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

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 skills.

It's perfectly plausible to me that Ramadan-observing judges would better at judging while hungry while non-fasters would get worse. So this article's author is doing exactly what he criticizes: assuming his naive model is the only explanation.

My hunger seems to stabilize at very hungry after about two days.

I have been working remotely for 15 years, that’s how I like it. But the two years of pandemic with forceful social distancing were really hard.

In Middle Eastern countries road rage incidents and reckless driving skyrocket during Ramadan. And many countries acknowledge this by all but shutting down after 1500 in the afternoon.

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.

They assumed that cases were randomly ordered and this equally likely to get the same sentence. However, they were actually done in blocks, each containing prisoners from one prison. Judges tried to finish a block before adjourning. Within each block, cases were ordered by attorney and those without an attorney were last.

For many reasons, people representing themselves tend to fare more poorly. Boom, there’s the effect!

PNAS published a commentary pointing this out but naturally it’s been cited 80x less: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1110910108

Another obvious tell that there was a problem is that ordinal rank (1st, 2nd, etc) was associated with severity but wall time was not (once you also include rank). The mechanism presumably isn’t linked to the number of cases heard (swinging the gavel isn’t *that energetically expensive!) but the passage of time since the meal. Thus, you’d expect the exact opposite effect.

Why? Wouldn't that undermine the meaning of Eid?

From my experience, it's a delusion. The focus is there for some while, but the actual abilities decline very fast without you even realizing it because of this supposed clearness. It might be even that the clearness comes exactly because of your mind limiting itself to a shorter attention and horizon, removing all the complex and complicated things. It's basically being in the zone, but the zone itself is so limited that you might not do good work if you need to have a "big zone". Though, it depends on your type of work if this can be beneficial. But as a knowledge worker, I consider it harmful for my work.

> When I was a kid, I recall the teachers always telling us to have a good meal before a test. Even then I felt that was silly, as a big lunch always gave me brain fog.

Depend on the type of food, size of meal and how long before the test you were eating.

It's not even that I feel particularly hungry (unless I ate less than usual yesterday), peak of hunger is usually somewhere before I go asleep, I just feel a bit lethargic.

I only get "brain fog" some time after eating a lot of sweet or otherwise easily accessible sugars

> Anyway, I'm surprised this article (study?) didn't take into account "meeting fatigue". I know that for myself, after an hour in a meeting, I just want to get out so I can recharge. I know nothing productive will happen until I do so.

I swear I feel way more drained after a day of meetings than a day of brain work...

Insufficient direction from the teachers there, I think. A good meal in this context doesn't mean a big meal, usually. You'd want to eat like you were planning to do some strenuous exercise shortly afterward. If you eat big and then go running, that's no good; if you have a roughly typical diet, you want a mix of carbs, fat, and protein, as those provide energy on different timescales. If you keep a diet which avoids one of those things, you do you, but you still want the same goal of energy available over time, not eating too much that digestion needs overwhelm everything else, nor not little that hunger distracts.

Hunger gets something done. Not necessarily the right thing. I see what you mean though

> always telling us to have a good meal before a test

I wonder how many of these are 'outdated memes' from times where kids were more neglected and/or didn't have supervision then went to school however and 'eat a good meal before a test' actually means 'try to eat something before coming to school one time this week'

I never make appointments for the later afternoon. Last thing you want is someone that’s tired and trying to hurry up and get home. Also avoid Friday afternoons. I’ve heard stories that manufactured things that have serial numbers that say they were built on a Friday afternoon have a far higher warranty claim rate.

> 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.

This is a human system, so it will never be perfect. “just” needs to be relative. This isn’t a framework for wholesale ignoring of problems. Rather, an appeal for a degree of grace in our judgments.

You can make up for it afterwards, but usually don't. Most of the people eat way more than they need in general, and thus there is no need to "make up" for a few missed meals. If you've gotten used to it, after a fast - whether 18 hours or 240 hours - you just (slowly) resume regular eating.

You do need to be aware of refeeding syndrome, which may be triggered by jumping back to regular amounts of food after a prolonged fast though; If you haven't eaten for a few days, you shouldn't just resume your regular feeding schedule and food - you need to start with small, easily digestible (preferably, liquid/pouridge) and build up back to normal over a few days.

That's called science: to act on data and knowledge you have, and to refine your theories with more / better data and knowledge you gain over time. And that's true over all fields of science - no one got it right or complete on the first try, we are building on literally thousands of years of experimentation and thinking.

This sort of revisionist/hindsight thinking is, coincidentally, fueling a lot of the antivaxxer/covid denier bullshit: Yes, now we know that decent immunity needs three to four doses of a COVID vaccine, and that it is likely that we need regular refreshers to keep up with evolving variants. But it remains a valid statement that, back two years ago, the available data suggested that one (AZ) or two (BT/Moderna) doses were enough to provide immunity. And people whining that "they should have known better" are charlatans at best and destructive discourse participants at worst, because they do not understand the basic definition of how science works.

For example: it took until the 1980s until it was formally recognized that washing hands is important in healthcare [1].

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...