I believe the original studies were shown to be faulty because they didn’t account for the fact that the cases were ordered. Less severe cases were seen first, which meant the more severe cases (ie those with more severe penalties) were shown later.
“Danziger etal. rely crucially on the assumption that the order of the cases is random and, thus, exogenous to the decision-making process. This assumption has been forcefully challenged. For a short and very critical reply in PNAS, Keren Weinshall-Margel and John Shapard analyzed the data of the original study—as well as other self-collected data—and conducted additional interviews with the court personnel involved.Footnote 51 They point out that the order of the cases is not random: The panel tries to deal with all cases from one prison before a break, before then moving to the cases of the next prison after a break. Most importantly, though, requests from prisoners who are not represented by a lawyer are typically dealt with at the end of each session. So, prisoners without legal representation are less likely to receive a favorable decision compared to those with legal representation.Footnote 52 Additionally, lawyers often represent several inmates and decide on the order in which the cases are presented—it might well be possible that they start with the strongest cases”
[1] Chatziathanasiou, K., 2022. Beware the lure of narratives:“hungry judges” should not motivate the use of “artificial intelligence” in law. German Law Journal, 23(4), pp.452-464.
> the fact that the cases were ordered. Less severe cases were seen first, which meant the more severe cases (ie those with more severe penalties) were shown later.
Isn't that order creating a bias for the judge? Should the cases be randomized instead?
Yes, in the words of the linked paper it injects exogenous decision making. In other words, the decision is based on more than just the judge so we can’t conclude the discrepancy is due to the judge’s personal bias.
Yeah thats the original point but I think he means aside from that, the order itself also drops a suggestion to the judge as to the nature of the case before hearing it.
The order itself might be injecting a subconscious bias to the judge.
I think maybe the judges can tell how important cases are based on the charges. I don't think the implication is that someone is somehow reviewing the case prior to it being heard and using some judgement based on some (likely unknown as it has not yet been presented) evidence to order them, but that charges that carry less penalty or that are are already classified as lesser (i.e. misdemeanor compared to felony) are sorted prior to ones that are not.
I don't think the people sorting the cases (which could be the judges themselves) have any additional information that the judge doesn't readily have available, so I'm not sure there's much room for bias of a substantial nature.
That’s good point. The authors of the original papers the “hungry judge” idea also did work on what they call “priming” which would include what you suggest. I don’t know if that has been replicated though.
This is not an example of the priming effect, which describes how one stimulus affects the reaction to a different stimulus, but is simply an example of suggestion for a common stimulus. The priming effect itself has come under fire in recent years for failure to replicate.
Examples of priming include what was studied in the Priming Intelligence study, which primed groups of participants with the idea of either professors or the idea of hooligans, then tested how they performed on an intelligence test. It purported to discover that those primed with the idea of professors performed better. This is an example of a widely discussed priming study that has failed replication.
It's not as if the judge does not have all the details of the case prior to sentencing. The order can't possibly supply more information than the fact that he just sat through the trial himself days or weeks prior. At least in the United States, the same judge who presides over a trial is the one who sentences the convicted. The only time a defendant gets different judges for anything is early in the process, like during arraignment.
Knowing the details and being subconsciously influenced are different questions. Ambient music in stores doesn’t change the prices, products, or a shoppers needs yet it still influences buying behavior.
Suppose a taste tester is asked to rank something on a scale of 1-100, but before giving a number they need to presort them into terrible, ok, good, great then go back to each group and give a specific score to each item. My guess is there would be different clustering vs someone doing the same task in one go.
Adding to this, even knowing the subconscious biases doesn't necessarily mitigate them. Kahneman talked about how he was still subjected to such biases, even though he was an expert in studying and identifying them.
What ‘subconscious influence’ are you assuming here?
The cases are ordered in a known, public, obvious way by known, public, obvious criteria. Are you thinking that a judge would not know the difference between the severity of charges if they weren’t grouped together? That he would be inclined to think a jaywalking case sandwiched between two murders was just as serious? This argument seems unlikely in the extreme.
I’m suggesting the exact opposite situation, ie groups of equal severity create a subconscious bias even if it’s the Judge that makes them.
A jaywalking case seems meaningless when sandwiched between just about anything because objectively it’s not serious. However 20 murder cases and you might start benchmarking things to the pedo cannibal not each case on it’s own merits.
If all you see is 20 white collar crimes row with several 10+ million dollar cases someone who ‘only’ stole 100 thousand seems almost meaningless even if objectively it’s a lot of money. And that exact loss of objectivity is a problem.
> What you are describing bears no relationship to the study or… any real case that we’re discussing.
Study says before lunch cases are meaningfully different than the after lunch case, thus it’s a like with like grouping.
I referenced a known effect where grouping like with like can create a subconscious bias. Sure it’s best known in other contexts, but there’s little to suggest sentencing is somehow uniquely unbiased.
Like any other set of tasks, the order is a practical matter. Severe cases are more random, sometimes sucking up more time than expected. Put them early in the order and any delay will impact everyone. So judges try to get the easy/predictable stuff done first, minimizing the number of people impacted by the inevitable delays. (Doctors do the same if they can, trying tk see easy patients first.)
Also, as with any other process, you want to start with a few easy wins in order to solve inevitable problems. If there is something wrong with the court tech (recorders, security etc) you can work it out during the easy cases. Save the murders for after everything is sorted.
Thirdly, prisoners are different than normal people. They do not control thier own scheduals. Put thier case early in the docket and they might miss breakfast at the jail. Prisoners are also moved as groups. Put them randomly on the docket and they all have to wait all day. Put them as a group towards the end and the group wont wait as long. So cases involving prisoners, on average the more severe cases, are placed later on the docket.
