Drinking While Jurying
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Additionally limiting discussions of the case with other jurors while drinking seems like a good idea. The Ouija board seems highly inappropriate, since I believe jurors are instructed to not use outside research or experiences in rendering a verdict.
Outside of that these are adults, and the should not lose all agency because they've been picked to serve on a jury.
I think they're also supposed to be paying attention to the proceedings.
Being on a substance isn't in and of itself a good marker of whether someone is capable of holding their position.
Arguably lack of sleep might be as bad or worse as being drunk. But culturally we don't moralize about the former.
Addiction is a really psychological issue though.
I was up for jury duty recently, and one of the potential jury members flat out said that she couldn't be unbiased in the trial, since she'd been assaulted by a black man not too long before, and the defendant in the case was black as well. The judge released her back to the jury pool.
I would assume that stating that you have PTSD (and having documentation to that effect) and explaining how it would prevent you from being able to serve would be a pretty good reason to not serve. (No idea about claiming alcoholism, and I'd wager that most people wouldn't want to announce to fifty people that they have a drinking problem.)
That's starting to change. My country has nearly eliminated drink-driving, so driving while tired has become the big target. Medicine is starting to take the issue of sleep deprivation amongst practitioners seriously, with a lot of very frank discussions about the impacts of shift work and on-call rotas.
The one that I really love is how being unintelligent is often considered to be a failing, but only to a point. When someone does something stupid and there's a bad consequence, it's often met with "that's what they deserve, what an idiot!" But there's a sharp cutoff (officially at an IQ of 69 or below) where it ceases to be a moral failing and becomes a handicap worthy of sympathy.
Outside research? Do you genuinely believe they consulted the the spirit world?
At most this this would surface their collective belief in the guilt of the accused. An unconventional means to arrive at a consensus, but no more outside research than each of them writing a verdict on a piece of paper.
That being said, I still find it absurd that independent research from valid sources isn't allowed.
It's not allowed, among many reasons, because validity is a disputable fact, and outside research by jurors prevents the party that would be adversely affected by taking the source as valid from contesting the validity of the source in open court, defeating the entire purpose of having a public trial, a reviewable trial record, the right to counsel, and, well, the whole of legal process.
The only conclusion is that the current legal system is so broken that the only reasonable judgment is not guilty.
1. Divination is real, and they are consulting whatever they called. Could be the victim. Could be someone/something else. Could be a deity. Long and short, unless you're practiced in this realm, you can't know. And there's no empirical proof.
2. It's a link to their subconscious. Nothing mysterious. But it's a way they can interrogate their own ideas about a situation without personally owning said ideas. Think of this akin to a couch and therapist.
3. Someone is playing with them and controlling a weak-willed person. In other words, they're choosing what's being divined in order to exert influence over someone else. This is not only a bad situation, it's likely illegal.
The tough part, is when divination is integral to someones' religion. What's to say that your reading verses with a bible is any less than me relying on the tarot? If you're allowed your religious expression, why not I? And speaking of such, isn't it common still to "swear to tell the truth, the only truth, so help you god"? My first question to that is, "Which God?"
1 would appear protected, 2 isn't, and 3 looks illegal. Hard call.
I disagree, because...
> there's no empirical proof.
We have been trying very hard for centuries to contact any kind of afterlife, spirits or gods, and failed. Even if we cannot perfectly rule it out in principal we can rule out anything we have conceived and tested thus far.
That and Ouija boards are made by Parker Bros [1]. Unless you believe that a group of people with a reliable channel to the afterlife chose to keep making Scrabble and Monopoly games with their super powers, then we really should just discount it as an obvious money grab, because it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Parker_Brothers_games
I'd suppose you haven't tried spending time with people who do practice and do this, do you?
> Even if we cannot perfectly rule it out in principal we can rule out anything we have conceived and tested thus far.
Simply put, you can't. "Absence of proof" does not equal "proof of absence".
