For Jury, I would give a "skip question" option. I found one relating to Christianity that I had _no_ idea what the "correct" answer would be based on the two options.
I thought clicking "Ask a new question" then going right back into Jury Duty would give me a new question, but I landed on the same one.
I think the asker providing the two valid responses is flawed. It doesn't allow the "jury" to draw their own conclusion, or provides leading answers (one about "is it rude" to eat by themselves when they're socially exhausted in a work context -- one is "yes they would be offended", the other "no they won't be" -- well, they certainly may be but it is your right to eat alone, so the answer could have been "they may, but you need to take care of yourself").
Maybe also add a "Needs More Info/Context " option. So two choices which the user provides, and then two system-added options (NOTA/NMI). If the jury votes on the latter two options, allow the user to resubmit the question with edited text/choices.
> Skipping unanswerable questions would be good for everyone. Any answer would be misleading.
I disagree with this. The purpose of the website is to provide answers. If you let people skip questions, you can't guarantee that any given question will ever be answered.
The whole concept here is that you aren't asking people who hold particular credentials. You, Nevermark, should provide your take, regardless of whether you feel it's valid.
However, I'm uncomfortable with the fact that the two answer options are both specified by the user. They should be limited to "yes" or "no", with the meaning of that supplied by the question.
Leads me to the conclusion that I don't know what JuryNow is for. The post says it's a game but it's not really. I think that people will use it 'fo real'. But think about a real jury. Typically you will be excused from a jury if you are an expert in a specific field that is important to the case, or if you have a conflict of interest. The jury must be a bit of a blank slate so that both prosecution and defence can give them the facts pertaining to the case, question witnesses, call experts to give testimony when pertinent and then let the jury deliberate together on the result.
If these JuryNow questions are just a snap judgement on a one-shot question, with no opportunity for depth or deliberation between members, then I can see all sorts of potential problems, including the one you pointed out. The person asking the question can also load it in such a way that it leans towards their chosen answer (somewhat like loaded surveys with leading questions). I can certainly see it being used that way in toxic online debates, like a cheap mini survey that gives credence to some opinion. Aren't Reddit "CMV" and "AITA" even a little better since the jury can deliberate with each other online, as would happen in a real case?
This is an alternate form of hotornot.com, more or less.
And you're right, typically an expert would be excused, but you would also have the opportunity to learn what the issue is about to make an 'informed' choice, which in one particular case I could not.
Yes, skip would be good, but I'd also advocate an option like "I reject the premise of the question".
In legal contexts yes-or-no answers can work because the case can in theory be boiled down to guilty or not. If there is any flaw with the case, the answer should be not guilty.
But let's take the "do I have a moral duty to..." questions used as examples here for contrast. I'd argue you never had a moral duty to attend your sibling's wedding to begin with. But because the question was asked with a weird modifier like "even if it's their 3rd wedding", any answer you give will be inadequate and will just serve to reinforce the flawed premise. Skipping is not enough in my opinion, because even if communicated to the question asker, it doesn't make it clear whether there as an issue on the answerer's side ("I don't know" / "don't feel qualified") or with the question itself.
After answering several questions, I really wanted to see what the final jury decision was. I saw a question from a father asking about leaving his assets to his children. I would want to know what the other 11 random people selected (for various reasons).
Without this feature, I think I might start to lose interest because it'll start to feel like I'm clicking into the empty, voiceless void.
The big problem is kinda the same as what happens in push polls -- in that they ask misleading or suggestive questions trying to boil the issue down to a good and bad answer.
The reality for many of these questions is pretty complex.
I'm not saying it's not worthwhile, but I'm saying forcing users to choose on some topics aren't black and white.
It's maybe worthwhile getting information on things like people who aren't knowledgeable, people who don't care or have no preference, or people who don't want to answer because the answers are skewed towards one side.
I think you’re correct in that lots of things aren’t black and white, but the reverse is also true. Lots of arguments end up being over-litigated when a black and white answer (even if imperfect) will suffice.
As with most things like this, you get out what you put in. Ask a biased question, and get a biased answer. At some point, the responsibility has to lie with the user that if they want something like this to be interesting and unbiased, they need to think about ways to use it to accomplish that.
