Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Chris_Halkides]

one country versus another

Cases that occurred in another country with a different system of justice hardly seem relevant to this case.

tsig,

If one country had a forensic infrastructure that was completely independent of law enforcement and another did not, then comparing them could be inappropriate, for example. However, I see no reason to think that tunnel vision and the urge to protect oneself and one's institution operate much differently in one country to the next. I have to wonder though, if an American commenter had given only Italian examples, would he or she have been accused of anti-European bias (which BobTheDonkey brought up on several occasions in the first Knox thread).

 

[komponisto]

On "100% innocence" and highly confident beliefs

I would agree that people who assert that Knox and Sollecito are "100% innocent" (who I would say are in the minority here)

I have a sense that I am among those being referred to here, so I'll make an attempt to inject some clarity into this discussion so we can avoid setting up strawmen. First of all, the expression "100% innocent" is confusing in this context, because it mixes up two distinct concepts: (1) a defendant's degree of culpability (someone who was only peripherally involved or complicit in a crime would be "more innocent" than someone who was directly involved; someone who is "100% innocent" would be completely uninvolved and not culpable in any way) and (2) one's own degree of belief or confidence level in one's opinion about the defendant's culpability (for example, I might think a defendant is entirely "100%" innocent, in the sense of being totally uninvolved in the crime and not complicit or part of a conspiracy, but only believe that conclusion with 90% confidence, say).

It seems to me that what LondonJohn (and others who have made similar statements) are mainly talking about is the second concept, confidence level. I think what is meant here is "I'm not 100% sure of their innocence, and only a few people here are".

The first thing to point out is that there is no such thing as literal 100% certainty about anything -- so if that is what is meant, then of course this is a strawman. However, one could reasonably be approximately 100% certain about some things -- for example, I'm approximately 100% certain that homeopathy does not work as claimed, and I suspect most readers here are similarly confident in this conclusion.

Now, on the Knox/Sollecito case, I have been explicit about what my confidence level is: it is about 999 on a scale of 0 to 1000, or, if you like 99.9%. So, rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent, you could say I am "100% sure" that Knox and Sollecito are innocent (completely uninvolved). But I would like to stress that this is far from the most confident belief I have. For example, the belief I have about homeopathy I mentioned above is several orders of magnitude stronger -- there would be several more nines after the decimal point.

So it's important to understand that I'm not claiming omniscience. I'm putting my degree of belief on a scale, for comparison purposes, and I'm saying that my belief in Knox and Sollecito's innocence is pretty far to one end of that scale. Needless to say, not all my beliefs about all subjects are this confident. There are many things that I am far less sure about (and, as mentioned above, some things that I am even more sure about). If you took 1000 of my beliefs that were equally strong as my belief about this case, I would expect to be wrong about approximately one of them. The main point I am trying to illustrate by stating my confidence level is that I think believing that Knox and Sollecito are guilty is a pretty severe error. Although I would readily concede that being a guilter is not as big of a mistake as being a homeopath or creationist, my disagreement with such people is nevertheless not small, but rather quite large.

Unfortunately, one thing I have learned over time is that most people -- even on a forum such as this -- are not particularly intellectually curious about this kind of thing. That is, they don't react to an expression of high confidence by being intrigued, as I would. Instead, they react with something like offense. They don't say "Hmm, I wonder what makes this guy so confident -- let me try to get him to tell me what information he thinks he has that I don't, or what mistake he thinks I'm making". Rather, they say something more like "Who does this guy think he is, making such a claim? I'd better show him that he's not the authority he thinks he is" -- as if, you'll note, a highly confident belief were in itself some kind of aggressive status signal, a claim to be some kind of high-ranking figure in the tribe. As strange as it is to me, few people seem to actually understand that your degree of belief is not regulated by your status in the tribe, it's regulated by the amount of information you think you have.

This, by the way, explains some of the bizarre behavior that we witness here, such as people apparently clinging to the idea that there must be secret information that the court had that the rest of us don't, which would prevent us from being able to confidently claim they were wrong. They don't really believe such an obviously absurd proposition, even though they may think they do. Rather, what's actually going on is that they're trying to enforce what they perceive as the tribal hierarchy -- specifically the "fact" that the judges in Perugia outrank the mere internet commenters here. Massei and Cristiani were the judges in the case, you see, so they're the ones who are entitled to decide whether Knox and Sollecito are guilty. We here do not have that authority -- because in the minds of these people, the distinction between the question of what is actually true and the question of what the court decided is true doesn't really exist. It's just too abstract for them to grasp. Their minds process status transactions, not Bayesian probability flows. (And I'd better watch out now, because by criticizing them in this way, I've implicitly claimed higher status than them, so you know how they'll react...)

But even setting aside the guilt-believers (or really, guilt-asserters, since as noted they don't really think in terms of belief), I think something similar is going on with people "on my side" not wanting to confidently assert innocence -- such as when people say things like "only the people who were there actually know the truth". Because that's ridiculous -- it would be like saying that only animals alive during the Mesozoic era could know that dinosaurs existed. There are all kinds of ways to know what happened somewhere at some time without actually being present. This is what we call "evidence". And sometimes (as in the case of dinosaurs) the evidence is so strong that there's nothing wrong with saying we know what happened, even if we weren't there.

LondonJohn can correct me if I'm wrong, but I find it hard to believe his analysis of the Kercher case is really all that different from mine. I find it hard to imagine that (as his wording implies) he sees significant room for the possibility that Knox and Sollecito are guilty where I don't. How would that work? What would be the most plausible scenario? How would one get around the stomach evidence, for example? I think that if you start to actually think about what the most plausible guilt scenarios are, you'll realize that, though they may not be literally impossible, they're around as statistically improbable as my stated confidence level indicates they should be.

