My gut feeling is that most people have not bothered to weight the evidence, but look at the surface layers of the case and judge based on questionable heuristics.
Indeed. My own more specific theory is that people—this includes juries, by the way—judge these cases by first sizing up the defendant’s personality and deciding how much they sympathize with him or her (in almost all cases, the answer is “very little”), deriving a prior for guilt directly from that, and then looking at other evidence in the case to see whether it confirms this initial impression. This theory accounts nicely for the otherwise perplexing emphasis that people put on psychological evidence such as the defendant’s “lies”, both in the Knox case (where this negative impression is based on misinformation and misunderstanding) and in the Anthony case (where the defendant does appear to have behaved in an authentically unsympathetic fashion).
FWIW, my take on the case is that (from what I know from very limited media exposure) there is a substantial probability that Anthony is guilty of murder, well over 10%, possibly over 50%, but very likely well below the 99% or so that I would consider “beyond reasonable doubt”. In this, the case is sharply distinguished from that of Knox, where in my view the hypothesis of guilt lacks sufficient evidence even to be considered.
komponisto, I would be very interested in reading if you decided to do a similar post (to the Knox case post you had) for this case as well—even if it’s just a discussion post.
Also, you say that p(Anthony=guilty) is ‘possibly over %50’. Let’s assume it’s %50.
This claim could be interpreted as the following. Suppose that there are X many possible scenarios for what happened, given the constraints of our evidence about the case. In X/2 Anthony is guilty and in X/2, she is not guilty.
This seems implausible to me. X/2 alternate scenarios (scenarios that don’t involve Anthony’s guilt) seem too many.
Link. ;-)
Indeed. My own more specific theory is that people—this includes juries, by the way—judge these cases by first sizing up the defendant’s personality and deciding how much they sympathize with him or her (in almost all cases, the answer is “very little”), deriving a prior for guilt directly from that, and then looking at other evidence in the case to see whether it confirms this initial impression. This theory accounts nicely for the otherwise perplexing emphasis that people put on psychological evidence such as the defendant’s “lies”, both in the Knox case (where this negative impression is based on misinformation and misunderstanding) and in the Anthony case (where the defendant does appear to have behaved in an authentically unsympathetic fashion).
FWIW, my take on the case is that (from what I know from very limited media exposure) there is a substantial probability that Anthony is guilty of murder, well over 10%, possibly over 50%, but very likely well below the 99% or so that I would consider “beyond reasonable doubt”. In this, the case is sharply distinguished from that of Knox, where in my view the hypothesis of guilt lacks sufficient evidence even to be considered.
komponisto, I would be very interested in reading if you decided to do a similar post (to the Knox case post you had) for this case as well—even if it’s just a discussion post.
Also, you say that p(Anthony=guilty) is ‘possibly over %50’. Let’s assume it’s %50.
This claim could be interpreted as the following. Suppose that there are X many possible scenarios for what happened, given the constraints of our evidence about the case. In X/2 Anthony is guilty and in X/2, she is not guilty.
This seems implausible to me. X/2 alternate scenarios (scenarios that don’t involve Anthony’s guilt) seem too many.
What other alternate scenarios are there?