The irrational hungry judge effect revisited (2023)

Yes, in the words of the linked paper it injects exogenous decision making. In other words, the decision is based on more than just the judge so we can’t conclude the discrepancy is due to the judge’s personal bias.

I wonder if this butts up against the fourth and fifteenth amendments, which touch on due process and justice not being delayed unnecessarily.

Randomness introduces inefficiency which implies delay

Maybe? I don’t think the severity of a case is unknown to the judge, though, even with random ordering.

>> Should the cases be randomized instead?

Like any other set of tasks, the order is a practical matter. Severe cases are more random, sometimes sucking up more time than expected. Put them early in the order and any delay will impact everyone. So judges try to get the easy/predictable stuff done first, minimizing the number of people impacted by the inevitable delays. (Doctors do the same if they can, trying tk see easy patients first.)

Also, as with any other process, you want to start with a few easy wins in order to solve inevitable problems. If there is something wrong with the court tech (recorders, security etc) you can work it out during the easy cases. Save the murders for after everything is sorted.

Thirdly, prisoners are different than normal people. They do not control thier own scheduals. Put thier case early in the docket and they might miss breakfast at the jail. Prisoners are also moved as groups. Put them randomly on the docket and they all have to wait all day. Put them as a group towards the end and the group wont wait as long. So cases involving prisoners, on average the more severe cases, are placed later on the docket.

Aren't there only like four laws in psychology?

It seems a lot of the (pop) psychology taken for granted is based on single, flawed studies.

Should at least eat lunch before deciding to cite them if you’re not going to wait for replication.

Without having read in-depth either original paper, it seems like the issue here is much simpler than reproduction (though reproduction is the gold standard as is totally under-appreciated these days).

Rather, it seems the authors made a much simpler mistake: hypotheses can only be refuted by evidence, not confirmed. So, in this case, if the hypothesis is "judges act more harshly when hungry", what they should have been doing is looking for evidence disproving that statement. Instead, they seem to have presented a correlation and a suggestion, which is not the same thing as a scientific finding.

They have incentive to hide it. Ordinary people want to think the justice system actually does justice. Not group cases by time slot because they are likely to be simply denied, which is clearly biased.

Personally this is more disturbing to me than the alleged earlier finding that the judge was in a bad mood because he was hungry. At least that is correctable and avoidable; systemic discrimination by case type isn't.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> Is it difficult to believe that a judge would be able to predict at least some outcomes from a single paragraph?

It's difficult to believe that the decision should be made quickly. When making decisions about the trajectory of someone's life, they should be made with care. Having a system that removes snap judgements and bias is important, and I would say that even a quick-scan and re-ordering of documents is a form of bias.

This reads almost verbatim as my conception of bias.

"Once you've abandoned principled, wholistic reasoning for your pet heuristics, you can figure out many outcomes from the inputs to your pet heuristics".

Do you mean something different by "bias"?

Developing that sort of expertise requires getting clear and—ideally—timely feedback on the quality of your decisions. Do parole judges get that?

I'm sure they get feedback on whether their decisions are consistent with what other judges would have decided, but that's qualitatively different from feedback on whether those decisions were fair or right. If anything, that is the kind of feedback that would propagate biases in the system! You would end up becoming an expert on making consistent, defensible decisions, even if those decisions were consistently and defensibly bad.

In British parliament the most important people in the country get alcohol subsidised by the taxpayer. And they regularly find drugs in the bathroom.

You’d think that if anyone, these people would have to be sober.

This surprises me. Are you speaking from a US point of view?

In many west european countries it is forbidden to consume alcohol in work hours, except at company-arranged events etc. and/or to be intoxicated.

For a comparative overview of the practical differences: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9779578/

Nassim Taleb has a theory that the primary purpose of school is not to educate children, but to keep them from roaming the streets and causing mayhem. Learning is a side-effect.

> The first clinical studies that showed it was toxic were in 1969.

We knew it was dangerous within a year of it being introduced, even if we didn't publish widespread clinical studies before the 60s. Its creator, Thomas Midgley Jr, was diagnosed with lead poisoning multiple times.

> Warnings about the toxicity of tetraethyllead came to Midgley from various sources. The letter of Erich Krause concerning its toxic effects, quoted in part in part 1,2 written on November 30, 1922, to George Calingaert (then at M.I.T.) was forwarded to Midgley in December 1922 by W. G. Whitman, Assistant Director of the M.I.T. Research Laboratory of Applied Chemistry. However, despite his own health problems and these early warnings, Midgley did not appear to be overly concerned about the health issues associated with the handling and use of tetraethyllead.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/om030621b

There's also some discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Initial_controv... suggesting that early studies may have been suppressed by the lead industry.

