Casey Anthony: Acquittal

Oh my. Oh my, oh my, oh my.

Casey Anthony: Defense's logical fallacies

Closing arguments are finished in the Casey Anthony trial taking place in Orlando, Florida. The prosecution's rebuttal is finished. The jury is going to start deliberations today.

The closing arguments by the defense took four hours, as against the prosecution's hour and a half.

The prosecution's arguments were short and sweet. Attorney Jeff Ashton went through every single thing that Casey did and said during the 31 days following the disappearance of her little daughter Caylee. Every lie that she told her mother and her friends, every party, every date, every phone call, even her "Bella Vita" tattoo. Ashton talked about Casey's MySpace password "Timer55", and explained that she'd told her brother Lee that Timer55 referred to the 55 days between Casey's disappearance and Casey's 3rd birthday, when she knew that her mother, Cindy Anthony, would no longer accept being put off, and would require and demand to see her granddaughter. The way Ashton reconstructed it, Casey was hoping for just 55 days of freedom, 55 days to live with her lover, party and do what she wanted. She didn't flee across country or try to disappear. She just hung out with her friends in Orlando, enjoying herself. Casey Anthony had a short term mentality. She thought she could fob her mom off for those 55 days, "et après le deluge".

She didn't count with Cindy's persistence. After 31 days, Cindy had enough, started calling Casey's friends, tracked Casey down, brought her home, discovered that her granddaughter was missing, and called the police. The web of lies that Casey had been building for a month, in fact for many many months - that she worked, that Caylee had a nanny, that Caylee was being well looked-after - fell apart under police investigation.

According to Ashton, on June 15, 2008, Casey fought with her mom, scooped up her daughter, left home, hopefully gave the child chloroform (the words "chloroform" and "how to make chloroform" were entered into google search no less than 84 times from the Anthony's computer), smothered her, left the little body in the trunk of the car, and went off to party. Two or three days later, she disposed of the body by placing it in a laundry bag and leaving it in a marshy swamp minutes from the Anthony home. But not before the car had become completely inundated with the smell of human decomposition.

The defense counters Ashton's depiction with another theory: that Caylee got out of the house by herself early on the morning of her disappearance - he proves by photographs that she was able to open the back door by herself, climbed the ladder to the above-ground pool - here again he proves by photographs that she was able to do this - and drowned. Then, according to the defense, George Anthony found her, and Casey was awoken by his screaming and shouting that she was guilty for what had happened. George, according to the defense, got rid of the body and forced Casey to keep completely silent about what had happened, under threat and also because, according to the defense, years of sexual abuse had taught Casey to lie, to deny reality, and to obey her father.

Unfortunately, the defense's arguments fall down in a few major places. The main one, of course, is that defense attorney Jose Baez couldn't get a single witness to admit to knowing anything whatsoever about any alleged abuse of Casey by George. In fact, when Baez drew from Casey's former boyfriend the admission that Casey had confided "a big secret" to him, and thunderingly asked whether that secret was that Casey had been abused by her father, the witness responded by a simple "No". It turned out that the secret was that her brother had once groped her. It also emerged that her father, a former police officer, sometimes hit her when he was angry.

Judge Belvin Perry, who to my mind has emerged as a star of the bench and an example of American common sense, plain thinking and straight justice, forbade Baez to even mention sexual abuse in his closing statements. You can't just invent stuff without even a shred of evidence.

Undeterred, Baez sketched out the rest of his theory in detail in his closing arguments, essentially substituting George's influence over Casey for the sexual abuse. He spent most of his time explaining that the prosecution didn't really prove anything. He concentrated intense attacks on George Anthony.

Both sides left out some very important things. Ashton mentioned the obvious question of why Casey should kill her child rather than simply leave Caylee with her parents and disappear to make a new life for herself elsewhere, but explained it with the simple "Cindy would never have permitted that". How many kids run away - and how many parents actually permit them to do so? I thought that was a flaw in his argument. There's a much better answer: Casey was wildly jealous of Cindy. Caylee shared her affection between her mom and her grandmother, and there's evidence that Casey sometimes thought Caylee preferred her grandmother. During one of her lengthy lies to police, she claimed that the nanny who had kidnapped Caylee had allowed her to talk to Caylee on the phone. She said something to the effect that Caylee seemed happy and didn't ask to see her, and then added some oddly significant words. "She wouldn't have been that way with my mom." Leaving Caylee with Cindy would in some sense have meant that Cindy won. Ashton stressed that Casey killed Caylee in order to have fun and freedom. He didn't go into the possibility that Casey killed Caylee to hurt her mother, perhaps because it's hard to find actual proof of such a statement. But it's real.

