Hey, the Supreme Court annulled the conviction. Any thoughts? I'm sure this has come as a (pleasant) surprise to you.
I guess we'll know better when they publish their reasoning in 90 days.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.
Hello komponisto,
By 'why', I mean why do courts keep changing their opinion when the evidence is the same? I know you have written on this subject a lot before (which influenced my opinion) so here are some questions (perhaps some a little basic) I have about the case. (Some may be just rehashing old facts about the case.)
(1) You write that 'the Supreme Court has gotten the verdict it wanted.' Why does the Supreme Court want to convict Sollecito and Know? The appeals courts cited 'a complete dearth of evidence' when they acquitted Sollecito and Knox - whic...
Hello,
There have been informed discussions of this subject on LW before.
Particularly to parties informed on the subject: Can someone explain the court's reasoning? I can't quite follow why Knox and Sollecito were first convicted, then acquitted and yet are convicted once again.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It was inspiring indeed.
The Inuit may not have 47 words for snow
The Inuit does not have 47 words for snow! Please, don't propagate this falsehood, especially on a 'rationality' blog.
Edit: Sorry I read incorrectly. My apologies! It says 'may not'...
I wonder if most of the responses to JJT's thought experiment consider the least convenient possible world. (Recall Yvain's insightful discussion about Pascal's wager?)
Most of the responses that I have read try to argue that if the act of killing a healthy person to steal his organs for organ-missing people were generalized, this would make things worse.
By the way, this worry about generalizing one's individual act feels so close to thoughts of Kant - oh the irony! - whose "first formulation of the CI states that you are to 'act only in accordance wit...
"If you object to consequentialist metaethical theories"
There is no such thing as a 'consequentialist metaethical theory'.
Consequentialism is a first-order ethical theory.
While most people here despise philosophy (see here ), I do wonder how much people actually understand philosophy.
I think strictly speaking consequentalism is a property of first-order ethical theories. That is they either are consequentialist or are not. But it is not by itself a first-order theory.
Ah, that was a mistake- thanks for catching it.
If you (or anyone else) are still interested, I recommend this article . I think I'm pretty close to the position the author articulates.
The only consideration I can think of even close to the insightfulness of komponisto's analysis of how the coverup is the only hard question in the Knox case would be to ask how often mothers cover up a murder of their children they were not culpable in. And when you ask it like that, then Anthony looks highly likely to be guilty.
This morning I read the following. I still don't have statistics on this but this should be relevant:
...Nicholson, who worked as a social worker on the child abuse team at Dayton Children’s before becoming director of Care House
komponisto, I would be very interested in reading if you decided to do a similar post (to the Knox case post you had) for this case as well - even if it's just a discussion post.
Also, you say that p(Anthony=guilty) is 'possibly over %50'. Let's assume it's %50.
This claim could be interpreted as the following. Suppose that there are X many possible scenarios for what happened, given the constraints of our evidence about the case. In X/2 Anthony is guilty and in X/2, she is not guilty.
This seems implausible to me. X/2 alternate scenarios (scenarios that don't involve Anthony's guilt) seem too many.
What other alternate scenarios are there?
Let me note that most (all?) of this evidence is contested by the defense. Juror #3 Jennifer Ford, in her post-verdict interview with ABC news, said that she didn't believe the evidence based on chloroform.
The stench similarly was also contested.
I personally think that Case Anthony at least caused the death of Cayley that involved criminal elements. So, I am biased - I've made up my mind. I could change it if someone could explain all of the above in a more plausible way.
Judging by the public uproar, I guess that most people think she is guilty. Even the jurors themselves said that they 'were sick to their stomachs' in delivering the verdict, which is a strange display of human psychology.
What exactly do people mean by 'proof'? With near certainty, almost nothing can be proven.
Since the body decomposed under the soil for 30 days, it's really hard to determine the precise case of death - even though I think some prosecution witnesses made the argument that it was a homicide. It's hard to link the murderer with the body, since the body was discovered so much later.
I think the prosecution had enough 'circumstantial evidence' to get a conviction. I think that beyond a reasonable doubt, Casey Anthony was responsible for the child's death. It ma...
Thanks for posting this.
I don't know about Bayes but I think Occam's razor (simplest explanation for the data) indicates that most likely she's guilty of murder. Here are the relevant events (as evidence) that I'm thinking about:
Casey Anthony borrowed a shovel from her neighbor on June 18th 2008. Cayley Anthony was last seen alive on June 15th 2008.