If they are ordered by severity, with the most severe coming just before lunch, the implication is the harsher sentencing is due to the ordering rather than the hunger pangs of the judge. Ie the hunger thesis is a spurious correlation.
I think the person I responded to was talking about actual bias from the judges knowing the order, not about this study.
Yes, this study would absolutely be suspect if the order is not random. I was saying I am not sure if the order being based on severity would bias the judges, since my assumption would be that judges are aware of severity directly and don’t need to rely on ordering to deduce it.
>Randomness introduces inefficiency which implies delay
That assumes that the previous arrangement, in the form of sequential escalation, was a pre-existing state of nature that came at no cost of effort. And that randomness has to be introduced after the fact, at a new and extra cost.
But I think if cases were ordered without any specifically intended sequence of any kind, that starting point would be closer to randomness than the currently existing escalation. So randomness would cost less, not more.
What does that even mean in this context?
The amount of cases to be processed doesn't change regardless of the order, and the amount of time and attention directed toward each shouldn't either, otherwise you have a much bigger issue.
But that's not how it's currently done (at least I don't think and nobody in the comments or article is suggesting so), and escalation in severity doesn't have anything to do with officers or with how efficient you are with officer time.
But if the order stated by OP is accurate, they're not ordered by the officer who needs to show up, they're ordered by severity. Severity might correlate by officer, but probably won't.
Putting harder cases to the end of the queue gives less time to them. This may result in judges speeding the process by giving a case less consideration and thus increasing the chance of a mistake. This may result in postponing the case for another day because too little time remains today, so delaying it further.
OTOH simple cases are likely the majority of cases. Putting them first lets the majority of, well, users of the judiciary system get served faster.
To be clear, are you talking about US Constitution amendments? If yes, I am confused. (Ignore for a moment that we are talking about Israeli jurisprudence.)
US 4th: It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
US 15th: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Why is either of these relevant in US jurisprudence?
These cases were in Israel. So if you mean the fourth and fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution, they are very unlikely to apply (I’m leaving some room because I don’t know anything about Israeli government)
Doesn't this ordering also go against additional delay, since it expedites misdemeanors at the expense of felonies? Cases should just be tried in the order they were submitted.
I feel like there's probably an excellent reason that the order is the way it is, due to the wonderful process of time.
This feels a lot like saying "let's just blow up the tax code and rewrite it!" And we end up generating the same 2 million lines of policy to close all of the loopholes all over again.
> I feel like there's probably an excellent reason that the order is the way it is, due to the wonderful process of time.
But this assumes that the process of time is tending towards the better. Each change that was made was surely made on the basis of experience and created a local improvement, but that doesn't mean that they operate well together.
(Nor, of course, does it mean that they are likely to be so easily fixed that it can be done in a tossed-off HN comment.)
> Yes, this I generally believe, at least as far as societal maturity is concerned.
That's probably too big a discussion for here, but, on the institutional rather than the societal level, is that what you observe? Certainly it seems to me that institutions just accumulate more and more cruft over time, and, though "throw it out and re-write it" is, as well documented, rarely the right answer, neither is "trust that things are as they are because time has optimized them."
Cruft can be good. If you give everyone a chance to speak on any issue, it's extremely slow, but also the most egalitarian. When societies move too fast, large groups of people are invariably marginalized.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" etc.
I do think institutions, while extremely flawed, are currently the best versions of themselves. Very difficult to measure, of course. Rome was the best version of itself until the second it began to collapse.
I'm not a history buff, but believe deeply that it's a predictor of the future. Are there historical examples you can think of where the institutions were better than they are today?
> I'm not a history buff, but believe deeply that it's a predictor of the future. Are there historical examples you can think of where the institutions were better than they are today?
The problems with this question are at least two. First, there is no fixed definition of "better," so that two people might disagree about any example even if they agree on the facts. For example:
> I do think institutions, while extremely flawed, are currently the best versions of themselves. Very difficult to measure, of course. Rome was the best version of itself until the second it began to collapse.
While I wish I shared your optimism, I also disagree with your example! It seems clear to me that a society that is about to collapse is likely not its best self, and that surely there was a local maximum of Roman "goodness," however it's measured, some time after its founding but well before its collapse.
Second, that the examples I know best are likely to be the examples in which I have a personal interest, and so, inevitably, a bias that prevents me from judging them dispassionately.
In that spirit, as a teacher, I think that most, let's say for specificity, US universities were much better in the period immediately following the GI bill than they are today. Their "corporatification" is, to me, a huge step backwards. But then, I am a university teacher, so, though I can speak from a position of knowledge, I can hardly be trusted as an unbiased judge of in what way universities can best serve society.
For those unfamiliar, the original study found that judges were kinder in their decisions right after lunch, and harshest right before. (I’m dramatically oversimplifying, but that’s the bit folks usually cite.)
This study contests the strength of that finding by showing that positive rulings take longer, and that you can fit more simple negative rulings in just before a break (negative rulings are denials of parole, if you’re wondering why they are faster). Judges don’t want to start complex cases that are more likely to be favorable just before break. (Again, dramatically simplifying. The article has more.)
I have cited the original study countless times, and this injects a lot more nuance for me. I’m glad it was revisited.
Exactly. Just like that one study saying how cyclists wearing helmets in trafic are more in danger than those without because car drivers supposedly are more careful with the non helmet wearing crowd, that peers here keep bringing up as a reason to cycle without a helmet.
Tip from my SO who does ER work at the hospital: wear a helmet to give her less work
Without having read in-depth either original paper, it seems like the issue here is much simpler than reproduction (though reproduction is the gold standard as is totally under-appreciated these days).
