Although I’m among those persons who find it very difficult to believe that a person would make a false confession, I have read that such a confession is not unheard of and, in fact, might be made fairly frequently. Such a thing is extremely anti-social and is, I hope, criminalized itself.
I would point out that, in this particular case, we’re not really quite talking about any of the things you mention. Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis; they’re not even really incoherent claims or repudiations of previous claims—not, at least, from what I can tell from the internet pages where I’ve seen them discussed. They are story-changing, an inconsistent story, one version of which includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person). I’ll mention, too, that it’s not out of the question that Knox has falsely stated that she was slapped, by a police officer (or maybe officers, plural), when she was being questioned about the crime.
Let me add that I agree with Komponisto’s suggestion, in this essay, that .99 is probably a weak lower bound for the probability of the guilt of Guede. In fact, I would say anything below 1.00 is an insult to the spacetime continuum. Even if we add to that the fact, discussed below, in this thread, that the absence of physical evidence of Knox or Sollecito in the murder room is just about equally certain, I will say that, had I been on any of these juries, I would probably have voted Knox guilty. Komponisto’s essay and the reading that I’ve now done, because of it, have made me realize I have a simple rule in these things:
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
...and if your accusers are people who say things like the above, your probability of innocence is 10.00.
In all seriousness, you appear to be completely ignorant of the subject of coerced statements, as well as wildly overconfident about your ability to predict your own (not to mention other people’s) behavior in highly abnormal situations. This, indeed, will make it difficult for you to understand the case for Knox and Sollecito’s innocence.
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00.
This is equivalent to stating “no innocent person ever changes their story.” Empirically, this is false.
Let me provide a personal example. Several years ago, I was nearby when a co-worker was injured on the job. Two years later, I received a summons—she had ended up suing the company, and as an eyewitness, my testimony was relevant. Lawyers for the two parties asked me questions for a while; I answered to the best of my ability, as honestly as I could. My memory of the event was somewhat fuzzy by then, so I tried to only state things which I was sure I remembered accurately, and expressed my uncertainty when I was uncertain.
Once they finished their questions, they handed me a photocopy of a document in my own handwriting, written on the day of the event. The company had gotten such statements from everyone present on the day of the incident, you see. Not only had I forgotten that I had written such a thing until they showed it to me, my own handwriting directly contradicted the things I’d stated from memory minutes before!
This was before I participated in Less Wrong or was otherwise aware of the breadth of human cognitive failings. I was quite taken aback! My brain had betrayed me—not in old age, in my early twenties! I do not generally consider myself forgetful—if anything, I have an unusually good memory—yet in a fairly short span of time, my brain had managed to confabulate almost every detail of the event.
Since I became aware of it, I’ve noticed myself mid-confabulation on a regular basis. Despite how much my conscious mind values truth, my underlying hardware doesn’t seem to much care.
You may indeed be one of the lucky people with flawless recall. This is not, by a long shot, a universal human trait. Memory is fragile. It is quite easy for many humans to misremember things without knowing anything has gone wrong, especially when under significant amounts of stress.
I know very little of the Amanda Knox case specifically, so this should not be taken as an argument for either side particularly. I am only arguing that your simple rule is not a good rule—it doesn’t actually work.
Your example is a good one—of memory change across a period of two years. From work I’ve done on a family history based on my own recollections, recollections from other persons, and the occasional bit of documentary evidence, I know I don’t have “flawless recall,” but that strikes me as a bit of a straw man. In fact, I will mention, in passing, that I have been favorably impressed, in the course of the project, by the number of decades-old recollections that comport—or very-nearly comport—with surviving documentation. On one or two occasions, an erroneous memory has been interestingly explained. A family member recalls, for instance, that a photograph was taken on a date that a relative moved out of a residence, but the photograph itself is seen to be dated three years before the relative’s departure from that place. At some point, somebody else’s recollection reveals that the photograph was taken on the day a visitor to the residence left it, to go home. The false memory, in other words, included an association with the word “departure.”
It’s a matter of the details of the story-changing. I haven’t read all of Knox’s statements to the investigators and don’t know the dates on which each of them was made. They appear to have been made within a few days of the murder; and at least one of them seems to have included the following false statement, about the man named Lumumba: “I confusedly remember that he killed her [Kercher].”
