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Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

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Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#31

Post by maxerickson »

kldaace wrote: post #22

I'm going to wait for more replication before I adjust my priors too much on this. It seems plausible prima facie, but I'm suspicious of their methodology. From the article (I don't have access to the working paper), it sounds like they might have been trying to test the significance of a lot of different variables, and this might just be the one that popped up.

If you have "priors" that you can adjust, that suggests you think you are an explicit Bayesian reasoner.

It's incoherent to take on that identity and then ignore new information. You should just conjure probabilities from this incident that will have an acceptably low impact on your priors.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#32

Post by dogma1138 »

mangeletti wrote: post #29
dogma1138 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you formalize it without it being exploitable? And what about other things, how about a father who killed the man who raped his daughter? Or a woman who hired some one to kill her abusive partner? How would you estimate damage? it's easy to do with itemised goods but how do you estimate the damage of being abused, raped, how do you put a value on someone's life? These are things we haven't even managed to f…

Certainly not with Ethereum :) Of course what I just said is kind of comical at first glance, but in all honesty, and to absolutely agree with and add to your point, the exploits related to Ethereum are great examples of how something seemingly infallible that is set in stone can easily turn out to be an Achilles' heel, which then, just like in the case of Ethereum, requires human intervention, bringing it back full…

>Also, to add to this, as @hackuser mentions[1], the system, even if set perfectly in stone, will still be based on somebody's biases.

Yes but these are going to be "fixed" biases, where a judge's ones are not.

A judge can be argued with, it can be presented with the case in a different manner, it can be given precedents which might be relevant for this case because of it's unique circumstances.

Overall a system that has a fixed set of "biases" is still "impartial" it's just utterly static, it would have it's penal code and some large list of if this then that's in regards to how to execute it's judgment.

So while it might have if (crime.type = theft && crime.subject = food && crime.offender = parent.single) { return show.sympathy(); } you won't be able to change that by arguing for or against it and that's what our legal system is based on.

This is why we have defense and prosecution rather than simply running the crime through some flow chart to figure out if you are guilty and if so what the punishment should be.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#33

Post by rayiner »

pc86 wrote: post #15
dogma1138 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want "impartial" judgements this is how martial law works, the legal system has to take circumstances into account unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. You can't teach computers empathy and empathy is part of our legal system for better or for worse.

I'm pretty opposed to having computers issuing legal judgments for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that I spend a pretty large part of my day surrounded by government-written and government-sponsored software. But if we were going to go that route eventually, perhaps a system where a judge is provided the "impartial" judgment as additional information or where the decisions are reviewed by a judge…

> But if we were going to go that route eventually, perhaps a system where a judge is provided the "impartial" judgment as additional information or where the decisions are reviewed by a judge before sentencing and could be lessened/cancelled but not increased?

That is basically what we do in the federal system. Judges have to calculate sentences using a mechanical, point-based system called the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. The judge has discretion to depart from the calculated sentence, but in practice the guideline sentence has a powerful anchoring effect.

And it's terrible. Turns out that its much easier to formulate a system with inhumanely long sentences when you're a committee developing an abstract point-scoring system than when you're an individual judge faced with deciding the fate of a living, breathing human in front of you.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#34

Post by kldaace »

maxerickson wrote: post #31
kldaace wrote: post #22

I'm going to wait for more replication before I adjust my priors too much on this. It seems plausible prima facie, but I'm suspicious of their methodology. From the article (I don't have access to the working paper), it sounds like they might have been trying to test the significance of a lot of different variables, and this might just be the one that popped up.

If you have "priors" that you can adjust, that suggests you think you are an explicit Bayesian reasoner. It's incoherent to take on that identity and then ignore new information. You should just conjure probabilities from this incident that will have an acceptably low impact on your priors.

I'm not ignoring new information, I'm just saying my priors are strong enough and the evidence is weak enough that this won't make me change my beliefs "too much."

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#35

Post by dogma1138 »

laurent123456 wrote: post #12
dogma1138 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want "impartial" judgements this is how martial law works, the legal system has to take circumstances into account unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. You can't teach computers empathy and empathy is part of our legal system for better or for worse.

