Cass Sunstein: belief

Transcript context

…They let you? They let me. I tried to get off. I said I was a law professor who works on jury behavior. I thought that would certainly get me off. I was included. Then, after the trial, the lawyer for the prosecution actually wanted to talk to me to ask what I thought of his performance, which was very generous of him. He lost, the prosecutor. He did a pretty good job. He talked to me, and the judge was there. I said after our discussion, “How come I was allowed on the jury?” All the lawyers there were saying, “We wanted you off, but the judge wanted you on.” I said, “Why did the judge want me on?” Then the judge said, “I thought you studied jury behavior. You should be a juror.” Now, it’s not completely appropriate for a judge to insist over the objections of lawyers. But this was Chicago, and we’re all informal here. One thing I learned being on a jury — I learned close up, of course; this is part of the common wisdom about juries — is that juries bring to bear some assessments that are accuracy-independent moral views. Now, if you had an AI that would track jury moral assessments — and you’re way ahead of me on this — you would be able to embed the thing you get from a jury in AI. People wouldn’t like that very much, and so, there’d be a strong presumption against it in terms of actual practice, and in any case, the Sixth Amendment wouldn’t allow it. Why is Byatt’s Possession your favorite novel?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.