Look at ALL the discrepencies, look at the WHOLE picture. Doesn't anything seem out of sinc, here guys? ANYTHING??
There's a pattern of thinking I want to lay out here, that I think lies at the root of the Amanda-is-guilty case.
The first part of the pattern is that it's human nature (demonstrated by psychological studies) that most people find a large number of bad arguments
more persuasive than a single watertight argument. This is the exact opposite of strictly rational behaviour, which would be to discard bad arguments regardless of volume but to be convinced by a single argument if it's genuinely sound.
(This is why the moon hoaxers have dozens of really bad arguments for their kooky beliefs, as do the 9/11 deniers. Volume counts far more than quality to the kind of thinkers these movements attract).
The second part is confirmation bias, the well-known habit of the mind to highlight and retain information that confirms a hypothesis and to ignore or forget information that falsifies it. Everyone's mind does this. This leads people who already think AK and RF are guilty to see every minor oddity or contradiction as more evidence that AK and RF are guilty, regardless of whether it has any relevance. You can see this very clearly in the recent exchanges where people found the order in which AK called MK's phones to be evidence of her guilt, when the order in which the phones were called is manifestly utterly irrelevant to her innocence or guilt.
I suspect it's these two effects together that give rise to the echo chamber whack-a-mole effect, where no PMF talking point stays down for long even if it's been shown to be false. You can whack that mole down, but enough people ignore it or forget it (confirmation bias at work) that it pops right back up again in a page or two.
What I'm sensing here is frustration because you find a large, well-reinforced array of bad arguments highly compelling and we don't. The AK/RS-are-not-proven-guilty side often points out that there is no solid, unimpeachable evidence linking them to the murder at all. Or in other words, there is not a single really good argument for their guilt. Just a large number of bad arguments, each of which a rational person should discard. A large number of bad arguments do
not add up to a good argument.
I'm going to say that again because it's very important.
A large number of bad arguments do
not add up to a good argument.
So Amanda and Rudy were not best chums. Does that mean the rest of the body of evidence against Amanda is invalid?
Here's a recent illustration of this kind of thinking: A talking point gets whacked down yet again (this is very definitely not the first time in this thread for this talking point). BobTheDonkey isn't worried though, because he's got plenty more arguments.
Amanda did blame an innocent person..and I can't imagine anyone doing that, even if given a couple of cuffs and some shouting.
Here's another: The fact that Amanda's false accusation matches up neatly with what we know of false statements elicited by police interrogations has just been discussed
again, yet the mole pops right back up. We've linked to the relevant case studies, we've demonstrated that Amanda's statement is in important ways a textbook case of a false statement elicited by police interrogation, but the mole doesn't stay down.
As I said before, the more minutiae you examine the more meaningless contradictions or Texas Sharpshooter "oddities" you will find, in absolutely any case. It's been thoroughly illustrated that there are plenty of such "oddities" in the police and Filomena's behaviour, yet in those cases (probably due to lack of confirmation bias on that issue) it's not taken as evidence they were in on a murder. What we're seeing in the PMF community is confirmation bias in a self-reinforcing cycle, as people convinced of AK and RF's guilt examine more and more minute details of the case and so develop more and more bad arguments for their guilt.
This thread is going to go on forever unless people exercise some intellectual hygiene, as it were, and take responsibility for dropping those talking points which have been discredited. Bad arguments need to be scrubbed away and not allowed to grow back like mould, and it's each person's responsibility as a rational human being to do their own scrubbing, not to make someone else do it for you.
