Your point about privileging the hypothesis, and the fact that we feel a need to explain away weird facts in order to believe Knox’s innocence, is excellent, though it gets rather buried in a very long post.
As far as the probability estimates go, I expect that many people (like me) did two things: erred on the side of underconfidence, and used numbers as conveying a general feeling. Particularly since it’s a criminal case, it doesn’t take much to disagree with a conviction. If I’d put the odds of Knox’s guilt at .95, I’d say she’d been wrongly convicted, as 5% is extremely reasonable doubt—think that if that were our normal standard, we could have hundreds of thousands of totally innocent people imprisoned. So if people are somewhat like me, they probably just picked a low number to show “not guilty” and left it at that.
Of course, this is largely your point: given the evidence, there’s really no reason those numbers should too much higher than they are for a random inhabitant of the city, so our willingness to compromise is itself a flaw, though, in this context, a flaw without adverse effect, as we’d still acquit.
there’s really no reason those numbers should too much higher than they are for a random inhabitant of the city
Actually simply being in the local social network of the victim should increase the probability of involvement by a significant amount. This would of course be based on population, murder rates, and so on. And likely would also depend on estimates of criminology models for the crime in question.
Your point about privileging the hypothesis, and the fact that we feel a need to explain away weird facts in order to believe Knox’s innocence, is excellent, though it gets rather buried in a very long post.
As far as the probability estimates go, I expect that many people (like me) did two things: erred on the side of underconfidence, and used numbers as conveying a general feeling. Particularly since it’s a criminal case, it doesn’t take much to disagree with a conviction. If I’d put the odds of Knox’s guilt at .95, I’d say she’d been wrongly convicted, as 5% is extremely reasonable doubt—think that if that were our normal standard, we could have hundreds of thousands of totally innocent people imprisoned. So if people are somewhat like me, they probably just picked a low number to show “not guilty” and left it at that.
Of course, this is largely your point: given the evidence, there’s really no reason those numbers should too much higher than they are for a random inhabitant of the city, so our willingness to compromise is itself a flaw, though, in this context, a flaw without adverse effect, as we’d still acquit.
Actually simply being in the local social network of the victim should increase the probability of involvement by a significant amount. This would of course be based on population, murder rates, and so on. And likely would also depend on estimates of criminology models for the crime in question.