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Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

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Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#161

Interesting bias on the bias: the author of this article seems not to have experienced a prolonged fast themselves, otherwise they'd know this is not true at all: > "longer fasts – and thus, presumably, greater hunger" As anyone who has fasted for probably any reason can tell you, the longer the fast the less hungry you are overall AFTER an initial peak. Meaning, miss a meal and you are hungry, miss two and you becom…

Yeah, as somebody who has experimented with fasting, I think it's a huge mistake to think that Ramadan fasters would respond like hungry non-fasters. Fasting is a common religious practice because it is both a challenge and a discipline. To get good at fasting, you have to work to unlearn habits of instant gratification and learn to consciously lean against the urgings of the body. A fasting practice develops real sk…

I dunno about getting better, but yeah the dropoff would be less pronounced.

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#162

So many comments here claiming to understand the effect of fasting on humans generally through personal experience. Come on, people - your experience is a datum, it's not data, and your entirely subjective conclusions drawn from that datum are not analysis. People's response to fasting varies widely. Hunger is both a physiological and a psychological phenomenon - and like any phenomenon with a psychological component…

I don't know who is labeling their observations as "analysis" other than you. It's reasonable to question a study's methodology, especially when the judges in question were fasting as a part of Ramadan. And including one's own experience as an addendum is completely reasonable too.

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some incontrovertible evidence of the effectiveness of the Superman position. https://youtu.be/99K4gpJZWdw

So... I do think the superman position is effective, but I don't think a single video without any auditing is considered "incontrovertible evidence"

I think you missed the joke of the video.

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#164
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as somebody who has experimented with fasting, I think it's a huge mistake to think that Ramadan fasters would respond like hungry non-fasters. Fasting is a common religious practice because it is both a challenge and a discipline. To get good at fasting, you have to work to unlearn habits of instant gratification and learn to consciously lean against the urgings of the body. A fasting practice develops real sk…

I dunno about getting better , but yeah the dropoff would be less pronounced.

My theory for why it might go the other way: to get good at fasting, I had to get better at noticing and leaning against feelings that might throw off my judgement. Hunger was the feeling at issue, but I think it's at least partly transferable to other feelings.

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#165
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t feel hunger. If you adapt to a 18:6 or even 20:4 schedule, you don’t feel hunger.

I ate once a day for years. You can easily ignore hunger, but your body/brain isn’t going to preform as well. It’s like being mildly dehydrated or sleep deprived, yes you can still function but no it’s not optimal.

I tried multiple times 1-4 days around 25 - 23 years ago and

1. I didn't feel hunger and I don't think everyone needs to feel it

2. I focused a lot better,

I would probably do it a lot of I lived alone.

In practice I often end up with some kind of intermittent fasting: skip meals between 1700 and 1200 (lunch next day) and even then I happily minimize my lunch.

It helps me.

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some incontrovertible evidence of the effectiveness of the Superman position. https://youtu.be/99K4gpJZWdw

I heard this is so effective, they had to ban it to keep the sport safe and fair.

If everyone can do it, isnt it fair?

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#167
Only tangentially related, but I can’t seem to access archive.ph (to view this article) when using Cloudflare DNS. Wikipedia says their dispute ended in May 2022 and that it should work again. But that seems to be based purely on a community forum post from what I can tell.

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#168

I'm a daily faster for the past 20 years, so I can attest (anecdotally) to the benefits of working while hungry. Once you adapt, after a couple weeks, instead of being irritable when hungry, you mind feels clear and focused. After all, despite the trappings of modern society, we are a predator species. Hunger gets shit done. When I was a kid, I recall the teachers always telling us to have a good meal before a test.…

> instead of being irritable when hungry, you mind feels clear and focused. From my experience, it's a delusion. The focus is there for some while, but the actual abilities decline very fast without you even realizing it because of this supposed clearness. It might be even that the clearness comes exactly because of your mind limiting itself to a shorter attention and horizon, removing all the complex and complicated…

> From my experience, it's a delusion.

You say this, implying that you got some objective outside measurement to confirm you were being deluded - what was it?

Re: Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true

#169

I always wondered about the original study whether they controlled for the fact that courts control their case calendars. I can't count the number of times I've had a client's case shuffled to the back of the line because the judge didn't want to deal with it (or wanted to make me or the client wait longer). Also, Muslim countries commonly offer amnesty or executive clemency at the Eid to people who have been convict…

No, the original study didn’t—-and that was its fatal flaw. They assumed that cases were randomly ordered and this equally likely to get the same sentence. However, they were actually done in blocks, each containing prisoners from one prison. Judges tried to finish a block before adjourning. Within each block, cases were ordered by attorney and those without an attorney were last. For many reasons, people representin…

> They assumed that cases were randomly

IMO making this assumption is inexcusable, and I find it hard to believe it was "accidently overlooked". Asking a single judge for comments on the study before publishing it would have been enough.

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