Today I’m thinking about trial by jury and efficiency.
In a courtroom, everyone has a specific role. Each lawyer is supposed to make the most effective and compelling argument they can, regardless of who they imagine to be guilty. The judge is supposed to constrain those arguments to the law, regardless of who they imagine to be guilty. Outside the courtroom, there’s an entire representative democracy making that law, which must apply to everyone, regardless of who the lawmakers imagine to be guilty. The jury is supposed to assess those arguments and come to a conclusion about the arguments, not the people involved. The stenographer is recording the proceeding so it can be vetted, and the decision appealed if anyone hasn’t done their job.
In reality, there are plenty of situations where the judge alone makes a (ahem) judgment call; but in the perfect vision of a jury trial, no one person makes the entire moral decision of right or wrong, guilty or not guilty, legal or illegal. Everyone has some smaller, less subjective job to do, and the final verdict is the sum of all those jobs without being exactly equal to any of them.
In this way, the court is a Chinese room. It is a system for making those decisions that is, in principle, more resilient than any single person, and indeed in spite of any single person. A person can be corrupt, or lazy, or biased; and even if it were humanly possible for a perfect judge to exist, undying, and able to preside over every dispute, our society is varied enough that there is no single ideal of moral judgment for that person to live up to.
A courtroom is, for that reason, much less efficient than a single person making decisions! A court is slow and plodding and expensive and resource-intensive. Robustness is redundancy, and redundancy is expensive.
I think this is a feature common among almost all long-lasting positive institutions; they are not efficient, they are robust. They work slowly and change slowly, and that slowness is, if not a feature in itself, a direct result of the most important feature.
Chesterton’s Fence urges us to understand the purpose of what we’re replacing but I think it is easy to look at slow robust systems and say “I understand the input and output of this process, and I can do it much faster and cheaper!” The robustness of social systems is a secret, hidden feature because the corruption and conflict it counteracts is rarely visible — because it’s ineffective, it goes away on its own! But if you remove that robustness, the corruption will return the moment your back is turned, and recreating the slow, plodding, but robust system is far harder than tearing it down — especially when it was built over centuries of real-world learning.