JohnBonaccorsi

Thank you, komponisto. Congratulations to you on this fine essay. I think I must have first encountered it in December 2012, when I first learned of Less Wrong and came to see what the site was. Though I didn't do much to absorb the essay at that time, it stayed in my mind; the news the other day about Knox's re-conviction moved me to read it again. My mental process in response to that rereading has, in a sense, been recorded here, in my last few days' worth of exchanges with Less Wrong posters. When I posted my first comment in response to the essay, I wasn't sure it would be noticed, because the essay was more than four years old. Fortunately for me, Less Wrong's participants were paying attention.

Reply to myself:

I hereby withdraw every negative thing I have said about Amanda Knox at this website. In the period since I posted the comment immediately above, I could not drive from my mind a remark my fellow-poster Desrtopa made in a post at 03 February 2014 07:39:06AM. In effect, Desrtopa asked whether I would fault a person for giving changed-stories because of torture; if I wouldn't, why would I fault the person for giving changed-stories under interrogation so harsh that its effect on the person being questioned would be tantamount to that of tor... (read more)

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

I appreciate your alerting me to Komponisto's translations. If the information I've encountered at pro-guilty and anti-guilty websites had not given me identical impressions of the murder-room evidence, I might well be inclined to read those translations. As things are, my caveat that my sources are second hand is a minor one. From what I know, your assessment of the prosecution doesn't sound off-base.

After seeing your links to them, I took quick looks at "Privileging the Hypothesis" and "0 and 1 are Not Probabilities." I'm not sure... (read more)

I responded to what I regarded as a ridiculous question. I've said enough to indicate my view of the seriousness of false confession. Do you really find it difficult to believe I could come up with countless examples of behavior that, say, you and I would agree is mildly antisocial--my neighbor's failure to trim weeds that were partly obstructing our block's common driveway, for one? You're being pointless.

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?

I didn't see the above when I first read your comment; maybe I was busy forming, mentally, my reply, below, to the rest of what you said. I direct you to the comment I just posted, at 02 February 2014 11:49:15PM, in response to Wes_W.

I also doubt that criminalisation would change much.

It wouldn't hurt.

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.

Presumably, a false confession increases the likelihood that a case will be erroneously closed. That, in my estimation, makes it extremely antisocial, not least because it increases the likelihood that a criminal is not only at large but is unrecognized as such. Every person is obliged to avoid giving his or her fellow human beings false information about crime.

Got it. Thank you.

Detective fiction isn't exactly known for its realism.

Whether that's true, I didn't use the phrase detective fiction. If you're suggesting that the significance of story-changing in a fictional narrative would be lost on you, I would say you're probably mistaken.

Within the last twenty-four hours, I think, I posted here a comment that has been removed--unless my browser is not displaying the page properly. The comment was a reply--an addendum--to my own comment of 31 January 2014 09:33:17PM. Going by memory, I'll say it read as follows:

Having pursued, over the past twenty-four hours or so, some information about the case, I would say that, whether she was involved in the murder, Knox is a catastrophic failure of personality formation, one who, at the least, increased the agony of Kercher's family by making an u

From what I've read on the internet since I posted the statement to which you've replied, I tend to share your view that there's no physical evidence, for lack of a better term, of more than one attacker. Similarly, I've encountered nothing that suggests the shattered window is evidence of anything other than a genuine break-in. Maybe that's been discussed extensively in the threads, too.

I'll qualify that, in two ways. First, the things I've read have been second-hand reports, at websites where the case has been discussed. I would prefer to have read p... (read more)