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Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

bbc.com

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Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#61

Post by mcguire »

chrisweekly wrote: post #34
Houshalter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. It seems like the issue is with slowmo is it looks like you have more time to decide and react, then you actually do. In real time it's more clear that an action was reactive, and that there was no time to make a calculated decision.

Confounding the issue: evidence that some reactions happen before the actor is consciously aware that there is a decision to be made (let alone actually making a choice and deliberately initiating a response). It goes beyond recoiling your hand from a hot stove before you're aware of the pain. Tests w/ next-gen helicopter gunship HUD trigger controls showed pilots opening fire microseconds _before_ their neural pathw…

Long answer to a short post:

Assuming those studies are correct,...

Someone please correct me if I mangle the results in question; I know they've shown up here on HN before.

The ones I recall involve a participant in an fMRI machine watching a screen. The instructions are, when something occurs on the screen, decide whether or not to push a button, push the button (or don't) and then report when the conscious decision was made. The studies determined that with the assistance of the fMRI, they could predict the button push before the conscious decision:

1. Screen flash.

2. fMRI prediction.

3. Conscious decision.

4. Button push.

The usual interpretation is that consciousness and free will are illusions; the decision is made without conscious participation.

But I think there's a problem with that interpretation: specifically that its alternative is a strawman: dualism.

My argument: How, exactly, do you expect a conscious decision to be made before the neural machinery goes through whatever convolutions are necessary to make that decision?

Here's my alternative interpretation of the experiment:

1. Screen flash.

2. "Conscious" decision (although the awareness of the decision, as a conscious event itself, does not bubble up until later).

3. fMRI prediction.

4. Awareness (and reporting) of conscious decision.

5. Button push.

Consciousness and free will are not epiphenomena, but the event in the movie in your head has to appear after actual decision. The fMRI prediction is simply seeing the mechanism in progress.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#62

Post by mcguire »

alanwatts wrote: post #41
rubidium wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"? Your materialistic assumptions are a wonderful way to do science, but a terrible way to be human or govern.

>Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"? Maybe that we are influenced far more by uncontrollable environmental factors than by our "freely* willed" decisions. >Free will: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; When you are hungry, you need to eat. But if you don't have any money and take an apple from th…

The "crime by necessity" argument is well known and well accepted in moral philosophy (even if not always in jurisprudence). The real question is unnecessary crimes: You choose to steal cars and ride around. Can we convince you not to do that (and other, worse, things), or are you simply broken?

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#63

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #26

I think what slow motion does is reveal the full violence of an action. Some commenters have mentioned that slow-motion tackles and punches look much worse than they do in real life. However, in real life, I think we underestimate the violence. Medical research into things like CTE has revealed that there is actually brain damage occurring during those plays. Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the aver…

" I think the average person underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition fails us for small objects traveling that fast"

My opinion is that this is caused more by glamorization/trivialization of violence (in all its forms) by the US movie industry.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#64

Post by mcguire »

imaginenore wrote: post #3

But the article doesn't explain why it calls it "distortion", and not "clarification".

Let's say that A punches B, causing B to fall backwards onto a hard surface, resulting in death.

If A intended to kill B, that's murder.

If A did not intend to kill B, it's manslaughter, a lesser crime with lesser punishment.

You are sitting on the jury, with the prosecution flashing between two frames of a video of the punch and arguing that A altered the trajectory of the punch to cause B to fall onto the hard surface.

Two frames is, say, 33 milliseconds, or somewhere between 2cm and 4m (I admit, I was surprised by that speed) of neural pathway, taking the lowest and highest nerve conduction velocities I can find. How many intentions and motor changes can you perform in 33ms?

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#65

Post by beachy »

chrisseaton wrote: post #59
Confusion wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the slow motion would actually help the jury come to the correct conclusion. For the wrong reason. The whole point of the article is that it helps them come to the wrong conclusion in a number of cases and your argument is that they must be wrong, because they came to the 'correct', in your opinion, solution in this specific case. That kind of reasoning is awful and immoral.

> come to the wrong conclusion How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order to say that though? You can say that slow motion makes people convict more, or convict less, or whatever, but unless you have an oracle to tell you which was the correct verdict in each case, and we don't, this data tells us nothing. Maybe people are systematically underestimating violence when they don't get to see it in slow mot…

Good point.