Rather, it seems the authors made a much simpler mistake: hypotheses can only be refuted by evidence, not confirmed. So, in this case, if the hypothesis is "judges act more harshly when hungry", what they should have been doing is looking for evidence disproving that statement. Instead, they seem to have presented a correlation and a suggestion, which is not the same thing as a scientific finding.
There was another article related to this study that hit the HN front page. It talked about the size of effect, and argued that the effect size was ridiculously big, and if true, we should see giant spikes in car crashes around lunch, big enough for common sense to ban driving just before noon.
I think you'll enjoy the read.
> If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion.
It's always fascinating to see the vapor of trends which seem local and harmless - work sucks, i can't wait for lunch - condensed into real-world results. In the same vein is an infamous study correlating the beginning of daylight savings time with a marked increase in heart attacks [0].
Did anybody ever ask the judges/clerks about this finding? It seems like the whole thing could have been rebutted with one phone call and the judge saying “yeah, we make the schedules and intentionally backload the negative/easy ones”
They have incentive to hide it. Ordinary people want to think the justice system actually does justice. Not group cases by time slot because they are likely to be simply denied, which is clearly biased.
Personally this is more disturbing to me than the alleged earlier finding that the judge was in a bad mood because he was hungry. At least that is correctable and avoidable; systemic discrimination by case type isn't.
It is absolutely correct to systematically discriminate by ‘case type’ if ‘case type’ means severity of charges. You don’t want arsonists to be granted parole as easily as jaywalkers.
You are maybe forgetting that the job of judges is judgment.
They arent hiding anything nefarious, they’re just organizing their day. Start a session with the cases most likely to run long and have extra paperwork so you’re more likely to finish at the right time and not go over
Statistics for stuff that has unequal length is tricky. Reminds me of the days there I did packet sampling on the LAN and as the length distribution is bimodal statistical math using means as assumption yielded misleading results.
Interesting, didn't see this before. Now I am curious about addicted judge effect (e.g. smoking) since I witnessed weird things semi-similar to this, but for smoking.
Not to mention how different vices are going to affect a judge differently. One addicted to the lunchtime brothel might rule different than one addicted to the lunchtime smoke, and different still to one addicted to the lunchtime scotch.
How much of the current failure to repliacte could be attributed to the subjects undee observation being aware of the phenomenon and actively compensating?
Study finds that when there's a time limit, even a rational judge would try the case faster, and there would be a tendency towards unfavorable ruling.
Since lunchtime (and presumably end of work day) are such time limits, we see a drop in favorable rulings as lunchtime approaches, and a restoration in favorable rulings right after lunchtime.
And yet, the study, curiously, says, "the analyses by DLA do not provide conclusive evidence for the hypothesis that extraneous factors influence legal rulings". What is lunchtime and end of work day as not extraneous factors?
Note: the above only explains a part of the original finding. And the study admits that there are definitely more factors at play.
> Study finds that when there's a time limit, even a rational judge would try the case faster, and there would be a tendency towards unfavorable ruling.
This study does not say this.
The simulated rational judges are "ideal" and their decisions are not influenced by the ordering of the cases or how long it has been since a break.
The study is saying that despite this perfect behavior, some simulated methods for choosing when to take a break will cause favorable cases to be more likely to be scheduled at the beginning of a session (in their last simulation, this effect only appears after applying the same statistical processing as the original study).
When was the last time a judge got fired for bad perforomance or being biased. Funny how judges somehow never face consequences of doing their jobs really poorly. They'll grant immunity for themselves.
It's like a mafia...protect their own.
Even if judges don't suffer punishment for bad performance, they do suffer personal discomfort from poor meal planning. Most judges most days will be following their usual eating routine which will have them feeling fine before lunch. People become notably irritable when they miss a meal, not before meals when they're eating normally.
This day and age if a social/psych “paper” defies common sense it should just be ignored. Pushing these “findings” as science should be considered malpractice.
Perhaps, but the original paper (harsher sentences before lunch) does not defy "common sense." Common sense tells people that when they are hungry, they are irritable. Many people are familiar with the concept of feeling "hangry."
Sure that’s why it’s plausible but it defies common sense to assume that judges are not managing their own hunger to the extent that it’s affecting their job performance.
Why wouldn’t surgeons or pilots have the same problem?
The paper is sensational because of the implications it has for the social justice causes certain people are obsessed about.
>to assume that judges are not managing their own hunger to the extent that it’s affecting their job performance.
>Why wouldn’t surgeons or pilots have the same problem?
Firstly, this is such an incredibly naive view of the world, especially in regards to the type of professionals that proliferate the legal system.
Past that, surgeons and pilots DO have these issues. The airline industry has religious standards and procedures for how pilots prepare and "rate" themselves before a flight mainly due to how visible egregious pilot errors typically are; in the case of surgeons the insurance company does it best to sweep things under the rug.
Pilots are supposed to be well rested, but then you have incidents like Northwest Airlines Flight 188[1], and pilots admitting they fall asleep more than you would imagine[2].
It's hard to gather data on surgeon-specific incidents since the medical industry does its very best to sweep things under the rug, but it's estimated that 400,000 deaths occur unnecessarily while in the hospital due to medical malpractice [3].
None of these systems or data are made available in the legal system, because it's all "scratch my back" etc. So no, you really shouldn't trust judges (or anyone else in the legal system) since there are no systems of accountability.
Parole judges are not accountable for their work in the same way surgeons or pilots are. If a judge makes a bad call on a parole hearing, a person stays in prison and it's effectively impossible to challenge the decision. Parole hearings are extremely subjective, so it's vanishingly unlikely that a judge will face any repercussions for making a ruling which people would consider unfair.
This means that there's no pressure for them to manage the influence of factors like hunger on their decision.