 

[snook1]

Were there two Skype conversations between Rudy and his pal, Giacomo?

The first one was when he didn't say anything about Amanda or Raffaele being involved, right?

The second one was when he knew they were arrested and he suggested they were involved. Am I getting this right?

 

[Rhea]

LondonJohn can correct me if I'm wrong, but I find it hard to believe his analysis of the Kercher case is really all that different from mine. I find it hard to imagine that (as his wording implies) he sees significant room for the possibility that Knox and Sollecito are guilty where I don't. How would that work? What would be the most plausible scenario? How would one get around the stomach evidence, for example? I think that if you start to actually think about what the most plausible guilt scenarios are, you'll realize that, though they may not be literally impossible, they're around as statistically improbable as my stated confidence level indicates they should be.

I agree with that, it's the sheer implausibility; all the improbable events that would have had to have taken place multiplied with each other, at the end you get a statistical likelyhood that is in my eyes even much less than you asserted, I see it more like 0.000000000000000000000001 percent, but even this seems to high in my eyes, actually I just see no chance at all, so more like 0 percent.

 

[Katody Matrass]

lionking, many posters today gave in-depth answers to your question.

Still, there is no explanation from you - what makes you think AK and RS innocence would require some vast sophisticated conspiracy to explain that the court erred on the initial verdict?

IIRC you brought up that argument before, only to go silent as soon as asked to clarify that issue. Will it be the same this time?


I must check the rationalwiki.org. I bet such tactic of arguing is already labeled there.

 

[Kid Le]

Hi all, longtime lurker here.
I have some reflections on the whole "you are just people debating on the internet without having access to the real evidence" thing.
Not sure if anyone is interested, this is just how I see this ongoing discussion.

When I first heard about this case, I took to the view that AK and RS were guilty. I didn't have any real arguments for this opinion and I was aware of that; it was just my feeling from what I read in the tabloids. Later, when I heard that the jury verdict was an unanimous guilty, I gathered that my feelings must have been right. After that I hadn't given it much thought until last summer, when I was stuck in a hotel room for 2 weeks and had few other things to occupy myself than internet forums. I noticed the enormous Amanda Knox thread on JREF and wondered why such an open-and-shut case could raise that much discussion. So I decided to start at page 1 (IIRC the discussion at that moment was at page 200 of Continuation Part 1) and just see for myself.

Initially it annoyed me to no end. I wasn't happy with how the discussion evolved and became irritated with some posters who seemed to know it all. After a couple of dozen of pages into the thread I realised that my main frustration lay with the fact that the people who were arguing "my point of view" were consistently losing the arguments and increasingly started to resort to logical fallacies. I told myself that this was because the proper persons weren't arguing for the guilt side yet, and that soon a debater would show up that would effectively and conclusively show that my preconceived notions were correct indeed.

Well, it didn't happen. After a few hundred pages into the first thread I realised what was going on: I suffered from confirmation bias. So I decided to continue reading with an open mind and judge the arguments on their logical merit rather than which side they represent.
I have caught up with the thread a while ago. I am now 99.99% convinced that AK and RS are not guilty. The arguments for that are plentiful: at this moment I really cannot see any facts that would point at AK and RS being guilty.

Which brings me to how this discussion reflects on real life. I have become convinced of innocence because of this particular internet discussion, without having looked at the actual evidence myself. I let other people do the digging work and then evaluate what they come up with. How does that relate to the actual, real-life involvement of AK and RS?
What I read in this thread made a very strong argument for pro-innocence, not in the last place because the arguments pro-guilt are virtually non-existent and no one on the guilter side seems to be willing to discuss them. Instead certain people seem to resort to some post-modernistic mumbo-jumbo that you can never be certain about anything and that there can always be more evidence hiding somewhere. Not a very skeptical method of reasoning, I would say. But is relying on one particular forum with its particular participants any better? I thought about how I could falsify my notion: what are the possible options that this forum has a legitimate dissonance with reality? I came up with the following:

- JREF has somehow not yet attracted the proper persons to effectively argue the guilt side. Maybe these people reside at other forums? So I looked at the other forums, TJMK, PMF and what have you. Well then. Let's just say these sites serve as a very interesting read if you're interested in the psychology of group-thinking, but I couldn't detect any proper rationality going on. Debaters over there also seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with the personal details of who is debating for the other side. Not my thing.
- All the people that so eloquently argue for the innocence of RS and AK have been paid by a PR firm hired by Amanda's parents (the Marriott meme). This sounds too much like a conspiracy theory, and besides, it seems that pro-innocenti here are quite diverse in where they come from, how they argue and their precise view on the case.
- There really is some killer-evidence that was used in the trial but is not covered in the reports that were released to the public. This also reeks of a genuine conspiracy theory. And why on earth would the judge / prosecution in such a controversial case hide substantial evidence from the public? One might expect that at least the motivation report would cover the most substantial arguments for guilt?
- There is some demo-graphical, sociological or whatever bias that makes the better debaters to argue for innocence rather than guilt. Not sure if that makes sense, but could it be that people who are just merely very good in debating have a bias in as such that they would automatically defend the student-killers against the justice system? Is it some elitist thing? Or America versus Europe? I thought about this quite a bit, since biases are often hard to spot on the surface. I couldn't spot anythinh, but I'm always open for suggestions. I think my last option is much more likely though:
- There is a bias, but it is that rational people tend to choose the pro-innocence narrative over the guilty one. From what I gather it seems that the most informed, reasonable and open-minded people on this forum, who always attempt to use logic and science to back up their claims and try to reason with the facts that are available, consistently argue for the innocence side. I understood some of them were once convinced of guilt but changed their views when confronted with the details of the case. I wonder how many guilters have done the same thing the other way round?
(By the way, I don't deny that some people who tend to believe AK and RS are somehow involved do a good job to keep the discussion alive, like Shuttit, Draceme and Fine. I would have stopped reading this thread long time ago if it wasn't for them keeping my expectations alive that a proper argument pro-guilt could be delivered).