> That and Ouija boards are made by Parker Bros [1]. Unless you believe that a group of people with a reliable channel to the afterlife chose to keep making Scrabble and Monopoly games with their super powers, then we really should just discount it as an obvious money grab, because it is.
Not at all. The Ouigi boards are just a tool. There's usually nothing in them that would be manifest to a specific entity or emotion. Not even that, but they are made by machine, so there would be very likely no emotion in contact with them.
Since you seem unlearned in this area, divination can use any sort of tools. Tarot, pendulum, sand, tea, coffee grounds, bones, compass (luao-pen), ruler, entrails, fire, water.. Any of these can be learned and used. Or some are versed in doing divination using no instruments at all - although even in the occult and esoteric areas, this is considered very difficult.
And then it comes full circle with religion. These are religious practices. If you're thinking of Miss Cleo, you're further from the truth. Those are advertisement services ; whereas what I talk of are honestly held beliefs. And when understood from the occult mindset, do give valid answers.
It's one area where I work in regularly, is divination. Sometimes, it doesn't work. In that case, I say as such. Usually, it does.
No, honestly, it doesn't.
Indeed. I know well about the confirmation bias. I've considered it early on as a likely candidate. I've ruled it out by too many extremely improbable events, many which include other people unawares about anything that I do.
(In 'unrelated' computer science, do you consider a zero knowledge proof to be 0% likely even after 100 iterations? How many iterations would you need as proof?)
> Note that you say the times it doesn't work, you dismiss as being due to circumstances beyond control; when it does seem to work, due to random chance, you seize on that as proof, confirming that there is a hidden occult mechanism at work.
You misunderstand. I do not classify them as failures, because they are not. I can tell when a divination won't work. Call it a little message in the back of my mind. Something. Doesn't happen often.
> Even a really low success rate -- maybe only 5-10% of your guesses are correct -- is still enough to generate the illusion, particularly if you are able to dismiss the failures as unimportant, so the successes stick out more.
Id say much higher than that. But you've already dismissed this as some self-inflicted mental health issue. If you've read any of my meager posting history, you'd know that I'm trying to blend both this mysticism and science, and bring it so all may use and benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_...
Document you processes and methods and let others duplicate them. If you have a process that works it could change the world.
Until you have something I can duplicate I will disregard it with active hostile because this kind of mental has killed too many.
Honestly held beliefs can be wrong. In this case divination of the sorts you have described fly in the face of empirical testing. Please stop presuming my level of knowledge, I am fairly certain I have more than none in this regard and would not have commented otherwise.
> Usually, it does.
Then publish a paper and pick up your Nobel prize. Or start a business and guarantee results. Or do one of a million other things people do with technologies that work do and go be successful.
Except you can't because the ranks of fortune tellers, prophets, mystics and yogis is filled with charlatans. Some honest but wrong and some liars deceiving, but it doesn't matter both are wrong or their practices would have spread as far as success took other ideas like modern agriculture, engineering or math.
You simply cannot get knowledge without working for it. These "revealed" sources don't stand up to experimentation because they are quite literally made up, and experimentation is how we work for it.
Instead of having a pointless arguments whether Ouija board can talk to dead people (see other comments), much easier is to assume it does and apply existing rules to rule it out.
I think there is no doubt that it can affect outcome.
Outside research? Do you genuinely believe they consulted the spirit world?
At most this this would surface their collective belief in the guilt of the accused. An unconventional means to arrive at a consensus, but no more outside research than each of them writing a verdict on a piece of paper.
The justice system is quite sensitive to things like this, and frankly I'm surprised that jurors are ever allowed to drink.
Eh... don't practice any empathy. Practice rationality and common sense.
Seriously? At the very least I hope you're only narrowly applying this to the jury system, but even then...
And yes, this applies solely to the situation I gave.
What is the depth that makes it sound good?
For example, someone gets caught with some crumbs of weed. You could make the empathetic argument for fining that person rather than jail time because, "They're not hurting anyone. It's just a little weed.", so on and so forth. Or you could make the logical/rational argument that the punishment and what stems from it (housing a person in jail, the economic aspects of ruining this person's life for what really is a victimless crime) does not fit the crime.
