Congratulations on changing your mind!

You did it exactly right: you realized you lacked knowledge in a certain domain (interrogation, in this case), proceeded to learn something about it, and updated your previous opinions based on the information you received.

Less Wrong exists pretty much in order to help people become better at doing exactly that.

My hat is off to you, sir.

Dear fellow-poster Desrtopa --

Something called a "karma problem" has prevented me from replying directly to your comment at 03 February 2014 08:52:06AM. In the hope you will spot it, my reply will be posted here. I'm afraid it's the last comment I'll have time for; your reply to it, should you choose to post one, will be the last word in our exchange.

Suppose that you were living in a rather more paranoid country, where the government suspected you of subversive activities. So, they took a current captive suspect, tortured them, and told them they'd stop if the suspect accused you. If the suspect caved, would you blame them for accusing you, or the government for making them do it?

I would hope my friends would know I would applaud their doing anything--even torturing me--to avoid being tortured themselves. That goes double for strangers.

PS At 02 February 2014 11:49:15PM, I wrote, with respect to Knox's accusation of Lumumba: "The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved." I withdraw the word "maybe."

PPS Let's consider your own personal experience, the stressful interrogation you underwent about the money you were suspected of taking. Were you tortured? Was Knox tortured? If Knox was of the view that she was tortured, she had a duty--not merely to herself but to everyone--to take the stand in her trial and say her story-changing and her accusation of Lumumba were products of torture.

Dear fellow-poster Desrtopa --

Something called a "karma problem" has prevented me from replying directly to your comment at 03 February 2014 08:52:06AM. In the hope you will spot it, my reply will be posted here. I'm afraid it's the last comment I'll have time for; your reply to it, should you choose to post one, will be the last word in our exchange.

Suppose that you were living in a rather more paranoid country, where the government suspected you of subversive activities. So, they took a current captive suspect, tortured them, and told them they'd stop if the suspect accused you. If the suspect caved, would you blame them for accusing you, or the government for making them do it?

I would hope my friends would know I would applaud their doing anything--even torturing me--to avoid being tortured themselves. That goes double for strangers.

PS At 02 February 2014 11:49:15PM, I wrote, with respect to Knox's accusation of Lumumba: "The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved." I withdraw the word "maybe."

PPS Let's consider your own personal experience, the stressful interrogation you underwent about the money you were suspected of taking. Were you tortured? Was Knox tortured? If Knox was of the view that she was tortured, she had a duty--not merely to herself but to everyone--to take the stand in her trial and say her story-changing and her accusation of Lumumba were products of torture.

Allow me to say first that I appreciate your extended comment even if I can't say I embrace all you've said in it. I can believe the personal experience you've described was, as you say, surprisingly stressful; but let's note that you came through it without, as I gather, either falsely confessing or changing your story. Every one of us lives with crime; every one of us lives with the possibility that, at any moment, he or she will be arrested for, or questioned about, a crime with which he or she has had nothing to do. Every one of us lives, as well, with the knowledge that some humans are liars; every one of us knows that that knowledge complicates interrogation. If any one of us is subjected to interrogation, he or she is obliged to perform seriously through it. That fact is no more subject to change than is, say, the law of conservation of energy. Either you accept it, meet your duties, and hold others to theirs--or you are antisocial.

This seems like an unfairly high standard to hold people to in order to determine whether they are "antisocial." After all, in an interrogation where the police do not believe the subject's protestations of innocence, they generally take extensive measures to induce the subject to change their testimony. Interrogation subjects can be subject to considerable duress, and condemning people for changing their stories under circumstances is, hopefully, different in degree, but is not different in kind from condemning people for caving to torture. It would certainly take an unusual definition of "antisocial" to capture people who will falsely self incriminate under sufficient pressure from the police.

As you know by now, I mentioned, below, that I'd got the impression that the multiple-attacker theory was insubstantial, but I do appreciate the time you've taken to detail problems with it. I'm not sure it's accurate to say the police walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito to it; but I can believe the police early on developed a theory of a many-party-attack and a false break-in to cover it, a theory they never managed to abandon.

In fact, the police flagged Amanda Knox as a suspect on the basis of her mannerisms at the crime scene, which the lead investigator (who has come under fire for his use of implausible profiling techniques in other cases) judged to be unusual, before developing a multiple-attacker hypothesis behind the murder. Raffaele Sollecito was flagged by association with Knox, as was Patrick Lumumba on the basis of her phone contact with him. All of this is a matter of public record. Since the presumption of Knox's involvement was central to their investigation from the beginning, they had a major reputational stake in not admitting that it had been based on weak premises, and all the information they received was thus evaluated in light of their original hypothesis.

As for your distinction between false confession and story-changing, the relevance of false confession here is simply that it is generally the most extreme form of story changing under duress from the police- false self incrimination. If people can regularly be induced to falsely self-incriminate, it should be no surprise if they can be induced to falsely incriminate others. The fact that Amanda Knox changed her testimony should be evaluated in light of the fact that she changed it to something that the police had known motive to pressure her for, and when she was removed from her conditions of duress, she immediately recanted. If we are to take this as evidence of anyone's wrongdoing, it should be that of the police, since we can take it as a measure of their misconduct that they convinced an interrogation subject to point them to a suspect that they had already decided they wanted, who we know in light of present evidence could not have been involved.

Komponisto translated what documentation was available to the public in Italy for people on this site to peruse. They're probably still linked on this or some related page, but if you're not invested enough to check them out yourself, I'll at least say that having spent a fair amount of time examining them during a protracted debate on the subject, I'd regard them as pretty damning to the prosecution.

