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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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LLMs outperformed human judges.

This is exactly what I'd expect. Humans are full of bias. For example, the hungry judge effect (judges are more likely to give harsher sentence just before lunch).

Daniel Lakens: Impossibly Hungry Judges

Andreas Glöckner: The irrational hungry judge effect revisited: Simulations reveal that the magnitude of the effect is overestimated

In short: the supposed effect is absurdly large, with the probability of a favorable ruling going from 65% to almost 0% before a break. The far more likely explanation is that, since the order of cases is not random, worse cases are scheduled last. In particular, it makes sense for judges to put short cases last rather than ones anticipated to go over time, and losing cases are shorter.

This sort of explanation should be the first thing we consider when hearing about a supposed effect like this. Outside of actual randomized control trials selection bias tends to be more powerful than the effect being investigated and common methods like "we controlled for some things we thought of and assumed any remaining discrepancy was the effect we're looking for" are inadequate for dealing with it.

IIRC there's some question about if the results of that study were due to other cofounding factors, for instance judges scheduling "tougher" cases earlier in the day.

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