Most people haven’t weighed the evidence for the same reason I’m not motivated to do so—there’s nothing in it for me. It helps that none of my friends talk about the case.
As well, I don’t see any obvious way to attack it with Bayesian tools. (As Hamming reminds us in “You and Your Research”*, what makes a problem important is not what consequences solving it would have (like FTL or antigravity) but whether you have any productive lines of attack on it. What questions have the highest marginal return?)
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.
* Serendipitously, I just learned there’s apparently an expanded book form available online
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
Naturally, I greatly appreciate the compliment and the link. (Thanks!) However, I have to point out that this isn’t a correct summary of that post. A correct summary would be: “the burden of proof for demostrating a coverup by Knox and Sollecito is as high as for demonstrating their guilt of murder”. I don’t claim that the question of whether there was a coverup is particularly hard to resolve (to the contrary, the aforementioned claim implies strongly that there almost certainly wasn’t a coverup), and nor do I compare its difficulty with other aspects of the case.
ask how often mothers cover up a murder of their children they were not culpable in
As I understand it, the principal defense theory in the Anthony case is that it wasn’t a homicide at all, but an accident that was covered up.
The line I was thinking of was the one about how hard work has to be done somewhere, and if the coverup implied guilt, then the work had to be done on the coverup. But OK, thanks for the correction.
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 in 1998, said there are facts about the case that she finds extremely troubling.
“What I can tell you definitively is that the parents of children who die accidentally don’t lie about it; they don’t wait 31 days before reporting the deaths, and those are facts of this case that are seemingly indisputable,” Nicholson said.
That doesn’t really tell us much—lying about accidents is rare, OK. Parents murdering their children, accidentally or deliberately, are also pretty rare. It’s the ratio of rarity which tells us which to prefer in lieu of any other evidence—which is rarer?
Most people haven’t weighed the evidence for the same reason I’m not motivated to do so—there’s nothing in it for me. It helps that none of my friends talk about the case.
As well, I don’t see any obvious way to attack it with Bayesian tools. (As Hamming reminds us in “You and Your Research”*, what makes a problem important is not what consequences solving it would have (like FTL or antigravity) but whether you have any productive lines of attack on it. What questions have the highest marginal return?)
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.
* Serendipitously, I just learned there’s apparently an expanded book form available online
Naturally, I greatly appreciate the compliment and the link. (Thanks!) However, I have to point out that this isn’t a correct summary of that post. A correct summary would be: “the burden of proof for demostrating a coverup by Knox and Sollecito is as high as for demonstrating their guilt of murder”. I don’t claim that the question of whether there was a coverup is particularly hard to resolve (to the contrary, the aforementioned claim implies strongly that there almost certainly wasn’t a coverup), and nor do I compare its difficulty with other aspects of the case.
As I understand it, the principal defense theory in the Anthony case is that it wasn’t a homicide at all, but an accident that was covered up.
The line I was thinking of was the one about how hard work has to be done somewhere, and if the coverup implied guilt, then the work had to be done on the coverup. But OK, thanks for the correction.
This morning I read the following. I still don’t have statistics on this but this should be relevant:
That doesn’t really tell us much—lying about accidents is rare, OK. Parents murdering their children, accidentally or deliberately, are also pretty rare. It’s the ratio of rarity which tells us which to prefer in lieu of any other evidence—which is rarer?