True, but one of other self-selected group is wrong and what caused me to comment was a member of one self-selected group criticising the other self-selected group for being self-selected.
Oh no, you misunderstand completely. There is nothing wrong with being a member of a self-selecting group at all. Many, many clubs, hobbies, occupations and so on are self-selecting groups and to say so is not a criticism.
What
is a criticism is to say that a group is self-selecting from a group with particular deficits in their knowledge base or reasoning skills. There are lots of those - homeopaths, crystal healers, 9/11 Twoofers and so forth. You don't find any scientific rationalists who are homeopaths, for example, because homeopaths are a self-selecting group of people who are poor scientists, poor thinkers or just unfortunately ignorant.
Many wrong facts have been put out by both sides. Since the original claim was being made by the innocent camp I first became aware of those errors. Doubtless there are lists on TrueJustice, or some such place of things the innocence camp have got wrong.
Yes, but not all lists are equal. They have such lists but they have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked (showing that they were wrong all along) and repeatedly reposted anyway (showing that the authors do not amend their views in light of new evidence).
I'm certainly not certain that all of these things are universally agreed to be false...
Are they admitted to be false by loyal opposition?
You keep trying to reintroduce this arbitrary standard of "universal agreement". It's a very silly standard. We can never achieve universal agreement as long as there are a subset of pro-guilt believers who will not amend their views in light of new evidence, and there is plentiful evidence that there are many pro-guilt believers who fall into this category.
All I'm aiming for is to demonstrate to standards sufficient for a rational and intelligent person that the pro-guilt case is hogwash. I'm not going to lose any sleep if irrational or less-than-intelligent people maintain their belief in the pro-guilt case after this has been done.
I'm sure if we went over to PMF and asked Michael he would say much the same thing, sides reversed.
There's an implicit assumption there that Michael is an intelligent, honest, rational and well-informed human being whose opinion deserves as much weight as mine. I could see how if you believed that to be true you could also be capable of believing in the guilt of Knox and Sollecito.
I'm sure you don't trust them and I don't intend to try to convince you to read them. I merely meant that both sides have their lists of facts and things refuted. The pro-innocence camps lists aren't the only ones, and the pro-innocence camps opinion that their own lists haven't been refuted tells us little in this debate. Either side presumably thinks as you do that the others lists are old, many times refuted and not worth bothering with. If they didn't they could hardly believe in their own case, could they?
What makes one argument better than another, or one factual claim better than another? If two people think contrary things, how do we tell when one is right and the other is wrong?
I don't know what methods you use in such cases, or even whether you use any methods at all.
What rational people do is they examine the factual claims to see whether they are factual, and the arguments made to see whether they are logical. These two threads are full of examples of exactly this process. When you do this it turns out that the Massei narrative and the currently dominant guilter theories are a rotten tapestry of false and thoroughly debunked factual claims and fallacious arguments.