There were search queries like chloroform, 'how to break a neck' (and others) found on Casey Anthony's computer - through reconstructed Firefox cache browser. The computer files were deleted to hide the dat
There is a reason why the Gettier rabbit-hole is so dangerous. You can always cook up an improbable counterexample to any definition.
That's a very interesting thought. I wonder what leads you to it.
With the caveat that I have not read all of this thread:
*Are you basing this on the fact that so far, all attempts at analysis have proven futile? (If so, maybe we need to come up with more robust conditions.)
*Do you think that the concept of 'knowledge' is inherently vague similar (but not identical) to the way terms like 'tall' and 'bald' are?
*Do you suspe...
If our situation controls our behavior (let's try to bracket "to what extent" and "how" it does so), then wouldn't it also control what kind of situation we will go for?
Here's an example from an Orwell essay: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks."
And then I've always wondered about the following: If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a t...
If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?
Jones and Nisbett attempted to answer this question in their classic paper on actor-observer bias. It's an interesting read.
However, beware of falling into an overly strict interpretation of situationism (as I think Jones and Nisbett did) which amounts to little more than behaviorism in new clothes. People do tend to underestimate the extent to which their behavior and the behavior of others is driven b...
Interestingly, I've read that the fundamental attribution error is less strong in East Asian cultures, such as China and Japan.
Will our situation affect which situation we will go for? Of course.
One reason the folk may have such a robust theory of character traits is that it successfully predicts behavior. But the reason for this is because we mostly only see people in the same situations, not because they do or would behave reliably in very different situations.
Thursdays 7pm is a little tough for me. I have a chess game at my chess club 8pm every Thursday. Weekends work better for me.
Nonetheless, thanks for organizing.
Sorry, you'll have to excuse a bit of my ignorance here.
Classical philosophers like Hume came up with some great ideas, too, especially considering that they had no access to modern scientific knowledge. But you don't have to spend thousands of hours reading through their bad ideas to find the few good ones, because their best ideas have become modern scientific knowledge.
What are some of Hume's "bad" ideas? He's a philosopher I cherish quite a bit. I'd be interested to know what his "bad" ideas are. (Have you read Hume at all? Or...
I agree with caveats. I mean I just looked up what the hell is a 'g6' - it turns out it's a twin-engine airplane manufactured by Gulf Stream. (They will finish production in 2012 - it's said. Price tag is $58M.)
Now I surely for hell didn't need to know that but I couldn't help myself... like a g6... so fly like a g6...
My caveat is that it may be good to accumulate seemingly useless information. You can't after all predict when it'll be handy.
Do you know these laws?
The laws I know ban wearing the veil/turban (i mean the same thing by these two words) in government-related places - you can't wear it in the work place if you are working for a government, can't wear it in public universities, can't wear it in the TBMM (the Turkish congress) etc. etc... You are free to wear it on the street or in the workplace if you are working for a private company. I may be mistaken - the ban covering the universities is the most famous and contentious.
...Could you confirm that the text matches wikipedia's d
As a Turk, I strongly believe that story is fictional.
Where and how was this ban issued? Can you give more details?
You may be hearing some fictional story based on his social reforms.
See here
And the veil, currently banned in public universities, is still very much a hot button issue. Also, a large segment of the Turkish population still wears the veil. The country is deeply divided over this issue.
Now that I think about it, believing the story requires ignoring how strongly many people who follow modesty rules are apt to be attached to them.
If a western ruler announced that prostitutes were required to cover their breasts, do you think respectable women would start going topless?
Don't get over-excited. You are still losing money in a less than fair-odds situation.
And since most people don't stop gambling until they have some deficit from gambling, casinos usually make more than the odds give them.
There is nothing in what I wrote that implies people value their lives infinitely. People just need to value their lives highly enough such that flying on an airplane (with its probability of crashing) has a negative expected value.
Again, from Nick Bostrom's article:
"Pascal: I must confess: I’ve been having doubts about the mathematics of infinity. Infinite values lead to many strange conclusions and paradoxes. You know the reasoning that has come to be known as ‘Pascal’s Wager’? Between you and me, some of the critiques I’ve seen have made me won...
'Small enough' here would have to be very much smaller than 1 in 100 for this argument to begin to apply. It would have to be 'so small that it won't happen before the heat death of the universe' scale. I'm still not sure the argument works even in that case.
