December 2, 2007

Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias compares the nature of certain jury deliberations with the task of observers instructed to estimate the loudness of certain sounds without being given a reference sound ("modulus") with which to compare them: "A jury award for punitive damages isn't so much an economic valuation as an attitude expression -- a psychophysical measure of outrage, expressed on an unbounded scale with no standard modulus." (via Haspel).