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Comment by jwarden | Hacker News Reader

The article argues that supreme court justices, like all human beings, have cognitive bias. It does not follow that the supreme court is “broken”. If you accept this argument you must accept all institutions as irretrievably broken.

Further. This article is part of a flood of anti-supreme-court rhetoric that has started in the last couple of years, and I sense sinister political ends behind it.

But sowing distrust in our democratic institutions — be it our election systems, our law enforcement agencies, or the supreme court, is not healthy for democracy. Even though these institutions are indeed flawed.

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This is not cognitive bias. The question is indeed not straightforward because, indeed, society has tended to see 'meat' and 'fish' as two separate categories.

So when Justice Scalia says: " “Of course fish isn’t meat!” he boomed. “Why else do I—and millions of Catholics—eat fish on Fridays during Lent?” ", he is making a legal argument that there is an established precedent in society that 'meat' and 'fish' are understood as different things.

By the way, two definitions of 'meat' I quickly found on Google:

Oxford Languages: " the flesh of an animal, typically a mammal or bird, as food (the flesh of domestic fowls is sometimes distinguished as poultry ). "

Merriam Webster: " animal tissue considered especially as food / flesh of a mammal as opposed to fowl or fish / flesh of domesticated animals "

So even dictionaries are not that clear-cut that 'animal' should be understood by is pure biological definition and do say that 'meat' is often to be understood as NOT including fish.

Edit: This also illustrates the importance of defining terms in a discussion. A term might have an obvious meaning to me and an equally obvious but different meaning to someone else.

> society has tended to see 'meat' and 'fish' as two separate categories.

This is the first that I've heard this asserted as a widespread societal thing. That isn't at all my experience in my part of the US. I don't know a single person who would say that fish isn't meat. There are oddball religious stances, but even the Catholics I know don't really consider fish as not being meat.

I'm not saying that nobody at all thinks fish isn't meat, but if you were to assert that publicly, the reaction from the vast majority of people around here would be laughter.

There are folks who are vegetarians + fish (they call themselves pescatarians), so there are arguments, even from vegetarians, that fish don't count as meat. I don't know what the right answer is, but my personal opinion is that fish flesh is 'meat'.

The law exists to bring finality, in a legal sense, to questions with nebulous answers such as this one.

Pescatarians don't consider themselves vegetarians, though. They eat primarily vegetarian, and just limit their meat to only seafood.

I just don't see how the "is fish meat" question is even a little nebulous, at least in my culture. All but a very tiny percentage of people here, including pescatarians, say it is.

But I'm only talking about the culture I'm a part of. I'm not saying that others thing differently. My only point was that, around my neck of the woods, society does not tend to consider fish as not-meat.

But Catholics have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme court. So perhaps fish isn't meat after all. I was raised to believe in a separation of church and state, and while I still hold dearly to that promise of the first amendment, latter day rulings have convinced me that the constitution is irrelevant when it gets in the way of a unipolar supreme court.

It's great that your personal experience and of those you interact with on the regular can provide your entire society a level of finality in this decision.

Here in the US, we generally rely on our judicial system (ending at the Supreme Court) to determine these bounds.

I live in the US.

> Here in the US, we generally rely on our judicial system (ending at the Supreme Court) to determine these bounds.

The judicial system determines definitions that courts (and therefore regulations) use. Those are very often quite different from the definitions that are used outside of court. (As an example: is pizza a sandwich? The courts say "yes") I'm talking about how people use the language, not courts.

>even the Catholics I know don't really consider fish as not being meat.

It depends on what you mean by “really consider”. For the religious practice they have, they really consider it not as meat. But that’s a different context than scientific discussions or otherwise.

Words have their meaning based on context. So in the context of Fridays during Lent, Catholics are not eating meat according to their religious instructions. Outside of that context “meat” may be defined in a different way. Meat can also mean the edible part of fruit.

> But that’s a different context than scientific discussions or otherwise.

This is what I meant. I think we're on the same page here.

"In prison, dinner was always a big thing. We had a pasta course, and then we had a meat or a fish."

-- Goodfellas

And Henry wasn't even Catholic anymore at this point.

The only time I heard anyone distinguish fish and meat was when I was in a Catholic high school. I remember specifically thinking what a small sacrifice it was to give up meat (excluding fish and other animal products) for one day of the week for a month.

This is an ultra low effort version. All Catholics I know give up whatever they give up for every day during Lent. 40 days, not 5 Fridays.

And if they avoid meat on Fridays, they do it for every Friday, all year long.

Perhaps one way to think about it is to imagine you are with a group of friend, it's lunchtime and everyone's hungry then you say "I'm craving meat!". I'm guessing no-one will think you mean you want to eat fish.

Lots of vegetarians eat fish for some reason

That would technically be a pescatarian

They called themselves vegetarians for most of my life, including on tv and in films

> Further. This article is part of a flood of anti-supreme-court rhetoric that has started in the last couple of years, and I sense sinister political ends behind it.

Yeah this was my gut reaction as well... Why all the hate on the Supreme Court lately?

News you get for free is being paid for by someone / someorg.

