Dang, civil-case reversal rates are much higher than the U.S. (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11027117874758072323), I still can't find anything on criminal cases though. komponisto said about 1/3, any cite on that?

There's lots of interesting high-profile Italian murders on Wikipedia, but after excluding those related to the mafia, terrorism, or serial-killers, there's not much recent activity left. Still, three of the ones I found (the Cogne homicide, the Novi Ligure murder, and the "Beasts of Satan") were partially or fully upheld, and the fourth (Nicholas Green) was reversed from acquittal to conviction. (I guess there's no double-jeopardy protection in Italy, since that would deprive them of additional opportunities to reverse. </sarcasm>) So I'll poke around a bit more when I get a chance, but so far a 50/50 bet is feeling moderately advantageous to me, even with the DNA review results.

So, komponisto, Kevin, Pavitra, or anyone else, any general thoughts on how to calculate p(K | guilt) or p(K | innocence)? (K meaning Kevin's claim, that Knox will be released on appeal).

Hey Kevin, thanks for pinging me, sounds exciting. I'd bet Knox's odds are only somewhat better than the average guilty defendant of release on appeal, that "somewhat better" based on her having a more expensive legal and PR team than the average defendant. Can't find such info easily though, I'll google around tonight. Wikipedia says we're still on the first of the two mandatory appeals, do you mean released on the first appeal or on any appeal? What if it's remanded back to the lower court? Also, I assume you mean 'released on the murder charge', not on libel (although that might be "time served" anyway by that time.)

For tax purposes, wagering a charity donation would probably be better, but cash might be doable, I'll need to think about it. Let me anyway research tonight how favorable p(successful appeal | guilt) looks to me.

That said, from a "getting to the truth" perspective, I still think a 1-on-1 debate is a better way of getting to the truth in the Kercher case than this wager, given the additional uncertainty of p(successful appeal | guilt).

Rolf Nelson's AI deterrence doesn't work for Schellingian reasons: the Rogue AI has incentive to modify itself to not understand such threats before it first looks at the outside world. This makes you unable to threaten, because when you simulate the Rogue AI you will see its precommitment first. So the Rogue AI negates your "first mover advantage" by becoming the first mover in your simulation :-) Discuss.

Matt wrote:

Here's a source for the 'three unidentified individuals' DNA' claim:

Thanks Matt. While my claim that there are not three unidentified individuals' DNA on the strap is tangential to C1, I will back it up anyway.

The Daily Mail is a tabloid, rather than a reliable source (in case the headline, 'The troubling doubts over Foxy Knoxy's role in Meredith Kercher's murder', didn't give it away) that clearly got the content for the summary article from Wikipedia. In contrast, the more reliable Sunday Times states instead that Meredith's, Rudy's, and Raffaele's DNA were found. Keep in mind that, as of the day before the Daily Mail summary story you mention, there was no media report (even in tabloids) of the three unidentified people; it seems likely the Daily Mail pulled it from either the Friends of Amanda site, or the prior day's Wikipedia, which has the (non-cited!) claim.

If you post here more often, you'll learn that certain linguistic patterns are required for the community to not get annoyed at you when making strong-sounding conclusions.

For example, ":s/Knox//g" helps.

More seriously, that phenomenon extends far beyond LessWrong and applies particularly when the comments are personal (or reflect on an individual fairly directly).

Maybe I'm applying some hindsight bias, but I still agree with rolf that the evidence (for komponisto's position) was there in his selection of "the relevant facts". Keep in mind that many people did not spend any time at all reading the pro-guilt website and would not even be aware that he'd excluded "evidence" from there in his summary.

I believe that many of the posters (especially the wrong ones) didn't spend any additional time gathering information beyond that which was presented in the post+discussion; I certainly didn't. I like to believe that, because it implies that they could have gotten it right if they really cared to, which is a nicer thing to believe than that you absolutely can't trust most people's best efforts at thinking and making fair judgments.

So, Rolf, do you understand how this post failed? Hint: Others are not to blame.

Well, fellow LWers, I must admit I'm somewhat taken aback here.

I came on the site today intending to reply to Rolf Nelson's comments, which I expected would lead to a detailed discussion of the evidence that maybe a handful of people here would be interested in following, safely confined to an existing post on the topic. Then, I saw...this.

I'm not yet quite sure how to react.

Despite Nelson's protestations that he doesn't care about karma (and, by implication, social status in this community), I see no rationale for this post other than a desire to raise the profile and prestige of his (IMHO deservedly) marginalized viewpoint.

When I wrote my original survey post, I did so hesitantly, with conscious awareness that I was doing something experimental. I was well aware of the dangers of posting about controversial current events (though something like this is noticeably distinct from politics), and I certainly didn't expect most other LW readers to have anything like my level of interest in this particular case. But I did think there might be a few who would find the rationality issues interesting enough to participate in the survey -- enough to justify a low-profile, non-promoted top-level post. I was expecting maybe a couple dozen comments (a few of which I expected would complain about the post's relevance); in the event that it received such a level of interest, I said I would do a followup about my own thoughts.

The LW community could thus have vetoed the whole thing right then and there; instead what happened was that the post was promoted, received 200-odd comments (among which were the thoughts of the some of the biggest guns here such as Eliezer and Yvain), and was voted up into the 20s. Clearly, then, the community had agreed with me that there were important rationality issues at stake in this case, and had decided that, at that moment, it was a perfectly good thing to be talking about on LW. And so they did talk about it, extensively. And, in so doing, they came to a fairly decisive opinion. The question was then: did their opinion agree with mine?

That was the context of the post I called "The Amanda Knox Test" -- which I thought of as a reaction to the commentary on "You Be the Jury", and which I thought of as arguing that the LW community was even more right than it realized. This second post (which was even more well received than the first) also sparked extensive discussion -- the result of which appeared to be an even stronger consensus in favor of Knox's and Sollecito's innocence than before.

My point here is that the idea that the LW readership was somehow bamboozled by misinformation from me is not only completely and obviously mistaken but downright insulting -- logically and otherwise. Whatever further top-level posts on the Kercher case may be warranted (and I don't think any more are, at least not without some major development happening), a post arguing or implying that is clearly not warranted. So I think that this post's current score (-7 at last check) is pretty much on target, and I don't intend to comment any further on it lest intelligent conversation in comments lead to upvotes on the post.

I'm going to wait a bit before saying any more about this (for one thing, I currently have some intervention from Real Life to deal with). In the future, I remain willing to discuss the case with Rolf Nelson or anyone else who sincerely believes that Amanda Knox killed her roommate -- in exactly one place: the comments section of my post on that topic.