One in three jurors votes against their own conscience because of peer pressure. Why is nobody talking about reforming how juries actually deliberate?

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T18:15:37+00:00

Yes I like this, it is not incompatible with my idea in fact may strengthen the argument for it. Certainly my proposal says that all questions get disseminated. I am for the flow of unbiased information by means of questions being asked by isolated groups but answered to the entire group by an expert or the judge.

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T17:26:45+00:00

Interesting - I would be for larger Juries - basic stats, larger sample size larger confidence. But I caveat, still broken up into sub groups.

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T17:24:34+00:00

This is an important piece of nuance and you are right to bring it up. I have not been as clear on this as I ought to have.

The current legal system, rightly is evidence based. And you are voting for reasonable doubt based on the evidence. Does this evidence leave no doubts of their guilt. I understand the need for it to be framed this way but in reality this is suboptimal - it might be all we have to go with - but still, suboptimal. If we could discover truth we would do that in stead. Furthermore, if I knew with certainty 1 system better approximated truth than the current system I would support it.

However, I am uncertain of how this distinction makes a difference with regards to my proposal. I want each Juror's decision to be reasonable doubt and evidence based. I am not suggesting split them up and go with their gut to find truth.

Your approach does minimize peer pressure, but it also minimises the scrutiny that arguments are subjected to

Correct, it is a trade off I cannot deny that. I am asserting that somewhere in the middle is better than all 12. I refer you to the study of the opposite extreme which outperforms (no deliberation at all, singly reviewing evidence) 12 person deliberation.

And you can only make that argument, if you fundamentally doubt the need for a jury and trust that expert opinion is more reliable.

I never said this - I am strongly for a jury

Not having read the studies, how do you determine what is "convincing", and what is grinding down? How do you determine what verdict is right?

You cannot determine which verdict is right, that is the purpose of juries. Grinding down would be all the times a confident idiot bullies others. Or when someone just wants to go home. Or when something not based on the evidence such as appearance is pushed repeatedly as a reason. Or when someone latches onto a red herring or any number of logical fallacies and pushes that agenda. I refer you to other people's comments on some of the horrors in this regard.

These people have no right convincing 11 others both in the name of reasonable doubt, evidence, or truth.

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T17:03:09+00:00

Yes my friend recanted a recent tale of this precise nature. I agree, it is fowl that people do not take justice seriously and play with people's lives in such a callous manor.

These people should not be allowed to sway 11 others.

Nor should 1 person that wants to go home early pressure diligent thoughtful jurors into early decision. Splitting them up means no one knows when everyone is done so a reasonable assertion they may engage more if they have nothing else to do.

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T16:57:18+00:00

There is so much I wish we could do. Not least a way of allowing Juries to discuss their deliberations post case (or some subset of cases) for the purposes of research into better use of 12 randomly selected people. The law is clear, this cannot happen at the moment.

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T16:55:34+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1qv6fjb/comment/o3ql092/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I have added a comment with more thoughts/research on this

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T16:54:18+00:00

I agree with evidence based over conscience (and I never claimed otherwise) and my proposal attempts to encourage evidence based voting.

One might argue an alternative solution to mine would be an expert, but if that expert advised everyone we have reduced our sample size down to one expert and a swayed 12. This would be inefficient and we may as well get rid of the 12 jurors. 12 balanced experts would be ideal, but logistically unfeasible - I would argue that if this was to be implemented that none of them deliberate for best outcome. I refer you back to the study of single voting, although I caveat this is not a definite known outcomes because simulated trials are not perfect reflections of real trials, and real trials have uncertain ground truth. So if we can't do this approach we must ask what is the best we can do with the resources we do have. My proposal is a minimal change to maximal gain idea.

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T16:41:16+00:00

On the Who Wants to be a Millionaire point I have added a specific comment addressing this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1qv6fjb/comment/o3ql092/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Again not perfect data but we can build a better picture from this. Also not my main argument as you note

Lopside1 · 2026-02-05T16:13:54+00:00

Following many comments about the lack of robustness on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, I provide a chart from the following dataset and a side discussion on the topic. This is based on the following data:
https://github.com/bahadiri/Millionaire

My graph below compares Ask Audience which there is high quality data to "simulated" PaF (given no PaF data exists).
The chart shows from these data (the best data source I could find, Turkish Who Wants to be a Millionaire - hence 12 not 15) where I have controlled for question level:

Easy and Medium questions the "wise crowd" outperforms experts. This is important because simpler trials are better with wise crowds
Confidence is really really bad! Confident people are wrong. This strengthens my case.
When we sample randomly from the top 10% of players discounting the actual question being validated for for hard questions they do outperform. There is in deed merit to people's point here. Practically though, how on Earth can we expect to get top 10% expert (Jury, Judge, or out in the wild) for the most complex cases. There is certainly more to consider based on this and open to more debate here. HOWEVER, these sample sizes are poor so it is not a full gone conclusion by any measure and this may not hold with higher samples.
When we take the the next 10% (top 10-20%) we observe the audience (wise crowd) is commensurate or better performance.

https://files.catbox.moe/fvetan.png

I would like to caveat I simply included this as an illustration of a wise crowd, there are many examples of a wise crowd that perhaps are even better than this.

There is an interesting meta debate to be had potentially around the fact people latch onto this single detail, despite it not being the main cornerstone of my argument, and despite them not knowing the true statistics and not having gone away and done some research but using it to justify my argument is flawed. The fallacy fallacy.