I want to know who's agenda is being pushed, and who is paying for these stories and why.

Free news is just junk news (like junk mail) and needs to be ingested with a good measure of memetic resistance.

Poor and unpopular rulings combined with revelations about serious amounts of grift going on? I don't think coverage is for sinister reasons.

Well that's the obvious suspect. But those words are so loaded.

Poor ruling? Isn't that an opinion?

Unpopular rulings? Which ones are we talking about? Totally subjective. I get that some rulings are unpopular to those paying for the stories... But which rulings, what funding, and why now?

Grift is just a clever/convenient "reason" to justify rhetoric like this. Show me the man and I'll show you the crime, etc.

> Unpopular rulings? Which ones are we talking about? Totally subjective.

Which objective criteria you'd like to apply to determine this?

What's objective to me is the uptick in anti-supreme court articles largely based on strawmen and rhetoric. At least it "feels" objective to me. Like a meta trend, cultural undercurrents, etc, which I try to pay attention to as it helps me make more sense out of the "why" behind story trends.

Beyond that its just guesswork. So more data is better. Maybe it's just trendy to crap on democracy, as our culture seems to enjoy crapping on anything that used to be deemed good/noble/just. Bad is good, right is wrong, etc.

Or maybe it's just the old political tactics used by authoritarians... When winning they tend to talk about how "just" and "overdue" the ruling/decision/policy is. When losing they tend to resort to strawmen and character assassination, an Orwellian way of associating decisions they don't like with people of bad character. "Big brother can't be bad" "Oceana can't be good" etc

Personally I don't like all the "crap on democracy" rhetoric that seems to be more and more pervasive. Especially in young people. I've heard it said "Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried".

Also, it’s not the job of the Supreme Court to make popular rulings. It’s actually pretty explicitly not, which is why they have lifetime appointments.

Popularity belongs to the other two branches of the government.

Free news is junk news.

As the Last Psychiatrist said

"if you're reading it, it's for you".

Love this quote I'm stealing it.

The older I get the more I see this stuff all around me.

For some reason lately I've been hearing INXS songs everywhere, like 7 or 8 on satellite radio in just a few days. Followed by the same songs in a few bars we frequented. So much so that my GF noticed it as well.

After the 7th or 8th time of pointing out it's another INXS song, my immediate thought was "This can't be coincidence. Who the heck is promoting INXS right now, and why?"

As you said, the message was definitely meant for, and received by, us.

I don't like not knowing why, because in the absence of data the mind will make up narratives to fit the data.

Maybe INXS is being promoted. Maybe I'm just becoming paranoid. Then again, being paranoid doesn't make you wrong.

I guess the point is it's hard to take anything in the media at face value these days.

I agree. And, it seems to paint Justice Scalia as sort of a madman, even though the author has laid out plenty of reasoning as to why there could be different answers, the author believes that any confident, unqualified answer was wrong, and Scalia should have begun a debate instead.

And it seems to also indicate that Catholics are madmen for following the Pope, who might be wrong about fish. Well, guess what.

This is a linguistic question, and it has origins that date back before Jesus's time and among non-Christian pagans in all sorts of places. Let's look at Europe and Latin.

In Latin, carnem means meat. But it is specifically flesh meat, that is: beef, pork, chicken, etc. It is an umbrella term, and of course there are more specific words, but carnem is a class of meat, and it is associated with the human flesh, and this is why we abstain from this type of meat on Fridays.

Carnem excludes fish. In Roman Catholic discipline, we abstain from eating land animals and birds. Animals that swim in water (some opinions say, cold-blooded) are in the "fish family" as far as we are concerned. Guess what? Alligators are fish. Muskrats, beavers, and capybaras are fish. Call me a madman if you wish. I am just classifying things according to the faith. Try having this conversation with an Orthodox Jew.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/26593/alligator-ok-t...

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/lent-beavers-muskrats-capy...

I think what a canny debater would first do is define the terms. I would've asked the questioner: "How do you define meat? Give some examples and counter-examples. How do you define fish?"

Over-confident? Perhaps, but wasn't that supposed to be the tone of the meal, with a confident Justice welcoming new recruits?

The issue isn't the answer to the question it's the fact he (allegedly) resorted to "You’re telling me the Pope has been wrong for centuries?" which is a comment I'd find embarrassingly stupid from anyone (if he meant it seriously which is unclear).

Either way, it is not intellectually honest to assess someone by the quality of their informal/off-the-record comments made to a colleague while eating/drinking. If he's the kind of person painted in this article then it will be reflected in his judgements/writings.

Interesting, in school, when we learned about this principle, it was taught that fish were excluded because their meat wasn't bloody. Meaning, fish wasn't meat, because land animal meat would influence aggressivness while translucent meat wouldn't. Could be wrong, just sharing.

The general public view of the supreme court for a long time has been of a uniquely noble and incorrupt institution. Now people are realizing, or it is becoming politically viable to point out, that it is merely another political institution, prone to the same biases, influences, and constraints as any other.

I don't think it's sinister to attempt to align others towards this "political realism" view of the court. Attempting to maintain its mythology of being the sole realm of apolitical reason in the government in fact is pretty nefarious though.