> In the years that followed, research was heavily funded by the lead industry; in 1943, Randolph Byers found children with lead poisoning had behavior problems, but the Lead Industries Association threatened him with a lawsuit and the research ended.

The effect of lead toxicity is not immediately and enormous so it is not remotely analogous.

> Lead was added to gasoline since the 1920s...the last was Algeria in 2021.

Right, so we figure these things out within 100 years or so at most. We've been dealing with hunger for millions of years, you'd expect there to be something in the Torah about how no man shall act as a judge before he's had lunch.

I don’t want to quote Einstein here, or the path not taken. ;)

"High-risk/high-reward" basically translates 1:1 with increased variance. Seeing it framed that way was a helpful mental model for me.

This is a good point. And seen in predatory animals. Hungry animals will take the more risky food/prey.

It might be a similar stressor like performing a task with a full bladder. there's definitely something that negatively impacts your cognition and you'll be more likely to refuse complexity to 'get it over with' whatever that means for the ruling of a court.

Sure, but hard to argue there's not some advantage as well, even to traits that operate unadaptively in some situations, so evolution likely played a role.

More important that evolutionary argument is we all know how increasing the noise unfurls the decision tree into more possibilities, which seems undeniably adaptive by fanning out the search space.

You have to consdier the en masse effect, not just the obvious, "in this 1 instance it was bad." Overall, a mode where you switch to a wider search strategy (like turning up the heat in an LLM) can be what you need...to procreate (eventually) hahaha! :)

Exactly! That's what I'm saying. Thank you! :)

I didn't totally get your last phrase on the comparison (I think you mean we evolved less rational low power state on low food to conserve energy for when we need it more, because low power but operational is more survivable than passing out due to hunger - did I get you right?), but this is a good counter. How could we test between them? It's possible it's /both, but without a good experiment hard to say. Hypothesis 1: brain on low sugar, increases variance in problem solving. Hypothesis 2: brain on low sugar low power mode prioritizes simpler solutions (I think I got you?). Your point is a good counter to mine, but I think the qualifier is that in low food situation, a less rational state is a more effective search algorithm to find key resources, than a more rational one (with definition of rational tempered by what is achievable passing as rational for most humans in aggregate). But maybe we are getting too complex for a hn comment when we might not be running the experiemnt oursleves hahaha :)

Maybe. But judges are also disciplined and anally retentive. Gratification delayers. I can imagine many of them just want to get it done, then eat. May even be a cerebral-overemphasis leading to lack of body awareness. So for them, the rational action would be complete work, then eat (if time haha :)).

But I guess you meant more generally in evolution. Yes, but the question is how does the body prioritize eating in situations where food is not available but hunger is? If food is not obvious, it must be sought. Increase the noise in the search algorithm, would seem to maximize state space exploration in food quest, which seems something evolution would then pass on.

Better than cargo culting anyway hahaha! :)

Honestly I was responding to the title which suggests that "irrational hungry judge" is a thing. If it is not, I revise all my ideas hahaah! :)

But then again, we must question a study that questions a proceeding one and so on. I'm not getting into the weeds of it to do that right now, just speculatin :)

What did you see about it that counters the "irrational hungry judge effect"?

This is a fair point about different conditioning to hunger, which to some extent, we are all capable of attaining. Those responses you mention do seem like evolutionary adaptations themselves, which may nevertheless vary across individuals. Such as ketolysis making people sharper mentally, which I've certainly experienced.

Your point about that making it hard to tell what evolution may have wanted from this, given such variety, is fair. However it's not necessarily a point against an evolutionary trend here, just because responses are varied. There could be adaptiveness, in aggregate (as it always is in these considerations I think), to having some people express different responses.

I think this stressor is ripe for gleaning insight about evolution, tho. Because of how critical food is. And therefore how much effective ways to overcome food loss would have been critical for evolution to hack at. It's likely evolution has laid out a series of algorithms for us, depending on what stage of hunger we are at - each developed to be the most effective balance at that stage between resource usage, and search success.

In that sense the different modes you describe "hangry" and "hunglightened" (and possibly some more in between) are most likely evolutionarily designed "behavior algorithms" that each maximize adaptiveness for finding food and surviving at each stage of progression towards starvation.

I really think you should think more about it, because how could it be any other way? Food is so crucial, evo is obviously going to get right into how we react to its absence.

Of course if your point is more about difficulty in concluding from the paucity of data in this discussion, I'm all with you! We are just hypothesising now, which is perfectly valid. And, for me at least, insightful. I feel truly sorry for you, that you didn't find it that! :)

I'd like to end with this weird little side-note counter: another pithy aphorism about food and performance: never make any big decision on an empty stomach! Hahaha! :) Many have said that.

LLMs are great at non-mechanical application