Like, someone comes with a problem, great. They suggest 2 options. Lets assume one is super biased. The asker is just fishing for compliments. The jury decides on a third option of 'No, actually, your dilemma is terrible, we need to re-word this'
Then you get some people to recraft answers for it. One person gets to craft one answer, another the other answer. Then a third person to adjudicate that both are acceptable. Then it goes to the jury.
Annnnnnd like the game 'Werewolf', we're expanding this to have all kinds of fun little jobs. Because of course we're going to need a bailiff, and a court reporter, and a stenographer, etc.
For getting this off the ground, yeah, there needs to be a 'send this back' button. But once it does get going, then more fun little jobs will be good to have as updates to keep people interested.
> diverse panel of 12 real people of all ages, far removed from your peer group, around the world who will be able to give you an instant decision on your question 24/7. No commentary, just a verdict between two choices
If the userbase becomes equally-ish distributed around the world, for many questions, this wouldn't be very useful.
Especially when you only get a yes/no answer. People can give you the same answer for opposite reasons.
Should I invite 400 people to my wedding?
12xNo
1 from countries where this is too many,
11 from countries where this is too few.
(and it depends on who is up, timezones and all)
You were hoping for a No, because you can't afford 400 guests, and now you think the world agrees with you. Wrong.
With a well-crafted question, this can be mitigated. But I doubt the average user will be willing to put the effort.
Bingo. Further, there are some questions which I don’t the opinions of people from particular countries. If I want opinions to a some moral dilemma, I would probably be inclined to go against the verdict if all or most of the jurors happened to come from Israeli’s.
First congrats on launching, from personal experience that's the hard part.
Are there filters or monitoring for the more violent or maleficent types of things that people have a habit of gravitating towards? Depending on the number of people online and the balance, I could easily see groups jumping on and choosing the negative or harmful choice for lolz
Hello there! Thanks so much for trying it! Indeed, there is a filter to weed out any hate speech, self harm content, there is also a feature for jurors to report comments, and there is the User Agreement! But indeed, this was a big worry for me and put me off trying for a long time!
I don't know. All of this smells fishy. Clearly noone has worked 16 years on this. The whole description is odd. Made by a new HN account. The thing barely works. Sometimes you get stuck in the same question loop. Sometimes buttons are huge.
Is it possible that this is some form of clickjacking site?
Look, this is good entertainment, you should own up to that and enough with the noble purpose stuff:
> I built JuryNow because I wanted to create a truly objective place to get outside opinions that were not from my peer group, but from 12 people in 12 different countries, different ages, professions, cultures, a truly diverse global objective jury with no algorithms.
You don't collect demographics, and couldn't verify them anyway, so this game doesn't give insight into those dynamics. And the result is not more objective than a social media consensus.
That doesn't mean it isn't fun and even maybe useful in collecting one's thoughts, so go with that.
I actually saw this in your previous HN post and tried it out - it's a great improvement to replace the email/password with a captcha, since I anyways filled out a fake email and I'm sure most people would do the same. Super cool concept, congratulations on launching it!
>> if there are fewer than 13 people playing (and it only just launched last week and that was just on Reddit!) then a popup will appear saying your verdict is simulated by AI. But this is just a TEMPORARY feature with the MVP. As soon as there are regular players, it will be permanently dismantled and we will celebrate the power of collective human intelligence!
Congratulations for a great idea and a fun game, but AFAICT there is no way to stop participants from plugging in an LLM to your site and having the LLM read questions and make decisions. For example, someone might do this to cheat their jury duty and get decisions from others without having to personally invest time and effort.
I don't know what you can do about this. Do you have any ideas?
Interesting idea. While waiting for my verdict I was asked the same question (and provided the same answer) over and over. Was expecting a bunch of different questions, rather than the same questions, repeated.
Congrats on the launch! Very nice idea! Looking forward when more people are playing so I get answers from real people. While I was waiting, I had to answer the same question multiple times. Is this by design?
