Comment by DataDive
2 years ago
Once you are an expert at any topic, you can figure many outcomes from very small amounts of information. That does not mean the outcome was biased or flawed etc.
Is it difficult to believe that a judge would be able to predict at least some outcomes from a single paragraph?
All it takes is to predict above random chance to have a statistically significant effect.
This reads almost verbatim as my conception of bias.
"Once you've abandoned principled, wholistic reasoning for your pet heuristics, you can figure out many outcomes from the inputs to your pet heuristics".
Do you mean something different by "bias"?
If I am testing something I believe works and is ready, prior to testing, I will tell you it is almost ready.
Then if we test it and it fails acceptance testing, I might learn there is a problem that takes some time to fix.
I did not arrive at a biased decision; I had priors that I used to make an estimation, which turned out to misleading.
The judge is exactly this case. They guess the time it will take to rule; it doesn’t have to mean their eventual ruling is biased.
But in this case the testing is given different amounts of time.
The thing you think works gets less testing time than the thing you aren't so sure works.
Thus the thing you think works is more likely to pass, just because you are subjecting it to less tests.
Your bias (whether you think the thing works) is having an effect on the outcome.
Good testing, as with good judging should involve 0 preconceptions.
Yes it could be that the judge has a good eye for how long a topic will take, but leaving less time for the facts to come out, necessarily means the facts are less likely to come out.
Sorry to say, but I think you have put the wagon ahead of the horse.
Being able to predict an outcome has nothing to do with the process of deriving the outcome, and it has nothing to do with bias.
There may be many signals that correlate with an outcome. If you are out of shape and move ploddingly, you probably can't do a triple axel even though you believe you can. Is that prediction biased?
Bias would be if you could demonstrate that predicting the outcome has influenced their decision-making.
Yes?
To expand on the point using your analogy -
Your point is that there would be some things an expert would see, and then judge to be highly improbable.
While this point can inform our thinking, it is the lesser point that exists within a bigger issue:
First - This is a court of law, not the court of public opinion, or processes. There is an expectation of exactness, and of a fair, unbiased and attentive hearing of the facts.
Second- While I don’t know what a triple axel is, I have seen people who seem utterly out of shape dance with grace, and people who appear to be incredibly fit, turn out to be frauds.
In this scenario, I would say that the assumption that each case is similar, is not valid.
I will grant that it becomes human to behave this way though.
Developing that sort of expertise requires getting clear and—ideally—timely feedback on the quality of your decisions. Do parole judges get that?
I'm sure they get feedback on whether their decisions are consistent with what other judges would have decided, but that's qualitatively different from feedback on whether those decisions were fair or right. If anything, that is the kind of feedback that would propagate biases in the system! You would end up becoming an expert on making consistent, defensible decisions, even if those decisions were consistently and defensibly bad.
> Developing that sort of expertise requires getting clear and—ideally—timely feedback on the quality of your decisions. Do parole judges get that?
The expertise in question is predicting, from a short summary of the case, what's going to happen in the trial itself.
So yes, every judge gets clear and timely feedback on prediction quality.
> Is it difficult to believe that a judge would be able to predict at least some outcomes from a single paragraph?
It's difficult to believe that the decision should be made quickly. When making decisions about the trajectory of someone's life, they should be made with care. Having a system that removes snap judgements and bias is important, and I would say that even a quick-scan and re-ordering of documents is a form of bias.
In general I agree with your attitude - however my sympathy is limited by my “lived experience” of interacting with those in the criminal justice system. Most of them belong right where they are - regardless of what the brain dead politico class has embraced.
So how far do you want to take that. If the judges lived experience of suspects is that they're normally guilty....
Having interacted with the criminal justice system, that's the view they seem to take.
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