So it is impacting those highly empirical disciplines and they have managed to develop no standards and practices? But they have around food poisoning?
I don't think this is totally unreasonable, nor unique to judges.
For example, the developed world rolled out school lunch programs as a way to improve academic performance, which at the time of implementation was controversial.
Skipping lunch is bad for school performance, but judges aren't skipping lunch. Judges eat their lunch at a regular scheduled time and so they can naturally adjust their eating habits to get them through the day without experiencing discomforting hunger.
that's exactly what the original study was proposing as an effect:
> They found that the probability of a favorable decision drops from about 65% to almost 0% from the first ruling to the last ruling within each session and that the rate of favorable rulings returns to 65% in a session following a food break.
it's not unreasonable as an original hypothesis; and it's good that we're testing it and finding out later that it's wrong. but the base hypothesis is not particularly egregious.
It's unusual for people to experience mentally distracting hunger pangs before lunch on a regular basis, because people tend to eat larger dinners and/or breakfasts to get them to lunch without significant discomfort. Debilitating hunger is an unusual experience that comes from skipping meals for some unusual reason, a break in somebody's normal routine.
I think that’s a little far — mainly the point where science itself is often a rejection of things that were previously called “common sense”.
But this can also be expanded. There are no fields of science where a singular paper should be widely accepted before replication and additional studies.
Social sciences have a noticeable issue where they lend themselves to dramatic headlines and over extrapolation I suspect that this is largely an aspect of them being much more understandable and ultimately relatable than some of the more niche fields where papers address nearly unapproachable topics
> There are no fields of science where a singular paper should be widely accepted before replication and additional studies.
Certainly within mathematics, this isn't a requirement, and I think the same holds within some branches of theoretical physics, as well as computing science.
I suppose there's a decent argument to be made that these things aren't "Science". Certainly, mathematics uses something different from the empirical method to progress knowledge. But there isn't really a good alternative word.
That the effect is so large should draw a lot of suspicion. Real psychological effects almost never have that magnitude.
The claim that heavily vetted, highly educated judges are reliably just throwing out punishments willy-nilly because they want a snack is also quite suspect, especially as there is no reason to expect this to only work in one direction- why wouldn't they be just as willing to let people off easy when that gets them to lunch just as quickly?
It is true that being hungry makes you irritable. But that irritability is a component of wanting a snack, and the claim is that the feeling of wanting a snack was responsible for a judge denying parole across the board to all candidates, among whom ostensibly 67% deserved parole.
I assume we've both felt hungry for too long. I do feel annoyed and frustrated, maybe I make a rude remark or snap at someone. It is not my belief that it is a feeling powerful enough to make me carry out a massive miscarriage of justice and ruin people's lives for years to come. And I expect judges typically have more willpower than me.
I have seen people be unfair when hangry. And expecting judges to be fundamentally different people then rest of us is irrational. That job attracts people who like to have power. That is about what is special about them.
Judges have made it through law school and typically are selected for their ability to make fair decisions according to the law. I lacked the willpower to survive a year of undergrad, but I have no trouble holding back my temper when others' wellbeing is on the line. It stands to reason that either I am a different kind of person than the rest of you, or that the average judge is better at this than me.
I don't know that judges are fundamentally power-seeking (I expect someone who has a judges credentials and wants power would rather be a prosecutor), but assuming so, I'm not sure I should expect someone who seeks power to be more beholden to their emotions than average.
It’s also seems like it’d be commonsense for judges to know that and have meal and snack strategies to account for it. To determine what the real effect is then you need to establish it empirically and they haven’t.
If judgery is like any other field, they're overbooked and burnt out. I imagine it's like medicine. In other words, there is no room for a meal strategy.
Once you are an expert at any topic, you can figure many outcomes from very small amounts of information. That does not mean the outcome was biased or flawed etc.
Is it difficult to believe that a judge would be able to predict at least some outcomes from a single paragraph?
All it takes is to predict above random chance to have a statistically significant effect.
This reads almost verbatim as my conception of bias.
"Once you've abandoned principled, wholistic reasoning for your pet heuristics, you can figure out many outcomes from the inputs to your pet heuristics".
But in this case the testing is given different amounts of time.
The thing you think works gets less testing time than the thing you aren't so sure works.
Thus the thing you think works is more likely to pass, just because you are subjecting it to less tests.
Your bias (whether you think the thing works) is having an effect on the outcome.
Good testing, as with good judging should involve 0 preconceptions.
Yes it could be that the judge has a good eye for how long a topic will take, but leaving less time for the facts to come out, necessarily means the facts are less likely to come out.
Sorry to say, but I think you have put the wagon ahead of the horse.
Being able to predict an outcome has nothing to do with the process of deriving the outcome, and it has nothing to do with bias.
There may be many signals that correlate with an outcome. If you are out of shape and move ploddingly, you probably can't do a triple axel even though you believe you can. Is that prediction biased?
Bias would be if you could demonstrate that predicting the outcome has influenced their decision-making.
Your point is that there would be some things an expert would see, and then judge to be highly improbable.
While this point can inform our thinking, it is the lesser point that exists within a bigger issue:
First - This is a court of law, not the court of public opinion, or processes. There is an expectation of exactness, and of a fair, unbiased and attentive hearing of the facts.
Second- While I don’t know what a triple axel is, I have seen people who seem utterly out of shape dance with grace, and people who appear to be incredibly fit, turn out to be frauds.
In this scenario, I would say that the assumption that each case is similar, is not valid.
I will grant that it becomes human to behave this way though.
Developing that sort of expertise requires getting clear and—ideally—timely feedback on the quality of your decisions. Do parole judges get that?
