if this evidence is truly worth paying attention to, why shouldn’t it be admissible in court?
Hmm. I was going to say that it’s really a form of private evidence, if these “truth wizards” can tell more accurately on a subconscious level than they can consciously explain the reasons for. But this basically puts them in the same boat as other expert witnesses, whose authority and probity basically has to be trusted (or countered by another expert of the same type).
Exactly what is this person’s error rate?
Like I said, the usual figure is 5% false positives, and this person did list a recent case where they offered an opinion on the blog and later found themselves mistaken. Their track record otherwise looks pretty good.
I am strongly tempted to defy the data here.
Why? (Serious question.) It doesn’t seem to me that there’s strong evidence in the other direction, just a low prior of a random person being a sociopath. But given the way that this case has gone, it’s worth considering the hypothesis that Amanda Knox is a sociopath who is innocent of this particular crime, but suspected nonetheless because of her atypical behavior during the investigation.
The prosecutor does appear to be a hack with an affinity for farfetched conspiracies, but he didn’t try that in every case he’s touched— it’s reasonable to suspect that something in Knox’s interrogation set him down that trail, and one plausible hypothesis is that she wasn’t acting the way a neurotypical human being would act in that situation. Indeed, there are plenty of bits of evidence you mentioned to this effect, but you (rightly) treated them as mostly irrelevant to the question of whether she committed the crime. They are, however, good evidence that she’s not neurotypical, and Eyes for Lies’ analysis further supports that theory.
We may need to do some tabooing. My understanding is that “sociopath” is a much narrower category than “not neurotypical”; in particular, I was under the impression that sociopathy involved a lack of empathy. That doesn’t appear to characterize Knox from anything else I have come across (there are perhaps one or two anecdotes that you could retrospectively regard as consistent with that assumption, but only if you didn’t know anything else—most information about Knox from her hometown points in the opposite direction).
It doesn’t seem to me that there’s strong evidence in the other direction, just a low prior of a random person being a sociopath.
Hmm. I was going to say that it’s really a form of private evidence, if these “truth wizards” can tell more accurately on a subconscious level than they can consciously explain the reasons for. But this basically puts them in the same boat as other expert witnesses, whose authority and probity basically has to be trusted (or countered by another expert of the same type).
Like I said, the usual figure is 5% false positives, and this person did list a recent case where they offered an opinion on the blog and later found themselves mistaken. Their track record otherwise looks pretty good.
Why? (Serious question.) It doesn’t seem to me that there’s strong evidence in the other direction, just a low prior of a random person being a sociopath. But given the way that this case has gone, it’s worth considering the hypothesis that Amanda Knox is a sociopath who is innocent of this particular crime, but suspected nonetheless because of her atypical behavior during the investigation.
The prosecutor does appear to be a hack with an affinity for farfetched conspiracies, but he didn’t try that in every case he’s touched— it’s reasonable to suspect that something in Knox’s interrogation set him down that trail, and one plausible hypothesis is that she wasn’t acting the way a neurotypical human being would act in that situation. Indeed, there are plenty of bits of evidence you mentioned to this effect, but you (rightly) treated them as mostly irrelevant to the question of whether she committed the crime. They are, however, good evidence that she’s not neurotypical, and Eyes for Lies’ analysis further supports that theory.
We may need to do some tabooing. My understanding is that “sociopath” is a much narrower category than “not neurotypical”; in particular, I was under the impression that sociopathy involved a lack of empathy. That doesn’t appear to characterize Knox from anything else I have come across (there are perhaps one or two anecdotes that you could retrospectively regard as consistent with that assumption, but only if you didn’t know anything else—most information about Knox from her hometown points in the opposite direction).
Start here, here, here, and here (4:50).
But you may be right in the sense that I may be overestimating P(Guilty|Sociopath).