Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long)

Have you considered the possibility that Amanda Knox was present the night of the murder, lied about it, but is not a murderer? I assign a significant probability to this and it seems likely that this greatly confused the justice system.

I initially voted up to counter what seemed like an unfair response by others (I know, you don't care about karma).

Did you read the comments at The Amanda Knox Test? You linked to it. Much of what you present as if it were uncontroversial fact is effectively rebutted there.

This certainly should have been limited to a comment in the existing post.

Edit: apparently komponisto didn't post those facts until his second post, where he made his view explicit. Mea culpa.

So, Rolf, do you understand how this post failed? Hint: Others are not to blame.

Why is this a top-level post? Why doesn't a comment on the open thread or on the original post suffice? If you had wanted to say this back when the original post was fresh, would have you have used a top-level post?

This post is intellectually dishonest. You yourself state that you have no interest in establishing Amanda Knox's guilt, but instead intend to "debunk komponisto's post" - what is the purpose of that? - and then proceed to list a bunch of cherry-picked details about the case, half of which you have not even sourced!

My belief is that komponisto merely accepted propaganda from the Friends of Amanda (FoA) at face value, even though most of their claims are incorrect. Unlike komponisto and FoA, I shall cite reliable sources for my claims.

Like TrueJustice.org? Which is more reliable than Friends of Amanda because..... you say it is?

Did you read the original survey post? As far as I can tell, there is no intent to mislead there, as the OP doesn't even state his position. Yet - somehow! - most members seemed to conclude that she had a low probability of being guilty. If you want to establish Amanda Knox's guilt, I suggest you read through those comments and see what factors influenced their opinions. I don't see that you addressed any of those factors in your post.

This should help you understand that DNA does not voluminously and constantly spew forth from humans in the way komponisto believes it does.

This statement, in particular, comes off as more "misleading" than anything komponisto claimed in his post.

If this post is not the result of a vendetta against a particular member, then the OP could have done a much better job of arguing this case. But frankly, this whole case has been discussed on this website at great length already, and in great detail. I would suggest examining the arguments that have already been made in the 3(?) or so other posts that have been devoted to this topic.

Matt wrote:

Here's a source for the 'three unidentified individuals' DNA' claim:

Thanks Matt. While my claim that there are not three unidentified individuals' DNA on the strap is tangential to C1, I will back it up anyway.

The Daily Mail is a tabloid, rather than a reliable source (in case the headline, 'The troubling doubts over Foxy Knoxy's role in Meredith Kercher's murder', didn't give it away) that clearly got the content for the summary article from Wikipedia. In contrast, the more reliable Sunday Times states instead that Meredith's, Rudy's, and Raffaele's DNA were found. Keep in mind that, as of the day before the Daily Mail summary story you mention, there was no media report (even in tabloids) of the three unidentified people; it seems likely the Daily Mail pulled it from either the Friends of Amanda site, or the prior day's Wikipedia, which has the (non-cited!) claim.

Well, fellow LWers, I must admit I'm somewhat taken aback here.

I came on the site today intending to reply to Rolf Nelson's comments, which I expected would lead to a detailed discussion of the evidence that maybe a handful of people here would be interested in following, safely confined to an existing post on the topic. Then, I saw...this.

I'm not yet quite sure how to react.

Despite Nelson's protestations that he doesn't care about karma (and, by implication, social status in this community), I see no rationale for this post other than a desire to raise the profile and prestige of his (IMHO deservedly) marginalized viewpoint.

When I wrote my original survey post, I did so hesitantly, with conscious awareness that I was doing something experimental. I was well aware of the dangers of posting about controversial current events (though something like this is noticeably distinct from politics), and I certainly didn't expect most other LW readers to have anything like my level of interest in this particular case. But I did think there might be a few who would find the rationality issues interesting enough to participate in the survey -- enough to justify a low-profile, non-promoted top-level post. I was expecting maybe a couple dozen comments (a few of which I expected would complain about the post's relevance); in the event that it received such a level of interest, I said I would do a followup about my own thoughts.

The LW community could thus have vetoed the whole thing right then and there; instead what happened was that the post was promoted, received 200-odd comments (among which were the thoughts of the some of the biggest guns here such as Eliezer and Yvain), and was voted up into the 20s. Clearly, then, the community had agreed with me that there were important rationality issues at stake in this case, and had decided that, at that moment, it was a perfectly good thing to be talking about on LW. And so they did talk about it, extensively. And, in so doing, they came to a fairly decisive opinion. The question was then: did their opinion agree with mine?

That was the context of the post I called "The Amanda Knox Test" -- which I thought of as a reaction to the commentary on "You Be the Jury", and which I thought of as arguing that the LW community was even more right than it realized. This second post (which was even more well received than the first) also sparked extensive discussion -- the result of which appeared to be an even stronger consensus in favor of Knox's and Sollecito's innocence than before.

My point here is that the idea that the LW readership was somehow bamboozled by misinformation from me is not only completely and obviously mistaken but downright insulting -- logically and otherwise. Whatever further top-level posts on the Kercher case may be warranted (and I don't think any more are, at least not without some major development happening), a post arguing or implying that is clearly not warranted. So I think that this post's current score (-7 at last check) is pretty much on target, and I don't intend to comment any further on it lest intelligent conversation in comments lead to upvotes on the post.

I'm going to wait a bit before saying any more about this (for one thing, I currently have some intervention from Real Life to deal with). In the future, I remain willing to discuss the case with Rolf Nelson or anyone else who sincerely believes that Amanda Knox killed her roommate -- in exactly one place: the comments section of my post on that topic.

I think it depends how you understand the phrase "physical evidence" I think komponisto was using the phrase to mean physical evidence directly tying Knox et al. to the murder victim. Such as DNA, fingerprints, etc.

So I don't have a big problem with his characterization. As I mentioned in the thread on rudeness, the polite thing to do is to is to respond to the best reasonable interpretation of one's opponent's argument (while noting the imprecision).

(FWIW, I do believe that Knox et al. were probably involved in the murder but that's a separate issue.)

Note: this is a post version of the same document that I posted yesterday.

This isn't what this site is here for.

I note that your top level posting priviledges have already been (automatically) removed due to the karma hit from votes thus far and I expect this negative score to remain so for some time as this post is downvoted to oblivion. Please do not make posts like this here.

I'm sorry but this is just laughable. Talk about lying..