That's why I wrote "simple cases" and circumstances could be taken into account as long as the software has access to the person's criminal record, family situation, job, etc. Empathy in the end comes from knowing about the person's background and, assuming it's possible to provide this information to a software program, it could make a decision as good, and maybe better, than a judge (if anything, that will allow th…

We can't get a machine to recommend a movie accurately atm you want it to case judgement? And there are solutions for less attractive people getting harsher sentences, I think the jury sitting with their backs to the courtroom isn't a bad idea, or not even being in the same room at all.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#36

Post by nxzero »

Once had the very surreal experience while in court waiting to litigate a case to object to a higher court's jurisdiction over a case; my motion was granted, and the case was sent to the lower court.

While waiting for the above motion to be heard for over an hour, the person directly behind me was calling how the judge would respond to various matters that required the judge's opinion. Having nothing to do, since mobile device weren't allowed, I listened to the predictions made and the outcome. The predictions were wrong most of the time.

As I stated earlier, my motion to send the complaint back to the lower court was granted and it turns out that the person behind me was the judge for the lower court.

Yes, the lower court was predictably unable to predict the higher court's judgements the majority of the time.

To me, this if it holds true statistically across the legal system in a blind test of judges -- it is a major issue; normally, judges don't want to publicly rule against another judge unless it's obvious the other judge was wrong.

Strange end to my experience was that I won in the lower court and the other party failed to appeal the judgement in a timely manner; meaning my motion to dismiss the appeal was granted based on it being filed one day late by the opposing party by the higher court. Always wondered what would have happened if the higher court had heard the case and issued a judgement; lucky that never happened.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#38

Post by hackuser »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #25
hackuser wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're not likely to eliminate these factors any time soon. I disagree. Knowing about them can make a big difference, and training can teach people to avoid these errors.

We can mitigate them to some extent with awareness and training. With research seeming to show subconscious biases remarkably difficult to remove, I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in society and the workplace despite significant legislative effort.

> I sincerely doubt they can be eliminated. We haven't managed it in society and the workplace despite significant legislative effort.

Right. Who made the standard (for anything!) 100% success?

But society and the workplace have greatly improved, through social effort and also the resulting legislative one. Just 60 years ago, women were only allowed to be teachers and nurses; not long before that, they needed their husband's permission to get a job and were locked out of higher education for the most part. Now most college graduates are women and most law school graduates are women. 65 years ago the U.S. had segregation! Now a black man is President, the black middle-class has exploded, etc. Look also at attitudes toward race, sexual orientation, religion - look at surveys from the 50s and 60s (and later).

In fact, I think the pessimism in the above comment is completely backward. The track record is of amazing revolutions in human affairs.

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#39

Post by hobbyjogger »

brianlweiner wrote: post #8
jdminhbg wrote: post #2

A lot of the discussion around this seems to focus on football, but that's just the easily-measurable proxy for a bad mood the authors found. Presumably an argument with a spouse, a poker game loss, a parking ticket, or a bad interaction with a coffee clerk would have the same effect. It's disheartening that justice is so capricious, but setting sentences through the legislature seems even more fraught. I don't have…

Indeed other research has indicated that lots of factors can affect a judge's decisions. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full A panel of judges would be one approach. Perhaps judges could be made aware of what the average penalty is for similar cases and that would give them an easier anchor for their decision.

The Danziger study assumed that the order in which the parolees appeared was random, which turned out not to be the case:

"Danziger et al. (1) concluded that meal breaks taken by Israeli parole boards influence the boards’ decisions. This conclusion depends on the order of cases being random or at least exogenous to the timing of meal breaks. . . [But] case ordering is not random ...the board tries to complete all cases from one prison before it takes a break and to start with another prison after the break. Within each session, unrepresented prisoners usually go last and are less likely to be granted parole than prisoners with attorneys...

[O]ur data indicate a success rate of 67% for prisoners with counsel and 39% for unrepresented prisoners. Excluding deferrals in the authors' data yields very similar success rates, beginning at about 75% and dropping to 42% at the end of a session. Thus, we strongly suspect that the pattern of declining success rates is a result of hearing represented prisoners first and unrepresented prisoners last."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198355/

Re: Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

#40

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

dogma1138 wrote: post #5
laurent123456 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe simple cases could some day be automatically handled by a computer, in which case the judgement will be completely impartial. Initially they could be trained in parallel to real judges to see if the judgements more or less match and to detect errors.

You don't want "impartial" judgements this is how martial law works, the legal system has to take circumstances into account unless you want to the days where we used to send people to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. You can't teach computers empathy and empathy is part of our legal system for better or for worse.

What do you mean "used to".
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