I'm sure they get feedback on whether their decisions are consistent with what other judges would have decided, but that's qualitatively different from feedback on whether those decisions were fair or right. If anything, that is the kind of feedback that would propagate biases in the system! You would end up becoming an expert on making consistent, defensible decisions, even if those decisions were consistently and defensibly bad.
> Is it difficult to believe that a judge would be able to predict at least some outcomes from a single paragraph?
It's difficult to believe that the decision should be made quickly. When making decisions about the trajectory of someone's life, they should be made with care. Having a system that removes snap judgements and bias is important, and I would say that even a quick-scan and re-ordering of documents is a form of bias.
In general I agree with your attitude - however my sympathy is limited by my “lived experience” of interacting with those in the criminal justice system. Most of them belong right where they are - regardless of what the brain dead politico class has embraced.
1) Most people charged with a crime these day are usually guilty of it. The public has made it pretty clear they would rather see no one charged if the crime is a legit whodunit -- no one desires to see innocent people arrested and charged just to give the impression of safety. Prosecutors, and downwards (police) feel pressure to only file and prosecute cases that are legitimately believed to be of truth regarding the suspect. That said, you are innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the state. Even if we can mostly feel that you did it, if it can not be put before a jury to return a guilty verdict, you are not to face penalty in our society (mostly; ignore OJ's civil case... that's a pretty rare exception to be honest).
2) I understand why judges seem automatic -- but remember this: in a criminal trial (minus your option to do a bench trial), you are found guilty or not-guilty by a jury of your (location) peers. The judge has his own opinion, but he is restricted based on the guilty/not-guilty finding of the jury, and sometimes state/federal sentencing guidelines. Of course there are prick judges who SENTENCEMAXXXX people just to be an asshole - no one with an ounce of common sense will endorse that. In general, I trust and expect judges to apply their experience of both law and life in determining what is the appropriate penalty after someone is found guilty.
Well my experience is a solicitor pleading guilty on my behalf which isn't generally allowed in this jurisdiction.
So no trial, no presumption of innocence, and absolutely no interest in anything other that processing 'criminals' as quickly as possible.
So your comment
"Most people charged with a crime these day are usually guilty of it"
May well be true. the issue is that it is self reinforcing, most people are guilty, so the system treats you as probably guilty, so the people that aren't guilty don't get the protections theyre supposed to have the right to.
As someone said in an article about detecting bullshit science research, if such an effect were true, every day at noon tragedies and accidents would happen all over the world, and we would live in a different world where work close to lunch was illegal and so on, just like we forbid work under alcohol.
Lead was added to gasoline since the 1920s. The first clinical studies that showed it was toxic were in 1969. The first country to ban it completely was Japan in 1986 and the last was Algeria in 2021. For more than a decade, people could have made a similar claim to yours, "if such an effect were true, we would have banned it already". And they would have been wrong, the effect was true.
> The first clinical studies that showed it was toxic were in 1969.
We knew it was dangerous within a year of it being introduced, even if we didn't publish widespread clinical studies before the 60s. Its creator, Thomas Midgley Jr, was diagnosed with lead poisoning multiple times.
> Warnings about the toxicity of tetraethyllead came to Midgley from various sources. The letter of Erich Krause concerning its toxic effects, quoted in part in part 1,2 written on November 30, 1922, to George Calingaert (then at M.I.T.) was forwarded to Midgley in December 1922 by W. G. Whitman, Assistant Director of the M.I.T. Research Laboratory of Applied Chemistry. However, despite his own health problems and these early warnings, Midgley did not appear to be overly concerned about the health issues associated with the handling and use of tetraethyllead.
> In the years that followed, research was heavily funded by the lead industry; in 1943, Randolph Byers found children with lead poisoning had behavior problems, but the Lead Industries Association threatened him with a lawsuit and the research ended.
> Lead was added to gasoline since the 1920s...the last was Algeria in 2021.
Right, so we figure these things out within 100 years or so at most. We've been dealing with hunger for millions of years, you'd expect there to be something in the Torah about how no man shall act as a judge before he's had lunch.
Until when do they sit in judgment? ? Rav Sheshet said: Until mealtime, noon. Rav Ḥama said: What is the verse that alludes to this? As it is written: “Woe to you, land that your king is a lad and your ministers eat in the morning. Happy are you, land that your king is free and your ministers eat on time in strength and not in drunkenness”
> and accidents would happen all over the world, and we would live in a different world where work close to lunch was illegal and so on,
Not at all, as a society ee are really good at ignoring terrible consequences of our decisions and carrying on regardless, sometimes for no reason other than habit.
We force children to go to school early despite mountains of evidence that this harms their learning, we give antibiotics to healthy livestock despite absolute proof that this causes antibiotic resistance, you can probably add more to this list, I.e climate change, etc.
Nassim Taleb has a theory that the primary purpose of school is not to educate children, but to keep them from roaming the streets and causing mayhem. Learning is a side-effect.
Also, to acclimatize them to the structure of working where we spend massive amounts of our time carrying out arbitrary tasks with arbitrary deadlines. The core work skill for many jobs is our ability to both believe and co-create the shared fiction that they are important enough to even spend time on in the first place.
I don't think 6-8-year-olds would cause a lot of mayhem. But parents need to go to work and kids aren't trusted to supervise themselves at that age (analogous to kindergarten before it). For teenagers the mayhem thing is also doubtful because school usually ends around 1-2 pm, while parents only finish working around 5 pm, so there's plenty of time to roam in the afternoon (at least outside present day America where parents drive kids around until late teenage years - which really is rather the exception in the broader context of school tradition).
