If she only did that once in many hundred days, on that night in particular, then that could be a very huge amount of evidence.
....No. Not even slightly. This line of questioning MIGHT be relevant if you didn't already have the killer identified, with overwhelming physical evidence pointing towards them. You don't need to explain why Knox turned her phone off, because you already have the killer and every single piece of physical evidence at the crime scene accounted for.
I can't attend this one, but I can possibly attend in the future. The Dallas area is a 2 hour drive for me, but I make it up there every couple of months or so. (Incidentally, I'll be there on Saturday night, but not in time for this meetup.)
I don't think her reaction makes a tremendous amount of sense, at least as she explains it.
I do, and I didn't have any kind of dysfunctional upbringing. I agree with your friend, and if such a place existed, I would enjoy participating there.
It's possible to be intelligent and interested in rationality, but uninterested in being constantly graded and judged.
I do feel like LW is cold, and I'd rather not say "unfriendly", which to me sounds explicitly hostile, but it's non-friendly. Commenting here feels like Coming to Work, not like hanging out with friends. You know, where I need to remember to mind all of my manners. Seeing the orange envelope fills me with panic, as I am sure there is someone there just waiting to chew me out for violating some community norm or just being Wrong.
Truthfully, I think it is the lack of "small talk" that makes it feel unfriendly to me. It has the air of, "we're not interested in you personally, we're here to get things done". I want things to be personal. I want to make friends.
The main reason I am interested in a LW-related environment (other than it really being my only online "community") is because I know there's been talk here before about people switching fields to become programmers. That's a group of particular interest to me, since I'm one of them. I also know of at least one other person here who is working on becoming a programmer through self-study. There was a post a while back about encouraging more people to become computer programmers, so I'm betting that there are more of us out there.
There's been some talk recently of the need for programmers and how people that are unsatisfied with their current employment can find work in that area while making a decent living. Does there exist some sort of virtual meet-up for people that are working towards becoming programmers? I'd like to form, or be part of, a support group of LW-ers that are beginning programming. There may be something like this around that I've just missed because I mostly lurk and not even that regularly anymore. (Hoping to change that, though.)
What evidence I have seen does not give me much confidence in the critical thinking ability of posters here as a group, to put it politely. Not much different from "anonymous internet posters" in general.
Just in this instance, or in general?
I'm not sure that's the way to put it, but let me ask you this: How much stock do you put in the unsupported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet?
How much stock do you put in the supported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet? I think that's a more relevant question here. To what degree does a poster's anonymity detract from his argument?
Slate Star Codex fulfills this niche for me.