See: You Be the Jury, The Amanda Knox Test
While we hear about Bayes' Theorem being under threat in some courts, it is nice to savor the occasional moment of rationality prevailing in the justice system, and of mistakes being corrected.
Congratulations to the Italian court system for successfully saying "Oops!"
Things go wrong in this world quite a bit, as we know. Sometimes it's appropriate to just say "hooray!" when they go right.
Discuss, or celebrate.
Several news sites (including the Daily Mail Online, the Sun, Sky News and the Guardian, and that's just the UK ones) heard the judge say "guilty" about slander, & posted the wrong verdict about the murder conviction.
It's not unusual to have more than one story ready to go, but the Daily Mail online was particularly detailed:
As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.
A few feet away Meredith's mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and brother Lyle, who had flown in especially for the verdict remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family.
Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that 'justice has been done' although they said on a 'human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail'
Maybe they tapped phones in another Everett branch?
It is good news.
According to the BBC report there were loud crowds outside protesting that she was freed. Why they trust the first court case, but not a second case with equal/better access to evidence is worrying but worth thinking about.
Could one categorise it as anchoring to the original response?
Could one categorise it as anchoring to the original response?
Every effect has multiple causes (and every cause affects multiple things). You identify a relevant bias but there is no need to stop thinking about what others are also relevant if one determines this bias is.
One of the most interesting and tragic things about this is how Kercher's family has reacted very negatively. See e.g. this article.
This is an understandable reaction on their part. They've become convinced that Knox killed their daughter and tried to cover it up. The amount of emotion and feelings of identity that must get wrapped up in trying to make sure that the killer of one's child is convicted and jailed must be massive. The cognitive difficulty in acknowledging that one has gone after the wrong person must be immense. If I were (Omega forbid) in a similar situation, I suspect that I'd react very similarly to the Kercher family.
One of the most interesting and tragic things about this is how Kercher's family has reacted very negatively. See e.g. this article.
Which is, I must say, disgraceful behavior. The only redeeming feature is that they are powerless to do anything about it.
Wanting to destroy the lives of people they have no evidence have done anything to harm anyone and using what social influence they have to make others also wish to destroy said lives resolves as (impotent) evil. That their daughter has died is very little excuse.
I'm curious. Have you ever lost a loved one due to someone else's actions? The closest experience I have to this is a cousin who was killed about a year ago by a speeding driver. My cousin Brandon wasn't that old. He hadn't been a great student in highschool but had really shaped up and become a lot more responsible in college. Brandon was working to become a chef, something he was clearly good at and clearly enjoyed. My cousin was on his bike and never even saw the car. He had on a helmet. It saved his life, for a few days. His grandmother, my aunt, was on an airplane flight when the accident happened. She was on her way to the funeral of another relative who had killed himself. She found out about the accident as her plane taxied to the gate.
At first, after a few days in the hospital it seemed that Brandon was going to make it. Then he took a sudden turn for the worst and his organs started to fail. The end was so sudden that some of my relatives saw in their inboxes the email update saying that Brandon wasn't like to make it right under the email saying he had died.
Then, it turned out that the driver of the car had a history of speeding problems. He received in a year in ja...
If someone came up to me, and gave me the choice of making that driver die a slow painful, agonizing death I'd probably say yes. It would be wrong. Deeply wrong. But the emotion is that strong I don't know if I could override it.
You're talking about killing that driver. The actual villain in the story. I don't have any particular problem with vengeance, I often advocate it. But that's an entirely different to killing Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, who lives at 128 Ordinary Ln. just because... well... you really want to kill somebody. This isn't even a case of finding a different driver who also happens to be reckless and likely to kill people like your friend. This is choosing to kill someone with a AAA driving rating who you have no reason at all to suspect is dangerous.
To call the Kerchers evil is a deep failure of empathy.
Even leaving aside the difference between saying that a behavior resolves as evil and calling a person evil I suggest it is you who is failing at empathy here (partially as a result of the aforementioned simple comprehension error). I am empathizing here with all the victims of blatantly irrational persecution. The lives destroyed because people use their social...
Saying that their actions are evil whether intentionally harmful to innocents or not isn't a moral point that requires a citation; it's merely an idiosyncratic definition.
I disagree strongly with both your argument and conclusion. Self delusion is not a get-out-of-ever-being-immoral free card. (Unlike most of the rest of this whole conversation tree) this point is a hugely important one to me and does not rely on idiosyncratic definitions.
