Comment by galacticpony | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galacticpony | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"What later changed my mind was the realization that our society is a human one, and that humanity has a huge spectrum of experience. A group of physicists may not understand something about the world that others do. Furthermore, any select group of citizens will differ in belief somewhat from the interests of society at large."

Why the hell would that realization change your mind? For society at large, that "huge spectrum" includes copious amounts of superstition and ignorance, which (one would hope) should be significantly lower in those people subjected to scientific scrutiny on a regular basis. You're gambling on something being in that spectrum that will positively offset this negative, but you don't know (or mention) what it is.

"But do I want educated and principled jurors on any jury that judges me, ones with enough fortitude to mis-trial a jury or nullify a law if that's what is required? Damn straight."

So you actually want a different kind of elite to be jurors, but not just physicists. You don't actually want citizens as a whole.

"If the notion that your citizen-peers might not be informed troubles you, take time to help others form informed opinions."

Have you ever tried that? What makes you believe that your citizen-peers are even interested in spending their valuable time to listen to someone else trying to change their opinion? Lots of people are quite fond of their uninformed opinions.

As an example for the first point: Fewer-than-average professional scientists have known the desperation of poverty nor the devastation wrought by broken homes, disability, or crimes of passion. Scientists may be somewhat better prepared to find facts in a case, but may have diminished sensitivity to both the motivation for a crime and for the impact of a verdict.

An educated, reasoning, and principled jury pool should not be an exception. It should be the expectation. We should expect it of our society as a whole and our school system in particular.

Taking the time to share interesting and useful insights to people at a moment when they're interested in exchanging ideas can be very effective.

True but its' a jury of your peers. If you are an impoverished individual who only took to crime to feed your family, then a jury of your peers would be people from your neighborhood who are similarly poor.

So if you want to commit crime, you'd move to a neighborhood with a lot of criminals who will be likely to give you a pass?

Specializing the "peer" criteria seems to run big risks of having people judged by a group of peers who may all disagree with certain laws.

That was the idea behind 'jury of your peers'.

If you're a starving peasant, who poaches on the King's land, do you want the jury to be filled with other starving peasants who poach for survival or aristocrats who cannot understand why you have robbed them of a chance to hunt pheasant next feast day?

If you're a peasant, your peers would be the other peasants. If you're an aristocrat, your peers would also be. IMO it doesn't make sense to have random laypersons decide highly technical cases over what are many times pedantic disputes. They won't understand and they don't care, but they're in charge of deciding, and their decisions can have widespread repercussions.

I agree that having a jury of 10 random software developers deciding Oracle vs Google would more than a little biased (APIs being copyrightable), but I think that it would largely be a good thing -- professionals who actually know about this stuff would be making the decisions. Luckily for everyone, they were able to dumb it down enough for the jury to understand, but not all cases are so lucky. I just chose this example because many people on here are likely to remember this case, even though it doesn't really illustrate my point that random citizens deciding technical cases is IMO not the best solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com