What sort of additional wording do you think would have helped make this clearer?
Perhaps something along the lines of “This post assumes that the reader has read the comments section of the previous post.”
You may have missed a key point here; see comments by mattnewport and Eliezer. This is not, it turns out, a difficult case that hinges on the details; instead it’s decided overwhelmingly just by the priors. The thesis of my post was that a skilled rationalist shouldn’t need more than a few minutes of study in order to arrive at a high probability of innocence. Now, whether you could actually get to a probability of 0.99 or 0.999 that way, as opposed to merely 0.9, is an interesting, but separate, question.
The above might be true if I didn’t know that Knox and Sollecito were convicted by an Italian court, but once I take that into account, it seems impossible to get to 0.9 probability of innocence that quickly. Unless I’ve seen nearly all of the evidence and arguments that the court has seen, I think there’s a probability higher than 0.1 that the court knows something significant that I don’t.
I’m not sure why you would make such an assumption. It’s not as if my total level of global outrage is fixed, and hearing about Knox and Sollecito unfairly moved some sympathy in their direction at the expense of others. It just so happened that this case came to my attention, and provoked an emotional response appropriate to my state of knowledge. The result was a net increase in my concern about the madness of this world and in my desire to alleviate suffering; you may be interested to know that additional resources were allocated to the general goal of improving humanity’s future as a direct result of my feelings about this case.
I assume that a human being has a finite capacity for outrage. To feel that strongly about Knox and Sollecito implies that you cannot feel equally strongly about all other individuals who have suffered equally terrible fates. You say that the case increased your net concern about the madness of the world, but surely you must have already known that injustice like this (assuming you’re right Knox and Sollecito) happens every day to many people all over the world? Is it just that the abstract knowledge didn’t engage your emotions, like seeing these two specific individuals did?
The above might be true if I didn’t know that Knox and Sollecito were convicted by an Italian court, but once I take that into account, it seems impossible to get to 0.9 probability of innocence that quickly. Unless I’ve seen nearly all of the evidence and arguments that the court has seen, I think there’s a probability higher than 0.1 that the court knows something significant that I don’t.
There was little to no change in the information content of True Justice and Friends of Amanda between Thursday, December 3, 2009 and Friday, December 4, 2009 (when the verdict was announced). If you believe that you would have arrived at a high probability of innocence on Thursday, then by conservation of expected evidence, you should have been very surprised to observe significant evidence of guilt on Friday. Since you appear to regard the conviction as significant evidence of guilt, this would imply that you have a low prior on a jury delivering a guilty verdict on the basis of the information available on those two sites.
To which I can only ask: Whence cometh this unwavering faith in the rationality of one’s fellow humans?
I assume that a human being has a finite capacity for outrage. To feel that strongly about Knox and Sollecito implies that you cannot feel equally strongly about all other individuals who have suffered equally terrible fates. You say that the case increased your net concern about the madness of the world, but surely you must have already known that injustice like this (assuming you’re right Knox and Sollecito) happens every day to many people all over the world? Is it just that the abstract knowledge didn’t engage your emotions, like seeing these two specific individuals did?
If I understand you correctly, you appear to be arguing (or at least suggesting I consider an argument) for the following disjunction:
Either:
(1) I should devote more psychological energy to other victims of injustice to match my concern for Knox and Sollecito.
Or:
(2) I should devote less psychological energy to Knox and Sollecito in order not to unfairly privilege them more than other victims of injustice.
Now neither of these strikes me as plausible. (1) is simply impractical: LW readers would get tired if I did a post on every miscarriage of justice that has ever occurred, even if I were capable of doing so. But (2) can’t be right either, because what happened to Knox and Sollecito is a legitimate outrage, and simply going about my business with indifference strikes me as highly unsatisfactory.
I see this as nothing more than a variant of the old argument against “ordinary” altruism: we really ought not to hold doors for little old ladies, since doing so consumes resources that could be put to better use fighting existential risk. But, as we know, human brains simply don’t work that way. It’s far more efficient to harness our natural feeling-circuitry to accomplish our goals than it is to (vainly) struggle to reprogram it.
