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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

#181
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no single experience of thinking yet I can say everyone has thoughts. Thoughts about what? _That_ is what varies. The body is similar, it speaks through signals to the brain. The only way to know your body’s voice is by doing. Dismiss your notion that individual experience has no value.

Bodies are quite different, different metabolic rate, different fitness, different in many ways. I can go an entire day without eating to little ill effect. I knows people who must eat three times a day and if they miss one meal get super cranky. It’s not dismissing it to point out data vs datum or that people’s bodies vary wildly.

Exactly right. I can go 24 hours without eating with no ill effects, and while I am hungry, I'm not ravenous, and I can certainly keep going just fine. I have a neighbor and friend who can't get through a morning of moderate labor without a snack - not because he can't stand the hunger, but because he simply runs out of energy. He is genuinely ravenous after a 12 hour fast.

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

#182

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…

best option is to just assume every psychology/social sciences article is bullshit, pretty much all of the most famous studies have failed to replicate. And many of those studies were used to justify trillions of dollars in federal spending over the past few decades

> And many of those studies were used to justify trillions of dollars in federal spending over the past few decades

Can you clarify where you beleive trillions were spent as a result of bogus social research?

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

#183

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…

Data is also overrated. Data is often highly convoluted, with multiple causes in one correlation. We want to understand the way things work, and correlation can give us hints. But so can individual experience. But "data" is often used as the truth. So yeah individual experience here is valid. Hunger is not as simple as every hour you eat you get more hungry, and that's valid to deduct from personal experience.

Data is indeed often opaque, but it's the only way you can make a rigorous argument that something is characteristic of the natural world. To borrow a phrase, data driven conclusion on a hypothesis are the worst form of conclusion, except for all the other methods you can name.

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

#184

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…

Ramadan fasts aren't really much as far as fasts go. They last only during daylight hours and you can stuff yourself silly in the mean time.

I just attended an Iftar a while back. The amount of gluttonous eating, wastage of food and lack of hygiene in cleaning up the area after the Iftar was astounding.

It's of course no surprise then that most Muslim cities see the maximum amount of food wastage, and most Muslims the maximum weight gains during the month of Ramadan. Not to mention how overworking the ladies of the house in preparing the Iftar , while the men laze around, seems to be a common theme transcending across cultures. And I say these as a Muslim.

In my opinion, water fasts make more sense than silly daylight fasting. My stomach seems to agree with that too - Ramadan always seems to exacerbate my auto-immune condition.

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

#185

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…

Don't Ramadan fasters only fast for a few hours a day (e.g. during daylight?) Do they ever reach the point where they've skipped enough meals to no longer be hungry? TBQH skipping meals during the day and eating one big meal after dark doesn't seem terribly unlike the lifestyle of many nerdy bachelors. I'm sure I've done that many times myself without even thinking about it.

[deleted]

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

#186
post #17

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…

I’ve gone on multiple 3-5 day fasts and disagree (or at least haven’t gotten to this point). My hunger seems to stabilize at very hungry after about two days.

But the SMELL of food!

I think my normal sense of smell is not great, but when hungry... It's just glorious.

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

#187
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all anecdotes are equal but some anecdotes are more equal /s

I don't even know what point you're trying to make, but regardless, I think the point the poster you're responding to is making is that there are two places in the scientific method where anecdotes comes into the play: observation and hypothesis. These are the seeds for follow-up inquiry and the basis for the scientific method. Moreover, it's completely reasonable to be skeptical of the methodology of a study, especi…

In that case, I would avoid commenting on something you don't understand.

'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' - George Orwell

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

#188
post #98

This new paper finds 10% higher likelihood to acquit per hour of fasting. That’s huge. Imagine you’re in the criminal’s shoes. The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates. They real story here is that a just system would have no relationship between judge hunger and acquittal rate, and both studies show human judges fall far short of that mark.

The new paper found that practicing muslim judges were more lenient on a major religious holiday involving fasting. I wish the study looked at whether the results generalized to other religious holidays without fasting.

> The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.

Yes, but the opposite one, and it's been completely discredited. What this article calls out as a clever gotcha is in fact obvious to any subject matter expert: case assignment isn't random. People without lawyers were scheduled for right before lunch, and that's what correlated with worse outcomes.

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

#189
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the replies you'll see the huge variety of responses people have to this, which is absolutely fascinating. I think this might actually be different for different people.

It’s definitely different for different people. It will vary by age, health status, body composition, and fitness level as well. I’m kind of perplexed at all of these anecdotes from people who tried fasting and assume their experience to be definitive for everyone.

Sure there might be different experiences, but that's what I'm critizising from the article, since it says it IS the same experience for everyone (hunger increases the longer the fast). I do agree I should probably have added an extra "for some/many" or two on my comment though.

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

#190
post #17

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…

I’ve gone on multiple 3-5 day fasts and disagree (or at least haven’t gotten to this point). My hunger seems to stabilize at very hungry after about two days.

It does depend on different people, but yeah peak hunger is around 2-5 days in (again depending on multiple things) so doing multiple 3-5 day fasts just seems torture to me when you could've done a longer one and not be so hungry in the process. I have done three 10+ days fasts (trying not to get stuffed just before) and usually at 2-3 days is the peak. Days 4-5 are also hard, and you might get a punctual "hunger pang" much later on depending on what's going on (e.g. walk by a pizzeria), but overall nothing at all compared to day 2-3.

This is based on the experiences that I've seen (as my comment before) derived from reading 10s-100s of people's experiences about fasting on Reddit groups over the years. Not scientific, but also not taken from thin air.

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