I spent less than an hour browsing the two links provided and randomly surfing elsewhere afterwards. I was unfamiliar with the case before.
My estimated odds of Raffaele Sollecito being guilty of murder are very roughly 1:1, of Amanda Knox being guilty of murder a little less, of Ruedy Guede being guilty closer to 4:1.
Unfortunately I couldn’t entirely avoid having a peek at comments before coming to an estimate—there were some numbers in the right-hand “recent comments” box of the site.
The main driver in my estimates is that all three were convicted. This implies that dozens of people, including a carefully selected jury, spent days poring over all available evidence and came to that conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt”, and my own effort in assessing the evidence is necessarily shoddy compared to that.
I started out with about 4:1 to 9:1 confidence in their guilt, given the information provided in the post, which mentioned their conviction.
Then I started reading the Friends of Amanda site, reasoning that evidence mentioned as uncontroversial in a site arguing for the convicted would tend to be solid.
I browsed TJMK for a while as well, my take-away being that the principal question seems to have been whether one person (RG) or several were involved in the killing. I heavily discounted what I’d read there after I came across an article arguing against Amanda Knox on the basis of her liking singer Feist because Feist has published sexy pics.
On balance the evidence against Rudy Guede seemed rather damning, that against the other two much thinner. (Nobody seems to take seriously the idea that there could be something to RG’s version of the facts.)
My peek at the comments here might have moved me slightly away from assuming the guilt of the two, perhaps as much as from .6 to .5 probability of guilt.
I suspect, if you think of this as a “rationality litmus test” (I don’t, since the odds seem slim that we’ll ever get to the bottom of the case, fact-wise), that you have formed an opinion that the two are not guilty.
I spent less than an hour browsing the two links provided and randomly surfing elsewhere afterwards. I was unfamiliar with the case before.
My estimated odds of Raffaele Sollecito being guilty of murder are very roughly 1:1, of Amanda Knox being guilty of murder a little less, of Ruedy Guede being guilty closer to 4:1.
Unfortunately I couldn’t entirely avoid having a peek at comments before coming to an estimate—there were some numbers in the right-hand “recent comments” box of the site.
The main driver in my estimates is that all three were convicted. This implies that dozens of people, including a carefully selected jury, spent days poring over all available evidence and came to that conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt”, and my own effort in assessing the evidence is necessarily shoddy compared to that.
I started out with about 4:1 to 9:1 confidence in their guilt, given the information provided in the post, which mentioned their conviction.
Then I started reading the Friends of Amanda site, reasoning that evidence mentioned as uncontroversial in a site arguing for the convicted would tend to be solid.
I browsed TJMK for a while as well, my take-away being that the principal question seems to have been whether one person (RG) or several were involved in the killing. I heavily discounted what I’d read there after I came across an article arguing against Amanda Knox on the basis of her liking singer Feist because Feist has published sexy pics.
On balance the evidence against Rudy Guede seemed rather damning, that against the other two much thinner. (Nobody seems to take seriously the idea that there could be something to RG’s version of the facts.)
My peek at the comments here might have moved me slightly away from assuming the guilt of the two, perhaps as much as from .6 to .5 probability of guilt.
I suspect, if you think of this as a “rationality litmus test” (I don’t, since the odds seem slim that we’ll ever get to the bottom of the case, fact-wise), that you have formed an opinion that the two are not guilty.
Italy does not have voir-dire (juror screening) as in the U.S.
Are they chosen by simple sortition? (randomly)