Given some of your statements in this thread though, I think it might be a good idea (at least if you want to get an understanding of why people have been downvoting your comments,) to check out Privileging the Hypothesis and 0 and 1 Are Not Probabilities. Reading the entire How To Change Your Mind sequence would definitely give a better understanding of where people in this thread are coming from, but to be fair, it's pretty long.

You state that "some people" are innocent and yet change their story. I don't know whether that's true, but it does not change the fact that story-changing is, in my view, at least, strong evidence of guilt. You state that it "can probably [be taken] as weak evidence of guilt," and the author of the present post seems to grant even less than that. Story-changing by someone caught in a trap is a significant element of the human condition, an element you seek to dismiss with the phrase "speculative psychological evidence."

I also don't know whether it's true that "lots of confessions" are coerced and false; but unless you have something specific to point out with respect to such supposed coercion and the changed stories of Knox, you're just throwing up dust.

It's extremely common for people to give false confessions under duress, and some judicial systems take this into account. In Japan, for instance, no person can be convicted on the basis of a confession alone; they must be able to reveal verifiable information about the crime which the police could not have already provided to them.

I participated in a psychological study a few months ago regarding interrogation. I was interrogated for a minor offense which I did not commit by a person who was led to believe that I had committed it. I pretty much had the deck stacked in my favor here; I knew that the stakes riding on the interrogation were trivial, I had, if not an actual alibi, then at least extremely strong circumstantial evidence in favor of my innocence, plus strong material evidence. I was accused of stealing money, which I would not have had time or opportunity to spend or hide, but I did not have any bills on me in the denomination I was accused of stealing, and was free to demonstrate this. I am also pretty good at retaining my reasoning and rhetorical faculties under pressure, making me better at arguing in my own defense than most people.

Nevertheless, it was a really surprisingly stressful experience. If you've never been interrogated for a crime you haven't committed, then I would say that this is absolutely an area where you shouldn't try to state with any kind of confidence what you would or would not do.

As for the evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime, to make a not-that-long story short, that's not really the case. The prosecution had already flagged Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito by connection, as suspects, on very tenuous bases, prior to processing any forensic evidence for the case, and they continued to interpret the available evidence in light of that hypothesis, but on the whole there was really an absence of evidence favoring the involvement of multiple people over a single murderer.

The evidence for the involvement of other people besides Guede pretty much boils down to

*The number of stab wounds and general brutality of the murder *Evidence of the break-in being staged *DNA of other individuals aside from Guede at the scene.

However, had the prosecution not already had a vested interest in flagging multiple suspects, they would almost certainly have noted that the number of stab wounds on Kercher's body was not actually unusual for a knife murder. Knife murders routinely involve very large number of stab wounds, because it's much harder to kill a person with a knife than people generally expect, and when a person who's not trained or experienced in killing people with knives attempts to do so, the result is usually a frantic extended struggle. The "evidence" that the break-in was staged did not stand up even cursory analysis by the defense, and could reasonably be described as "completely made up," and the DNA analysis only suggested involvement of multiple people after egregious mishandling.

Had the police not walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito into the case, it's unlikely that they would have concluded from the available evidence that any perpetrators other than Guede were involved.

Edit: With regards to Knox having specfic reason to alter her testimony in absence of her guilt, it's important to realize that the person she flagged after her extended interrogation was the same person the police had already decided to treat as a suspect based on their interpretation of her phone messages to him0, messages which were in fact quite innocuous when viewed in light of English language colloquialism. They had a suspect they wanted her to finger, and after an interrogation in which she alleges extreme duress, she eventually does so. Then, after having a short period in which to recuperate, she repudiates her own testimony. The suspect then proves to have an airtight alibi.

Under these circumstances, if her changing testimony should be taken as indication of anything, it's that the police probably did push her extremely hard to give a response they had already settled on. It's very unlikely that she and the police would independently narrow down the same suspect who was unambiguously uninvolved, and the content of the proceedings clearly shows that the police, rather than Knox, were the first to point to that suspect.

Are you a neurological outlier in some respect so that you could not grasp the implications of my question, or are you just being an annoyingly uncooperative communicator? By the way, I don't believe for your claim about thousands for a split-second. I wouldn't even believe it if you had said "hundreds". I'll be impressed if you manage in reasonable time for "tens".

It wouldn't hurt.

Right, because the people making false confessions aren't under enough psychological pressure already...

That, in my estimation, makes it extremely antisocial

Can you give me an example of what you consider to be a mildly antisocial act?

Every person is obliged to avoid giving his or her fellow human beings false information about crime.

At arbitrary costs to themselves... ?

If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00

At most you could convict them of something like obstruction of justice or criminal defamation, if you could actually prove mens rea beyond reasonable doubt.
But convicting somebody of murder just because they made an incorrect or even deliberately false claim, would not serve the interests of justice.

In this case, Knox was actually convicted of "calunnia" against Lumumba.
It could be argued whether this conviction was fair, since Knox made the claim in a statement signed at the end of a lengthy interrogation without an attorney, in a language she was not familiar with, and the statement mentions that she "remembered confusedly".
Anyway, fair or not, she already served her term for that false accusation.

Such a thing is extremely anti-social and is, I hope, criminalized itself.

I doubt that criminalisation would change much. Without having researched this, I would assume that people make false confessions when they believe they would be convicted even if they didn't confess.

I'm also not sure what's supposed to be so extremely antisocial about it. It's not like the police will surely catch the responsible party if only you don't make that false confession to get a more lenient sentence.

If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00

Well, one shouldn't be using such heuristics without prior research into the matter, precisely because of the typical mind fallacy. You couldn't imagine innocent people changing their stories - but it happens. So what does that say about the validity of your inference from your own imagination to the expected behaviour of other people?