As well, I don't see any obvious way to attack it with Bayesian tools. (As Hamming reminds us in "You and Your Research"*, what makes a problem important is not what consequences solving it would have (like FTL or antigravity) but whether you have any productive lines of attack on it. What questions have the highest marginal return?)

The only consideration I can think of even close to the insightfulness of komponisto's analysis of how the coverup is the only hard question in the Knox case would be to ask how often mothers cover up a murder of their children they were not culpable in. And when you ask it like that, then Anthony looks highly likely to be guilty.

* Serendipitously, I just learned there's apparently an expanded book form available online

Someone made a very useful post like this for the Amanda Knox case

Link. ;-)

My gut feeling is that most people have not bothered to weight the evidence, but look at the surface layers of the case and judge based on questionable heuristics.

Indeed. My own more specific theory is that people -- this includes juries, by the way -- judge these cases by first sizing up the defendant's personality and deciding how much they sympathize with him or her (in almost all cases, the answer is "very little"), deriving a prior for guilt directly from that, and then looking at other evidence in the case to see whether it confirms this initial impression. This theory accounts nicely for the otherwise perplexing emphasis that people put on psychological evidence such as the defendant's "lies", both in the Knox case (where this negative impression is based on misinformation and misunderstanding) and in the Anthony case (where the defendant does appear to have behaved in an authentically unsympathetic fashion).

FWIW, my take on the case is that (from what I know from very limited media exposure) there is a substantial probability that Anthony is guilty of murder, well over 10%, possibly over 50%, but very likely well below the 99% or so that I would consider "beyond reasonable doubt". In this, the case is sharply distinguished from that of Knox, where in my view the hypothesis of guilt lacks sufficient evidence even to be considered.

Sounds like Casey is overwhelmingly likely to be guilty. It also sounds plausible, but unlikely (and maybe more evidence makes it less likely; this post is all I've read on the matter), than Cindy killed Cayley.

The things that need to be distinguished are "guilty" and "committed murder". "Not guilty" and "innocent" are very, very different terms. I haven't met anyone who thinks she didn't commit the murder, but A. was there enough evidence to prove it, and B. Did the prosecution actually prove it? Maybe, and absolutely not.

The other thing that's bothered me as of late about a purely Bayesian approach is this: I'm reading Elizer's OB posts in order from the beginning, and I'm almost to 2008. Perhaps he addresses it at some point, but he hasn't yet in my reading. (I've also read the intuitive explanation, but having had three separate statistics classes, Bayes was a subject I understood pretty well to begin with.)

Shouldn't there be some accounting of the standard deviation of your estimate of your priors? If I have a prior that I've reached by amounting ten bits of evidence, that is quite different from a prior that I've reached by amounting one bit of evidence. I don't see how a traditionally Bayesian approach takes this into account.

(And sorry that's somewhat off topic, it's just bothered me for awhile now.)

Thanks for posting this.

I don't know about Bayes but I think Occam's razor (simplest explanation for the data) indicates that most likely she's guilty of murder. Here are the relevant events (as evidence) that I'm thinking about:

• Casey Anthony borrowed a shovel from her neighbor on June 18th 2008. Cayley Anthony was last seen alive on June 15th 2008.

• There were search queries like chloroform, 'how to break a neck' (and others) found on Casey Anthony's computer - through reconstructed Firefox cache browser. The computer files were deleted to hide the data, so special software was used to reconstruct the data.

• There was a month between the last time Cayley Anthony was seen alive and the time she was reported as missing. When she was reported as missing, it was the grandmother, Casey Anthony's mother Cindy Anthony, who reported it.

• During that month, Casey Anthony was seen as partying and entering 'hot-body' contests.
• In Cindy Anthony's call to 911, she describes the stench in Casey Anthony's car as a foul smell 'as if someone died in there'.
• The body was found only a quarter a mile away from the house where here parents and Casey Anthony live.
• There was a duct tape with the skeletal remains of the body. Same type of duct tape was also found in Anthony household.

I could go on and on and on...

The jurors acquitted Casey Anthony on the basis that there was no connection between her and the dead body of the child and that prosecutors weren't able to prove a link between her and the dead body of the child.

My reaction is that if you look at all the circumstantial evidence, the simplest explanation that fits all the data is that she probably killed her child. Yes, you can have someone just curious about chloroform searching google. Yes, it may also have been food rotting in the car. Yes, Casey Anthony may have borrowed the shovel for gardening - but if you string together all these explanations, the final conjunction of all of them just becomes a lot less probable.