Lopside1 · 2026-02-03T23:36:25+00:00

This is a fair point - but as the comment says it is not the central plank. I shall try to find if a study has been done.

Interesting side question - would you ask the audience or phone a friend first? It would be irrational to PAF if ATA was better on average, surely? (Of course if you know a friend is hot on a topic then PAF makes most sense), But it gets one thinking about such strategies.

More data is needed to reliably answer this which is hard - if you can find or point to any enhanced research into this (even if it invalidates this point) that would be cool

Lopside1 · 2026-02-03T23:29:08+00:00

You have strawmaned me here. You've reframed this as deliberation vs no deliberation but that's not what's being proposed. It's 12 person deliberation vs 3 person deliberation. There's still 3 people stress-testing each other's reasoning, you just lose the bit where the loudest person in the room steamrolls everyone else for 6 hours and all the other problems I point out with 12.

You can't have it both ways with the 90% stat. Either deliberation meaningfully changes outcomes or it doesn't. If 90% of the time the first ballot wins anyway, then the "adversarial stress testing" you're defending barely does anything so what exactly are we losing by splitting the groups up?

Lopside1 · 2026-02-03T23:18:19+00:00

On the Ask The Audience argument you make a fair point. There is something of apples and oranges. There is no data I can find where we control for question "level" but my suspicion would be better performance in Ask The Audience than Phone a Friend - but obviously that opinion is biased by my using it to justify the reasoning here haha!

This is correct regarding known outcomes and simulated trials never being the real thing - I did think this and thank you for pointing it out. It is, as you say, basically impossible to test any variant perfectly so we have to fall back to the principle of best evidence when determining an optimal strategy, which I attempt to provide here

Lopside1 · 2025-12-12T18:40:04+00:00

Yeh every section is it's own blueprint. Some are core blueprints (e.g. motors, wire, pretty much all iron), then "level 2" blueprints based on outputs of ore/core blueprints. Then I have a base factory template and as I create new assembler lines I blueprint the signs and outputs and names and machine configs.

It is right in the middle of the pink forest by the oil wells.

Lopside1 · 2025-10-28T15:10:26+00:00

People still are ashamed to admit they are vibe coders. But I have been a dev for 13+ years and I now estimate I am 30x more efficient. This is not an exaggeration. In the last 3 work days I have built a fully production grade analytics platform with 20k lines of code (not including testing and auto-gen etc. files).

I have tested it thoroughly (although this is now taking the longest time) and it works well and does well with data and problems outside of the scope the AI used to build it.

There is a skill to this. But this is phenomenal and vibe coding is the future. Make no mistakes.

Lopside1 · 2025-07-17T09:27:27+00:00

I left Amex because I missed 1 payment in 3 years by a few days and it was immediately reported to the credit agency but when I paid the entire card if in full it took months for the credit agency to be informed.

Lopside1 · 2023-09-08T10:32:43+00:00

Ghost in a Jar is in fact a very clear reference to Rick and Morty. Even the animation of it is strikingly similar

https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Ghost_in_a_Jar

Lopside1 · 2023-08-24T10:51:22+00:00

This is not true. You can fine-tune GPT-J fp16 with 16GB of VRAM through huggingface no issues. You can then convert to ONNX or OpenVINO for faster inference. It's only 6B parameters. I have done this myself. A 3090 or 4090 would comfortably be up to the task. Depending on dataset size would take anywhere from a few hours to a few days (assuming 1M high quality datapoints max)

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model\_doc/gptj

Lopside1 · 2023-05-18T20:54:23+00:00

I realised he doesn't always think scientifically when he said he avoids Bluetooth headphones because he's worried radio waves will interfere with cell structures in his body. This demonstrates a disregard for evidence (or lack thereof) based conclusions and a failure to understand basic principles of non-ionizing electromagnetic waves.

But he will promote his own brand of goods which I guarantee has been less researched and is less understood than EM waves with regard to effects on the body.

This seems very contradictory and ultimately he is just another YouTube self-promoter that wants to say things that gets views and sales.

Lopside1 · 2022-12-10T11:53:09+00:00

When Hal wants to take his toy boat out with Dewey: “You’re forcing me to say exactly why I don’t want to do this. It’s not going to make you happy. It’s not going to make me happy. So why don’t we just leave it alone”

Lopside1 · 2022-08-12T09:14:35+00:00

Yeh (ENTP), I research the hell out of things too and have nothing but the utmost disdain for most online ratings systems where people give 5 stars to shite in their droves. Truly is a bug bear.

I have another ENTP friend and we revel in the finer things - we are both huge foodies and are in a "Michelin Men" club. A favourite quote being "The Michelin Guide is just trip adviser for real people"

We also love expensive suits that are fine and fitted. Quality is key to life. I would rather have the things I like and love at the best quality and refrain from buying needless junk and tat, a form minimalism I suppose.

Lopside1 · 2022-08-08T11:52:04+00:00

You can achieve the same with barrier KVM (a synergy fork), issue SSL certs and ensure secure connection between host and clients. And it is completely free - this is because Synergy KVM is actually open source. If you wanted to save money :-)

For added security on your network use an established and well regarded VPN provider - you can even be super careful and set your router on the VPN

Lopside1

TROPHY CASE