Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

I believe the original studies were shown to be faulty because they didn’t account for the fact that the cases were ordered. Less severe cases were seen first, which meant the more severe cases (ie those with more severe penalties) were shown later.

“Danziger etal. rely crucially on the assumption that the order of the cases is random and, thus, exogenous to the decision-making process. This assumption has been forcefully challenged. For a short and very critical reply in PNAS, Keren Weinshall-Margel and John Shapard analyzed the data of the original study—as well as other self-collected data—and conducted additional interviews with the court personnel involved.Footnote 51 They point out that the order of the cases is not random: The panel tries to deal with all cases from one prison before a break, before then moving to the cases of the next prison after a break. Most importantly, though, requests from prisoners who are not represented by a lawyer are typically dealt with at the end of each session. So, prisoners without legal representation are less likely to receive a favorable decision compared to those with legal representation.Footnote 52 Additionally, lawyers often represent several inmates and decide on the order in which the cases are presented—it might well be possible that they start with the strongest cases”

[1] Chatziathanasiou, K., 2022. Beware the lure of narratives:“hungry judges” should not motivate the use of “artificial intelligence” in law. German Law Journal, 23(4), pp.452-464.

> the fact that the cases were ordered. Less severe cases were seen first, which meant the more severe cases (ie those with more severe penalties) were shown later.

Isn't that order creating a bias for the judge? Should the cases be randomized instead?

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.

Yeah thats the original point but I think he means aside from that, the order itself also drops a suggestion to the judge as to the nature of the case before hearing it.

The order itself might be injecting a subconscious bias to the judge.

That’s good point. The authors of the original papers the “hungry judge” idea also did work on what they call “priming” which would include what you suggest. I don’t know if that has been replicated though.

This is not an example of the priming effect, which describes how one stimulus affects the reaction to a different stimulus, but is simply an example of suggestion for a common stimulus. The priming effect itself has come under fire in recent years for failure to replicate.

Examples of priming include what was studied in the Priming Intelligence study, which primed groups of participants with the idea of either professors or the idea of hooligans, then tested how they performed on an intelligence test. It purported to discover that those primed with the idea of professors performed better. This is an example of a widely discussed priming study that has failed replication.

I think maybe the judges can tell how important cases are based on the charges. I don't think the implication is that someone is somehow reviewing the case prior to it being heard and using some judgement based on some (likely unknown as it has not yet been presented) evidence to order them, but that charges that carry less penalty or that are are already classified as lesser (i.e. misdemeanor compared to felony) are sorted prior to ones that are not.

I don't think the people sorting the cases (which could be the judges themselves) have any additional information that the judge doesn't readily have available, so I'm not sure there's much room for bias of a substantial nature.

It's not as if the judge does not have all the details of the case prior to sentencing. The order can't possibly supply more information than the fact that he just sat through the trial himself days or weeks prior. At least in the United States, the same judge who presides over a trial is the one who sentences the convicted. The only time a defendant gets different judges for anything is early in the process, like during arraignment.

Knowing the details and being subconsciously influenced are different questions. Ambient music in stores doesn’t change the prices, products, or a shoppers needs yet it still influences buying behavior.

Suppose a taste tester is asked to rank something on a scale of 1-100, but before giving a number they need to presort them into terrible, ok, good, great then go back to each group and give a specific score to each item. My guess is there would be different clustering vs someone doing the same task in one go.

Adding to this, even knowing the subconscious biases doesn't necessarily mitigate them. Kahneman talked about how he was still subjected to such biases, even though he was an expert in studying and identifying them.

What ‘subconscious influence’ are you assuming here? The cases are ordered in a known, public, obvious way by known, public, obvious criteria. Are you thinking that a judge would not know the difference between the severity of charges if they weren’t grouped together? That he would be inclined to think a jaywalking case sandwiched between two murders was just as serious? This argument seems unlikely in the extreme.

I’m suggesting the exact opposite situation, ie groups of equal severity create a subconscious bias even if it’s the Judge that makes them.

A jaywalking case seems meaningless when sandwiched between just about anything because objectively it’s not serious. However 20 murder cases and you might start benchmarking things to the pedo cannibal not each case on it’s own merits.

If all you see is 20 white collar crimes row with several 10+ million dollar cases someone who ‘only’ stole 100 thousand seems almost meaningless even if objectively it’s a lot of money. And that exact loss of objectivity is a problem.

What loss of objectivity? What you are describing bears no relationship to the study or… any real case that we’re discussing.

> What loss of objectivity?

Bias is a loss of objectivity.

> What you are describing bears no relationship to the study or… any real case that we’re discussing.

Study says before lunch cases are meaningfully different than the after lunch case, thus it’s a like with like grouping.

I referenced a known effect where grouping like with like can create a subconscious bias. Sure it’s best known in other contexts, but there’s little to suggest sentencing is somehow uniquely unbiased.

The study involved parole boards, not initial sentencing from an initial trial.

So these people have already received fair sentences, and they have to serve them out? What's the problem?

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

Doesn't this ordering also go against additional delay, since it expedites misdemeanors at the expense of felonies? Cases should just be tried in the order they were submitted.

I feel like there's probably an excellent reason that the order is the way it is, due to the wonderful process of time.

This feels a lot like saying "let's just blow up the tax code and rewrite it!" And we end up generating the same 2 million lines of policy to close all of the loopholes all over again.

This assumes some of the the 2 millions lines weren’t written specifically to introduce loopholes.

> I feel like there's probably an excellent reason that the order is the way it is, due to the wonderful process of time.

But this assumes that the process of time is tending towards the better. Each change that was made was surely made on the basis of experience and created a local improvement, but that doesn't mean that they operate well together.

