First things first, if you are hungry, have a snack – I don’t want any negative reviews on my blogs.

Ate something? Let’s get started.

Robert Sapolsky. Have you heard this name yet? If you haven’t, I promise you will in the near future. A quick YouTube search reveals he has aired at TED, Andrew Huberman, and Big Think. His most viral lecture posted on Stanford’s channel has attracted over 17 millions views. The source of this attention is Sapolsky’s stance on the Free Will. For him, humans have no true control over their decisions.

This time I don’t want to go into the philosophical weeds, but instead talk about – human ignorance.

For that, I need you to watch this 1-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OsleLlBWlBo

Hopefully, the stars aligned in a way that gave rise to just the right hormone configuration that made you watch the video.

Years ago, when I stumbled upon the Extraneous factors in judicial decisions(commonly known as the Hungry Judge) study, I was blown by how faulty human nature is. The fact that one person’s hunger could result in another person’s life-long sentence was astonishing and angering to me.

Not so long ago, I stumbled upon this article: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html

I was once again blown by how faulty human nature is. This time, because of my own naiveness and either foolishness or bad intentions of the 1,939 scientists that cited the notorious study.

The article proposes that the study should be dismissed simply because of the absurdity of its findings.

To quote Lakens: “If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion.”

The study has received so much criticism that the second sentence on its Wikipedia page is about its possible flaws:

“The hungry judge effect is a finding that judges were more inclined to be lenient after a meal but more severe before the break. It has been suggested that this may be an artifact of the scheduling of cases, based on their likely outcome and duration.^[1]“

And yet, 1,939 scientists including respectable Robert Sapolsky cited it. Whether they did it out of ignorance or in a desperate attempt to support their own studies is not entirely clear.

However, it is clear that common people like me, putting our faith to the rigor and objectivity of the scientists, need to be wary of how foolish even the most educated of us and them are.

PC https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1234040721p5/187.jpg