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Comment by schemy | Hacker News Reader

Just copy blind auditions orchestras do.

Everything is done by typed text, with no humans visible. Jurors just sit isolated in a booth reading the text, or have the same person read out all the text to them.

Lawyers would be against it, but everyone would benefit from a society that decides guilt based on how convincing an argument is and not how convincing the person saying the argument is.

"Look at that man, he is guilty." Is not very convincing when the person who is supposedly guilty has never been seen.

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Sounds nice in theory, but the whole idea behind the right to face your accuser is that people depend on their senses to judge if someone's lying or not by how he/she reacts to the confrontation.

Perhaps, but "I can tell if someone is lying or not by [their manner]" sounds like exactly the kind of situation where people wildly overestimate their own abilities, doesn't it?

That depends on what you think the point of justice is.

Is it to make you feel better or to improve society?

Personally I'd go for improving society because as fun as lynchings are we probably shouldn't kill minorities we don't like.

Tonal variation, speech cadence, hand gestures, and facial expressions sometimes communicate as much as what you actually say. That is probably important in a court environment. I would love to see your idea tested though.

The conversion of {speech, body language} to {text, nothing} is pretty severe when you're on a jury trying to establish if the person on the stand is credible.

In this case being attractive makes you more credible so I see this as a feature.

I have a dream, that one day I will live in a country where peoples credibility will be decided by the strengths of their argument and not the sound of their accent.

Yes, lets take the already limited bandwidth of conversation and hack out more parts of it.

Why not test and see if it leads to better outcomes.

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