It is probably clear by now where I stand in this. However, I am always willing to change my point of view, after all I have done that before. What I would need to see is a line of reasoning that would not fall back to the post-modernistic fallacy that there is no objective truth in evidence if it is not all encompassing. This is a skeptics forum: we base our opinions on the evidence that is available. Anything beyond that is merely conjecture.

 

[Kaosium]

Your analogy is coming at this from the wrong direction, Alt+F4. In this case, the police and the prosecutors claimed they saw a UFO and Bigfoot. Innocence supporters asked them for evidence, but they were not able to provide it.

Now you are asking the innocence supporters to prove the police and prosecutors did not see a UFO and Bigfoot. Can't be done.

It was a ghost story, and it was endorsed by one of the weakest 'authorities' in the world, and just because some found one website and an associated message board that endorsed it, and told them all that opposed it were part of a 'PR campaign' against them, they bought it hook, line and sinker.

:::FACEPALM:::

I remember reading through the thread when you 'conspirators' were 'unmasked.' I looked you all up, those I could find at any rate. Off the top of my head the ones posting the most:

Halides1 had his own blog dedicated to (mainly) miscarriages of justice
Rose had posted there as well on the Duke LaCrosse debacle
You came from comments sections and one Seattle paper in particular
LondonJohn came from PMF--so did I in a sense I just never posted
Bruce Fisher had a website dedicated to the case
Charlie Wilkes had a long posting history on miscarriages and was FOA
RVWBVL (?) was a surfer in LA that had read books on the case
Katy-Did knew Italian which might explain the interest in the case
Kestrel was a JREFer (I think)
Kevin_Lowe definitely was

So...a bunch of people with maybe one one weak correlation, miscarriages of justice. So, what did Halides and CW's track record look like? Damned good! Good noses for ferreting out what were legitimate injustices. Bruce Fisher's site was extensive and contained excellent information on the case. It would also figure that those who were promoting the idea of Amanda and Raffaele's innocence like Charlie Wilkes and Bruce Fisher would be attracted to this beautiful board with all these neat toys and the best discussion of the case etherwide.

Investigative record of the other place? Abysmal. It was obvious just reading through it that LondonJohn wasn't a sinister infiltrator from Texas, (or wherever) that Bruce Fisher wasn't a cameraman in Seattle, that Steve Moore wasn't the one investigating financial crimes on some island in the Pacific and especially that Frank Sfarzo wasn't a 'plant' put in place by that Sinister Gogerty-Marriott FOA conspiracy.

That didn't mean Raffaele and Amanda were innocent, and they did make for interesting reading and had accumulated megatons of information on the case, and claimed to be translating the 400 page Massei Report (!) thus that gave them a certain aura of credibility. However this idea that they were opposing an organized online 'PR campaign' was nonsense. That (just about) every article positive about Raffaele and Amanda was also the influence of this sinister network was even dafter. For the longest time I actually thought it was just a running joke.

It is one of the extreme ironies of the discussion of this case that a website dedicated to a rationalist illusionist which supposedly busts conspiracy theories was--and is--(almost)--completely taken in by a conspiracy-loving prosecutor who cast an illusion and denounces the 'shadowy network arrayed against him'--mainly the 'PR campaign.' All because the (then) regulars here, the so-called 'skeptics,' found one website with an associated messageboard that promoted (mind you they did promote it extremely well) that...theory...and called all that opposed them 'conspiracy theorists.'

:::FACEPALM::::

What kind of 'skeptic' thinks a miscarriage of justice is a 'conspiracy theory' anyway? That happens all the time, even the best justice systems are going to produce them, and by and large it's going to be the result of the cops and the courts screwing up. They screwed this one up so badly and so publicly that was actually my last line of defense, how could anyone ever screw the pooch this badly and even entertain the thought they'd get away with it?

Answer: things are different in Italy. Different cops, different courts, different press environment.

 

[RoseMontague]

Hi all, longtime lurker here.
I have some reflections on the whole "you are just people debating on the internet without having access to the real evidence" thing.
Not sure if anyone is interested, this is just how I see this ongoing discussion.

When I first heard about this case, I took to the view that AK and RS were guilty. I didn't have any real arguments for this opinion and I was aware of that; it was just my feeling from what I read in the tabloids. Later, when I heard that the jury verdict was an unanimous guilty, I gathered that my feelings must have been right. After that I hadn't given it much thought until last summer, when I was stuck in a hotel room for 2 weeks and had few other things to occupy myself than internet forums. I noticed the enormous Amanda Knox thread on JREF and wondered why such an open-and-shut case could raise that much discussion. So I decided to start at page 1 (IIRC the discussion at that moment was at page 200 of Continuation Part 1) and just see for myself.

Initially it annoyed me to no end. I wasn't happy with how the discussion evolved and became irritated with some posters who seemed to know it all. After a couple of dozen of pages into the thread I realised that my main frustration lay with the fact that the people who were arguing "my point of view" were consistently losing the arguments and increasingly started to resort to logical fallacies. I told myself that this was because the proper persons weren't arguing for the guilt side yet, and that soon a debater would show up that would effectively and conclusively show that my preconceived notions were correct indeed.

