Wednesday, May 21, 2003

[Colin Glassey] Den Beste Explains how Ben Franklin Thought Steve Den Beste's latest essay is a wonderful explaination of how a rational person makes decisions. As far as I know, the first person to use this method (or to explain what they were doing) was Ben Franklin. He said that to make hard choices he would put down on paper in two lists all the reasons he could think of for, and against, the choice. Then he would compare reasons and strike out those of equal weight. Some reasons would be weak and two or three could be removed by just one reason on the other side. At last, one side has reasons remaining, and the other does not. Then he would choose the side that "won". Den Beste's method is more modern and fairly easy to do with a spreadsheet. 10:55:30 AM     [Colin Glassey] Volokh beats up on Landsburg Here is Eugene Volokh's rejoinder to Steven Landsberg's idea of rewards and punishments for juries: The jury system is foreseeably inefficient in many different ways. The main argument for having it (and I'm not saying this is necessarily a sufficient argument, just that it's the main one) is not that jurors are more accurate decisionmakers than judges. Rather, the argument is precisely that jurors are not answerable to government officials, and neither hope for reward nor expect punishment based on whether government officials see their views as "right" or "wrong." (Cf. Bushell's Case (1670), holding that jurors cannot be punished for rendering the "wrong" verdict.) If you take that away, you give jurors an "incentive" not just to reach a factually accurate conclusion -- you give them an incentive to reach a conclusion that their reviewers will like, and you thus destroy the one greatest merit of the jury system. The chief complaint about attempts to apply economic arguments to real life -- and especially to law -- is that economists create models that ignore too much about the real world. In their haste to try to create a simple and therefore useful model, they create a radically oversimplified and therefore useless model. If the Slate argument is serious, then it's an excellent example of this phenomenon. I agree with Mr. Volokh. 10:18:03 AM

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