Comment by encoderer
2 years ago
This day and age if a social/psych “paper” defies common sense it should just be ignored. Pushing these “findings” as science should be considered malpractice.
2 years ago
This day and age if a social/psych “paper” defies common sense it should just be ignored. Pushing these “findings” as science should be considered malpractice.
Perhaps, but the original paper (harsher sentences before lunch) does not defy "common sense." Common sense tells people that when they are hungry, they are irritable. Many people are familiar with the concept of feeling "hangry."
See https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-being-hangry-really-a-...
Sure that’s why it’s plausible but it defies common sense to assume that judges are not managing their own hunger to the extent that it’s affecting their job performance.
Why wouldn’t surgeons or pilots have the same problem?
The paper is sensational because of the implications it has for the social justice causes certain people are obsessed about.
>to assume that judges are not managing their own hunger to the extent that it’s affecting their job performance.
>Why wouldn’t surgeons or pilots have the same problem?
Firstly, this is such an incredibly naive view of the world, especially in regards to the type of professionals that proliferate the legal system.
Past that, surgeons and pilots DO have these issues. The airline industry has religious standards and procedures for how pilots prepare and "rate" themselves before a flight mainly due to how visible egregious pilot errors typically are; in the case of surgeons the insurance company does it best to sweep things under the rug.
Pilots are supposed to be well rested, but then you have incidents like Northwest Airlines Flight 188[1], and pilots admitting they fall asleep more than you would imagine[2].
It's hard to gather data on surgeon-specific incidents since the medical industry does its very best to sweep things under the rug, but it's estimated that 400,000 deaths occur unnecessarily while in the hospital due to medical malpractice [3].
None of these systems or data are made available in the legal system, because it's all "scratch my back" etc. So no, you really shouldn't trust judges (or anyone else in the legal system) since there are no systems of accountability.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24296544
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_188#...
[3]: https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/fulltext/2013/...
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Parole judges are not accountable for their work in the same way surgeons or pilots are. If a judge makes a bad call on a parole hearing, a person stays in prison and it's effectively impossible to challenge the decision. Parole hearings are extremely subjective, so it's vanishingly unlikely that a judge will face any repercussions for making a ruling which people would consider unfair.
This means that there's no pressure for them to manage the influence of factors like hunger on their decision.
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I don't think this is totally unreasonable, nor unique to judges.
For example, the developed world rolled out school lunch programs as a way to improve academic performance, which at the time of implementation was controversial.
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Who says surgeons or pilots don't have the same problem?
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It's unusual for people to experience mentally distracting hunger pangs before lunch on a regular basis, because people tend to eat larger dinners and/or breakfasts to get them to lunch without significant discomfort. Debilitating hunger is an unusual experience that comes from skipping meals for some unusual reason, a break in somebody's normal routine.
Similarly, I had a manager who used to try to push stuff in right at the end of pre-lunch meetings when everyone just wanted to get out of there.
I think that’s a little far — mainly the point where science itself is often a rejection of things that were previously called “common sense”.
But this can also be expanded. There are no fields of science where a singular paper should be widely accepted before replication and additional studies.
Social sciences have a noticeable issue where they lend themselves to dramatic headlines and over extrapolation I suspect that this is largely an aspect of them being much more understandable and ultimately relatable than some of the more niche fields where papers address nearly unapproachable topics
> There are no fields of science where a singular paper should be widely accepted before replication and additional studies.
Certainly within mathematics, this isn't a requirement, and I think the same holds within some branches of theoretical physics, as well as computing science.
I suppose there's a decent argument to be made that these things aren't "Science". Certainly, mathematics uses something different from the empirical method to progress knowledge. But there isn't really a good alternative word.
Hungry people are cranky, and cranky people are less fair to others, are both only common sense.
Why does this paper defy common sense?
That the effect is so large should draw a lot of suspicion. Real psychological effects almost never have that magnitude.
The claim that heavily vetted, highly educated judges are reliably just throwing out punishments willy-nilly because they want a snack is also quite suspect, especially as there is no reason to expect this to only work in one direction- why wouldn't they be just as willing to let people off easy when that gets them to lunch just as quickly?
> just throwing out punishments willy-nilly because they want a snack
That's not the claim.
https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/science-behind-be...
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Blood sugar affects mood. A person's decision-making can be affected by mood. Judges make decisions. Seems pretty common sense to me.
It may not change guilty/not-guilty verdicts but it's easy to believe that perhaps it would affect milder differences.
> Seems pretty common sense to me.
It’s also seems like it’d be commonsense for judges to know that and have meal and snack strategies to account for it. To determine what the real effect is then you need to establish it empirically and they haven’t.
If judgery is like any other field, they're overbooked and burnt out. I imagine it's like medicine. In other words, there is no room for a meal strategy.
Judging yesterday's findings with today's information is never fair.
Should Galileo be punished for malpractice because he thought tides were related to the sun?