I always imagined a system like this could be used for a larger community to self-regulate/moderate. Moderating would be a requirement of membership -- sort of like mandatory military service. So everyone is invested in creating a good community and everyone sees what it is like to be a mod. Maybe it is a naive idea and I am sure it isn't original. Curious to see who has experimented with it before. I bet in RL communes/utopias have attempted something like this.
I did a few and would almost not want to respond with boolean answers unless I could provide some commentary (which the recipient could choose to read or not).
As a follow up, I'd guide people on asking questions. More context = better answers.
For example, I joined a jury. The question was "Should I go to Belarus?" That's so vague, it doesn't even feel helpful for me to answer. I would much rather the question have said something like "I've always wanted to go to Belarus, but my rent is also due in a week. I only have enough money for one. Where should I spend my money?"
That at least gives me something to work with and weigh in on.
Unsolicited feedback: I felt that some questions (what do you think of new Indian government) require “I have no idea about the topic”, and some (do I have moral duty to visit family member in prison) require “much more nuance nuance exist here”
I love the concept. One tiny recommendation: on my phone the page both for voting and to see the voting result requires me to scroll. When content wise it could very easily fit within a single screen what is being displayed.
That is mostly a problem with the results page where i wanted to make a screenshot to show it off to my friends but couldn’t.
Also, i see repeated questions? As in i see one question. I vote, the “bar” moves forward, but i see the same question, so i vote again and the same happens.
So whoever was picking up skateboarding again in their 30s, but just suffered a hip injury after a fall. I voted that it is time for you to give up like four times. (Which i stand by as an opinion, but perhaps I shouldn’t be so overrepresented in your jury?)
so sorry about that! there was a bug 3 months ago (when i was just testing it with family and friends) when that happened, and one random question would repeat! And it's just come back tongiht!! (just as I post on hacker news!) i think it's fixed now! And thank you again!
Thanks for that - my post on HN induced a massive spike creating a few unexpected bugs (despite testing it for scalability for nearly 4 months) . Working on it!
THank you for this! That's really useful to hear. As you can see it's a very basic MVP for the moment, but I hope that when there are many more regular users and we can expand it, that the mobile app will be better and more user friendly! But thank you for playing!
It appears to have either been hugged to death or something broke on the backend - jury duty now just returns the same question about whether or not it is ethical for a startup to sell an ai as a physiologist.
I would definitely like a skip question button for jury duty. I also think it’s allowing me to vote multiple times on a single question, potentially when the queue is empty.
I get why you decided not to include commentary, but I think in some cases it would be useful. For example, if I have a moral dilemma, I might be interested in the moral framework used by each juror; if a juror makes a judgment based on a moral framework I disagree with (or, worse, find reprehensible), I might discard some responses and come up with a different verdict. But it would take a lot more time for a juror to write down a rationale than just picking from two options, so that would make JuryDuty more onerous, and it would take longer than 3 minutes for people to get their responses.
I tried JuryDuty and the first question was just "Israel or Palestine?" And... ooof... there is no way to boil that down to a binary decision. I am frankly not interested in choosing either one over the other without any ability to provide commentary or nuance.
"Sorry, we ran into a temporary bug and can't complete your request. We'll fix it as soon as we can; please try again in a bit!"
What is this about?
running on firefox 137.0.2 (aarch64) on Apple M1 Sequoia 15.4.1
Neat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor! But seriously, this really is a great idea IMO. The jury-duty-while-you-wait feature also seems like a fair trade-off.
Thanks SO much for trying! Honestly, interacting with real people who have tried my game after thinking about it non stop for 16 years is truly exciting! Indeed, the AI part is necessary (well I don't want to say evil but...) in order to show off he game as it will be, and after posting it on Reddit last week, it was working like a dream with real live juries answering! My dream jury will be age 16 - 99, from every continent, every profession and culture...because I do believe the more diverse the jury, the better the verdict!
> I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor!
People can be trolling. That is the kind of over the top, obviously silly question where I personally might also answer a silly answer. And out of those two the "Neighbor is culpable" is sillyier and funnier.
"Neutral" is truly a required option. I have played around a bit and ALL of the questions I've got were undecidable. Like, same shoes in two pics and "which one is better".
