31–40 of 41 posts
Interesting, especially when you consider that programmers will often complain when the subject of jury duty is brought up of being summoned for it only to be excused during voir dire when their occupation is discovered. Apparently attorneys prefer jurors they can easily emotionally manipulate. I suppose this is what you get when you systematically exclude anyone with an analytical bent and an IQ above 100 from jury…
It's like, "Hey, we're short on surgeons, can we introduce surgeon duty? Everyone can cut meat right?".
Are unattractive people more likely to commit crimes?
Irrelevant. The relevant question is, are unattractive people on trial more likely to be guilty?
Attractive people, on average, think less and are more sensitive to emotion including conscience. This makes them more likely to be good and less likely to be guilty of crime. Thinking draws resources away from the body and thus indirectly affects things like movement, grace and growth. Hence the medieval law of combat: a good knight could not lose against a bad knight. Also the Emperor Palpatine's skin problems, ugl…
Topics like virtue, nobility, the body/soul have been misunderstood by modern science; these problems can't be solved with empirical evidence + deductive logic. The ancients thought about these things in a radically different way from us because they accepted that higher-level values are a matter of interpretation to be distinguished from lower-level factual (scientific) things.
Jurors go through a lot in performing what is a pretty thankless task, and I would imagine that courts and legislatures will think long and hard before adopting any system by which they add the further burden of making jurors undergo psychological tests as a condition of being chosen. Such a system, if used on a jury pool in any systematic way, would prove incredibly burdensome because, as anyone who has served knows…
I think it's fair to assess who is able to perform that task with minimum bias etc.
Then again does that make it truly representative? Should we test people for racist bias in the trial of a black person?
It's an interesting dilema.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Irrelevant. The relevant question is, are unattractive people on trial more likely to be guilty?
It's not irrelevant. The fact that unattractive people are more likely to be found guilty doesn't mean anything without knowing whether or not they are more likely to have committed the crime.
You want to compare P(found guilty|unattractive,guilty) to P(found guilty|guilty) to see the same while taking into account the desirable bias against guilty people, which is of course more informative but has both components unknown.
These arguments tend to crop up whenever someone notices dependence between effects desired to be independent. The argument is then about where the the dependence lies. The topic is always politically sensitive.
I favor the grandparent's position, since it's the simpler one (and actually tractable). That doesn't mean it's right, and if someone's sufficiently convinced otherwise, they can attempt to estimate the guilt of various convicted (perhaps by waiting 50 years and looking for pardons). The results would have to be extraordinarily convincing, however, and quite possibly they would be harmful in that they would establish a genuine bias against unattractive people, which was the original problem.
So this is a situation where the grandparent's position is better whether or not it's right.
Jurors are also more likely to convict men than women. And give them harsher sentences for the same crimes.