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Jiro comments on [LINK] Amanda Knox exonerated - Less Wrong
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That's still base-rate neglect as you are picking and choosing what you want to look at and not conditioning on one of the more relevant variables.
What fraction of the pretty girls who lived with the victims turned out to be murderers? By looking at the genderless conditional probability ('somebody'), you're implying that women like Knox might have male-like murder levels, which is obviously wrong. And to the extent that pretty girls do not have differing patterns of murdering roommates from other women, you're making the exact same mistake, even (it doesn't matter whether you update on pretty girl then roommate or roommate then pretty girl).
Update on both living with the victim and being female and the small probability is bigger but... still small, since the still relatively low probability of a roommate murdering is penalized substantially by being female (female murder rates are like 1/10th male and that's the raw rates, not adjusted for age or SES or race etc). As the top comment says, "Once we take into account that AK and MK aren't in a relationship, AK is female, and there is very strong evidence that someone else committed the murder then I'd agree that the probability drops".
Isn't this also confounded by the fact that judges and juries like to go easy on women, so that women who do commit murder are less likely to be convicted? It may be that measures of what fraction of women are convicted of murder are not the same as what fraction of women are actually murderers.
Most statistics are based on police reports, not convictions. For crimes other than murder, there is a good agreement between police reports and surveys of victims.
Conviction data has a bias introduced by the the court, but it has a much worse bias from restricting to cases where a suspect is identified and apprehended.
Prosecutors may also be less likely to accuse women. I wonder what is the female rate of being accused of murder - if it is 1/10 just as the murder rate is, then this 1/10 can cancel out in the courtroom.
The prosecutor is already using what ever priors they wish, including racist and sexist priors, when they select the suspects to bring to the court; if the court is to do the same, they'll be double-counting.
Ultimately it's all in the wash once you start accounting for things like her trying to frame Lumumba.
Keep in mind also that there's evidence available to prosecution but unavailable to you. Knox claiming that she got slapped during interrogation, and other claims that those present at the interrogation know for certain to be true or not.
I can see it going either way: if I were the police present at the interrogation and then I see her completely lying about how interrogation went, then the reference class is not cute girls it's psychopaths and not very smart ones either. On the other hand maybe she didn't lie about the interrogation. I can't know but those present at the interrogation would know.
edit: also the thing is that a lot of the physical evidence was not reported on by the US media.
Basically there is a lot of physical evidence that if valid would massively overpower any "cute girl" priors. So the question is not about those priors but about the possible alternative explanations for said evidence and said evidence's validity.
Even if the lied that she was slapped, that doesn't suggest that she's guilty. It rather shows that she was under a lot of pressure which is expected. It doesn't make someone a psychopath to break under strong pressure and being accused of murdering your roommate is strong pressure.
Well it's a fairly specific type of breaking down, to be accusing other people. There's other ways of breaking down, you know. And if her account of interrogation is false, and the police's account is true, that goes well beyond the lie about slapping. She said she was at the scene of the crime covering her ears as black owner of the bar she works at was murdering the victim, and if you know you didn't coerce the witness into making such a statement, that's very different from coercing a witness into such a statement.
While perhaps insufficient evidence in the court of law, the prosecutor is not the court of law, the prosecutor merely needs a strong suspicion for it to be their job to try to convict.
Ultimately we have Knox's words against the police's, and both sides have a coherent story that makes either side right.
Yes, signing a confession would be another typical one. In that case she would have it even worse.
Her being psychopathic would have likely lead to other facts that a well funded persecution could uncover.
I think it'd be quite strange to claim that confessions don't ever correlate with guilt.
By the way what she did was she claimed she was at the scene of the crime covering her ears as Lumumba murdered Kercher (and no she didn't call the 112 about it or anything). If she as she says was coerced into making such a statement, yeah, that's not evidence of guilt. But if it is as police says it is, do you still think it's not evidence of guilt?
Picture an alternative universe. Bob, an exchange student from Australia, is being questioned as a witness. There's a minor discrepancy: Jake, his friend, withdrew his alibi for the night. Those things happen, you don't really think too much of it, but you have to question Bob. You're somewhat suspicious but not highly so. Without much of a prompt, Bob tells a story of how he was covering his ears as Peter, his boss, was murdering the victim.
Now what do you do with Bob, exactly? Let him go once you clear Peter? Keep him because he's not a cute girl?
Now, we aren't sure that this is how it went. Police claims that this is how it went and Knox claims that she got pretty much beaten into that statement, and it's one word against the other.
She's a foreigner, there's no budget for transatlantic flights to figure out if she had been cruel to animals as a child or the like, there's no jurisdiction, and you can't use that sort of stuff in a court anyway.
The police records indicate that they had already started considering Lumumba as a suspect prior to interrogating Knox. Knox was detained for a long period of time by the police, during which time she alleges she was treated abusively, before she pointed her finger at the person the police already suspected, but who later proved to have an airtight alibi.
The prosecution presented plenty of character evidence, the worst they had to present was simply very innocuous, even when they tried to exaggerate it for effect. In the prosecution's hands, an anime series which a member of Less Wrong attested to having watched in an after school club in middle school became a work of "violent animated pornography."