The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved.
The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved.
That may be so!
This is quite different from being a literally perfect indicator of guilt. I’d feel overconfident saying there was a 95% chance I could keep my story straight if accused of murder, never mind in another country and another language.
Part of this may be calibration. 2.00 obviously isn’t even a probability, but even if I assume your 1.00 figure is simply rounded to two decimal places, it would require that less than one person in one hundred who changes their story is actually innocent. I doubt that is the case.
Such a thing is extremely anti-social and is, I hope, criminalized itself.
I doubt that criminalisation would change much. Without having researched this, I would assume that people make false confessions when they believe they would be convicted even if they didn’t confess.
I’m also not sure what’s supposed to be so extremely antisocial about it. It’s not like the police will surely catch the responsible party if only you don’t make that false confession to get a more lenient sentence.
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
Well, one shouldn’t be using such heuristics without prior research into the matter, precisely because of the typical mind fallacy. You couldn’t imagine innocent people changing their stories—but it happens. So what does that say about the validity of your inference from your own imagination to the expected behaviour of other people?
You couldn’t imagine innocent people changing their stories—but it happens. So what does that say about the validity of your inference from your own imagination to the expected behaviour of other people?
I didn’t see the above when I first read your comment; maybe I was busy forming, mentally, my reply, below, to the rest of what you said. I direct you to the comment I just posted, at 02 February 2014 11:49:15PM, in response to Wes_W.
I also doubt that criminalisation would change much.
It wouldn’t hurt.
I’m also not sure what’s supposed to be so extremely antisocial about it. It’s not like the police will surely catch the responsible party if only you don’t make that false confession to get a more lenient sentence.
Presumably, a false confession increases the likelihood that a case will be erroneously closed. That, in my estimation, makes it extremely antisocial, not least because it increases the likelihood that a criminal is not only at large but is unrecognized as such. Every person is obliged to avoid giving his or her fellow human beings false information about crime.
Are you a neurological outlier in some respect so that you could not grasp the implications of my question, or are you just being an annoyingly uncooperative communicator? By the way, I don’t believe for your claim about thousands for a split-second. I wouldn’t even believe it if you had said “hundreds”. I’ll be impressed if you manage in reasonable time for “tens”.
I had failed to generate this as a hypothesis, but now that you bring it up, it makes the second possibility appear much more likely since it provides a possible motivation for the non-cooperativity. (This looks a bit like the conjunction fallacy, but it’s not really because possibilities that I had simply failed to think of play a role here...)
I responded to what I regarded as a ridiculous question. I’ve said enough to indicate my view of the seriousness of false confession. Do you really find it difficult to believe I could come up with countless examples of behavior that, say, you and I would agree is mildly antisocial—my neighbor’s failure to trim weeds that were partly obstructing our block’s common driveway, for one? You’re being pointless.
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
At most you could convict them of something like obstruction of justice or criminal defamation, if you could actually prove mens rea beyond reasonable doubt. But convicting somebody of murder just because they made an incorrect or even deliberately false claim, would not serve the interests of justice.
In this case, Knox was actually convicted of “calunnia” against Lumumba. It could be argued whether this conviction was fair, since Knox made the claim in a statement signed at the end of a lengthy interrogation without an attorney, in a language she was not familiar with, and the statement mentions that she “remembered confusedly”. Anyway, fair or not, she already served her term for that false accusation.
Knox’s behavior was worse than mere calumny, whether Italian law recognizes that. The exchanges here and at websites devoted to discussion of the case are just a small consequence of her actions; she completely and permanently disrupted investigation of the brutal destruction of a young woman.
But convicting somebody of murder just because they made an incorrect or even deliberately false claim, would not serve the interests of justice.
I guess that depends on your definition of justice. I use the Sicilian model:
“—but I’m a superstitious man, and if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if he should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he’s struck by a bolt of lightning, then I’m going to blame some of the people in this room.”
