Hey, the Supreme Court annulled the conviction. Any thoughts? I'm sure this has come as a (pleasant) surprise to you.
I guess we'll know better when they publish their reasoning in 90 days.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.
Hello komponisto,
By 'why', I mean why do courts keep changing their opinion when the evidence is the same? I know you have written on this subject a lot before (which influenced my opinion) so here are some questions (perhaps some a little basic) I have about the case. (Some may be just rehashing old facts about the case.)
(1) You write that 'the Supreme Court has gotten the verdict it wanted.' Why does the Supreme Court want to convict Sollecito and Know? The appeals courts cited 'a complete dearth of evidence' when they acquitted Sollecito and Knox - which is what I think. How did the prosecution respond to this?
(2) In the room... (read more)
Hello,
There have been informed discussions of this subject on LW before.
Particularly to parties informed on the subject: Can someone explain the court's reasoning? I can't quite follow why Knox and Sollecito were first convicted, then acquitted and yet are convicted once again.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It was inspiring indeed.
The Inuit may not have 47 words for snow
The Inuit does not have 47 words for snow! Please, don't propagate this falsehood, especially on a 'rationality' blog.
Edit: Sorry I read incorrectly. My apologies! It says 'may not'...
I wonder if most of the responses to JJT's thought experiment consider the least convenient possible world. (Recall Yvain's insightful discussion about Pascal's wager?)
Most of the responses that I have read try to argue that if the act of killing a healthy person to steal his organs for organ-missing people were generalized, this would make things worse.
By the way, this worry about generalizing one's individual act feels so close to thoughts of Kant - oh the irony! - whose "first formulation of the CI states that you are to 'act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.'". (Does... (read more)
"If you object to consequentialist metaethical theories"
There is no such thing as a 'consequentialist metaethical theory'.
Consequentialism is a first-order ethical theory.
While most people here despise philosophy (see here ), I do wonder how much people actually understand philosophy.
If you (or anyone else) are still interested, I recommend this article . I think I'm pretty close to the position the author articulates.
Two or three months ago, my trip to Las Vegas made me ponder the following: If all gambles in the casinos have negative expected values, why do people still engage in gambling - especially my friends fairly well-versed in probability/statistics?
Suffice it to say, I still have not answered that question.
On the other hand, this did lead me to ponder more about whether rational behavior always involves making choices with the highest expected (or positive) value - call this Rationality-Expectation (R-E) hypothesis.
Here I'd like to offer some counterexamples that show R-E is clearly false, to me at least. (In hindsight, these look fairly trivial but some commentators on this site speak as if... (read 244 more words →)
I'm just surprised to see that the Kercher family is sad that the accused were acquitted.
Why do the Kercher family think that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are guilty?
Update: Here's a clue to the family's thinking: