Unfortunately, that falls to the same critique. If you accept that we may have read into Plato and other Western pre-Christian our own conception of morality despite how profoundly those thinkers have shaped Western ethics and culture (not just in translation - how many people have learned Greek just to read the philosophy in the original?), then a fortiori, you should have no trouble in believing that, in lumping together the complex beliefs of thousands of poorly-understood aboriginal and tribal and semi-civilized foreign peoples across the world in a single short formula 'distinguishing right and wrong' for a list of universals, the compilers of the list (or their sources) have twisted various concepts of social norms and appropriateness and magical thinking and superstition into a Christian 'right and wrong'.

I've been teaching part time at a community center for a while now, and it's been interesting for me to see how the first impressions I had of the various students stacked up against the experiences I had knowing them over an extended period.

I can put numbers to it- out of a bit over 50 students, there were three for whom I found my first impressions to be substantial misjudgments of their habitual character, and one who I came to suspect I had misjudged, but for whom it turned out that the evidence that let me to suspect my initial judgment was wrong was actually uncharacteristic of him, whereas the behavior that formed my first impression was not. Of course, there's a likelihood of confirmation bias here, but since I discuss the students' personalities and behavior extensively with the other teachers, our assessments of them tend towards agreement over time.

Of course, error rates are going to depend strongly on context, but it's nice to have some idea of my expected error rate in this particular context.

Some well-designed studies even prove that ghosts exist.

I"m not aware of ghosts, Scott talks about telepathy and precognition studies.

There's an enormous skill component: it matters roughly as much as the aesthetic component. Even if I were as aesthetically discerning as Beethovn, I still wouldn't be able to invent the fast Fourier transform in the early 1800's like Gauss did. You need both for achievement at the highest levels.

I'm counterbalancing the standard attitude of the type "huh? Aesthetic component? What's that?"

How did your plan to become a history professor ultimately work out? What were your odds of becoming a history professor at the time you decided to start working towards that goal? What would you have done if you had failed in your goal? Would failing at becoming a history professor been better or worse than succeeding as a medical doctor?

For the overwhelming majority of people, neither history professor nor medical doctor is a good career choice. I had a cousin who last Thanksgiving mentioned he was considering history for his major in college. I strongly advised against it because of his low probability of success and the amount of work he would have to put in to succeed. By Christmas, he had changed his mind to Structural Engineering.

After considering my options and preferences, I decided that money and security mattered less than a profession that would be genuinely satisfying and meaningful. What’s the point of making a million bucks if I’m miserable doing it, I thought to myself.

You're welcome to believe a history professor's job has more meaning than a medical doctor's, but you're probably on an island in that belief. Money, job security, job meaning, and career interest are just some of the reasons to choose a job path. There is also:

• How well you like your boss
• How well you like your coworkers
• Job perks
• Difficulty of obtaining the job
• Number of hours worked
• Consistency of hours worked
• Amount of travel away from home
• Job Status

That is to name but a few. Money is a good barometer of the first four because higher demand jobs generally give you more options for where you work. The high-paying career paths right now are mostly in Engineering, Technology, Business, and Health Care. Medical Doctor is a bad idea because of the amount of debt and time you have to give up to get there even though it does have high pay and job security once you succeed. It also often has strenuous hours.

I do very little offline communication with young people anymore and tend to think Reddit is representative. I mean, it is big, right?

Well, for what it's worth their wounds and bruises guy didn't think it was a single killer. And when someone's murdered at their own place in the dead middle of the night, often the cohabitants are involved.

I think you skip some details. Sollecito withdrew his alibi for Knox. Then Knox implicated Lumumba. And they really go after the guy. Interestingly they fail to railroad Lumumba in the way in which you think they railroaded Knox. Which to me is really interesting because it doesn't fit the 'evil police' story.

Knox of course claims it was extremely coercive, took hours, and some physical abuse from the police. Police denies abuse. We can't really tell either way, but prosecution ought to know how coercive they were. So that's another opportunity to really piss prosecution off.

edit: another thing, wounds and bruises on the body were interpreted as Kercher having been held by one person and stabbed by another. This is the reason why prosecution got so completely sure that more than one person was involved. Yeah, it's rather subjective and unreliable but people can be very sure in that sort of stuff.

There's all sorts of complicated details that are completely missing from the US coverage of the trials, which make the prosecution's position much more understandable. Perhaps the prosecution did not have sufficient evidence, but neither did the prosecution come up with some batshit insane theory out of the blue for no reason when they had everything explained with Guede.

edit: also, Guede was not some random robber, he knew people downstairs and met Knox before at least briefly. If he was random robber who never set his foot on the premises, then Bayesian wise it would have been a no-brainer: it's just unlikely that two independent groups of people who had no chance to pick eachother would be on board with murdering.

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.

Her being psychopathic would have likely lead to other facts that a well funded persecution could uncover.

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.

What's wrong with being stupid? What's wrong with being perceived as stupid?

It seems that the "stupid" you're referring to is "not knowledgeable", or perhaps "poor aptitude". Those are both things that can (largely) be trained.

Personally, I judge people for lacking open-mindedness, and to a lesser extent curiosity, and to a lesser extent ambition. I sense that this is a rather common way that smart people judge others. But I don't think it's common to judge people for temporarily lacking knowledge.