Well, it didn't happen. After a few hundred pages into the first thread I realised what was going on: I suffered from confirmation bias. So I decided to continue reading with an open mind and judge the arguments on their logical merit rather than which side they represent.
I have caught up with the thread a while ago. I am now 99.99% convinced that AK and RS are not guilty. The arguments for that are plentiful: at this moment I really cannot see any facts that would point at AK and RS being guilty.

Which brings me to how this discussion reflects on real life. I have become convinced of innocence because of this particular internet discussion, without having looked at the actual evidence myself. I let other people do the digging work and then evaluate what they come up with. How does that relate to the actual, real-life involvement of AK and RS?
What I read in this thread made a very strong argument for pro-innocence, not in the last place because the arguments pro-guilt are virtually non-existent and no one on the guilter side seems to be willing to discuss them. Instead certain people seem to resort to some post-modernistic mumbo-jumbo that you can never be certain about anything and that there can always be more evidence hiding somewhere. Not a very skeptical method of reasoning, I would say. But is relying on one particular forum with its particular participants any better? I thought about how I could falsify my notion: what are the possible options that this forum has a legitimate dissonance with reality? I came up with the following:

- JREF has somehow not yet attracted the proper persons to effectively argue the guilt side. Maybe these people reside at other forums? So I looked at the other forums, TJMK, PMF and what have you. Well then. Let's just say these sites serve as a very interesting read if you're interested in the psychology of group-thinking, but I couldn't detect any proper rationality going on. Debaters over there also seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with the personal details of who is debating for the other side. Not my thing.
- All the people that so eloquently argue for the innocence of RS and AK have been paid by a PR firm hired by Amanda's parents (the Marriott meme). This sounds too much like a conspiracy theory, and besides, it seems that pro-innocenti here are quite diverse in where they come from, how they argue and their precise view on the case.
- There really is some killer-evidence that was used in the trial but is not covered in the reports that were released to the public. This also reeks of a genuine conspiracy theory. And why on earth would the judge / prosecution in such a controversial case hide substantial evidence from the public? One might expect that at least the motivation report would cover the most substantial arguments for guilt?
- There is some demo-graphical, sociological or whatever bias that makes the better debaters to argue for innocence rather than guilt. Not sure if that makes sense, but could it be that people who are just merely very good in debating have a bias in as such that they would automatically defend the student-killers against the justice system? Is it some elitist thing? Or America versus Europe? I thought about this quite a bit, since biases are often hard to spot on the surface. I couldn't spot anythinh, but I'm always open for suggestions. I think my last option is much more likely though:
- There is a bias, but it is that rational people tend to choose the pro-innocence narrative over the guilty one. From what I gather it seems that the most informed, reasonable and open-minded people on this forum, who always attempt to use logic and science to back up their claims and try to reason with the facts that are available, consistently argue for the innocence side. I understood some of them were once convinced of guilt but changed their views when confronted with the details of the case. I wonder how many guilters have done the same thing the other way round?
(By the way, I don't deny that some people who tend to believe AK and RS are somehow involved do a good job to keep the discussion alive, like Shuttit, Draceme and Fine. I would have stopped reading this thread long time ago if it wasn't for them keeping my expectations alive that a proper argument pro-guilt could be delivered).

It is probably clear by now where I stand in this. However, I am always willing to change my point of view, after all I have done that before. What I would need to see is a line of reasoning that would not fall back to the post-modernistic fallacy that there is no objective truth in evidence if it is not all encompassing. This is a skeptics forum: we base our opinions on the evidence that is available. Anything beyond that is merely conjecture.

Wow. That's a really nice first post. Now that you have set the level of expectation it is imperative that you do even better next time.

 

[RoseMontague]

It is one of the extreme ironies of the discussion of this case that a website dedicated to a rationalist illusionist which supposedly busts conspiracy theories was--and is--(almost)--completely taken in by a conspiracy-loving prosecutor who cast an illusion and denounces the 'shadowy network arrayed against him'--mainly the 'PR campaign.' All because the (then) regulars here, the so-called 'skeptics,' found one website with an associated messageboard that promoted (mind you they did promote it extremely well) that...theory...and called all that opposed them 'conspiracy theorists.'

I have been thinking about this concept and I plan to develop this some more for my upcoming GroundHog Day post. I appreciate your input on this subject.

 

[billyryan]

By the way, there's one very interesting part of Guede's Skype conversation, where he is talking about Meredith screaming. He describes the scream taking place at " around 9.20, 9.30". I believe that he must have thought that others might have heard the scream, which is why needed to place it into his narrative. In other words, if there had been somebody nearby who had heard a scream at "9.20-9.30", Guede would be able to say that this tallied with his version of events.

I believe that Guede therefore knows full well when Meredith died, and that it was a lot closer to 9pm than 10pm. This of course tallies completely with Meredith being confronted very shortly after she returned to the cottage at around 8.55pm, with the fatal stabbing occurring at some time between 9.05pm and 9.30pm.

