pretty good book

Interesting. One of the group's leading gullible twits recommends a book on the unfortunate side effects of masses of gullible twits taking one another seriously.

The book must flatter the reader outrageously for John Larkin to have missed the point that he's one of the kind of people being jeered at.

Sometimes those groups of protestors go mad too

Mackay's book title was "Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds." It's been in print since 1841.

All groups of normal people are dynamically unstable. The Bernstein book includes the 3-line experiment where what people literally see is influenced by what they think other people see.

A jury trial is a terrible way to decide innocence or guilt. 12 people form a noisy, unstable Schmitt trigger. If they enter with an average neutral but metastable opinion, the tiniest effects will swing the concensus one way or another.

Brainstorming is a planned battle against concensus.

Happily, most groups of normal people include enough sober, knowledgeable types to damp out the instabilities before the system hits the rails.

John Larkin doesn't seem to like them much.

"Seeing" is a complicated process, as anybody who has ever had anything to do with machine vision is aware. How people make sense of an image they are exposed to does involve constructing a hypothesis that fits the facts as the Necker cube makes obvious.

There are worse ways.

The wrong twelve people might.

As it should. In the real world, evidence usually makes a neutral opinion untenable. You can get metastability with logic circuits, but it doesn't happen often.

You don't bother with brainstorming if concensus can come up with a useful answer. If you need a brainstorming session, concensus has already lost the battle.

And as such is /designed/ to be noisy and unstable.

It must depend to some extent on the character of the individual jurors. Peer pressure is not omnipotent, otherwise how do you explain hung juries and majority verdicts? Some people are born dissenters - Yours truly being a prime example. :-)

Cursitor Doom thinks that he is a dissenter. In reality he doesn't understand what the discussion is about, so he is merely a distraction.

But give them the United States of America first. Native Americans are more closely related to today's Chinese than to anybody else, and they do deserve to be released from the clutches of the criminal elements who were transported to the United States by the British.

Cursitor Doom wrote: ====================

** Yes - but it is not usually because of any fault with the jury system. ** ????

** Then they must acquit, having zero " reasonable doubt" is essential. The feelings of other jurors are not relevant and ought be ignored. ** Consensus is not the deal, full agreement based on the evidence is. Have you ever seen the 1957 movie " 12 Angry Men " ? ** Hung juries are to be expected. Majority verdicts are allowed when all debate has been exhausted and just one juror is holding out.

One of my friends was a juror on a criminal case - a serious burglary. A female juror opposed the rest from the beginning, while the others believed the evidence was unconvincing.

She kept insisting: " but he might be guilty - how do we know he isn't? "

** Please don't change. Skeptics keep the world sane.

...... Phil

<snip>

The proposition that Cursitor Doom is a "dissenter" - as opposed to a contrarian - isn't good.

He certainly isn't sane.

Bill Sloman wrote: =====================

** As if......................

<snipped>

When I did jury service - 45 years ago - two of the jurors said quite openly at the outset, "If he wasn't guilty, he wouldn't be here." I suspect a couple of others thought the same but didn't say so.

[As it happens it was 6-6 and there was a retrial. I don't know how it ended.]

Not sure which jurisdiction you're in, but (in the UK at any rate) there used to be the doctrine of peremptory challenge whereby if the defendent (or his lawyer) didn't like the look of a juror, he could have them dismissed without giving a reason. So if you could spot someone who was congenitally stupid (as the jurors you recall clearly were) you could weed them out. Sadly that old protection was abolished many years ago - along with various others. No doubt some 'anti-prejudice initiative' by some bunch of do-gooders who were as congenitally stupid as the people they were promoting equality for.

Shakespeare's King Duncan lamented. ‘There is no art/To find the mind's construction in the face’.

Shakespeare got it right. Dumber people - like you - haven't worked this out yet.

More likely a rational appreciation of the pointlessness of the exercise.

That makes a jury trial that much more random. Which is why many cases are overturned on appeal.

Yeah, I'm a terrible juror too.

I think the peremptory challenge is still in effect. I was not selected for a jury quite some time ago as were several others. In my case it was because I was an engineer. Some professions think too much and are not swayed by emotions

Dan

AIUI the issue is less the cognitive performance of the individual juror than the danger of other jurors deferring to him/her, thereby reducing the safeguard provided by "twelve good men and true". There are some pretty idiotic technical people out there, after all. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's still done here. Typically 75 people are called up and hang around for a couple of days to select 12 jurors and a couple of alternates.

I think each side gets three or four peremptory dismissals.

A judge will sometimes dismiss a juror too if they tell the right story.

It still is, at least in Massachusetts. I got on a jury because the defense ran out of preempts. This was for a tort injury case.

Having seen the plaintiff's case, I can see why they needed to filter the jury pool. The plaintiff did win, but only $100K, not the few million she hoped for.

Joe Gwinn

Having twelve jurors is designed to reduce this. 12^0.5 would give a 3.464 reduction if jurors were identical. In reality most people are sensible so the improvement is rather more dramatic.

Jury verdicts are not subject to appeal as such. Appeals can be based on the proposition that judge didn't warn the jury comprehensively enough about the defects in the prosecution or defense cases, but that's not quite the same problem.

Cursitor Doom likes to think that he is a dissenter. He's actually just disagreeable - the "dissenting" ideas he presents here are merely right-wing conspiracy theories of the more demented kind, which let him distinguish himself from people with sense.

Gullible twits do present problems for more rational people.