

Judges in Jeopardy: Could IBM's Watson Beat Courts at Their Own Game? - grellas
http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-part/legislation/judges-in-jeopardy!:-could-ibm%E2%80%99s-watson-beat-courts-at-their-own-game?/

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sp332
This is not very insightful, mainly because the author does not understand how
the algorithms are chosen. The methods of attack Watson used in Jeopardy were
chosen and tuned by the programmers. Even the automated training they gave it
was programmed to find answers with an outcome the programmers chose. For
example, when the author says

 _Inasmuch as he makes errors, these errors are randomly distributed. His
mistakes are not skewed due to political preferences, personal relationships,
or other sources of human prejudice. Watson by design avoids the ideological
bias of judges—which textualists so deeply fear— because, of course, he does
not have any ideology of his own._

Of course the computer will be looking for answers to questions that humans
ask it, using techniques that humans programmed. Even if the humans introduce
bias unintentionally, or accidentally recreate the effects of "ideology", the
most you could say is that the computer is not "responsible" for skewing its
answers. Of course the answers will be skewed, whether we know how ahead of
time or not. There is no reason to think that the errors will be evenly
distributed.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#Uncarved_block>

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roel_v
While I'm the first to admit that I'm no expert on common law, I don't know of
many proponents of textualism (outside of constitutional law) since
Montesquieu. Seems to me like a rather vapid article that only applies within
the constraints of very narrow definitions of some of the terms used in order
to get to write a sensationalist headline.

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sp332
I'm not sure if I agree, but he does link to this PDF as corroboration:
<http://columbialawreview.org/assets/pdfs/106/1/Molot-Web.pdf>

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shawndumas
print version: [http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-
part/l...](http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-
part/legislation/judges-in-jeopardy!:-could-ibm%E2%80%99s-watson-beat-courts-
at-their-own-game?/print/)

