7 ms·

I once espoused a similar opinion, but have since changed my mind. I'm a physicist, and once expressed to a judge I had met on the trail that I wished I could

• foldr 10y ago
  > I wished I could be judged by my academic peers. It was my belief that they would be more receptive to logical argument, understanding in their analysis, and more committed to fundamental principles. Have you met any academics?
  • ISL 10y ago
    Yes.
  • Cyph0n 10y ago
    Exactly this. You would be surprised how petty and subjective academics are in practice. There is a reason why everything is done through committees in academia.
    • georgestephanis 10y ago
      To be fair, a jury is a committee.
    • rhizome 10y ago
      You would be surprised how petty and subjective academics are in practice. Sayre's Law[1] was paraphrased by Henry Kissinger as, "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small." 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
      • abtinf 10y ago
        Per the wiki article: > "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." I hadn't heard of Sayre's Law. It seems like a much more eloquent expression of the concept of bikeshedding. Edit: I thought about this some more. I think bike shedding and sayre's law are slightly different - Sayre is like the law of gravity, bike shedding is like saying “and this is what gravity actually is caused by”.
• fjdlwlv 10y ago
  Educated and principled people are generally excluded from juries during voir dire because they are less susceptible to attorney's arguments.
  • crimlaw 10y ago
    The exception to that rule is when you have a couple slam dunk where your forced to go to trial because a prosecutor refuses 2 dismiss the case or offer an appropriate plea bargain. Its almost an insurance against their pervasiveness
• xamuel 10y ago
  >The judge was visibly surprised I would be too. What you said is rather arrogant. If you had based it on their having specific physics knowledge, that would be one thing. But to say that logic and reasoning is the exclusive realm of academia---that's very insulting to a lot of people.
  • justinlaster 10y ago
    Insulting. But doesn't make it any less true or false. To presume that your average joe has bothered to play in the realm of academic, diligent logic and reason is a mistake. I am not saying you need to go into a university, I'm not claiming a piece of paper will lend you credibility in this regard. It's about the time and effort that people spend practicing these subjects. How many people do you know outside of STEM that can comment on the characteristic of falsifiability of scientific theories? How many even bothered to take philosophy 101? How many have bothered to seriously invest themselves in substantive topics that will give them the tools and experience they need to make sound judgements in an array of different subjects? We are talking about a society where in a large segment of the population does not believe credible scientific theories, and tend to latch onto what can and should be generally discarded viewpoints. We (as a society) by and large do not hire people without basic math and reasoning skills; why do we suddenly pretend that these same qualifications should not be held in the justice system, or even entertain the idea that these qualifications should be raised to a higher standard. After all, juries sometimes have the power to ruin entire lives and families. People's egos are not great bedrocks for their credibility and judgement to sit on. Let them be insulted.
    • arethuza 10y ago
      Do we have evidence that STEMers are paragons of logical reasonable minded virtue outside of their particular domains?
      • justinlaster 10y ago
        Science and technology would not be the fields that they are without such virtues. Your question is odd, the answer is kind of blatantly obvious. I am not saying these people are infallible, I am saying that they are obviously equipped with better tooling and experience to make such judgements than someone who has no serious experience in dealing with "hard" subjects. It was probably a mistake for me to explicitly list "STEM", but I thought it would hopefully convey my point a bit better. We live in an extremely technology oriented society, so it's a rather important subject to be decently versed in. However, a good, invested effort into the subject of philosophy would definitely be more than sufficient to make up for people's knowledge and reasoning errors. Are we going to pretend this is not the case?
• in_cahoots 10y ago
  I'm glad you changed your mind. The corrolary to this is to suggest that uneducated or unprincipled defendants should be tried by an uneducated, unprincipled jury. Everyone deserves access to an informed jury, regardless of the exact definition of 'peer'.
  • seanp2k2 10y ago
    Everyone deserves that; I agree. How many actually receive that, though? From what I've seen, juries are mostly composed of people who are most interested in getting out of jury duty by reaching a verdict quickly. The one person who holds out for justice because they give a damn is typically put under immense peer pressure to cave so everyone else can go home. A good idea in theory, but in practice, many jurors are lazy and apathetic IMO.
• galacticpony 10y ago
  "What later changed my mind was the realization that our society is a human one, and that humanity has a huge spectrum of experience. A group of physicists may not understand something about the world that others do. Furthermore, any select group of citizens will differ in belief somewhat from the interests of society at large." Why the hell would that realization change your mind? For society at large, that "huge spectrum" includes copious amounts of superstition and ignorance, which (one would hope) should be significantly lower in those people subjected to scientific scrutiny on a regular basis. You're gambling on something being in that spectrum that will positively offset this negative, but you don't know (or mention) what it is. "But do I want educated and principled jurors on any jury that judges me, ones with enough fortitude to mis-trial a jury or nullify a law if that's what is required? Damn straight." So you actually want a different kind of elite to be jurors, but not just physicists. You don't actually want citizens as a whole. "If the notion that your citizen-peers might not be informed troubles you, take time to help others form informed opinions." Have you ever tried that? What makes you believe that your citizen-peers are even interested in spending their valuable time to listen to someone else trying to change their opinion? Lots of people are quite fond of their uninformed opinions.
  • ISL 10y ago
    As an example for the first point: Fewer-than-average professional scientists have known the desperation of poverty nor the devastation wrought by broken homes, disability, or crimes of passion. Scientists may be somewhat better prepared to find facts in a case, but may have diminished sensitivity to both the motivation for a crime and for the impact of a verdict. An educated, reasoning, and principled jury pool should not be an exception. It should be the expectation. We should expect it of our society as a whole and our school system in particular. Taking the time to share interesting and useful insights to people at a moment when they're interested in exchanging ideas can be very effective.
    • true_religion 10y ago
      True but its' a jury of your peers. If you are an impoverished individual who only took to crime to feed your family, then a jury of your peers would be people from your neighborhood who are similarly poor.
• b0bdog 10y ago
  The problem is that everyone will want to have a jury of their peers. So drug dealers would want to be judged by a jury of drug dealers, for example.