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bigjeff5 comments on The Bias You Didn't Expect - Less Wrong
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I can certainly buy that, but would there really be zero people who apply even though they don't have much chance of winning? I know a few stubborn people who I would expect to apply anyway even if they didn't have much chance of success. I'd be surprised to find out that the prison system has an insignificant number of people who are like that as well.
Also, do the most highly contested applications (and therefore the longest, and therefore placed last on the docket) really have 0% chance of success? If so, would not those applications be better off not applying at all? It seems to contradict the idea that an application with 0% chance of success would not be filed.
Lastly, with only a 65% approval rate for the early applications, I'm pretty surprised that the prosecution doesn't care about them very much. If they were completely uncontested wouldn't you expect closer to a 100% success rate?
I would think a lot of people would apply even with a small chance of winning. However their applications will not necessarily be disposed of quickly. It's not like the Judge can say "Well, based on my experience you don't have much chance of persuading me so I'm not going to bother listening to witness testimony and hearing argument from attorneys; I'm just going to deny the application right now."
I doubt it, but there chances of success are surely worse than uncontested applications.
I don't know enough about the details of Israeli parole hearings to speak definitively about that. I can say as a lawyer that many times I have made uncontested applications which were denied. This was not in a criminal or parole context.
I agree that any contested case should be longer than an uncontested, however are there not cases where the prosecution simply doesn't need to go through a lengthy argument to prove their case? Prosecution lays out X, Y, and Z evidence that is definitive, and therefore the prosecution doesn't need to spend a lot of time arguing. Are these types of cases not generally shorter than cases that are contested but more likely to succeed? Or does a lengthy defense attempting to weasel out of the evidence make up for a short prosecution? And are these specific cases few and far between?
In this context I could believe a very low success rate, but the researchers found a 0% success rate for a number of courts. That still makes me suspicious. I'm still not sure what "very low success rate" means for parole hearings though. Is 20% low? Is it more like 5%? Somewhere in between? Obviously, the lower a reasonable success rate for these types of cases the more likely you'll see 0% rates in different courts, just based on chance.
Fair point. Like I said above I'm not really sure what my expectations should be for a reasonable success rate in these types of cases (or cases in general). Question though, did these applications tend to be closer to or further from a break than your more successful uncontested applications? (obviously purely anecdotal, but I'm sure you see my point)
I don't know enough about the Israeli parole process to address this definitively, but I would guess that yes, it does happen that there are contested cases which are such slam-dunks from the prosecution point of view that they don't need to do much at all. As with many things, the question is how significant this phenomenon is in terms of the overall average.
Because what we are talking about is what happens in general and on average.
I wasn't aware of that, but it actually makes me more confident that there is some factor in terms of how the cases are scheduled which is linked to the success rate. What else could it be?
The break distance bias found in the papers?
You can't use two pieces of contradictory evidence to support the same argument. If the most highly contested cases still have a chance at success, finding 0% success rate at the furthest distance from the last break (because they are the longest cases and therefore placed last) should not increase your belief that there is no bias at work. It should reduce it. How significantly your belief is reduced depends on just how likely you would see 0% success rates at a high distance from break due only to scheduling, but I can't see any way it could legitimately raise your belief that there is no bias.
I kinda doubt it . . . it goes against common sense that there are judges who, once they get hungry, rule against any parole applications no matter how compelling.
Yes you can, and I can demonstrate it by stepping back and demonstrating this point with an example in abstract terms:
Let's suppose that we are debating whether Hypothesis X is correct or Hypothesis Y is correct. I am relying on evidence A which seems to support hypothesis X. You are relying on Evidence B which seems to support hypothesis Y.
Ok, now suppose you present Evidence C which contradicts my hypothesis -- Hypothesis X. Does Evidence C make my hypothesis less likely to be correct? Not necessarily. If Evidence C contradicts Hypothesis Y even more acutely than Hypothesis X, then Hypothesis X is actually more likely than it was before.
So situations can arise where evidence comes out which contradicts a hypothesis but still makes that hypothesis more likely to be correct.
And that's pretty much the situation here. Your observation about a zero percent success rate at the end of the day in some cases undermines the 'hunger' hypothesis at least as much as it undermines the hypothesis that contested cases are being put at the end of the session (or the hypothesis that there is some other ordering factor at work).
No, Hypothesis X and Hypothesis Y are now both less likely.
No, since the debate (in my abstract example) is over whether Hypothesis X is correct or Hypothesis Y is correct. In my abstract example, one and only one hypothesis is correct. So you can't have a situation where both are less likely.
I have no idea what you think the word "likely" means, or why on Earth anyone should care about that thing.
The thing I talk about when I talk about likelihood is a thing that is affected by evidence. That thing absolutely goes down for X given evidence contradicting X, and goes down for Y given evidence contradicting Y, and is not affected by what debate I might or might not be having at any given moment.
"more likely" means greater probability. "less likely" means lower probability.
Technically I agree with you, but in interpreting bigjeff5's post, I understood him to be using a more flexible definition of "contradictory evidence" and that is what I used in my response. Either way, my basic point is the same.