I feel like there needs to be a third option, which might be "not a good question" or "false dichotomy" or "low quality"
for example, i got "Q: Is Luigi Mangione guilty of murdering the CEO of United Healthcare?"
Well yes, he shot the guy on camera. Due process and all of that, he's probably guilty. It's like asking is the sky blue. What's the point? That's a low quality question. Did you mean "is jury nullification a good choice" or "is what he did morally right"?
Also got asked if I ever had a physical fight with a sibling.
Well, I don't have one, so no. Perhaps not what the question was intending.
Yawn, I can't get past the filter. Boring.
Please moderate the content of your question before submitting it
Apparently "Furry" is enough to set it off.
The premise of this app is undermined by the oversimplified implementation.
Truly diverse panel? You have no idea what the diversity is.
Far removed from your peer group? You have no idea.
"Just a verdict"? Jury duty is not a duty to pronounce judgement. It's a duty deliberate on evidence. There's no evidence, here, and no deliberation.
This is no celebration of collective human intelligence. This is silly and cynical.
I asked a question that was 4-0, then suddenly 8 votes came in at once that made the score 4-8, i wonder if that was a UI bug or if the 8 votes were the AI kicking in and they all disagreed with the human answer...
I suspect that was the same user clicking on the same answer several times because he was presented the same question over and over again like I've been getting the same question over and over and over (and over) again.
And over. There seems to be something amiss in the question pipeline.
I thought clicking "Ask a new question" then going right back into Jury Duty would give me a new question, but I landed on the same one.
I think the asker providing the two valid responses is flawed. It doesn't allow the "jury" to draw their own conclusion, or provides leading answers (one about "is it rude" to eat by themselves when they're socially exhausted in a work context -- one is "yes they would be offended", the other "no they won't be" -- well, they certainly may be but it is your right to eat alone, so the answer could have been "they may, but you need to take care of yourself").
But answer choices should not be qualified by anything, because that systematically creates unanswerable regions.
There should be Context and Question, narrowed down any way the questioner wants. Then just “Yes” or “No” without qualification.
That is what a jury does.
Or: allow answer qualifications, followed by an automatic “None of the above”.
Anyone getting a lot of the latter is getting accurate feedback that the choices they posted were too narrow.
Without either fix, the basic logic of the utility will often be broken. Maybe both? Allow questions to be yes/no, or n choices with NOTA.
I disagree with this. The purpose of the website is to provide answers. If you let people skip questions, you can't guarantee that any given question will ever be answered.
The whole concept here is that you aren't asking people who hold particular credentials. You, Nevermark, should provide your take, regardless of whether you feel it's valid.
However, I'm uncomfortable with the fact that the two answer options are both specified by the user. They should be limited to "yes" or "no", with the meaning of that supplied by the question.
If these JuryNow questions are just a snap judgement on a one-shot question, with no opportunity for depth or deliberation between members, then I can see all sorts of potential problems, including the one you pointed out. The person asking the question can also load it in such a way that it leans towards their chosen answer (somewhat like loaded surveys with leading questions). I can certainly see it being used that way in toxic online debates, like a cheap mini survey that gives credence to some opinion. Aren't Reddit "CMV" and "AITA" even a little better since the jury can deliberate with each other online, as would happen in a real case?
And you're right, typically an expert would be excused, but you would also have the opportunity to learn what the issue is about to make an 'informed' choice, which in one particular case I could not.
Might also report skip rate to question asker.
In legal contexts yes-or-no answers can work because the case can in theory be boiled down to guilty or not. If there is any flaw with the case, the answer should be not guilty.
But let's take the "do I have a moral duty to..." questions used as examples here for contrast. I'd argue you never had a moral duty to attend your sibling's wedding to begin with. But because the question was asked with a weird modifier like "even if it's their 3rd wedding", any answer you give will be inadequate and will just serve to reinforce the flawed premise. Skipping is not enough in my opinion, because even if communicated to the question asker, it doesn't make it clear whether there as an issue on the answerer's side ("I don't know" / "don't feel qualified") or with the question itself.
I really miss not seeing the results.
After answering several questions, I really wanted to see what the final jury decision was. I saw a question from a father asking about leaving his assets to his children. I would want to know what the other 11 random people selected (for various reasons).
