It’s a question of whether errors in the story you know make the probability more extreme or less extreme. Knox seems like a bystander, pretty much, so the “privileging the hypothesis” concept applies to her. Guede seems pretty definitely involved, but the probability of error or misunderstanding the story might not be so low as 1 in 1000, and errors in his story make the probability less extreme.
It’s a question of how you try to apply compensation for overconfidence. With Guede, you apply compensation by lowering the probability of his guilt. But you can’t just take everyone in the world and say that to compensate for overconfidence you’re going to assign a non-extremely-low probability that they murdered Meredith.
You’re saying that sometimes compensating for overconfidence means moving a probability further away from 50%? That it somes means moving a probability estimate closer to some sort of “base rate”? Interesting and worth talking about more, I think. For one thing it gets you right into the “reference class tennis” you’ve talked about elsewhere—which in itself deserves further discussion.
That’s interesting. I’m wondering if you could elaborate on why you think that’s so, since I would have guessed the opposite.
It’s a question of whether errors in the story you know make the probability more extreme or less extreme. Knox seems like a bystander, pretty much, so the “privileging the hypothesis” concept applies to her. Guede seems pretty definitely involved, but the probability of error or misunderstanding the story might not be so low as 1 in 1000, and errors in his story make the probability less extreme.
It’s a question of how you try to apply compensation for overconfidence. With Guede, you apply compensation by lowering the probability of his guilt. But you can’t just take everyone in the world and say that to compensate for overconfidence you’re going to assign a non-extremely-low probability that they murdered Meredith.
You’re saying that sometimes compensating for overconfidence means moving a probability further away from 50%? That it somes means moving a probability estimate closer to some sort of “base rate”? Interesting and worth talking about more, I think. For one thing it gets you right into the “reference class tennis” you’ve talked about elsewhere—which in itself deserves further discussion.
Yup.