Another good example is the legal system. Individually it serves many participants poorly on a truth-seeking level; it encourages them to commit strongly to an initial position and make only those arguments that advance their cases, while doing everything they can to conceal their cases’ flaws short of explicit misrepresentation. They are rewarded for winning, whether or not their position is correct. On the other hand, this set-up (in combined with modern liberalized disclosure rules) works fairly well as a way of aggregating all the relevant evidence and arguments before a decisionmaker. And that decisionmaker is subject to strong social pressures not to seek to affiliate with the biased parties. Finally, in many instances the decisionmaker must provide specific reasons for rejecting the parties’ evidence and arguments, and make this reasoning available for public scrutiny.
The system, in short, works by encouraging individual bias in service of greater systemic rationality.
The legal system does supposedly encourage individual bias to aggregate evidence; I’m more of a skeptic about how well it actually does this in practice though.
Interestingly, there may be a way to test this question, at least partially. Most legal systems have procedures in place to allow judgments to be revisited upon the discovery of new evidence that was not previously available. There are many procedural complications in making cross-national comparisons, but it would be interesting to compare the rate at which such motions are granted in systems that are more adversarially driven versus more inquisitorial systems (in which a neutral magistrate has more control over the collection of evidence).
Another good example is the legal system. Individually it serves many participants poorly on a truth-seeking level; it encourages them to commit strongly to an initial position and make only those arguments that advance their cases, while doing everything they can to conceal their cases’ flaws short of explicit misrepresentation. They are rewarded for winning, whether or not their position is correct. On the other hand, this set-up (in combined with modern liberalized disclosure rules) works fairly well as a way of aggregating all the relevant evidence and arguments before a decisionmaker. And that decisionmaker is subject to strong social pressures not to seek to affiliate with the biased parties. Finally, in many instances the decisionmaker must provide specific reasons for rejecting the parties’ evidence and arguments, and make this reasoning available for public scrutiny.
The system, in short, works by encouraging individual bias in service of greater systemic rationality.
The legal system does supposedly encourage individual bias to aggregate evidence; I’m more of a skeptic about how well it actually does this in practice though.
Care to explain the basis for your skepticism?
Interestingly, there may be a way to test this question, at least partially. Most legal systems have procedures in place to allow judgments to be revisited upon the discovery of new evidence that was not previously available. There are many procedural complications in making cross-national comparisons, but it would be interesting to compare the rate at which such motions are granted in systems that are more adversarially driven versus more inquisitorial systems (in which a neutral magistrate has more control over the collection of evidence).