Rudy has had a long time to think about the prospect that at some stage he would be forced to give evidence in Amanda's and Raffaele's appeal,I don't believe his conscious troubles him much,assuming that Hellmann allows all questions and orders Rudy to answer,what would be Rudy's objectives next Monday,whats in it for him in helping the prosecution convict Amanda and Raffaele,he knows the truth that two totally innocent people have being in jail for the last three and a half years.People think he told his story to Alessi because his conscious was troubling him I don't think so,maybe he knew exactly what he was doing,does he not hold Mignini's Stefanoni's Giobbi's Massei's careers in the palm of his hand,surely he does not have to provide much information to prove what complete idiots they are

 

[RoseMontague]

Rudy has had a long time to think about the prospect that at some stage he would be forced to give evidence in Amanda's and Raffaele's appeal,I don't believe his conscious troubles him much,assuming that Hellmann allows all questions and orders Rudy to answer,what would be Rudy's objectives next Monday,whats in it for him in helping the prosecution convict Amanda and Raffaele,he knows the truth that two totally innocent people have being in jail for the last three and a half years.People think he told his story to Alessi because his conscious was troubling him I don't think so,maybe he knew exactly what he was doing,does he not hold Mignini's Stefanoni's Giobbi's Massei's careers in the palm of his hand,surely he does not have to provide much information to prove what complete idiots they are

If the Rudy as a police informant story has any legs at all, my guess is we will see it before Monday.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

Hi all, longtime lurker here.
I have some reflections on the whole "you are just people debating on the internet without having access to the real evidence" thing.
Not sure if anyone is interested, this is just how I see this ongoing discussion.

When I first heard about this case, I took to the view that AK and RS were guilty. I didn't have any real arguments for this opinion and I was aware of that; it was just my feeling from what I read in the tabloids. Later, when I heard that the jury verdict was an unanimous guilty, I gathered that my feelings must have been right. After that I hadn't given it much thought until last summer, when I was stuck in a hotel room for 2 weeks and had few other things to occupy myself than internet forums. I noticed the enormous Amanda Knox thread on JREF and wondered why such an open-and-shut case could raise that much discussion. So I decided to start at page 1 (IIRC the discussion at that moment was at page 200 of Continuation Part 1) and just see for myself.

Initially it annoyed me to no end. I wasn't happy with how the discussion evolved and became irritated with some posters who seemed to know it all. After a couple of dozen of pages into the thread I realised that my main frustration lay with the fact that the people who were arguing "my point of view" were consistently losing the arguments and increasingly started to resort to logical fallacies. I told myself that this was because the proper persons weren't arguing for the guilt side yet, and that soon a debater would show up that would effectively and conclusively show that my preconceived notions were correct indeed.

Well, it didn't happen. After a few hundred pages into the first thread I realised what was going on: I suffered from confirmation bias. So I decided to continue reading with an open mind and judge the arguments on their logical merit rather than which side they represent.
I have caught up with the thread a while ago. I am now 99.99% convinced that AK and RS are not guilty. The arguments for that are plentiful: at this moment I really cannot see any facts that would point at AK and RS being guilty.

Which brings me to how this discussion reflects on real life. I have become convinced of innocence because of this particular internet discussion, without having looked at the actual evidence myself. I let other people do the digging work and then evaluate what they come up with. How does that relate to the actual, real-life involvement of AK and RS?
What I read in this thread made a very strong argument for pro-innocence, not in the last place because the arguments pro-guilt are virtually non-existent and no one on the guilter side seems to be willing to discuss them. Instead certain people seem to resort to some post-modernistic mumbo-jumbo that you can never be certain about anything and that there can always be more evidence hiding somewhere. Not a very skeptical method of reasoning, I would say. But is relying on one particular forum with its particular participants any better? I thought about how I could falsify my notion: what are the possible options that this forum has a legitimate dissonance with reality? I came up with the following:

- JREF has somehow not yet attracted the proper persons to effectively argue the guilt side. Maybe these people reside at other forums? So I looked at the other forums, TJMK, PMF and what have you. Well then. Let's just say these sites serve as a very interesting read if you're interested in the psychology of group-thinking, but I couldn't detect any proper rationality going on. Debaters over there also seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with the personal details of who is debating for the other side. Not my thing.
- All the people that so eloquently argue for the innocence of RS and AK have been paid by a PR firm hired by Amanda's parents (the Marriott meme). This sounds too much like a conspiracy theory, and besides, it seems that pro-innocenti here are quite diverse in where they come from, how they argue and their precise view on the case.
- There really is some killer-evidence that was used in the trial but is not covered in the reports that were released to the public. This also reeks of a genuine conspiracy theory. And why on earth would the judge / prosecution in such a controversial case hide substantial evidence from the public? One might expect that at least the motivation report would cover the most substantial arguments for guilt?
- There is some demo-graphical, sociological or whatever bias that makes the better debaters to argue for innocence rather than guilt. Not sure if that makes sense, but could it be that people who are just merely very good in debating have a bias in as such that they would automatically defend the student-killers against the justice system? Is it some elitist thing? Or America versus Europe? I thought about this quite a bit, since biases are often hard to spot on the surface. I couldn't spot anythinh, but I'm always open for suggestions. I think my last option is much more likely though:
- There is a bias, but it is that rational people tend to choose the pro-innocence narrative over the guilty one. From what I gather it seems that the most informed, reasonable and open-minded people on this forum, who always attempt to use logic and science to back up their claims and try to reason with the facts that are available, consistently argue for the innocence side. I understood some of them were once convinced of guilt but changed their views when confronted with the details of the case. I wonder how many guilters have done the same thing the other way round?
(By the way, I don't deny that some people who tend to believe AK and RS are somehow involved do a good job to keep the discussion alive, like Shuttit, Draceme and Fine. I would have stopped reading this thread long time ago if it wasn't for them keeping my expectations alive that a proper argument pro-guilt could be delivered).