Ashton also avoided talking about how Casey was finally - after months - persuaded to admit that her entire story about a nanny called Zanny was fiction, and what she said next. This is something that apparently we will never get to know. Some say that she invented the name "Zanny the nanny" because of a children's book with that character; others say that she gave Caylee frequent doses of Xanax to put her to sleep while she partied, and "Zanny" was a nickname for "Xanax". Who knows?

As for Baez, what he failed to mention are some inconsistencies which, to my mind, are absolutely fatal to his argument.

If George Anthony hid the body and forced his daughter to remain silent about it, then some of his subsequent actions make no sense whatsoever.

Baez made much of his attempted suicide (for guilt?), his words "I have always let each of you down in more ways than I can remember" (abuse?), his use of duct tape around the house.

He thought he had an answer for everything. Why should there be duct tape on the face of a child who accidentally drowned? Well, the meter reader who found the body in the marsh took the skull home and put duct tape on it to hold the pieces together before putting it back in the woods and calling the police - duct tape that just happened to be the same rare and no longer produced brand that George Anthony had in the house. What the... ?

But hey, what about this?

When George Anthony picked up Casey's car from the tow yard, two days before Cindy got Casey to admit that Caylee had in fact disappeared, it smelled horribly and strongly of human decomposition. George stated that as a former police officer, he knew that smell, and he recognized it beyond a doubt. He was afraid to find the corpse of Casey or Caylee in the trunk, but instead, he found only a bag of trash.

George Anthony did not call the police that day, he says, because as far as he knew there was no reason to: he and Cindy weren't yet aware that anything was wrong, Casey was still fobbing them off with happy stories about how busy she and Caylee were and how much fun they were having. But he must have told Cindy that the car smelled like a dead body, because she stated this when she called 911 two days later, after learning that Caylee was missing, and she herself wouldn't have had any opportunity to recognize the odor.

But think about this. If George Anthony were guilty of getting rid of Caylee's body, why would he have told Cindy that he recognized the odor of human decomposition in the trunk of Casey's car? To get Cindy worried about the possibility of Caylee's death and to bring on an investigation would be the last thing he would have wanted. If he were guilty of covering up an accidental death, he wouldn't have wanted anything related to death to be noticed. He would have told her that the car stank of rotting trash.

And, what about the stain? Why would George Anthony ever have mentioned a new stain in the trunk that he had never seen before? How much wiser, if he were guilty (of anything at all), to have kept quiet.

This is just one of the logical fallacies in Jose Baez's arguments. There are others. It's actually an interesting mental exercise to pick them out. In fact, Baez's use of language already shows that he's not a logical thinker. Here's an example:

"Dr. Vass is not a chemist. He would like to be a chemist, but he isn't. I'd like to be a race car driver, and sometimes I drive pretty fast (heh, heh), but I'm not one. And he's not a chemist. And all the other chemists came to different conclusions."

You notice that pesky little "other" that crept in there? Maybe somewhere in Baez's unconscious, Dr. Vass is something of a chemist after all...

And here's another. "There isn't any stain there. The prosecution is trying to make you angry, so that if you stare hard enough and long enough at that picture, you'll just start believing that you see a stain. There isn't any stain. And the witness told us that not even professional cleaners could get that stain out. That car is ten years old and had another owner before."

There isn't any stain, but the car is old so it's normal for it to have stains, and in fact even professionals couldn't get the stain out. Yet there isn't any stain.

And what about Jose's "Freudian slips"? Did you notice him shouting "The truth stops here! - err, uhh, the truth starts here..." And what about when he's in the process of demolishing George Anthony and says "He can't lie at all! err, he can't tell the truth, at all." And when he says to the jury: "Right now as you sit here, you must certainly have more answers...uh, more questions than answers."

Freud didn't write volumes about these slips for nothing.

James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds

In the last post we talked about Intrade, which (along with other online betting and prediction sites such as Newsfutures) has a novel manner of predicting the future: letting the people decide.

A specific, factual prediction is made. If you believe it will happen, you buy shares, if you believe it won't happen, you sell shares. The prices at which you, individually choose to buy and sell reflect the strength of your conviction. The price of the stock fluctuates with each trade: essentially, the price of the stock at any given moment is the price that the latest person who bought it paid for it. That price is always between $0.00 and $10.00, and the "collective perception" of the probability of the statement's truth is 10 times the price of the stock.

The major question underlying this system is: why should we believe that a bunch of people laying bets and buying and selling stock knows anything about what's going to happen or not happen? They're not experts, what do they know?

Ah, but as it turns out, apparently they do know. Research has shown again and again that the dominant opinion of a crowd (if it's a yes or no question) or the average opinion (if it's a numerical question) tends to be closer to the truth than the opinions of individual experts, no matter how expert they may be.

For example, a 1984 study showed that the price of orange-juice futures was a more reliable weather predictor, in certain citrus-growing states, than the U.S. Weather Service forecast!

