Judgement

There are many things to disagree about in the world. But perhaps there are some things that we need to agree about so that we can still go through this life without injustice.

There are two kinds of justice that I know about: the concept of divine justice, and that of society-driven consensus-based justice. In both cases, ``justice'' still carries the meaning of righting the wrong, but their key difference is the time-span of enaction; divine justice is essentially unbounded in time, since whoever is in charge of it (in my case, God) is not a being of the universe and thus has literal free reign over all of space-time to righting the wrong. The other difference that is more subtle is the definition of what ``wrong'' means. Divine justice involves righting wrongs that are more cosmic in nature, the type of wrong that is done against a universal morality, while society-driven consensus-based justice can be seen as worldly implementation of divine justice, but with more cultural aspects to it. I cannot, however, say that divine justice is a proper superset of regular justice as we know it, since there may be cultural components that introduce concepts of justice that lie outside of a universal morality that may even be considered be blasphemous.

But in either case, we can agree that the notion of ``justice'' also entails the action of ``judgement'', a singular event that pronounces that an action is just/unjust, and the meting out of punishment/rehabilitation to correct the unjust actions to bring the judged back to be among the just. ``Judgement'', though stated as a singular event, has been known to be provided by any of these three types of judges: a universally impartial supernatural judge (in my case God), a society-driven consensually appointed human proxy (i.e. the regular judges in a court of [human] law), or a society-driven amorphous consciousness that simultaneously exists but cannot be precisely defined (i.e. public opinion).

The outcomes of a universally impartial supernatural judge's opinions are known in a vague way but not with the specific outcomes that can be pin-pointed to some specific space-time range; by definition, this judge is unknowable in many senses of the world. As such, we cannot reason about this judge in a way that is meaningful for discussion---the only true thing we can reason about is whether we ought to have faith in the infallibility of this judge or to not have faith in the infallibility of this judge, with the latter meaning either that the judge is fallible at some level that we do not comprehend, or that this judge simply does not exist. With that in mind then, we leave this judge out of discussion.

A society-driven consensually appointed human judge enforces human law, which we already have established as a particular implementation of divine justice that is itself affected heavily by cultural contexts. For the purposes of the exposition, ``cultural context'' here simply refers to the level of human understanding that a particular population comprises for that particularly defined society---it can mean a village of people, a country of people, an ethnic group of people, or even a religious group/cult of people. Human law is no different from that of sequential list of conditions and conclusions being applied to interpret a series of actions revealed through investigation to determine justice with respect to the [human] law, or what we would more commonly call as ``legality''. Judges of this sort are not necessarily as impartial as the universally impartial supernatural judge by definition, but they are generally among the most well-respected of people---they are believed strongly by the society-driven amorphous consciousness that simultaneously exists but cannot be precisely defined to perform their duties ``to the letter'' of the law that was agreed to by the said society from which all will abide by (and thus be justified).

In the case of regular judges, a principle of ``innocent until proven guilty'' seems to be in vogue. I don't think that principle is a correct statement: ``innocent'' and ``guilty'' are often misconstrued to being more polar than what they should mean in context. What I am saying is that ``innocent'' and ``guilty'' ought to be understood in the context in which a particular series of charges are being levied at---attributing more unnecessary context to these two words is one of the reasons why a legal system may be deemed to be unjust. Regular judges are well aware of this requirement, but the same cannot be said of public opinion.

And that is where character assassinations come into play through the use of public opinion.

It is never about ``innocent until proven guilty''. It has always been:

Let the plaintiff/complainant present their pieces of evidence and associated logical reasoning to demonstrate that the defendant is in violation of the specific laws that the defendant is charged with. The defendant may then be acquitted if they can present sufficient counter-evidence and proof of contradictions to the provided logical reasoning to demonstrate that the plaintiff/complainant has no case against them.

It really doesn't matter if the defendant is ``not innocent'' of other things not related to the specific charges---in the court of law, all they are answering to are the specific charges that are listed against them. If the plaintiff/complainant does not provide enough evidence and link them into a convincing enough narrative to explain how the defendant is violating the specific laws that comprise the charges, then the defendant must be acquitted---it has nothing to do with innocence or guilt.

That is part of the reason why good lawyers are so important. And it is also the reason why the law seems to favour the rich and powerful---not because they can bribe their way through the system (they don't have to, really), but because they have the means to hire the types of lawyers who are competent enough to mesh the evidence into a narrative that requires a formidable intellect to riposte against. As plaintiffs/complainants, their chances of success improve when the evidence are strongly linked into a narrative that requires an exceedingly improbable set of events to break either the evidence or the reasoning down; as defendants, their chances of success improve when they can break the relevance of the supplied evidence and point out alternative logical reasonings that contradict the proposed one by the plaintiff/complainant.

However, that's all technical; a classic demonstration of logos. The problem here is that public opinion (or the society-driven amorphous consciousness that simultaneously exists but cannot be precisely defined) runs on pathos, a distinctively different manner of reasoning. It's not about the logic, it's all about the emotion, the ``feels'', the type of intellectual laziness of lumping both the shortfalls of a person's character with the specific charge that they are being levied with. This is not helped at all by the media, social or otherwise, that thrives on generating lots of controversy (or as I would call it, ``stirring shit up'') to increase the visibility of that particular media to feed into the participation/relevance/advertising revenue-loop.

That is how someone who is exonerated in the eyes of the law can still be cast as a pariah of society. Because accusations get blown up into declarations of guilt in the court of public opinion, and where retractions of such mistakes never travel as far as the more controversial accusations. It is a classic example of a denial of service attack, in which case the ``service'' that the victim is denied is that of an unassumingly normal life devoid of unnecessary and incorrect judgement.

The problem is obvious, but the solution here isn't. How are we to deal with such manipulation in general? Can we even do anything about it at all? Sadly, I think not---humans are not rational by any degree, no matter what our economist friends might say (they are also starting to realise that homo rational is a simplifying assumption the same way that physics uses ``a spherical cow'' to create models to help explain a [small] part of how an emergent system works), with the added effect that the more we try to get people to be rational, the more they are likely to take those words out of context and twist it to fit their own pathos. Examples of the latter may be found through the many ``anti-vaxx'' arguments that can be seen out there that I don't want to reproduce for fear of damaging my brain even more.

Going back to my original statement, I think we really need to start thinking about the processes in which we take to thinking about things and developing our opinions. I think I might have mentioned before (either here or in meatspace) that it is often impossible to convince anyone from the extreme sides of a situation to change their minds---I said that ``they cannot be reasoned with if they don't want to listen to reason''. A recent musing that I read crystallised this concept into something that is a bit more proof-friendly:

Don't charge in to ``convince'' someone by throwing out all sorts of evidence, arguments, and associated reasonings---they are not likely to want to listen to all of that. Instead, ask these people what sorts of evidence, arguments, and associated logical reasonings that they are expected to see proven true or refuted before they are willing to change their mind instead.

I like that perspective because it forces contrarians to be more precise in terms of what they are contrary about. If an extremist can be articulate about the ``sacred cows'' that they hold dear to keep them in that particular polarity, then that person is no extremist any more---they are really extremists who can be reasoned with, as opposed to the intellectually lazy extremist who does not know what he/she is being extreme about, and opposes all forms of evidence, arguments, and associated reasonings because they can do so flippantly.

I guess this whole rant is just trying to see the link between how this new perspective gels in with what we believe to be an integral part of a functioning society.

That's all for now. Till the next update.