I did not know that. But I was told primary school is not only to teach the basics, but also (and even more important) to start forming social individuals to form a society. That is one of the reasons primary school is (typically) compulsory, presencial, and the based in groups that grow together for some years. Also is part of the primary school teaching respect for the Flag, the history and heros, anthem, etc. also patriotic holidays, like independence day, imply special works for the kids, actuation and what not. They have to learn to live their country.
> to start forming social individuals to form a society.
That's the explicit purpose of barnehage (from one to five years old) in Scandinavia, specifically Norway. That's preschool or kindergarten in other countries but without any academic instruction at all. Every child is guaranteed a place and the cost is strictly limited.
> Also is part of the primary school teaching respect for the Flag, the history and heros, anthem, etc. also patriotic holidays, like independence day,
We don't have that. I suppose that Constitution Day (17th May) has some slight similarity with American Independence Day. The barnehage children will walk in the procession waving flags but it's not really the same.
Of course part of the reason that hero worship isn't inculcated in barnehage in Norway is probably because every Norwegian has an unshakeable belief in the greatness of Norwegians (especially in regard to skiing championships against the Swedes) so it is unnecessary.
In my experience the Scandinavian countries fly flags for any reason or no reason at all. Birthday? Flags. Christmas? Flags. Wedding? Anniversary? Flags. Friend visiting from out of town? Flags. They are use for any celebration.
That's all true, but let's not forget the actual reason for children starting school very early in the morning is basically so that their parents can drop them at school and go to work.
It's funny that no one's understanding your claim.
The effect size claimed for the original paper, as well as how obvious and localised the effect is, would make it incredibly obvious to observe. Thus if this effect were true, we would have to explain how we've all missed it.
This is not comparable to long-term effects, or ones otherwise difficult to notice, etc. We notice the effects of alcohol immediately, and here, it's claimed being hungry-for-lunch is at least as large, if not larger, effect.
This seems obvious nonsense. If any other statistical model can explain the same effect, it's vastly more likely, since it benefits from not making a miracle out of our missing the lethality of mild lunchtime hunger.
I live in Germany and a lot of companies still have free beer on tap and the managers will pressure you to drink during work hours
From the article you posted:
> Therefore, in most companies and public administration, it is solely at the discretion of employers as to what extent they tolerate alcohol consumption by their employees. The employer has the right to impose sanctions on the employee who refuses to take an alcohol test, which may result in loss of employment or suspension [53]. In Germany, regional and cultural particularities can be decisive; for example, in Lower and Upper Bavaria and in Franconia it is still common for many companies’ employees to have a glass of beer during the lunch break.
I work for a German-owned industry corporation (in a nearby EU country) and would get fired for having a friday beer with colleagues if not at company-arranged “friday bar” or some other event :)
No national law requires this strictness, but +95% of companies in my country have simular rules in place.
My German colleagues are mostly serious when saying “Kein Bier vor vier” (i.e. no beers before 16:00/work ends).
My wife is in mechanical engineering. I am in academia. I think in my job there would be more pressure against it, but that's mainly because it's younger people. In my wife job, the CEO goes around encouraging people to drink while working, especially on Fridays.
> My German colleagues are mostly serious when saying “Kein Bier vor vier” (i.e. no beers before 16:00/work ends).
4pm doesn't mean that work ends then though. Many people continue working after that beer.
If this means factories full of machinery that can be very dangerous if safety rules aren't followed, it probably makes sense that they'd have stricter rules than say a small webdev shop.
I think there is a 20/80 split between blue collar and white collar workers here at the HQ in Westphalia. So mostly a cubicle-farm of sorts.
I asked around and my german colleagues tell me it is a Bavarian thing with the beers.
> 4pm doesn't mean that work ends then though. Many people continue working after that beer.
We are also offered a beer a few times at official Company events etc. and most can have a beer and do proper work after. It is also legal to drive after a single normal-sized beer.
If you assume what MPs do is all that important. They mostly just do what their told by their party leadership anyway, and the rest of the time they are making decisions about things they know nothing about.
Someone did a survey of how much MPs knew about economics and the results were dire, and they is something good many have been taught (all those PPE degrees!) and that is really important to them.
Not having MPs doesn't lead to a dictorship, dial it back.
Not having MPs means that we don't have MPs,(hooray) and the opportunity to replace them with something alittle more equitable to the society they exist in, free of the influences of lobbying, cronyism, greed, power and rampant, unchecked hypocrisy.
Personally, I want a new class of people, styled after monks that spend 20 years being schooled in social structure, land husbandry, city welfare etc. These are then cloistered for the term that they serve and can only be approached by the permanent Civil Service when required.
The local consituants are served by local councillers, (probably all of whom are lib dem as they are unconsionably successful at local issues).
Anyway down with parlimentary democracy, and have a nice Sunday.
I would favour just appointing people by random ballot (not from a particular group). That would be far more representative of the population. It would solve issues like having fair representation for women of ethnic minorities etc.
There was a party in Australia that wanted to elect MPs (or whatever equivalent) whose only job would be to delegate decisions to a panel of independent experts in each field (I think the panel would be elected as well, don't remember the details, but it would be something like doctors deciding what public health decisions should be, for example), and IIRC sometimes decisions would be made by having polls where every member of the party could vote if the policy was not related to some field in particular. I think that didn't get anywhere though, unfortunately, as the idea sounds pretty damn superior to having a bunch of know-nothing but charismatic people who decide on all sorts of things pushed by lobbyists whose interest not always reflect that of the general population (or very rarely do so).
The problem with that most important decisions cover multiple fields. For example public health decisions are not purely medical. They have financial and economic implications. They are sometimes tied to issues of personal liberty. They operative in a framework of laws. They are often organisational and management decisions (e.g. where to build a hospital, how many ambulances to buy).