How small should x be? And if the argument does hold, are you going to have two different criteria for rational behavior - one with events where probability of positive outcome is 1-x and one that isn't.
And also, from Nick Bostrom's piece (formatting will be messed up):
...Mugger: Good. Now we will d
Is the problem that 0.01 or 0.05 too high?
Take a smaller value then.
In fact, people take such gambles (with negative expectation but with high probability of winning) everyday.
They fly on airplanes and drive to work.
I think it's hard to enjoy gambling if you are sure you'll lose money, which is how I feel like. I may be over pessimistic.
Roulette gives you odds of 1.111 to 1 if you place on Red or Black with expectation -0.053 on the dollar. So I may be over-pessimistic. See the wiki entry.
The nonlinear utility of money?
Well, the point I was trying to make was supposed to be abstract and general. Nick Bostrom's Pascal's Mugging piece argues for a very similar (if not identical) point. Thanks for letting me know about this.
And yes, I'm bad at dealing with small probabilities. I feel that these evoke some philosophical questions about the nature of probability in general - or whatever we talk about when we talk about probabilities.
Obviously, this needs more discussion but the kind of thought I was trying to motivate was the following:
How is that saying a non-repeating singular event has a very small probability of occurring different from saying it will not happen?
This was motivated by the lottery paradox. Questions like, when you buy a lottery ticket, you don't believe you will win, so why are you buying it?
Examples like these sort of pull my intuitions towards thinking no, it doesn't make sense to speak of probabilities for certain events.
Sorry that talking about money lead to confusion. I guess the point I was making was the following. See my respond to mattnewport, i.e.:
Suppose you have a gamble Z with negative expectation with probability of a positive outcome 1-x, for a very small x. I claim that for small enough x, every one should take Z - despite the negative expectation.
What exactly does maximizing expected utility yield in these particular cases?
For one, I could be convinced not to take A (0.01 could be too risky) but I would never take B.
I feel that if maximization of expected utility involves averaging probabilities of outcomes weighted by payoffs, then it's going to suffer from similar difficulties.
Wouw... Thank you for this charitable interpretation. I'll try to respond.
(1) You don't have to construe the gamble as some sort of coin flips. It could also be something like "the weather in Santa Clara, California in 20 September 2012 will be sunny" - i.e. a singular non-repeating event, in which case having 100 hundred people (as confused as me) will not help you.
(2) I've specifically said that if you have enough trials to converge to the expectation (i.e. the point about Weak Law of Large Numbers), then the point I'm making doesn't hold.
(...
Well, to clarify, here's an example from here :
...To illustrate, in a study conduced by Tversky and Kahneman (1974), a random number was generated by spinning a wheel. Participants were then asked to specify whether this random number was higher or lower than was the percentage of nations that are located in Africa--referred to as a comparative question. Finally, participants were instructed to estimate the percentage of nations that are located in Africa-an absolute question. Participants who had received a high random number were more inclined to overesti
Matt,
I see how Gigerenzer's point is relevant to some of the biases such as the conjunction fallacy.
But what about other biases such as the anchoring bias?
Is there really a way to show that all fallacious reasoning in K&T's experiments is due to presentation of information in terms of probabilities as opposed to frequencies?
Thanks.
I don't know. I am hesitant.
I can think of instances in which someone has started talking about an anecdote and the other person wasn't really responsive at all. (And, yeah, more than anything it was I who were telling the anecdote.) I guess it requires social savvy to pick which anecdote to tell.
I don't think engaging someone meaningfully (i.e. "hooking") in a conversation is as easy as making more statements as opposed to asking questions.
Conversation is more of an art than an exact science - 'tis true...
Anybody wants to call me so they can hear my totally irrelevant anecdote?
Thanks for the link! I will try to fight it :-).
From the link you give:
She told him she could go even more and showed him. He asked why she was so good at stretching and she explained she had been doing gymnastic when she was younger. So he asked her if she could do the other things, the cartwheel, the split, the bridge and she showed him.
Thanks for this - one more mystery solved.
Thanks for your summary.
The only place I differ from you is the cartwheel part. This behavior strikes me as genuinely insensitive and disrespectful but being disrespectful and insensitive doesn't make one a murderer.
I'd like to believe that the prosecution has a case but for the life of me, I can't see one.
One thing that struck me as weird is that Kercher's family was 'pleased' with the verdict - do they really think that Knox and Sollecito took part in the murder? Why do they think that way? I'd like to know. Surely, the Kercher family must be reasonable ...