There is a whole range of humanly possible mental states whose existence you seem to be unaware of. It includes all sorts of confusion and anxiety/panic where one’s agency is severely reduced. You can pretend that they aren’t there on the basis that you can’t simulate them, but that won’t make them any less of a fact.
Although I’m among those persons who find it very difficult to believe that a person would make a false confession, I have read that such a confession is not unheard of and, in fact, might be made fairly frequently. Such a thing is extremely anti-social and is, I hope, criminalized itself.
I would point out that, in this particular case, we’re not really quite talking about any of the things you mention. Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis; they’re not even really incoherent claims or repudiations of previous claims—not, at least, from what I can tell from the internet pages where I’ve seen them discussed. They are story-changing, an inconsistent story, one version of which includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person). I’ll mention, too, that it’s not out of the question that Knox has falsely stated that she was slapped, by a police officer (or maybe officers, plural), when she was being questioned about the crime.
Let me add that I agree with Komponisto’s suggestion, in this essay, that .99 is probably a weak lower bound for the probability of the guilt of Guede. In fact, I would say anything below 1.00 is an insult to the spacetime continuum. Even if we add to that the fact, discussed below, in this thread, that the absence of physical evidence of Knox or Sollecito in the murder room is just about equally certain, I will say that, had I been on any of these juries, I would probably have voted Knox guilty. Komponisto’s essay and the reading that I’ve now done, because of it, have made me realize I have a simple rule in these things:
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
...and if your accusers are people who say things like the above, your probability of innocence is 10.00.
In all seriousness, you appear to be completely ignorant of the subject of coerced statements, as well as wildly overconfident about your ability to predict your own (not to mention other people’s) behavior in highly abnormal situations. This, indeed, will make it difficult for you to understand the case for Knox and Sollecito’s innocence.
This is equivalent to stating “no innocent person ever changes their story.” Empirically, this is false.
Let me provide a personal example. Several years ago, I was nearby when a co-worker was injured on the job. Two years later, I received a summons—she had ended up suing the company, and as an eyewitness, my testimony was relevant. Lawyers for the two parties asked me questions for a while; I answered to the best of my ability, as honestly as I could. My memory of the event was somewhat fuzzy by then, so I tried to only state things which I was sure I remembered accurately, and expressed my uncertainty when I was uncertain.
Once they finished their questions, they handed me a photocopy of a document in my own handwriting, written on the day of the event. The company had gotten such statements from everyone present on the day of the incident, you see. Not only had I forgotten that I had written such a thing until they showed it to me, my own handwriting directly contradicted the things I’d stated from memory minutes before!
This was before I participated in Less Wrong or was otherwise aware of the breadth of human cognitive failings. I was quite taken aback! My brain had betrayed me—not in old age, in my early twenties! I do not generally consider myself forgetful—if anything, I have an unusually good memory—yet in a fairly short span of time, my brain had managed to confabulate almost every detail of the event.
Since I became aware of it, I’ve noticed myself mid-confabulation on a regular basis. Despite how much my conscious mind values truth, my underlying hardware doesn’t seem to much care.
You may indeed be one of the lucky people with flawless recall. This is not, by a long shot, a universal human trait. Memory is fragile. It is quite easy for many humans to misremember things without knowing anything has gone wrong, especially when under significant amounts of stress.
I know very little of the Amanda Knox case specifically, so this should not be taken as an argument for either side particularly. I am only arguing that your simple rule is not a good rule—it doesn’t actually work.
Your example is a good one—of memory change across a period of two years. From work I’ve done on a family history based on my own recollections, recollections from other persons, and the occasional bit of documentary evidence, I know I don’t have “flawless recall,” but that strikes me as a bit of a straw man. In fact, I will mention, in passing, that I have been favorably impressed, in the course of the project, by the number of decades-old recollections that comport—or very-nearly comport—with surviving documentation. On one or two occasions, an erroneous memory has been interestingly explained. A family member recalls, for instance, that a photograph was taken on a date that a relative moved out of a residence, but the photograph itself is seen to be dated three years before the relative’s departure from that place. At some point, somebody else’s recollection reveals that the photograph was taken on the day a visitor to the residence left it, to go home. The false memory, in other words, included an association with the word “departure.”