In general important decisions require many different skills.
This will also lead to the problem raised earlier of experts making decisions that suit their own interests (and biases).
This approach does appeal to me in some ways, one of the things that excites me most about the current government is seeing people with experience being appointed to position in cabinet.
I’m pretty sure you’re not serious in suggesting a technocrat class who are sheltered from the real world, but let’s assume you weren’t. The end result of this is likely to be stagnation because you lack the introduction of new people and new views into positions of power. I’d also add that in a functional government we already have that class of people who are purely focused on implementation and looking at options in the Civil Service. Rarely is a cabinet minister themselves really coming up with ideas, they’re waving their arms and describing vibes to the Civil Service, who then go and work how they’re meant to achieve it.
Unfortunately for the last 14 years we’ve had a government asking them to do ever more unhinged things, with predictable results.
What you're describing is a form of technocracy (rule by a class of dedicated scholars). It has been tried occasionally, but it is essentially the same thing as any non-Democratic rule: the technocrats do what is best for themselves, and using their knowledge and expertise, are able to invent convincing reasons on why that is supposedly best for the country as well.
This is especially true when the "science" they are supposed to study is economics, a notorious pseudo-science whose real purpose is to act as justificationa for policies desired by whoever is paying the research.
There is no way to ensure that rulers align with the people unless the people have a say in who rules. Scientific authorities have a long history of being negative even for their own fields ("physics advances one funeral at a time"), and that doesn't change when they are given power over an entire country.
With the current MPs, why do you think they do not do what's best for themselves, or for whoever is sponsoring their political campaigns and lobbying them constantly? The question is not whether a technocracy would be perfect, it's whether it would be better than that, and your argument has zero explanatory power to answer that.
Because they still need to win an election, so at least some of them need to do at least a few things that makes them popular enough. A technocrat only needs to make sure people aren't so desperate as to rise up.
This is really simple political theory, not some advanced concepts.
So you simply want MPs who have a minimum standard of education? The fact that they are kept isolated for the duration of their term? That wouldn't prevent them from being bribed and lobbied in their election campaigns.
Interesting to think that in hunger evolution chose to increase the noise (irrationality) in our system, and that actually worked to make us more likely to survive (*in aggregate, statistically).
I guess the pithy aphorism: fortune favors the brave. Make a decision, even in limited information, you'll be better off than if you didn't.
Strange confirmation of the nature of reality from the human/experiment computation that is evolution. Hahaha! :)
Is it confirmed that this effect is “intentional” by evolution? Couldn’t this also just be a side effect of how the brain works which wasn’t negative enough to evolve a defense against? Maybe the neurons becoming less reliable when having too little sugar for example?
Sure, but hard to argue there's not some advantage as well, even to traits that operate unadaptively in some situations, so evolution likely played a role.
More important that evolutionary argument is we all know how increasing the noise unfurls the decision tree into more possibilities, which seems undeniably adaptive by fanning out the search space.
You have to consdier the en masse effect, not just the obvious, "in this 1 instance it was bad." Overall, a mode where you switch to a wider search strategy (like turning up the heat in an LLM) can be what you need...to procreate (eventually) hahaha! :)
It might be a similar stressor like performing a task with a full bladder. there's definitely something that negatively impacts your cognition and you'll be more likely to refuse complexity to 'get it over with' whatever that means for the ruling of a court.
Sure, the question was if this is actually beneficial from an evolutionary perspective. Was this an advantage for survival and humans evolved to be this way or is this an accidental side effect of the working mechanism of the brain which just stayed because it wasn’t a large enough disadvantage to evolve against?
A mechanism that causes people to become more decisive (but much less contemplative) when short on food seems like it would be beneficial. It stops analysis paralysis, and makes someone try something rather than just accept their fate.
Essentially the point I was making. There's truth to that pithy aphorism: decide in limited information and act. Making a decision and an action is better than not. And the feedback from the world you get for that choice will be the balm to your previous lack of information. Iterate to grow knowledge, and keep moving to progress.
Question I was considering was whether evolution had a goal in this? I guess it did. Nervous-system-noise helps explore that state space and extreme states (hunger, sleep deprivation) lower inhibition, leading to greater exploration of the decision space. Biochemical/genetic mediators of more efficient (in aggregate across all humans ever) search algorithms.
Those despotic genes! Programming us, the nerve of them! :) Hahaha :)
I think the question is whether bodily discomfort affects cognition, probaly yes, and how large is that effect size. Could that effect be enough to change a ruling in a significant way? I personally dont think so. In my experience with driving, cognitive distraction has a much higher effect than most bodily discomfort.
I think it's domain dependent the effect of body on cognition, but definitely vastly affects. Could be, no disparagement, a present paucity of self-awareness regarding the correlation of these states.
In terms of whether that's large enough for a ruling, I guess it'd depend on all the pertinent factors: the rule, the judge, the context, the level and nature of discomfort, and the definition of significant. Within that multid space, I think, contrary to you, there's ample chance to produce large effects.
Mitigating this is perhaps how similar many judges routines are. What might really be strong support would be some control, and putting some jurists on more extreme diets/routines hahaah! :) Of course, only in mock trials tho, as otherwise that would be unethical.
That's a good factor too but would have to investigate how much this correlates with the findings of the original article. Plus unrelated studies that find moderate performance increase to people who restrict bowel movements before test (anal retentive hahaha! :).
Do study support that it operates as blinker on complexity or even impacts cognition, besides the judgements or increased "irrationality"? As pointed out increased irrationality, can be a boon for lateral search space exploration, and could be argued to lead discovery of better judgements. Similarly, increased focus on core tenets by carving off complexity could also lead to better performance.