Would anyone actually be up for discussing the specifics of the case? (I don't know why but I find myself oddly interested in this case.)
As far as I can tell, the biggest pro-defendant evidence is that there is no major DNA evidence of Sollecito and Knox in the room where murder took place. We are told that there is a bra clasp with Sollecito's DNA and a knife that has both Amanda's and Kercher's DNA - both of these DNA traces are 'weak' in the sense that they are not that obvious, require a hefty search and are hard to see in lab. On the other hand, ther...
I, too, find myself oddly fascinated by the case. I assumed Sollecito and Knox were guilty until just before the verdict came in, when the story was gaining more traction here in the U.S. I can't recall what it was that I read that made me question their guilt, but it set me off on a quest to learn as much as I could about it. I've basically taken details reported in the media, blogs, etc., that disturbed me and looked for the defense's OR prosecution's take on that detail. Here are the main points, and what I understand to be the truth behind the "ev...
Hello,
I haven't made up my mind yet - and if anyone's interested, this cbs take on it looks well done:
I actually took information theory but this is more of an issue algorithmic information theory - something I have not studied all that much. Though still, I think you are probably right since Kolgomorov complexity refers to descriptive complexity of an object. And here you can give a much shorter description of all of consecutive natural numbers.
This is very interesting to me because intuitively one would think that both are problems involving infinity and hence I lazily thought that they would both have the same complexity.
Yes, but how are you going to represent 'n' under the hood? You are going to need eventually infinite bits to represent it? I guess this is what you mean by storage. I should confess that I don't know enough about alogrithmic information theory so I may be in deeper waters than I can swim. I think you are right though...
I had something more in mind like, the number of bits required to represent any natural number, which is obviously log(n) (or maybe 2loglog(n) - with some clever tricks I think) and if n can get as big as possible, then the complexity, log...
What is the notion of complexity in question? It could for instance be the (hypothetically) shortest program needed to produce a given object, i.e. Kolmogorov complexity.
In that case, the natural numbers would have a complexity of infinity, which would be much greater than any finite quantity - i.e. a human life.
I may be missing something because the discussion to my eyes seems trivial.
I disagree with your blunt formulation of intelligence as 'IQ'. An example: Lewis Terman (yes the father of Frederick Terman who has a building named after him at Stanford) followed a bunch of kids with high IQs - average of 151. As described in the article, William Shockley (have you heard of him?) didn't have a high enough to be one of the 'Termite's. But, as every electrical engineer will tell you, Shockley went onto invent the bipolar junction transistor at Bell Labs. (What's ironic is that Shockley himself adopted a static (unchangeable) view of huma...
This was really funny.
I'm reminded of a Seinfeld scene in which Jerry and Elaine, annoyed at each other, are in a push fight in Jerry's apartment when Kramer pops in, separates them and nonchalantly suggests, "Don't you two see you are in love with each other?". (Note that in the scene, it's obvious Jerry and Elaine are not romantically linked and that's why Kramer's comment is so funny.)
I'm always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
I'm sure we'd all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart - that's some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies - if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
Inspired by Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment, I'm going to go with delayed gratification. I think the most important skill (or perhaps meta-skill, as this particular skill allows one to develop skills) is the ability to delay gratification and discipline yourself to work on something for a prolonged period of time. Without hard work and discipline, you can't achieve much in life. I also want to link to an interview with Carol Dweck, since she is probably the psychologist who has influenced me the most in this regard.
After all, Joe is a deterministic physical system; his current state (together with the state of his future self's past light-cone) fully determines what Joe's future action will be. There is no Physically Irreducible Moment of Choice, where this same Joe, with his own exact actual past, "can" go one way or the other.
You sound to me as though you don't believe in free will.
...“You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,” said Billy Pilgrim.
“If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t
There is a field called philosophy of language. Have you heard of it? Here are some key papers/links:
On Sense and Reference by Frege
Reference and Definite Descriptions by Donnellan
Kripke's Naming and Necessity Lectures (Wohooo I didn't know this was freely available... I might reread it now...)
A.P. Martinich's Standard Philosophy of Language Anthology
Now you are an educated man...
I'm just surprised to see that the Kercher family is sad that the accused were acquitted.
Why do the Kercher family think that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are guilty?
Update: Here's a clue to the family's thinking:
... (read more)