I'm thinking of Robert Nozick's definition. He states his definition thus:

1. P is true
2. S believes that P
3. If it were the case that (not-P), S would not believe that P
4. If it were the case that P, S would believe that P

There is a reason why the Gettier rabbit-hole is so dangerous. You can always cook up an improbable counterexample to any definition.

For example, here is a counterexample to Nozick's definition as you present it. Suppose that I have irrationally decided to believe everything written in a certain book B and to believe nothing not written in B. Unfortunately for me, the book's author, a Mr. X, is a congenital liar. He invented almost every claim in the book out of whole cloth, with no regard for the truth of the matter. There was only one exception. There is one matter on which Mr. X is constitutionally compelled to write and to write truthfully: the color of his mother's socks on the day of his birth. At one point in B, Mr. X writes that his mother was wearing blue socks when she gave birth to him. This claim was scrupulously researched and is true. However, there is nothing in the text of B to indicate that Mr. X treated this claim any differently from all the invented claims in the book.

In this story, I am S, and P is "Mr. X's mother was wearing blue socks when she gave birth to him." Then:

1. P is true. (Mr. X's mother really was wearing blue socks.)

2. S believes that P. (Mr. X claimed P in B, and I believe everything in B.)

3. If it were the case that (not-P), S would not believe that P. (Mr. X only claimed P in B because that was what his scrupulous research revealed. Had P not been true, Mr. X's research would not have led him to believe it. And, since he is incapable of lying about this matter, he would not have put P in B. Therefore, since I don't believe anything not in B, I would not have come to believe P.)

4. If it were the case that P, S would believe that P. (Mr. X was constitutionally compelled to write truthfully about what the color of his mother's socks were when he was born. In all possible worlds in which his mother wore blue socks, Mr. X's scrupulous research would have discovered it, and Mr. X would have reported it in B, where I would have read it, and so believed it.)

And yet, the intuitions on which Gettier problems play would say that I don't know P. I just believe P because it was in a certain book, but I have no rational reason to trust anything in that book.

ETA: And here's a counterexample from the other direction — that is, an example of knowledge that fails to meet Nozick's criteria.

Suppose that you sit before an upside-down cup, under which there is a ping-pong ball that has been painted some color. Your job is to learn the color of the ping-pong ball.

You employ the following strategy: You flip a coin. If the coin comes up heads, you lift up the cup and look at the ping-pong ball, noting its color. If the coin comes up tails, you just give up and go with the ignorance prior.

Suppose that, when you flip the coin, it comes up heads. Accordingly, you look at the ping-pong ball and see that it is red. Intuitively, we would say that you know that the ping-pong ball is red.

Nonetheless, we fail to meet Nozick's criterion 4. Had the coin come up tails, you would not have lifted the cup, so you would not have come to believe that the ball is red, even if this were still true.

If our situation controls our behavior (let's try to bracket "to what extent" and "how" it does so), then wouldn't it also control what kind of situation we will go for?

Here's an example from an Orwell essay: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks."

And then I've always wondered about the following: If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?

Note that the folk do seem to allow for some 'situationism' - for example, when someone gets drunk, we admit they'll have a different persona and some more than others.

Thursdays 7pm is a little tough for me. I have a chess game at my chess club 8pm every Thursday. Weekends work better for me.

Nonetheless, thanks for organizing.

Sorry, you'll have to excuse a bit of my ignorance here.

Classical philosophers like Hume came up with some great ideas, too, especially considering that they had no access to modern scientific knowledge. But you don't have to spend thousands of hours reading through their bad ideas to find the few good ones, because their best ideas have become modern scientific knowledge.

What are some of Hume's "bad" ideas? He's a philosopher I cherish quite a bit. I'd be interested to know what his "bad" ideas are. (Have you read Hume at all? Or anything about Hume?)

You don't have to read Kant to think abstractly about Time; thinking about "timelines" is practically built into our language nowadays.

I think reading Kant about "Time" (why capital T?) could be a bad idea, since so many ideas about space and time were influenced by modern physics. (For instance, Kant thought that physical space, a priori, was Euclidean - please correct me if I'm misinterpreting Kant here-, which is unfortunate but completely reasonable.)

I think the most exciting idea Kant had was his attempt to establish a "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy - that our perception of the world and minds were somehow limited and subject to constraints like any other object in the world. I will direct all interested parties to this podcast .

Your wikipedia link claims that the fez & turban were banned in 1925 and the veil and (again!) turban in 1934. Do you know these laws? Could you confirm that the text matches wikipedia's description? or not - perhaps these are the famous laws that cover universities? (I can't follow google's translation) How does this fit in your understanding of history?

While Yvain's story doesn't sound terribly plausible to me, deducing law from the present state is tricky.