But in sports, slow motion is often enlightening. After a tackle, we see a soccer player collapse to the ground, writhing in agony, clutching their shin. But then slow mo shows that the other player never even made contact with them, its a classic "dive". In that case, there's no doubt that the slow mo version is more informative.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#66

Post by ChuckMcM »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #63
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #26

I think what slow motion does is reveal the full violence of an action. Some commenters have mentioned that slow-motion tackles and punches look much worse than they do in real life. However, in real life, I think we underestimate the violence. Medical research into things like CTE has revealed that there is actually brain damage occurring during those plays. Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the aver…

" I think the average person underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition fails us for small objects traveling that fast" My opinion is that this is caused more by glamorization/trivialization of violence (in all its forms) by the US movie industry.

I tend to agree with this. One of the things which struck me about gang violence in LA is that if you have even one gunshot wound you really are out of action. Contrast that with pretty much every depiction on screen or television where people continue fighting.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#67

Post by Consultant32452 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #66
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I think the average person underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition fails us for small objects traveling that fast" My opinion is that this is caused more by glamorization/trivialization of violence (in all its forms) by the US movie industry.

I tend to agree with this. One of the things which struck me about gang violence in LA is that if you have even one gunshot wound you really are out of action. Contrast that with pretty much every depiction on screen or television where people continue fighting.

There's two equal and opposite misrepresentations of reality. If you're not either the main bad/good guy then a single gun shot or punch will take you out completely. Often people fly backwards from a gun shot, which is just crazy. Conversely, if you are the main hero/villain, you can probably get shot 10 times and be beaten with a lead pipe across the head quite a few times and still be going along just fine.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#68

Post by Confusion »

chrisseaton wrote: post #59
Confusion wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the slow motion would actually help the jury come to the correct conclusion. For the wrong reason. The whole point of the article is that it helps them come to the wrong conclusion in a number of cases and your argument is that they must be wrong, because they came to the 'correct', in your opinion, solution in this specific case. That kind of reasoning is awful and immoral.

> come to the wrong conclusion How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order to say that though? You can say that slow motion makes people convict more, or convict less, or whatever, but unless you have an oracle to tell you which was the correct verdict in each case, and we don't, this data tells us nothing. Maybe people are systematically underestimating violence when they don't get to see it in slow mot…

  How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order 
  to say that though?
For the same reason that other things that have unconscious influences are expressly forbidden. A verdict should be based on the facts of the case, not on emotions incited in the jurors. That's why we forbid irrelevant anecdotes that demonstrate what a bad person an accused is. It would lead to the wrong verdict.

After it's been pointed out, the point of the article is entirely obvious: if we see someone take a minute before committing murder, then we will think them of having had sufficient time to think. If it takes 5 seconds, he obviously didn't have time to consider. So if we stretch 5 seconds into a minute, a jury will conclude there was rational deliberation where there was only instinctive response.

What is entirely non-obvious is supposing that brain of the average juror could 'just' compensate for his impressions based on the knowledge that it was shown in slow motion. We know they aren't capable of that with many, many other cognitive weaknesses. Sources: Influence, Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational, ...

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#69

Post by jsprogrammer »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #53
entropy_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How violent an action truly is is irrelevant when deciding whether a murder was premeditated(first degree) or not(second degree). If I swing a hammer at a wall and someone happens to be passing by, I hit them in the face and kill them, it's going to look very gruesome in slow motion. That doesn't mean I intended to kill the person. If a jury is more likely to think I had time to notice the person passing by because o…

It doesn't even have to be a killing. The slow motion makes it look like actions were deliberate instead of spontaneous. So it makes it look like a planned action. If the defendant deliberately did it, they must be pretty terrible, right? Guilty of a worse crime.

How often does spontaneous violence occur? If it looks like actions were deliberate and planned, wouldn't you need some other reasoning to believe that they weren't?

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#70

Post by DanBC »

pc86 wrote: post #37
DanBC wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a just law that should be enforced?

I don't think the speed of CCTV footage will affect any juror's opinion of the justness of a given law.

Afandian wasn't talking about cctv, but was talking about juries.
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