Much earlier, 19th century anthropologist Francis Galton was both surprised and impressed to discover that at a county fair guess-the-weight-of-the-ox competition, the average of the guesses of the 800 farmers present was astonishingly close to the actual weight of the ox - closer than all but a very few of the individual guesses, and closer than all of the guesses made by cattle experts present at the event. (It is said that Galton's observation greatly reinforced his faith in the system of democracy.)

But everyone knows that crowds can be swayed into wild, irrational behavior - stock market panics, lynchings, mass hysteria. So why should the wisdom of crowds be trusted?

One James Surowiecki, staff writer at The New Yorker, has developed a simple and striking theory to answer that question. According to Surowiecki, for a crowd to be a "wise crowd", it needs to have four qualities:

1) Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.

2) Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

3) Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.

4) Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

[This table summarizing Surowiecki's theory was drawn directly from the Wikipedia entry on "The Wisdom of Crowds".]

In examples of collective error or misbehavior, at least one of the elements above is missing from the crowd; most generally "independence", as the anger behind a lynching or the panic leading to a financial crash are highly contagious.

But, based on many studies, Surowiecki demonstrates that the predictive ability of "wise crowds" is remarkable.

Estimating the probabilities of possible outcomes of factual matters is fundamental in developing strategy. So if a "wise crowd" can make some of those predictions for us, let us by all means pay attention.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: situation reversal!

"Right now the odds of a conviction for a felony are hovering around 8.5% for DSK, according to Intrade, an online betting forum", I just read on a blog.

Intrade? Strauss-Kahn? An online betting forum for outcomes of current events?

Yes - it really exists! Chances for Strauss-Kahn to be convicted of at least one charge have just gone up a little, actually, from 8.5% to 9.1%.

Well, contrary to all expectation, Strauss-Kahn's accuser's credibility has just collapsed completely, and the case against him pretty much along with it. Gone are the ankle bracelet, the house arrest and the gigantic bail. Strauss-Kahn is free on his own recognizance, without a passport but able to travel within the U.S. His next court date is July 18.

Two posts ago, I was talking about developing strategy in a risky situation and using the Strauss-Kahn affair as an example. To develop strategy, it's necessary to be able to predict outcomes. That is exactly what Intrade is doing.

So what is their method? It's simple and brilliant, based on collective perception. Anyone who wants can place a bet of "Yes" or "No" to the statement "Dominique Strauss-Kahn to be found guilty of at least one charge", and each bet is associated to two quantities: the number of shares you buy (if you bet "Yes") or sell (if you bet "No"), and the price of those shares, which changes at each new bet. Every share price is between $0.00 and $10.00, and the probability of the "Yes" outcome at any given moment is equal to 10 times the price of the share. Shares can only be bought and sold by betters, not by Intrade. It is possible to offer for sale shares you don't own: you name your own sale price, but you have to buy them back later. If you wait till the event happens and your prediction is right, you buy them back at $0.00 so all the profit is yours, but if you were wrong, you have to buy them back at $10.00, which is more than what you sold them for. (In fact, you can buy or sell shares at the going price or name your own price at any time. For instance, you might want to sell at a lower price than the going price if you just want to get out of the whole story, or if you think that the situation is going to undergo a sudden reversal. But that will only work if you can find a buyer or seller who agrees with your proposed rate.)

How do predictions get started on Intrade?

A new statement is made, for example, "Dominique Strauss-Kahn to be elected President of France in 2012".

Shares for sale and purchase offers are visible. The site shows buyers offering to purchase a total of 10,179 shares at tiny prices ranging between $0.01 and $0.50, and 30 shares being offered for sale at about $9.99. This is indicative of a very low rate of belief that Strauss-Kahn will be the next French president.

(Personally, I might be willing to bet that he will, but making a $3.00 profit is not worth my trouble.)

None of these offers have found any takers yet, so there is no "going price" and no outcome prediction at present.

But once trades start - once someone offers a sale and another person accepts to purchase at that price - the share price is fixed, and the outcome probability is taken to be 10 times the share price.

Back to the question of whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn will be convicted on any of the seven original counts: I've just joined Intrade, and sold 10 shares at $0.84 - I believe he's going to walk free.

My action brought the prediction that he'll be found guilty down from 9.1 % to 8.3 %.

If he goes free, I make $8.40 ! :D

If he doesn't, I lose $91.60. :(

What that means is that most people agree with my prediction. Intrade is using collective perception to make predictions and that is a very neat idea.

In my next post, I'll talk about the fact that collective perception from a diverse group of people works better for predicting outcomes than either polling or asking experts.

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Let me end this post by offering a white rose of respect and sorrow for Intrade's founder, Irishman John Delaney of County Kildare. A band at the top of Intrade's main page informs us that he died two weeks ago, 50 metres below the summit of Mount Everest, a summit he had always longed to climb. Delaney leaves behind his wife, two sons aged three and two and a tiny daughter, born just two days before his death. My heart goes out to them.