If you are considering a species which is capable of constructing sincere but false beliefs for pragmatic purposes basing a morality entirely around whether individuals 'believe' they are doing something wrong is outright absurd!
Guessing I'm misunderstanding-- but do you mean to say that having sex is disgraceful and needs to be prevented?
Um... imagine the syntax resolves to something like:
It's understandable for people to want {other people's stuff, have sex and to eliminate rivals}. Which is a delicate way of saying that desires to steal, rape and murder are understandable. I didn't say rape because it is dangerous to even admit to 'understanding' or 'empathizing with desires to do awful things' in the same sentence as rape even in the context of saying things are disgraceful, evil and to be prevented.
I don't see a motivation that the Kerchers would be motivated to harm Amanda Knox other than their belief that she killed their daughter. In this context, what do you think is the underlying motive that they are engaging in self-deception to accomplish?
They -- and their lawyer -- have a pecuniary incentive to seek a verdict against Knox and Sollecito, since it would entail the imposition of monetary damages in the millions of euros. Needless to say, Rudy Guédé's financial rescources are almost certainly not comparable to those of Knox and Sollecito (even though the latter two aren't themselves extraordinarily wealthy).
Of course, this probably doesn't directly pass into their conscious motivation; but it still likely affects their judgement.
it's more comforting to believe Amanda Knox killed their daughter than some random stranger they know nothing about who may or may not ever be caught.
The random stranger was caught within a month: his name is Rudy Guédé, and he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the crime.
My interpretation of Wedrifid's point here is something along the lines of:
If you are going to advocate the kind of punishment sought against Amanda Knox, you have an obligation to hold yourself to high epistemic standards.
The evidence used to convict her fell so far short of that as to constitute dangerous negligence.
If someone came up to me, and gave me the choice of making that driver die a slow painful, agonizing death I'd probably say yes. It would be wrong. Deeply wrong. But the emotion is that strong; I don't know if I could override it.
Even if a man's life is at stake? Come on, it's not a place to express modesty before the drives of nature.
Of course it does. There's no way that the driver deserved that in any sane moral system, or for that matter almost any moral system post the Middle Ages. It is a terribly vengeful, horrific desire. It scares me that I can have that sort of desire in me. I'm very much not in any way advocating that this is a good thing. The argument is solely that if one feels this way over a death from negligence what it must be like to respond to a death due to deliberate action?
How in the process of the appeal were they not introduced to the notion that their daughter could simply have been killed by one person without co conspirators?
The same way they avoided being introduced to it during the first-level trial: by not listening to the defense arguments.
That, it occurs to me, was their mistake, and is why they are in my opinion fully worthy of criticism for the stance they have taken. From the beginning, they appear to have only gotten their information through prosecution filters. (They admit as much when they speak of having to trust the police; but they didn't have to trust the police -- they could have attended the trial and listened to the arguments, which they didn't do.) It isn't that they can't be excused for feeling harshly toward the people they believe killed their daughter/sister; it's that they shouldn't have allowed themselves to become convinced that Knox and Sollecito killed her without listening to what Knox and Sollecito's attorneys had to say first.
(Indeed, I find it somewhat telling that they flew in in time to hear the verdict, but not to hear Knox and Sollecito address the court earlier the same day.)
I never followed the Knox case, but I now looked at some of the old lesswrong posts regarding it -- and at least one of the sites linked to (http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php), is currently down. As is the case with all broken links, this is bad for our collective memory of the arguments made and discussed back then.
In regards to this issue in particular, where we had "Knox test" by which people should look at the sides in question as argued by external sites, this is quite negative, if the sites go down and we haven't saved their arguments in ...
Maybe Sharon McGrayne can add this story if an "Expanded" version of her history of Bayes' Theorem is released.
Video of a tearful Knox thanking the world. It's interesting that Sollecito is so much less a celebrity.
It is good news.
According to the BBC report there were loud crowds outside protesting that she was freed. Why they trust the first court case, but not a second case with equal/better access to evidence is worrying but worth thinking about.
Could one categorise it as anchoring to the original response?
The simple answer is that it's hard to change your mind, since once a belief gets formed it tends to become entrenched in various ways. There's a sequence and an upcoming book about the specific ways in which that's true, but some which seem most relevant in this case are:
... (read more)Confirmation bias. Once someone forms a belief, all the new evidence that they see gets interpreted in light of that belief so that consistent evid