It is probably clear by now where I stand in this. However, I am always willing to change my point of view, after all I have done that before. What I would need to see is a line of reasoning that would not fall back to the post-modernistic fallacy that there is no objective truth in evidence if it is not all encompassing. This is a skeptics forum: we base our opinions on the evidence that is available. Anything beyond that is merely conjecture.

Welcome Kid.

I think this post is very well thought out. You are correct about the lack of a coherent pro-guilt theory or at least the inability of anyone pro-guilt to present one here. You are also spot-on with regard to the pro-guilt websites you mentioned. I too wonder if anyone exists (here or elsewhere) who believed them to be innocent and changed their mind to guilty. I do not think I have heard of anyone in this situation.

 

[sln708]

LASHL,

I don't believe that Alt is claiming that there is "secret" evidence that has only been heard by the jury and members of the court. I believe she is simply stating that the evidence that has become public is secondhand information that possibly, or probably, has been misinterpreted, edited or perhaps even altered to the liking of whoever is reporting it.

Just sayin...

 

[sln708]

_______________

Rose,

I can see you're not a Bigfooter.

1 Bigfoot + 1 Bigfoot = 2 Bigfoots.


///

Yes but if I a big left foot and a big right foot...I have two big feet.

 

[LondonJohn]

I have a sense that I am among those being referred to here, so I'll make an attempt to inject some clarity into this discussion so we can avoid setting up strawmen. First of all, the expression "100% innocent" is confusing in this context, because it mixes up two distinct concepts: (1) a defendant's degree of culpability (someone who was only peripherally involved or complicit in a crime would be "more innocent" than someone who was directly involved; someone who is "100% innocent" would be completely uninvolved and not culpable in any way) and (2) one's own degree of belief or confidence level in one's opinion about the defendant's culpability (for example, I might think a defendant is entirely "100%" innocent, in the sense of being totally uninvolved in the crime and not complicit or part of a conspiracy, but only believe that conclusion with 90% confidence, say).

It seems to me that what LondonJohn (and others who have made similar statements) are mainly talking about is the second concept, confidence level. I think what is meant here is "I'm not 100% sure of their innocence, and only a few people here are".

The first thing to point out is that there is no such thing as literal 100% certainty about anything -- so if that is what is meant, then of course this is a strawman. However, one could reasonably be approximately 100% certain about some things -- for example, I'm approximately 100% certain that homeopathy does not work as claimed, and I suspect most readers here are similarly confident in this conclusion.

Now, on the Knox/Sollecito case, I have been explicit about what my confidence level is: it is about 999 on a scale of 0 to 1000, or, if you like 99.9%. So, rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent, you could say I am "100% sure" that Knox and Sollecito are innocent (completely uninvolved). But I would like to stress that this is far from the most confident belief I have. For example, the belief I have about homeopathy I mentioned above is several orders of magnitude stronger -- there would be several more nines after the decimal point.

So it's important to understand that I'm not claiming omniscience. I'm putting my degree of belief on a scale, for comparison purposes, and I'm saying that my belief in Knox and Sollecito's innocence is pretty far to one end of that scale. Needless to say, not all my beliefs about all subjects are this confident. There are many things that I am far less sure about (and, as mentioned above, some things that I am even more sure about). If you took 1000 of my beliefs that were equally strong as my belief about this case, I would expect to be wrong about approximately one of them. The main point I am trying to illustrate by stating my confidence level is that I think believing that Knox and Sollecito are guilty is a pretty severe error. Although I would readily concede that being a guilter is not as big of a mistake as being a homeopath or creationist, my disagreement with such people is nevertheless not small, but rather quite large.

Unfortunately, one thing I have learned over time is that most people -- even on a forum such as this -- are not particularly intellectually curious about this kind of thing. That is, they don't react to an expression of high confidence by being intrigued, as I would. Instead, they react with something like offense. They don't say "Hmm, I wonder what makes this guy so confident -- let me try to get him to tell me what information he thinks he has that I don't, or what mistake he thinks I'm making". Rather, they say something more like "Who does this guy think he is, making such a claim? I'd better show him that he's not the authority he thinks he is" -- as if, you'll note, a highly confident belief were in itself some kind of aggressive status signal, a claim to be some kind of high-ranking figure in the tribe. As strange as it is to me, few people seem to actually understand that your degree of belief is not regulated by your status in the tribe, it's regulated by the amount of information you think you have.

This, by the way, explains some of the bizarre behavior that we witness here, such as people apparently clinging to the idea that there must be secret information that the court had that the rest of us don't, which would prevent us from being able to confidently claim they were wrong. They don't really believe such an obviously absurd proposition, even though they may think they do. Rather, what's actually going on is that they're trying to enforce what they perceive as the tribal hierarchy -- specifically the "fact" that the judges in Perugia outrank the mere internet commenters here. Massei and Cristiani were the judges in the case, you see, so they're the ones who are entitled to decide whether Knox and Sollecito are guilty. We here do not have that authority -- because in the minds of these people, the distinction between the question of what is actually true and the question of what the court decided is true doesn't really exist. It's just too abstract for them to grasp. Their minds process status transactions, not Bayesian probability flows. (And I'd better watch out now, because by criticizing them in this way, I've implicitly claimed higher status than them, so you know how they'll react...)

But even setting aside the guilt-believers (or really, guilt-asserters, since as noted they don't really think in terms of belief), I think something similar is going on with people "on my side" not wanting to confidently assert innocence -- such as when people say things like "only the people who were there actually know the truth". Because that's ridiculous -- it would be like saying that only animals alive during the Mesozoic era could know that dinosaurs existed. There are all kinds of ways to know what happened somewhere at some time without actually being present. This is what we call "evidence". And sometimes (as in the case of dinosaurs) the evidence is so strong that there's nothing wrong with saying we know what happened, even if we weren't there.

