I don’t remember hearing about this case before reading this post. This is not strong evidence that I hadn’t; it’s the kind of news item I’d be likely to classify as “contains no valuable or interesting information” (no disrespect to the victim, her friends or her relatives is intended; but the global death rate is such that you just can’t keep up with all the individual instances, and therefore you necessarily have to be extremely selective about which individual deaths receive any specific attention from you) and discard immediately from memory. In any case I don’t have any significant prior case-specific knowledge.
I’ve consulted the Wikipedia article, one of the news articles used as a primary source by said article, read most of entries from the TJ Prosecution’sCase category, as well as the FOA pages. Altogether I spent a few hours on this research.
I accidentally looked at one response (IIRC it was this one) before I read the post itself, and learned that that had been a bad move. I’ll do my best to filter that knowledge out of my answer. Since there’s accusations of Anti-US bias flying around, I should probably also mention that I’m a citizen of (and live in) Germany. I don’t think I’m biased against US citizens, but such self-assessment is always tricky.
Given all of that, here’s my answers:
0.8
0.8
0.9
It’s hard to quantify this precisely. I expect about a 80% chance of you agreeing that the probability for 3 is >= 0.75, and around a 60% chance of you assigning probabilities of >= 0.6 to both of 1 and 2.
Reasoning:
1 and 2: Suspects’ behavior as documented by their phone and computer use doesn’t match their preferred stories. AK correctly mentioning MK screaming is some evidence that she was at the scene of the crime. FOA attacks the DNA test performed on the knife, but the experts responsible appear to think that this kind of testing is reliable under the circumstances, and they should be in a good position to judge.
The jury in the case had better access to the evidence available (apparently presenting all of it took on the order of 200 hours; this suggests there’s quite a lot of the stuff), and much more cputime to process it than I do; in absence of strong evidence that their reasoning was fundamentally flawed, their judgement is strong empirical evidence for the guilt of the defendants.
3: Pretty good evidence there; lots of DNA material, and RG’s story sounds rather unlikely. And again, there’s an existing judgement by someone who had better access to information and more time to think about the issue.
General comments:
This is quite a mess. Both of the advocacy sites are contaminated with lots of data that’s so weakly relevant as to be basically a distraction. So are the newspaper articles. Why exactly do we need photos of the people involved? Even hypothetically, what does this kind of information add to the discussion? The character testimonies are only marginally better; theoretically that kind of thing is evidence, in practice it’s so weak as to be likely to do more harm than good. This whole case is an affect minefield. I guess this does make this a great real-life rationality stress test, but somehow I doubt that that was what the people who put those documents together had in mind.
All of this is fairly general evidence about such cases, so the jury could well have had access to it, as well. They’re still in a position of having much better access to evidence, and the real question becomes how rational they are in evaluating it.
I don’t remember hearing about this case before reading this post. This is not strong evidence that I hadn’t; it’s the kind of news item I’d be likely to classify as “contains no valuable or interesting information” (no disrespect to the victim, her friends or her relatives is intended; but the global death rate is such that you just can’t keep up with all the individual instances, and therefore you necessarily have to be extremely selective about which individual deaths receive any specific attention from you) and discard immediately from memory. In any case I don’t have any significant prior case-specific knowledge.
I’ve consulted the Wikipedia article, one of the news articles used as a primary source by said article, read most of entries from the TJ Prosecution’s Case category, as well as the FOA pages. Altogether I spent a few hours on this research.
I accidentally looked at one response (IIRC it was this one) before I read the post itself, and learned that that had been a bad move. I’ll do my best to filter that knowledge out of my answer. Since there’s accusations of Anti-US bias flying around, I should probably also mention that I’m a citizen of (and live in) Germany. I don’t think I’m biased against US citizens, but such self-assessment is always tricky.
Given all of that, here’s my answers:
0.8
0.8
0.9
It’s hard to quantify this precisely. I expect about a 80% chance of you agreeing that the probability for 3 is >= 0.75, and around a 60% chance of you assigning probabilities of >= 0.6 to both of 1 and 2.
Reasoning:
1 and 2: Suspects’ behavior as documented by their phone and computer use doesn’t match their preferred stories. AK correctly mentioning MK screaming is some evidence that she was at the scene of the crime. FOA attacks the DNA test performed on the knife, but the experts responsible appear to think that this kind of testing is reliable under the circumstances, and they should be in a good position to judge. The jury in the case had better access to the evidence available (apparently presenting all of it took on the order of 200 hours; this suggests there’s quite a lot of the stuff), and much more cputime to process it than I do; in absence of strong evidence that their reasoning was fundamentally flawed, their judgement is strong empirical evidence for the guilt of the defendants.
3: Pretty good evidence there; lots of DNA material, and RG’s story sounds rather unlikely. And again, there’s an existing judgement by someone who had better access to information and more time to think about the issue.
General comments:
This is quite a mess. Both of the advocacy sites are contaminated with lots of data that’s so weakly relevant as to be basically a distraction. So are the newspaper articles. Why exactly do we need photos of the people involved? Even hypothetically, what does this kind of information add to the discussion? The character testimonies are only marginally better; theoretically that kind of thing is evidence, in practice it’s so weak as to be likely to do more harm than good. This whole case is an affect minefield. I guess this does make this a great real-life rationality stress test, but somehow I doubt that that was what the people who put those documents together had in mind.
It turns out most commentors are of a rather different opinion on 1. and 2., so … update time!
New evidence includes reports that use of the involved drugs does significantly impair memory, a reminder that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and fairly damning judgements about the Italien legal system. I also realized that my priors for P(group rape | rape) and P(group murder | murder) were insufficiently extreme (i.e. too high).
All of this is fairly general evidence about such cases, so the jury could well have had access to it, as well. They’re still in a position of having much better access to evidence, and the real question becomes how rational they are in evaluating it.
Updated probabilities are:
0.35
0.35
0.9