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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

This day and age if a social/psych “paper” defies common sense it should just be ignored. Pushing these “findings” as science should be considered malpractice.

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Perhaps, but the original paper (harsher sentences before lunch) does not defy "common sense." Common sense tells people that when they are hungry, they are irritable. Many people are familiar with the concept of feeling "hangry."

See https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-being-hangry-really-a-...

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.

Who says surgeons or pilots don't have the same problem?

The Null Hypothesis.

I don't think this is totally unreasonable, nor unique to judges.

For example, the developed world rolled out school lunch programs as a way to improve academic performance, which at the time of implementation was controversial.

Skipping lunch is bad for school performance, but judges aren't skipping lunch. Judges eat their lunch at a regular scheduled time and so they can naturally adjust their eating habits to get them through the day without experiencing discomforting hunger.

Wouldn't that argue that having eaten, judges would perform better rather than fasting?

that's exactly what the original study was proposing as an effect:

> They found that the probability of a favorable decision drops from about 65% to almost 0% from the first ruling to the last ruling within each session and that the rate of favorable rulings returns to 65% in a session following a food break.

it's not unreasonable as an original hypothesis; and it's good that we're testing it and finding out later that it's wrong. but the base hypothesis is not particularly egregious.

Parole judges are not accountable for their work in the same way surgeons or pilots are. If a judge makes a bad call on a parole hearing, a person stays in prison and it's effectively impossible to challenge the decision. Parole hearings are extremely subjective, so it's vanishingly unlikely that a judge will face any repercussions for making a ruling which people would consider unfair.

This means that there's no pressure for them to manage the influence of factors like hunger on their decision.

Doesn’t that mean we would have established standards and practices around hunger developed by those fields?

No.

So it is impacting those highly empirical disciplines and they have managed to develop no standards and practices? But they have around food poisoning?

That doesn’t compute.

>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?

Firstly, this is such an incredibly naive view of the world, especially in regards to the type of professionals that proliferate the legal system.

Past that, surgeons and pilots DO have these issues. The airline industry has religious standards and procedures for how pilots prepare and "rate" themselves before a flight mainly due to how visible egregious pilot errors typically are; in the case of surgeons the insurance company does it best to sweep things under the rug.

Pilots are supposed to be well rested, but then you have incidents like Northwest Airlines Flight 188[1], and pilots admitting they fall asleep more than you would imagine[2].

It's hard to gather data on surgeon-specific incidents since the medical industry does its very best to sweep things under the rug, but it's estimated that 400,000 deaths occur unnecessarily while in the hospital due to medical malpractice [3].

None of these systems or data are made available in the legal system, because it's all "scratch my back" etc. So no, you really shouldn't trust judges (or anyone else in the legal system) since there are no systems of accountability.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24296544

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_188#...

[3]: https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/fulltext/2013/...

What’s naive is defending a study here after it’s been disproven. But please go off about tired pilots.

>What’s naive is defending a study here after it’s been disproven.

I was refuting your point; I didn't even reference the study let alone defend it.

Whoknowsidont was giving a detailed, valuable response to your specific question about pilots and surgeons.

And then you insult them for "going off about tired pilots", and falsely claim they were defending the study in question.

You might want to review the HN guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I asked about pilots being hungry. He went on about them being tired.

If you’re interested in tone policing, start with his reply.

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.

I think that’s a little far — mainly the point where science itself is often a rejection of things that were previously called “common sense”.

But this can also be expanded. There are no fields of science where a singular paper should be widely accepted before replication and additional studies.

Social sciences have a noticeable issue where they lend themselves to dramatic headlines and over extrapolation I suspect that this is largely an aspect of them being much more understandable and ultimately relatable than some of the more niche fields where papers address nearly unapproachable topics

> 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.

Hungry people are cranky, and cranky people are less fair to others, are both only common sense.

Why does this paper defy common sense?

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?

> just throwing out punishments willy-nilly because they want a snack

That's not the claim.

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/science-behind-be...

It is true that being hungry makes you irritable. But that irritability is a component of wanting a snack, and the claim is that the feeling of wanting a snack was responsible for a judge denying parole across the board to all candidates, among whom ostensibly 67% deserved parole.

I assume we've both felt hungry for too long. I do feel annoyed and frustrated, maybe I make a rude remark or snap at someone. It is not my belief that it is a feeling powerful enough to make me carry out a massive miscarriage of justice and ruin people's lives for years to come. And I expect judges typically have more willpower than me.

I have seen people be unfair when hangry. And expecting judges to be fundamentally different people then rest of us is irrational. That job attracts people who like to have power. That is about what is special about them.

Judges have made it through law school and typically are selected for their ability to make fair decisions according to the law. I lacked the willpower to survive a year of undergrad, but I have no trouble holding back my temper when others' wellbeing is on the line. It stands to reason that either I am a different kind of person than the rest of you, or that the average judge is better at this than me.

I don't know that judges are fundamentally power-seeking (I expect someone who has a judges credentials and wants power would rather be a prosecutor), but assuming so, I'm not sure I should expect someone who seeks power to be more beholden to their emotions than average.

Blood sugar affects mood. A person's decision-making can be affected by mood. Judges make decisions. Seems pretty common sense to me.

It may not change guilty/not-guilty verdicts but it's easy to believe that perhaps it would affect milder differences.

> 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.

If judgery is like any other field, they're overbooked and burnt out. I imagine it's like medicine. In other words, there is no room for a meal strategy.

Judging yesterday's findings with today's information is never fair.

Should Galileo be punished for malpractice because he thought tides were related to the sun?

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