Also, in legal cases, with potential for politicization of key issues, what's deemed irrational may simply be heretical from one ideology. Unsure the specifics in this case, so would have to consider such factors, too.
Works in games too, if you're in a worse situation and almost guaranteed to lose with standard strategies, might as well try high-risk/high-reward strategies instead (since you need enough "reward" to overcome the difference and the risk doesn't matter).
Thanks for pointing that out. I think that will be useful for me too, even without the finance background, that I guess you back your understand up with.
If you're hungry, surely the evolutionarily 'rational' action is to prioritise eating. That seems to be what's happening, certainly for those lucky enough to be able to control who eats and when.
Maybe. But judges are also disciplined and anally retentive. Gratification delayers. I can imagine many of them just want to get it done, then eat. May even be a cerebral-overemphasis leading to lack of body awareness. So for them, the rational action would be complete work, then eat (if time haha :)).
But I guess you meant more generally in evolution. Yes, but the question is how does the body prioritize eating in situations where food is not available but hunger is? If food is not obvious, it must be sought. Increase the noise in the search algorithm, would seem to maximize state space exploration in food quest, which seems something evolution would then pass on.
It's easy to propose a different explanation: brain consumes a lot of energy, and in hunger it makes sense to run it in a sort of simplified economode to avoid risk of shutting down completely. It doesn't mean that going into less rational state increases survivability vs more rational one, it does however when compared to lying down unconscious because sugar is too low to support full throttle run
I didn't totally get your last phrase on the comparison (I think you mean we evolved less rational low power state on low food to conserve energy for when we need it more, because low power but operational is more survivable than passing out due to hunger - did I get you right?), but this is a good counter. How could we test between them? It's possible it's /both, but without a good experiment hard to say. Hypothesis 1: brain on low sugar, increases variance in problem solving. Hypothesis 2: brain on low sugar low power mode prioritizes simpler solutions (I think I got you?). Your point is a good counter to mine, but I think the qualifier is that in low food situation, a less rational state is a more effective search algorithm to find key resources, than a more rational one (with definition of rational tempered by what is achievable passing as rational for most humans in aggregate). But maybe we are getting too complex for a hn comment when we might not be running the experiemnt oursleves hahaha :)
You can’t glean insight about evolution from this. Hunger doesn’t follow a steady rate of making you irrational or whatever else. People who are used to it can go 18 hours without eating just fine. In fact they might report that it makes them sharper. While other people get “hangry” if they don’t eat every four hours.
This is a fair point about different conditioning to hunger, which to some extent, we are all capable of attaining. Those responses you mention do seem like evolutionary adaptations themselves, which may nevertheless vary across individuals. Such as ketolysis making people sharper mentally, which I've certainly experienced.
Your point about that making it hard to tell what evolution may have wanted from this, given such variety, is fair. However it's not necessarily a point against an evolutionary trend here, just because responses are varied. There could be adaptiveness, in aggregate (as it always is in these considerations I think), to having some people express different responses.
I think this stressor is ripe for gleaning insight about evolution, tho. Because of how critical food is. And therefore how much effective ways to overcome food loss would have been critical for evolution to hack at. It's likely evolution has laid out a series of algorithms for us, depending on what stage of hunger we are at - each developed to be the most effective balance at that stage between resource usage, and search success.
In that sense the different modes you describe "hangry" and "hunglightened" (and possibly some more in between) are most likely evolutionarily designed "behavior algorithms" that each maximize adaptiveness for finding food and surviving at each stage of progression towards starvation.
I really think you should think more about it, because how could it be any other way? Food is so crucial, evo is obviously going to get right into how we react to its absence.
Of course if your point is more about difficulty in concluding from the paucity of data in this discussion, I'm all with you! We are just hypothesising now, which is perfectly valid. And, for me at least, insightful. I feel truly sorry for you, that you didn't find it that! :)
I'd like to end with this weird little side-note counter: another pithy aphorism about food and performance: never make any big decision on an empty stomach! Hahaha! :) Many have said that.
I’m not sure this study does anything to show that hunger increases irrationality. If anything, the authors point to rational, predictive decision-making right before meal time.
Do you see something that indicates increased irrationality?
Honestly I was responding to the title which suggests that "irrational hungry judge" is a thing. If it is not, I revise all my ideas hahaah! :)
But then again, we must question a study that questions a proceeding one and so on. I'm not getting into the weeds of it to do that right now, just speculatin :)
What did you see about it that counters the "irrational hungry judge effect"?
Got ya. There are two studies here. The first study, referenced in the title, is from years ago that purported to show that judges were harsher just before mealtime. The second study was done to re-visit the first, and found that there are confounding variables that made the original findings look stronger than they otherwise would have been.
The article is about the second study, which found that the original study missed these confounding variables.
“Danziger etal. rely crucially on the assumption that the order of the cases is random and, thus, exogenous to the decision-making process. This assumption has been forcefully challenged. For a short and very critical reply in PNAS, Keren Weinshall-Margel and John Shapard analyzed the data of the original study—as well as other self-collected data—and conducted additional interviews with the court personnel involved.Footnote 51 They point out that the order of the cases is not random: The panel tries to deal with all cases from one prison before a break, before then moving to the cases of the next prison after a break. Most importantly, though, requests from prisoners who are not represented by a lawyer are typically dealt with at the end of each session. So, prisoners without legal representation are less likely to receive a favorable decision compared to those with legal representation.Footnote 52 Additionally, lawyers often represent several inmates and decide on the order in which the cases are presented—it might well be possible that they start with the strongest cases”
[1] Chatziathanasiou, K., 2022. Beware the lure of narratives:“hungry judges” should not motivate the use of “artificial intelligence” in law. German Law Journal, 23(4), pp.452-464.