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fortyeridania comments on The Bias You Didn't Expect - Less Wrong
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"But the market should fix everything!" is something you only get to say when you actually have a decent notion of the market in question. It is apparent that you do not, at least with respect to lawyers doing parole hearings (which may often not involve lawyers in the States).
There is no money to be made here. Most of these attorneys are being paid by the state. The ones that are not do not generally disclose their past records in an indexed, searchable database. There is no scalability - there's a finite number of after-meal time slots. There are no (or virtually no) large law firms working in this field. Lawyers as a group are not scientists and are generally relatively innumerate. I could probably go on for pages on how lawyer's interests really aren't that closely aligned with positive outcomes; a thousand times more so when their clients aren't the ones paying the bill.
It's one thing to say, "But if you figured this out, you could dominate the market!" It's another thing to articulate how to actually dominate the market with this knowledge. If you can't do that, the EMH doesn't really do much for you.
OK, but why haven't private law firms looked into the scheduling of hearings as a possible determinant of outcome? Surely they have an incentive to; or do these results only hold for paroles, in which "there is no money to be made"? If the hunger theory is right, then shouldn't judges of any type of case be under its effect?
Very few judicial decisions are actually made entirely during a hearing; despite what you see on television, most major issues are going to be briefed and the judge (or his staff) will have already read the briefs and come to a not-too-tentative decision about how they are going to rule. For issues that are so small as not to be briefed, lawyers have pretty much no control over when these will be heard by the judge, and the stakes tend to be relatively small anyways. Moreover, where there are two parties involved, it seems impossible to predict which direction this effect would take - would the judge be wiser, less wise, less agreeable, lazier? Even if someone were paying careful attention to the data, it seems unlikely they could discern a clear trend, and no one's paying such attention because (A) no one really has an incentive to and (B) the payoff is likely very close to 0 anyways.
Doesn't this strongly cut against the theory that the degree of hunger at the time of the hearing influences the decision?
... is the exact response I wanted to make.
Most legal choices are either incredibly short term - like an objection that a judge must often respond to immediately - or medium to long term - like a motion that a judge will ask for parties to provide briefs (written legal arguments) on. Parole hearing like this are one a few legal decisions where there really is a quick decision made - another area would be bail hearings, but there the outcome isn't binary, it's a dollar amount. There isn't much money to be made in gaming either,.
The Israeli parole result was for a short single high-stakes decision; most hearings are not like that, I think.
No. The study was specifically on parole decisions, which often are made at the time of the hearing, although other judicial decisions generally aren't.