Sublime
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“In this important, deeply researched debut, [Benforado] draws on findings from psychology and neuroscience to show that police, jurors, and judges are generally guided by intuitive feelings rather than hard facts in making assessments….The new research challenges basic assumptions about most key aspects of the legal system, including eyewitness
... See moreAdam Benforado • Unfair
Sam Harris | #338 - The Sin of Moral Equivalence
samharris.orgOne of the most robust findings in criminology is that increasing the severity of punishment has little deterrent effect. People simply aren’t as sensitive to the potential costs of crime as the rational-choice model predicts they should be, and so efforts to reduce it by cracking down have failed to justify the immense fiscal and social costs of
... See moreThe judges, however, wisely rejected that argument, quoting Thurgood Marshall's observation that given the mysteries of human motivation, “it would be unwise to presume as a matter of law that human beings of one definable group will not discriminate against other members of their group.”
Randall Kennedy • Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
fallacy that it takes Supermen to forge super teams.
Stanley McChrystal • Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
percent and 2 percent, respectively.11 Then there are the moral issues that arise. Racial profiling by police is an obvious example. Defenders of the practice claim that this is more efficient, but even if it were, it makes life worse for the people who are profiled, the vast majority of whom are innocent of any crime. I’m framing the issue here in
... See morePaul Bloom • Psych: The Story of the Human Mind
Degrees of guilt can still be judged by reference to the facts of a case: the
Sam Harris • Free Will
For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley
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