(Nor, of course, does it mean that they are likely to be so easily fixed that it can be done in a tossed-off HN comment.)

> this assumes that the process of time is tending towards the better.

Yes, this I generally believe, at least as far as societal maturity is concerned. We still have our moments, of course.

> Yes, this I generally believe, at least as far as societal maturity is concerned.

That's probably too big a discussion for here, but, on the institutional rather than the societal level, is that what you observe? Certainly it seems to me that institutions just accumulate more and more cruft over time, and, though "throw it out and re-write it" is, as well documented, rarely the right answer, neither is "trust that things are as they are because time has optimized them."

Short answer: I don't know.

Cruft can be good. If you give everyone a chance to speak on any issue, it's extremely slow, but also the most egalitarian. When societies move too fast, large groups of people are invariably marginalized.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" etc.

I do think institutions, while extremely flawed, are currently the best versions of themselves. Very difficult to measure, of course. Rome was the best version of itself until the second it began to collapse.

I'm not a history buff, but believe deeply that it's a predictor of the future. Are there historical examples you can think of where the institutions were better than they are today?

> I'm not a history buff, but believe deeply that it's a predictor of the future. Are there historical examples you can think of where the institutions were better than they are today?

The problems with this question are at least two. First, there is no fixed definition of "better," so that two people might disagree about any example even if they agree on the facts. For example:

> I do think institutions, while extremely flawed, are currently the best versions of themselves. Very difficult to measure, of course. Rome was the best version of itself until the second it began to collapse.

While I wish I shared your optimism, I also disagree with your example! It seems clear to me that a society that is about to collapse is likely not its best self, and that surely there was a local maximum of Roman "goodness," however it's measured, some time after its founding but well before its collapse.

Second, that the examples I know best are likely to be the examples in which I have a personal interest, and so, inevitably, a bias that prevents me from judging them dispassionately.

In that spirit, as a teacher, I think that most, let's say for specificity, US universities were much better in the period immediately following the GI bill than they are today. Their "corporatification" is, to me, a huge step backwards. But then, I am a university teacher, so, though I can speak from a position of knowledge, I can hardly be trusted as an unbiased judge of in what way universities can best serve society.

> Randomness introduces inefficiency

That's highly dependent on the situation. Ordering can introduce delays or inefficiencies in many situations.

Can you give some examples?

Putting harder cases to the end of the queue gives less time to them. This may result in judges speeding the process by giving a case less consideration and thus increasing the chance of a mistake. This may result in postponing the case for another day because too little time remains today, so delaying it further.

OTOH simple cases are likely the majority of cases. Putting them first lets the majority of, well, users of the judiciary system get served faster.

6.3.2 "shortest job first": https://www.cs.uic.edu/~jbell/CourseNotes/OperatingSystems/6...

> SJF can be proven to be the fastest scheduling algorithm

> 6.3.2 "shortest job first": https://www.cs.uic.edu/~jbell/CourseNotes/OperatingSystems/6...

> > SJF can be proven to be the fastest scheduling algorithm

That's not fully analogous, since the OS isn't going to miscompute the last operation because it's in a rush to get done and get home.

>Randomness introduces inefficiency

What does that even mean in this context? The amount of cases to be processed doesn't change regardless of the order, and the amount of time and attention directed toward each shouldn't either, otherwise you have a much bigger issue.

Using a benign example, imagine a day in traffic court, with cases distributed randomly.

According to the schedule, Officer A must be present at 8am, 930am, 1005am, 142pm, 315pm for their relevant cases.

Officer B must be present at 803am, 922am, etc through 4pm.

You've now got two officers effectively locked up for a full day.

Vs: Officer A cases, 8-12p Officer B cases, 1-4p

But if the order stated by OP is accurate, they're not ordered by the officer who needs to show up, they're ordered by severity. Severity might correlate by officer, but probably won't.

Each court picks their ordering… one might go by severity

Another might, as a traffic court with pretty much a ton of the same citations, order for the witness’ schedule

>Vs: Officer A cases, 8-12p Officer B cases, 1-4p

But that's not how it's currently done (at least I don't think and nobody in the comments or article is suggesting so), and escalation in severity doesn't have anything to do with officers or with how efficient you are with officer time.

>Randomness introduces inefficiency which implies delay

That assumes that the previous arrangement, in the form of sequential escalation, was a pre-existing state of nature that came at no cost of effort. And that randomness has to be introduced after the fact, at a new and extra cost.

But I think if cases were ordered without any specifically intended sequence of any kind, that starting point would be closer to randomness than the currently existing escalation. So randomness would cost less, not more.

These cases were in Israel. So if you mean the fourth and fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution, they are very unlikely to apply (I’m leaving some room because I don’t know anything about Israeli government)

To be clear, are you talking about US Constitution amendments? If yes, I am confused. (Ignore for a moment that we are talking about Israeli jurisprudence.)

US 4th: It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

US 15th: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Why is either of these relevant in US jurisprudence?

I assume they meant 5th

  nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

I thought it was the 6th amendment:

"the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial..."

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

If they are ordered by severity, with the most severe coming just before lunch, the implication is the harsher sentencing is due to the ordering rather than the hunger pangs of the judge. Ie the hunger thesis is a spurious correlation.

I think the person I responded to was talking about actual bias from the judges knowing the order, not about this study.

Yes, this study would absolutely be suspect if the order is not random. I was saying I am not sure if the order being based on severity would bias the judges, since my assumption would be that judges are aware of severity directly and don’t need to rely on ordering to deduce it.

>> 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.

This paper? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360865536_Beware_th...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com