I am sorry I did not manage to comment on this earlier; I did not suspect it would get promoted.

In short, your treatment of hearsay, and how the legal system addresses it, is simply wrong. Most of what you talk about is actually about the Confrontation Clause. I don't know if this is due to an intentional simplification of your examples, but the cases you use just don't work that way.

The main case you talk about, Davis v. Washington, is not a case about hearsay; just look at the wikipedia summary. It is a case about the confrontation clause. This is a clause that says that those accused of crimes have the right to confront the witnesses against them; if someone talks to the police under certain circumstances, that testimony may not be entered. It does not matter how reliable it is. See Crawford v. Washington. The "indicia of reliability test" was abandoned in Crawford, because it was completely circular - it was compared to doing away with a jury trial because the defendant was obviously guilty.

More generally, there is almost never a balancing test in hearsay. Hearsay is a series of rules that are applied systematically. Out of court statements are considered unreliable principally because the declarant is not under oath; there is no particular reason to believe they were being truthful. There is a series of rules that allow certain statements in for this purpose. The idea behind these rules is that they indicate the evidence is reliable. However, they operate purely formalistically: if something someone said was a statement for the purpose of medical diagnosis, it is admissible hearsay, even if the circumstances strongly demonstrate they were lying. The jury is permitted to figure that out.

The basic idea behind hearsay, and indeed behind evidence law generally, is that certain statement are more likely to mislead the jury than to aid in finding the truth. However, your whole discussion of "indicia of reliability" seems to me to address an obsolete doctrine on the Confrontation Clause. Hearsay, in the vast majority of circumstances, does not involve any kind of balancing test or similar determination. It either meets a rule, or it doesn't (though there is catch-all rule that gives the court some discretion - it can actually be somewhat problematic, because courts often get things wrong).

As to the issue of double hearsay - which I am used to hearing referred to as "hearsay within hearsay," a per se rule against a certain number of levels doesn't make a lot of sense. In the example you use, the bottom level of hearsay is very likely inadmissible; that's enough to keep it out. But the circumstances under which one could admit multi-layer hearsay are pretty limited; it would have to have an applicable exception for every level. You don't discuss any inadequacies with the exceptions, so I just don't see why it follows that their repeat application should be unreliable.

Content aside, you should generally avoid the first person as well as qualifiers and you should definitely avoid both, e.g. "I think it is interesting." Where some qualifiers are appropriate, you often phrase them too informally, e.g. "perhaps it is more like," would read much better as, "It is possible that," or, "a possible explanation is." Some first person pronouns are acceptable, but they should really only be used when the only alternative is an awkward or passive sentence.

The beginning paragraph of each subsection should give the reader a clear idea of the ultimate point of that subsection, and you would do well to include a roadmap of everything you plan to cover at the beginning.

I don't know if this is the feedback you're searching for or if the writing style is purposeful, just my two cents.

I disagree with your connotations. While the point is obvious and even follows logically from the premises it is not 'circular' in any meaningful sense. People are still getting confused on the issue so explaining it is fine.

Risk aversion with respect to paper clips or dollars is an empirical claim about the world. Risk aversion with respect to utilons is a claim about preference with respect to a theoretical construct that is defined by those preferences. It is not a meaningful discuss it, because the answer follows logically from the definition you have chosen.

And yet this was still disputed. Perhaps the point being made is less obvious to some others than it is to you. The same applies to many posts.

Your claim that a risk-averse agent cannot be rational is trivially true because it is purely circular.

You've defined a risk-averse agent as someone who does not maximize their expected utilons. The meaning of "rational" around these parts is, "maximizes expected utilons." The fact that you took a circuitous route to make this point does not change the fact that it is trivial.

I'll break down that point in case it's non-obvious. Utilons do not exist in the real world - there is no method of measuring utilons. Rather, they are a theoretical construct you are employing. You've defined a rational agent as the one who maximizes the amount of utilons he acquires. You've specified a function as to how he calculates these, but the specifics of that function are immaterial. You've then shown that someone who does not rationally maximize these utilons is not a rational utilon maximizer.

Risk aversion with respect to paper clips or dollars is an empirical claim about the world. Risk aversion with respect to utilons is a claim about preference with respect to a theoretical construct that is defined by those preferences. It is not a meaningful discuss it, because the answer follows logically from the definition you have chosen.

The only exceptions are if you've been married before or have been dating a rather long time and thus have a clear sense of what you're looking for. Of course, plenty of people don't know this.

Those aren't the only exceptions. There is the obvious "They are extremely rich and do either do not want a prenup or offer a desirable prenup package.". In that case you either get a great marriage in the long term or you get a truckload of money in the somewhat shorter term.

While the probabilistic reasoning employed in the card question is correct and fits in with your overall point, it's rather labor-intensive to actually think through.

In order to get two red cards, you need to pick the right pair of cards. Only one pair will do. There are six ways to pick a pair of cards out of a group of 4 (when, as here, order doesn't matter). Therefore, the odds are 1/6, as one out of the six possible pairs you'll pick will be the correct pair.

Similarly, we know the weatherperson correctly predicts 12.5% of days that will be rainy. We know that 20% of days will actually be raining. That gives us "12.5/20 = 5/8" pretty quickly. Grinding our way through all the P(X [ ~X) representation makes a simple and intuitive calculation look really intimidating.

I'm not entirely sure of your purpose in this sequence, but it seems to be to improve people's probabilistic reasoning. Explaining probabilities through this long and detailed method seems guaranteed to fail. People who are perfectly comfortable with such complex explanations generally already get their application. People who are not so comfortable throw up their hands and stick with their gut. I suspect that a large part of the explanation of mathematical illiteracy is that people aren't actually taught how to apply mathematics in any practical sense; they're given a logically rigorous and formal proof in unnecessary detail which is too complex to use in informal reasoning.

However, four months into the relationship, before much of this had happened, I proposed to her. I was always big on commitments. I felt that if you were dating someone, it was to eventually get married, assuming they were right for you.

I think a pretty good heuristic would be to never marry someone you have known less than a year. The only exceptions are if you've been married before or have been dating a rather long time and thus have a clear sense of what you're looking for. Of course, plenty of people don't know this.

The whole goth guy/ alternative look point misses a significant part of the appeal. People (particularly men) who prominently display membership in a subculture often have a strong sense of self. This kind of self-confidence is generally attractive to women, so those who aren't immediately put off by his group identity are likely attracted to that confidence and the charisma that goes with it.

Practically, this means that alternative styles only tend to work when they're genuine and you're comfortable with them. Someone who feels most natural in more conservative clothing may actually hurt themselves by trying niche appeal, because they need to belong to that niche.

Since I was randomly chosen to comment on this, I'll throw in my two cents. I haven't thought about too much and my first instinct was to trust whatever value judgements I had made at the time, which I thought were something like 5-5-95, but were actually 1-1-99. Since me-at-the-time was much more familiar than me-right-now, I'd still probably defer to his judgement; if anything, her exoneration and other evidence should move those numbers slightly closer to the extremes.