Aaron Tang:

> To be clear, Scalia was no outlier; the same identity-based bias affects us all

You wrote:

> ...all human beings, have cognitive bias. It does not follow that the supreme court is “broken”.

A Kahnemanian focus on bias is an unprofitable framework for analyzing jurisprudence and has no bearing here.

Scalia is not wrong because he used Catholic faith to shape his legal opinions.

Scalia is wrong, full stop, because he cannot:

  be objective

  entertain perspectives other than his own

  subjourn his own beliefs to address hypotheticals

  contemplate multiple contradictory ideas at the same time (consider paradox)

  impartially adjudicate the law

A proper response would be something like:

"Well, that's an interesting question. As a practicing Catholic, per our Pope, fish is not a meat. However, biologically, where meat is defined as the flesh of an animal, of course fish is meat. So I would have to ask you, what is the context of your question? Because in all areas of law, we must consider the social, legal, moral, and scientific norms which may affect our rulings."

In other words, a Justice of the SCOTUS must have a jurisprudence somewhat more nuanced than "because I said so" (judicial primacy).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence

> This article is part of a flood of anti-supreme-court rhetoric that has started in the last couple of years

Last few years? Can you point to a specific time when there wasn't anti-supreme court rhetoric?

> But sowing distrust in our democratic institutions — be it our election systems, our law enforcement agencies, or the supreme court, is not healthy for democracy.

Ironically, you are just parroting nonsense you heard on the news - 'This is extremely dangerous to our democracy'. Distrust of democratic institutions is foundational to america. The founders distrusted democracy. It's why we have checks and balances. You are supposed to distrust democracy because by nature, it's tyranny of the mob highly susceptible to demogoguery.

> Even though these institutions are indeed flawed.

Then we should distrust them.

Also, the supreme court, like the navy, fbi, cia, etc, isn't technically a democratic institution as we ( the people ) don't directlly vote for supreme court justices.

The entire 'rhetoric' you are dismissing by illogically implying bad motivations is crticising the US Supreme Court for being undemocratic. As someone who is not American, a court with judges, appointed by an undemocratic, lost-by-popular-vote twice-impeached former president, making rulings that are at odds with many polls out there, including a ruling that reverses protections from sexist laws, is incredibly undemocractic.

I honestly have no words for anyone looking at these facts and still think there need not change in the very flawed democracy of the USA.

Whether they lost the popular vote is not really that relevant as that's not the basis of elections. They were elected to the presidency, therefore they got to make appointments. And I'm not sure the Supreme Court should be considering what polls say on most subjects if they're ruling on matters of law.

Anyway while I think there is some merit in having judicial appointments which won't/can't be undone by the next administration I think the whole lifetime serving thing seems...unwise. 16 years would seem like a decently long tenure. 36 years is the current record and Clarence Thomas may well beat that if he's not somehow done in for corruption.

Given how heated US politics is becoming (in rhetoric anyway) it's only a matter of time until the justices require presidential level security teams.

> Anyway while I think there is some merit in having judicial appointments which won't/can't be undone by the next administration I think the whole lifetime serving thing seems...unwise.

The “in good behavior” thing wouldn’t be problematic if the accountability mechanism wasn’t hopely broken in the case of partisan wrongdoing serving either one of the major parties. (IOW, like many problems in the US government, what is broken is ultimately FPTP elections and the resulting partisan duopoly.)

>As someone who is not American, a court with judges, appointed by an undemocratic, lost-by-popular-vote twice-impeached former president,

In the USA, Supreme Court judges are nominated by a president (who was elected by through a process of representative democracy), but confirmed (closest to appointed) by a democratically elected Senate.

>making rulings that are at odds with many polls out there

The majority of SCOTUS rulings are bipartisan and non-controversial, but let's say we ignore those and focus narrowly on the ones with some controversy around them. The New York Times[0], a left-leaning and anti-Trump institution has identified 12 cases over this past year as "major decisions" and has compiled a page where you can see how the court ruled, and how the public polled. If you read it, you'll see that the Supreme Court diverged from public opinion on only 2 of those 12 cases.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/07/us/major-supr...

Furthermore, the underlying premise that the Supreme Court should be bound by public opinion is democratic only in the most literal sense and would quickly lead to tyranny of the majority.

So I guess I stand with OP - the fact that you, a "non-American" are convinced that what you wrote are "facts" is soft evidence of there being a deliberate effort to undermine faith in the legal system.

One of the principle ideas for the existence of the court is that it would make “rulings that are at odds with many polls”. It’s one of several interlocking mechanisms that’s supposed to protect us from popular democracy. Of course, there’s a lot of venal corruption on the current court, and for a long time, perhaps forever, it has failed to live up to its purpose, making rulings that are clearly motivated by politics rather than law. That’s another set of issues.

The failure is with our disgusting legislators who have abdicated their responsibilities and let that weight fall on the courts

Modern propaganda isn't informational. This article is published in an echo chamber and is informative to the audience of that chamber. The audience is agitated and in its turn coerces other unsuspecting people one by one with brute pressure without any logical arguments.

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