Mundane corollary: "You can make a case for anything."
I think his definition of empathy is narrower than what many people think of when they think of empathy, so in some ways his argument struck me as a battle against a straw man. But TBH I haven't read the whole book (just coverage of it, and some of his related work).
There's a counterpoint here [2].
1: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/paul-bloom-makes-a-weir...
2: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/good-thinking/201310/wh...
As I personally believe that a legislature is a juicy target for sociopaths seeking power and impunity, and therefore likely to demonstrate less empathy than the general population, I'd rather leave the cold rationality for writing the laws, and the empathy for interpreting them in a just manner.
Practice rationality in determining the facts of the case. Practice empathy in deciding whether to convict or acquit, and in the sentencing for the convicted.
Cold rationality is how Jean Valjean gets 20 years in the galleys for stealing bread.
The legislature is supposed to be burdened with this. Empathy for the people living with us is the reason why we all left the wild and came together in the first place.
> Practice rationality in determining the facts of the case. Practice empathy in deciding whether to convict or acquit, and in the sentencing for the convicted.
I think I disagree. Once we've come to the facts of the case, with the proper (empathetic) laws, it just becomes a matter of execution (no pun intended).
>Cold rationality is how Jean Valjean gets 20 years in the galleys for stealing bread.
Don't think what you're saying is falling on deaf ears. I definitely get it. I'm a black man in the US. I know what strict mandatory minimums and culturally deaf laws do to people. However, I think that if we fix the laws, the rest shakes out.
Empathy for the people living with us is the reason why we all left the wild
That's why most laws have a wide band of potential punishments.
> I'd rather leave the cold rationality for writing the laws, and the empathy for interpreting them in a just manner.
It's typically a single person -- the judge -- who will select the punishment from the band of permissible punishments. So now we're taking a theoretical group decision made across a wide swath of society, and laying it down on a single person... This is already done to a large extent, except that the judge has minimum and maximum punishments to work between.
> Practice empathy in deciding whether to convict or acquit...
This has huge implications on rule-of-law. I'll just link to another thread where I argued against a very similar viewpoint:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11503910#11504703
> There's a myriad of reasons why this is a bad thing for society. For example, white supremacy groups not being arrested or charged with crimes because all the cops and DAs and judges are also white supremacists. If it's truly within their world-view that a lynching is not wrong, then according to your theory it's their responsibility to not arrest or charge for it. This viewpoint is directly opposed to the rule of law.
(I removed the first sentence from my quote, since I was properly corrected on it down-thread.)
Given that USA jails a hell lot of people (per capita) compared to any developed nation and large number of them are about drug offenses or victimless crimes I would rather have a linient jurors than harsh ones.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread"
I find it interesting that all cases resulted in a conviction.
I'd assume that convictions were more often appealed than findings of innocence, but I have absolutely nothing more than blind faith to assume that, so corrections most welcome.
I get the feel a whole article could be done on "Regina v. Young (Court of Appeal of England and Wales, 1994)". I somehow think the drinking was just the beginning of a series of problems.
I'm eagerly awaiting the horror movie version.
I just want to say that it's more part of life then one assumes. If someone is on Prozac (hey is that okay then?) or someone has a hangover? Or someone who hasn't slept much? Or someone who is on a fast?
There is no normality. The norms of society is the goal, or the barometer, but basically we're all just trying to get by.
But the reality isn't that rosy. The sample size is far too small, and worst of all, juries amplify biases in the system. It's like inverting a matrix, great for a math proof but you never do that in practice.
Just take this writeup on a case in Britain:
http://www.cyclinguk.org/blog/duncandollimore/mason-verdict
She just straight rammed into the cyclist from behind. No braking, didn't even stop. But a jury of very likely overwhelmingly drivers have no problem to acquit when there is even the slightest hint of "hey, this could be something that might happen to me!".
"Summary: This case may well be the benchmark for jury bacchanalia."
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