It’s a matter of the details of the story-changing. I haven’t read all of Knox’s statements to the investigators and don’t know the dates on which each of them was made. They appear to have been made within a few days of the murder; and at least one of them seems to have included the following false statement, about the man named Lumumba: “I confusedly remember that he killed her [Kercher].”
The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved.
That may be so!
This is quite different from being a literally perfect indicator of guilt. I’d feel overconfident saying there was a 95% chance I could keep my story straight if accused of murder, never mind in another country and another language.
Part of this may be calibration. 2.00 obviously isn’t even a probability, but even if I assume your 1.00 figure is simply rounded to two decimal places, it would require that less than one person in one hundred who changes their story is actually innocent. I doubt that is the case.
I doubt that criminalisation would change much. Without having researched this, I would assume that people make false confessions when they believe they would be convicted even if they didn’t confess.
I’m also not sure what’s supposed to be so extremely antisocial about it. It’s not like the police will surely catch the responsible party if only you don’t make that false confession to get a more lenient sentence.
Well, one shouldn’t be using such heuristics without prior research into the matter, precisely because of the typical mind fallacy. You couldn’t imagine innocent people changing their stories—but it happens. So what does that say about the validity of your inference from your own imagination to the expected behaviour of other people?
I didn’t see the above when I first read your comment; maybe I was busy forming, mentally, my reply, below, to the rest of what you said. I direct you to the comment I just posted, at 02 February 2014 11:49:15PM, in response to Wes_W.
It wouldn’t hurt.
Presumably, a false confession increases the likelihood that a case will be erroneously closed. That, in my estimation, makes it extremely antisocial, not least because it increases the likelihood that a criminal is not only at large but is unrecognized as such. Every person is obliged to avoid giving his or her fellow human beings false information about crime.
Right, because the people making false confessions aren’t under enough psychological pressure already...
Can you give me an example of what you consider to be a mildly antisocial act?
At arbitrary costs to themselves… ?
Of course. I can probably give you thousands of them.
Are you a neurological outlier in some respect so that you could not grasp the implications of my question, or are you just being an annoyingly uncooperative communicator? By the way, I don’t believe for your claim about thousands for a split-second. I wouldn’t even believe it if you had said “hundreds”. I’ll be impressed if you manage in reasonable time for “tens”.
I think he answered your question by providing an example on the spot.
I had failed to generate this as a hypothesis, but now that you bring it up, it makes the second possibility appear much more likely since it provides a possible motivation for the non-cooperativity. (This looks a bit like the conjunction fallacy, but it’s not really because possibilities that I had simply failed to think of play a role here...)
I responded to what I regarded as a ridiculous question. I’ve said enough to indicate my view of the seriousness of false confession. Do you really find it difficult to believe I could come up with countless examples of behavior that, say, you and I would agree is mildly antisocial—my neighbor’s failure to trim weeds that were partly obstructing our block’s common driveway, for one? You’re being pointless.
At most you could convict them of something like obstruction of justice or criminal defamation, if you could actually prove mens rea beyond reasonable doubt.
But convicting somebody of murder just because they made an incorrect or even deliberately false claim, would not serve the interests of justice.
In this case, Knox was actually convicted of “calunnia” against Lumumba.
It could be argued whether this conviction was fair, since Knox made the claim in a statement signed at the end of a lengthy interrogation without an attorney, in a language she was not familiar with, and the statement mentions that she “remembered confusedly”.
Anyway, fair or not, she already served her term for that false accusation.
Knox’s behavior was worse than mere calumny, whether Italian law recognizes that. The exchanges here and at websites devoted to discussion of the case are just a small consequence of her actions; she completely and permanently disrupted investigation of the brutal destruction of a young woman.
I guess that depends on your definition of justice. I use the Sicilian model:
“—but I’m a superstitious man, and if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if he should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he’s struck by a bolt of lightning, then I’m going to blame some of the people in this room.”
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v75CFbaajKg )
There is a whole range of humanly possible mental states whose existence you seem to be unaware of. It includes all sorts of confusion and anxiety/panic where one’s agency is severely reduced. You can pretend that they aren’t there on the basis that you can’t simulate them, but that won’t make them any less of a fact.