So yes, there is a psychological difference between abstractly knowing that injustice exists and humans are irrational on the one hand, and actually seeing consequences of this happen to victims one finds particularly sympathetic on the other. But that emotional stimulation can be put to good use. That’s why it’s not quite right to say:
To feel that strongly about Knox and Sollecito implies that you cannot feel equally strongly about all other individuals who have suffered equally terrible fates.
I don’t feel less strongly about the other individuals than I used to; rather, I feel more strongly than I did before. In my mind, Knox and Sollecito represent others in their situation; thinking specifically of them makes it easier to care about the problem of injustice in general. It’s a mind-hack that happens to cater to the way my brain works. I suspect I’m not the only one on whom this kind of trick is effective.
(And it also helps Amanda and Raffaele themselves—who deserve to be helped, just like the old ladies for whom we open doors.)
It’s perfectly okay for a human rationalist to have natural human reactions; when those reactions are put to good use, it’s an outright good thing.
Perhaps something along the lines of “This post assumes that the reader has read the comments section of the previous post.”
The above might be true if I didn’t know that Knox and Sollecito were convicted by an Italian court, but once I take that into account, it seems impossible to get to 0.9 probability of innocence that quickly. Unless I’ve seen nearly all of the evidence and arguments that the court has seen, I think there’s a probability higher than 0.1 that the court knows something significant that I don’t.
I assume that a human being has a finite capacity for outrage. To feel that strongly about Knox and Sollecito implies that you cannot feel equally strongly about all other individuals who have suffered equally terrible fates. You say that the case increased your net concern about the madness of the world, but surely you must have already known that injustice like this (assuming you’re right Knox and Sollecito) happens every day to many people all over the world? Is it just that the abstract knowledge didn’t engage your emotions, like seeing these two specific individuals did?
There was little to no change in the information content of True Justice and Friends of Amanda between Thursday, December 3, 2009 and Friday, December 4, 2009 (when the verdict was announced). If you believe that you would have arrived at a high probability of innocence on Thursday, then by conservation of expected evidence, you should have been very surprised to observe significant evidence of guilt on Friday. Since you appear to regard the conviction as significant evidence of guilt, this would imply that you have a low prior on a jury delivering a guilty verdict on the basis of the information available on those two sites.
To which I can only ask: Whence cometh this unwavering faith in the rationality of one’s fellow humans?
If I understand you correctly, you appear to be arguing (or at least suggesting I consider an argument) for the following disjunction:
Either:
(1) I should devote more psychological energy to other victims of injustice to match my concern for Knox and Sollecito.
Or:
(2) I should devote less psychological energy to Knox and Sollecito in order not to unfairly privilege them more than other victims of injustice.
Now neither of these strikes me as plausible. (1) is simply impractical: LW readers would get tired if I did a post on every miscarriage of justice that has ever occurred, even if I were capable of doing so. But (2) can’t be right either, because what happened to Knox and Sollecito is a legitimate outrage, and simply going about my business with indifference strikes me as highly unsatisfactory.
I see this as nothing more than a variant of the old argument against “ordinary” altruism: we really ought not to hold doors for little old ladies, since doing so consumes resources that could be put to better use fighting existential risk. But, as we know, human brains simply don’t work that way. It’s far more efficient to harness our natural feeling-circuitry to accomplish our goals than it is to (vainly) struggle to reprogram it.
So yes, there is a psychological difference between abstractly knowing that injustice exists and humans are irrational on the one hand, and actually seeing consequences of this happen to victims one finds particularly sympathetic on the other. But that emotional stimulation can be put to good use. That’s why it’s not quite right to say:
I don’t feel less strongly about the other individuals than I used to; rather, I feel more strongly than I did before. In my mind, Knox and Sollecito represent others in their situation; thinking specifically of them makes it easier to care about the problem of injustice in general. It’s a mind-hack that happens to cater to the way my brain works. I suspect I’m not the only one on whom this kind of trick is effective.
(And it also helps Amanda and Raffaele themselves—who deserve to be helped, just like the old ladies for whom we open doors.)
It’s perfectly okay for a human rationalist to have natural human reactions; when those reactions are put to good use, it’s an outright good thing.