LondonJohn can correct me if I'm wrong, but I find it hard to believe his analysis of the Kercher case is really all that different from mine. I find it hard to imagine that (as his wording implies) he sees significant room for the possibility that Knox and Sollecito are guilty where I don't. How would that work? What would be the most plausible scenario? How would one get around the stomach evidence, for example? I think that if you start to actually think about what the most plausible guilt scenarios are, you'll realize that, though they may not be literally impossible, they're around as statistically improbable as my stated confidence level indicates they should be.

Well, one way to look at the situation is like this:

Imagine a scale of 0-10, with 0 representing total belief that the defendant did not commit the crime, and 10 representing total belief that the defendant committed the crime.

The issue for those who believe in the proper convictions of Knox and Sollecito is that they have to sit at 10 on the scale. They have to have total certainty (to the exclusion of any doubt that a reasonable person might reasonably hold) in order to agree with the convictions.

By contrast, anyone who sits at any other point on the scale - any point between 9.99 and 0 - must by definition believe that Knox and Sollecito should be acquitted. This is the inherent asymmetry in the arguments for conviction and acquittal.

Personally, I spent a very brief time at 10 on the scale, after reading what turned out to be gross inaccuracies in "Darkness Descending". Once I began to learn the truth, it didn't take me long at all to move down to 9 on the scale - which by definition meant that I went from arguing for conviction to arguing for acquittal.

As I've learned more and more, my position on the scale has moved down to somewhere in the 2-3 range. In other words, I strongly lean towards believing that neither Knox nor Sollecito were involved in any way, but I currently can't be certain. If the screensaver log computer evidence proves to be accurate and reliable, I'd very likely move down to around 0.1 for Sollecito, and 1 for Knox.

Of course, I understand why some people currently place themselves at 0 (or 0.01) on the scale - and I appreciate that part of it may be as a statement of principle. But I personally think that, as of right now, it's very difficult to intellectually defend placing oneself at 0 (or close) on the scale. I repeat, however, that there is absolutely no need to be totally convinced of Knox's/Sollecito's innocence in order to be convinced that they should be acquitted.

With regard to that last sentence, there's often an argument made (a fallacious argument, it has to be pointed out) that it's a "weasel" position to say that you don't believe entirely in the defendants' innocence, yet you think they should be acquitted. This smells (to some, erroneously) of some sort of legal trickery, akin to "you're suggesting that they get off on a technicality". I can't state strongly enough that this is categorically not the case. If the state makes criminal accusations against a person, it is entirely incumbent upon the state (and the court) to prove these accusations.

For example, if I accused my neighbour of punching me in the face outside the door of my apartment, it would be entirely up to me to prove that accusation. My neighbour's girlfriend might not be 100% certain that her partner had not carried out this assault (suppose she was out shopping at the time that I alleged it occurred), but nor would she need that level of certainty to know that my accusations had no validity - unless I was able to prove my accusations with evidence. It's exactly the same with the case against Knox and Sollecito.

 

[Diocletus]

I've been thinking about these new witnesses who are designated to testify next weekend.

I've read some items that say that the new witnesses are designated to testify in rebuttal to the recent inmate testimony to the effect that Rudy said Knox/Sollecito are innocent. It seems to me that the only direct ways to rebut this testimony is to find someone to say either (i) that Rudy did not say what the inmates say he said, or (ii) the inmates said that they had not be told this by Rudy. It seems to me very unlikely that someone would be found who would testify as to (ii), in effect, that the inmates by their own admission lied in court. And, Rudy is the only one who really can testify as to (i). So, I think what we will see on direct rebuttal is Rudy in effect saying "no, I didn't tell those inmates what they say I said." Fair enough.

When Rudy gives this testimony, we might have a big argument on how far the defense gets to go on cross-examining him. Do they have to limit their cross-examination to issues that go to the truthfulness of his testimony that he did not tell the inmates what they say he said? Or is the whole enchilada fair game? Honestly, the defense might not want to go too far in cross-examining Rudy, because it could lead to a direct accusation against the defendants. Of course, the court might have its own questions once it gets Rudy in the hot seat. We'll see.

But what about these other witnesses? Benedetti, Napoleoni, Chiarrara (sp?)? I don't think that they can testify in direct rebuttal, i.e., as to points (i) and (ii) above. Instead, after having thought some about this, I think that these witnesses will testify to the effect that "Rudy previously told us that Knox/Sollecito are guilty" (Benedetti visits Rudy in prison, and the other two are police officers who likely interviewed him). The door to such testimony might have been opened as a result of the court's rulings on the admissibility of evidence last weekend. This takes the accusation out of Rudy's mouth, and puts it into the mouths of witnesses who are likely to be deemed more reliable (of course, still Rudy's underlying words). This could potentially avoid the problems for the prosecution that might arise with a blistering cross-examination of Rudy.

If the above is true, then this seems a bit of gamesmanship by the prosecution because there is a difference between what the defense witnesses said and what these new rebuttal witnesses would be saying. The difference being that the statements to the inmates are statements against Rudy's interests, while the statements Rudy made about the alleged guilt of Knox/Sollecito would be more self-serving. Perhaps there is an evidentiary argument still to be had here.

If the prosecution adopts this strategy, it would be nice to question Rudy about deals he may have cut with the prosecution. It would also be nice to question Napoleoni about potential police misconduct as a way to undermine her reliability. The answers to these lines of questioning are not certain, though, so maybe we will not see these questions.

