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The crudeness of such spherical-cows Bayesianism did form part of my point. This is exactly why I said that I "would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence". I think falling back on any Bayesian pattern-matching in this sort of case is largely illegitimate, whether that's assuming that a black man stabbing a woman can't possibly have been racially-motivated, or its converse of readily assuming that eg a white cop shooting a black man has to have been an unmotivated racist hate-crime. There was indeed an implicit hidden term in the "but it doesn't seem odd or irrational…" but it wasn't just "prima facie"; it was "but if you're going to do this stupid thing at all, which you shouldn't, then prima facie…".
I think our remaining disagreement here is in how useful the currently-available details might be. I do think we're largely in prima facie land. We'll be in prima facie land until the suspect is interrogated, or at the very least, a background investigation is made into his life based on people who knew him before the incident. The information we have now is woefully insufficient to assert much of anything about the killer's mens rea. (I'll grant you that the "I got the white bitch" remark isn't nothing. But neither does it say very much unless you already have priors weighted towards black-on-white killings having a strong likelihood of being racially-motivated. If a crazed killer who's just killed a red-headed woman crows that he "got that ginger bitch", I wouldn't conclude that he killed her because he has 19th-century-peasant levels of prejudice against red-haired people per se.)
Ergo I think it's much too early to make any kind of cogent statement on the murder. But journalists have to try to spin more than the bare objective facts out of this, it's what they're paid for. So they fall back on extremely loose pattern-matching. This pattern-matching is dumb, but I argue that any pattern-matching would be dumb and the particular heuristic they're applying ("white-on-black murders are more often racist in nature than black-on-white") doesn't seem like a terrible heuristic as these things go, heuristics just don't get you very far.
OK, but then that changes the meaning of the statement fully. Because doing such an obviously stupid thing is irrational. Which makes your statement mean something like, "If you're committed to being irrational by falling back to Bayesian pattern matching, then it's not irrational to land at this conclusion." Fair enough, 100% true and defensible. Also doesn't contradict or challenge at all the notion that journalists are being irrational in being quicker to label white-on-black killings as racially motivated than to label black-on-white killings as such.
Yeah, no. You need zero priors weighted towards that. Entirely unprovoked murder on a random stranger followed by commentary on that stranger's race doesn't need one to have a prior leaning in one way in order to conclude racist motivations.
If person X killed ginger Y, and one of the only specific pieces of information we knew about the motive was X muttering "got that ginger bitch," we would absolutely be justified to conclude tentatively (as is the case for all conclusions we're talking about here) that he was motivated by some sort of bigoted hatred against gingers. It wouldn't be a particularly strong conclusion, one that could and would change as more information came in, but it absolutely would be the correct conclusion based on the available evidence.
To the extent this is true, my point is that it's so tentative as to be speculation for speculation's sake. Maybe that's the most correct conclusion under the circumstances, but even the best available conclusion is still going to be so tentative as to be useless, so why bother? There would be no cause to even begin to think about what the incident said about the state ginger-vs-brunette relations in 2020s America. There would certainly be no cause to print anything of the sort in a major newspaper. You're only going to come out with such a flimsy (if technically "most correct") conclusion if you have a gun to your head, albeit metaphorical. Journalists have one of those in the form of economic incentives to find something profound-sounding to say about every mildly viral event, way too soon for there to be anything valid to be said.
(But I'm not convinced it is true. Say I have a strong prior that "unprovoked public murder on a random stranger" probably evidences a disturbed, incoherent mental state on the part of the killer - psychosis, schizophrenia, or just hard drugs. That is, I will assume the killer's mental state to be so erratic and irrational that their actions are essentially random, and whatever they may gibber before or after the murder bears negligible relationship to anything that could be called a "motive" because the killer most probably doesn't have a "motive" at all, beyond a sudden, violent intrusive thought. In this case - and this doesn't seem like a silly prior to have - then you should in fact write off the "ginger bitch" remark and stick to your null hypothesis of an apolitical nutjob.)
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