that?". And the mathematically minded types were quite impressed with the answer, while the muggles think I've got some sort of incomprehensible maths-witchcraft thing that I can do to find out the truth.
Which is exactly the sort of thing you might want to sell, if you can find a way to teach it.
Fair enough.