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Logos01 comments on The Bias You Didn't Expect - Less Wrong
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If you seriously believe that the majority of Americans believe that judges are relatively unbiased, you need to spend some time with a lower class of people. And I'm not talking about middle class white kids pretending to be rebels.
EVERY convict I know (with one exception, and I'm not sure about him, it's been 20 years since he was in jail) and everyone who has ever tried to argue a child custody case, lost a small claims case, or whatever thought the judge was personally and malevolently biased against them for all sorts of reasons ranging from their haircut to the phase of the moon.
It's really only the upper middle class and the rich who think that judges are mostly unbiased, although many do think it's for racial or cultural reasons, most of them just don't want to admit that they are guilty.
In another vein, most of us DO think about "big" questions at different times, this is why they are "big" questions--we don't wake up in the morning and in between the time we finish grinding the beans and taking the first drink of coffee decide to quit or job designing and printing t-shirts for underground punk bands, drop back into school and get a masters in business management and go work for a Management Consulting company.
It's the important decisions that you can't put off (direct pressure, quick clot or tourniquet?) that you have to make RIGHT FUCKING NOW that you often have to make cold, wet, tired and hungry. And no, you're not at your best.
You are right that we need to be aware of how various factors impact our cognition. I get really fucking grumpy. Ok, grumpier when I'm fasting. Or when I'm tired. I get MUCH less tolerant of stupidity or ignorance (which is bad when dealing with a precocious 4 year old). I've had to work on complex problems when really tired, and I know (or at least I think I do) where my limits are. These days I live well inside them just in case.
I also keep some GU in my bag, or an energy bar or some sort in my backpack at all times. Because it helps.
Well, there could be a bit of selection bias there. The people who were acquitted of criminal charges, who were awarded sole custody of their kids, and who won their small claims cases might have different views.
I was once ticketed for speeding. (The circumstances were as follows: I was driving several of my friends home after a party -- I was as always completely sober -- and had a full car. After almost entirely highway driving, I pulled out of an on-ramp, waited at a red light, turned red [because there was no turn on red], and then almost immediately turned again because that's where my first delivery-couple lived at. As I was turning that second time police lights came on behind me. The officer spent five minutes trying to get me to admit to being under the influence in some way. After it became painfully clear I wasn't, he quickly wrote me up a ticket for going twenty over, claiming he had 'paced' me, and that he had to immediately run off to some other emergency.) Naturally for this story to be relevant here, I contested the ticket. I had each of my friends sign a notarized letter stating that they personally recall me turning on the cruise-control of my car at a non-speeding velocity.
The officer didn't show up, and so the charges were dropped. But not until after the judge spent a good three minutes lecturing me with as much condescension as she could possibly muster that I was lucky he didn't, and that "we all knew" what I had done. No amount of testimony on my part -- nor any collection of testimony (it was seriously seven on one, and the officer didn't even have dash-cam evidence, when all vehicles in my state have them...) -- was ever going to change her mind.
Now, I know anecdotes do not make up evidence. But... that taught me a great deal about how the legal system is designed for petty-level criminal violations, as I got to watch many individuals go through the same process. And from that I infer that the attitudes of lower-middle class and lower-class individuals is derived from their exposures to 'the law': it is an interference and a nuisance, and therefore all manner of malfeasant caricatures are eminently believable.