 

[Rolfe]

What kind of 'skeptic' thinks a miscarriage of justice is a 'conspiracy theory' anyway? That happens all the time, even the best justice systems are going to produce them, ....

But it's not just this case. It's pretty much any case where anyone posts details of a possible miscarriage of justice. And it's the same posters, by and large, every time.

We get assertions that it's not for them to prove guilt, these people have been convicted by a court and that's all they need to know. (Argument from authority, anyone?)

We get posts that simply say Conspiracy Theories thataway ======>

We get repeated, provocative assertions of guilt, undoubted guilt, demands that the murderers be executed, and so on.

What we never, ever get is a reasoned explanation why the posters in question believe the defendants committed the crime.

Most recently it has been Amanda Knox, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and the West Memphis Three. The only thing that distinguishes the Amanda Knox one is that there are still people trying to present a case for guilt. To some definitions of trying, anyway. The others seem to have been abandoned as a bad job. (I'm tempted to start one on Michael Stone and see who bites.... )

Nevertheless, these people are still guilty, you know. They absolutely, unquestionably did it, if the subject comes up in another thread.

I don't know if it's just trolling for fun (getting a bit obsessive it if is), or if there are people who call themselves sceptics who have an irrational fear of the concept that courts could ever get it wrong, or what. But I have a theory.

Most of the time, the establishment, mainstream view is correct. Man really did land on the moon. Homoeopathy really is just sugar pills. Bigfoot doesn't exist. Oswald shot JFK. Al Qaida flew some planes into some buildings. And so on.

But in the case of miscarriages of justice, the establishment is wrong. I think some people have become so habituated to supporting the establishment view by default, and believing it to be the "sceptical" position, that they can't tell the difference. A bit like the pro-vaccination posters who will rip into anyone who highlights a genuine case of an adverse reaction to a vaccine.

No, it's not scepticism and it's not critical thinking. But it's not against the MA, so we deal with it.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

By contrast, anyone who sits at any other point on the scale - any point between 9.99 and 0 - must by definition believe that Knox and Sollecito should be acquitted. This is the inherent asymmetry in the arguments for conviction and acquittal.

I don't know. You're not allowed to have reasonable doubt, and convict. You are allowed unreasonable doubt. I don't know where you'd place that, mathematically, but I'd say that if you're 9.99% sure someone is guilty, the remaining 0.01% is likely to be unreasonable.

Rolfe.

 

[RoseMontague]

But it's not just this case. It's pretty much any case where anyone posts details of a possible miscarriage of justice. And it's the same posters, by and large, every time.

We get assertions that it's not for them to prove guilt, these people have been convicted by a court and that's all they need to know. (Argument from authority, anyone?)

We get posts that simply say Conspiracy Theories thataway ======>

We get repeated, provocative assertions of guilt, undoubted guilt, demands that the murderers be executed, and so on.

What we never, ever get is a reasoned explanation why the posters in question believe the defendants committed the crime.

Most recently it has been Amanda Knox, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and the West Memphis Three. The only thing that distinguishes the Amanda Knox one is that there are still people trying to present a case for guilt. To some definitions of trying, anyway. The others seem to have been abandoned as a bad job. (I'm tempted to start one on Michael Stone and see who bites.... )

Nevertheless, these people are still guilty, you know. They absolutely, unquestionably did it, if the subject comes up in another thread.

I don't know if it's just trolling for fun (getting a bit obsessive it if is), or if there are people who call themselves sceptics who have an irrational fear of the concept that courts could ever get it wrong, or what. But I have a theory.

Most of the time, the establishment, mainstream view is correct. Man really did land on the moon. Homoeopathy really is just sugar pills. Bigfoot doesn't exist. Oswald shot JFK. Al Qaida flew some planes into some buildings. And so on.

But in the case of miscarriages of justice, the establishment is wrong. I think some people have become so habituated to supporting the establishment view by default, and believing it to be the "sceptical" position, that they can't tell the difference. A bit like the pro-vaccination posters who will rip into anyone who highlights a genuine case of an adverse reaction to a vaccine.

No, it's not scepticism and it's not critical thinking. But it's not against the MA, so we deal with it.

Rolfe.

It seems to me a lot of long term JREF members take a negative view of those of us that participate on this thread and in particular those that argue from innocence. Is there another reason for this other than what you have indicated?

 

[Rolfe]

It seems to me a lot of long term JREF members take a negative view of those of us that participate on this thread and in particular those that argue from innocence. Is there another reason for this other than what you have indicated?

No, I don't know. I think some of it is just a meme perpetrated by the regular posters who like to sneer at anyone who thinks that a miscarriage of justice might have happened. Also, the poster who started the original "cartwheel" thread isn't terribly well-regarded by rather a lot of people, of whom I am one as it happens.

I was getting something similar even before that thread was started. I joined to debate homoeopathy, and I'm generally well-regarded in the Science and Medicine forum for serial take-downs of medical-type woos. But after a while you've shot all the fish in that barrel, several times over. In the summer of 2009 I took up a long-term minor interest in the Lockerbie affair, and fairly soon realised that not only was there no evidence against Megrahi, he actually seemed to have an alibi for the crime.

I've been posting here since 2003, and as I say generally well-regarded, but the vitriol and hate I attracted at that point what quite astonishing. And no, I never did get anyone at all to make a coherent case explaining why they believed Megrahi really was "the Lockerbie bomber", on the evidence.

It seems that scepticism is OK so long as it leads you to comfortable conclusions, but if the conclusions aren't comfortable at all, well....

Conspiracy Theories thataway ========>

Rolfe.