Without this feature, I think I might start to lose interest because it'll start to feel like I'm clicking into the empty, voiceless void.
If I'm not logged in I should be able to get a unique identifier that let's me go back to a question and see the results.
The reality for many of these questions is pretty complex.
I'm not saying it's not worthwhile, but I'm saying forcing users to choose on some topics aren't black and white.
It's maybe worthwhile getting information on things like people who aren't knowledgeable, people who don't care or have no preference, or people who don't want to answer because the answers are skewed towards one side.
As with most things like this, you get out what you put in. Ask a biased question, and get a biased answer. At some point, the responsibility has to lie with the user that if they want something like this to be interesting and unbiased, they need to think about ways to use it to accomplish that.
Like, someone comes with a problem, great. They suggest 2 options. Lets assume one is super biased. The asker is just fishing for compliments. The jury decides on a third option of 'No, actually, your dilemma is terrible, we need to re-word this'
Then you get some people to recraft answers for it. One person gets to craft one answer, another the other answer. Then a third person to adjudicate that both are acceptable. Then it goes to the jury.
Annnnnnd like the game 'Werewolf', we're expanding this to have all kinds of fun little jobs. Because of course we're going to need a bailiff, and a court reporter, and a stenographer, etc.
For getting this off the ground, yeah, there needs to be a 'send this back' button. But once it does get going, then more fun little jobs will be good to have as updates to keep people interested.
If the userbase becomes equally-ish distributed around the world, for many questions, this wouldn't be very useful.
Especially when you only get a yes/no answer. People can give you the same answer for opposite reasons.
Should I invite 400 people to my wedding?
12xNo
1 from countries where this is too many, 11 from countries where this is too few.
(and it depends on who is up, timezones and all)
You were hoping for a No, because you can't afford 400 guests, and now you think the world agrees with you. Wrong.
With a well-crafted question, this can be mitigated. But I doubt the average user will be willing to put the effort.
Are there filters or monitoring for the more violent or maleficent types of things that people have a habit of gravitating towards? Depending on the number of people online and the balance, I could easily see groups jumping on and choosing the negative or harmful choice for lolz
Is it possible that this is some form of clickjacking site?
It's not objective, because the questions are biased.
It's really just an (I assume) real-time online opinion poll with a low sample size.
After asking a question, I was 'juror' for the same question approximately 10 times in a row.
> I built JuryNow because I wanted to create a truly objective place to get outside opinions that were not from my peer group, but from 12 people in 12 different countries, different ages, professions, cultures, a truly diverse global objective jury with no algorithms.
You don't collect demographics, and couldn't verify them anyway, so this game doesn't give insight into those dynamics. And the result is not more objective than a social media consensus.
That doesn't mean it isn't fun and even maybe useful in collecting one's thoughts, so go with that.
I’d also like to see such responses.
I’d also like to skip.
I’d also like to see my past questions and results, and results for at least questions I recently responded to.
It errors out with “ Please moderate the content of your question before submitting it.”
I rephrased the question as:
> Should driving licenses be available regardless of age?
> A: Yes, anyone who can pass the test can drive.
> B: No, only adults who pass a test should drive.
Option B won 10-2.
Congratulations for a great idea and a fun game, but AFAICT there is no way to stop participants from plugging in an LLM to your site and having the LLM read questions and make decisions. For example, someone might do this to cheat their jury duty and get decisions from others without having to personally invest time and effort.
I don't know what you can do about this. Do you have any ideas?
Whether or not that is a good system is another question.
As a follow up, I'd guide people on asking questions. More context = better answers.
For example, I joined a jury. The question was "Should I go to Belarus?" That's so vague, it doesn't even feel helpful for me to answer. I would much rather the question have said something like "I've always wanted to go to Belarus, but my rent is also due in a week. I only have enough money for one. Where should I spend my money?"
That at least gives me something to work with and weigh in on.
Seems like a fun idea, if it worked at all?
And when asking a question, it just keeps telling me to "moderate the question".
My question isn't profane or controversial, so I don't understand what I'm being asked to do.
That is mostly a problem with the results page where i wanted to make a screenshot to show it off to my friends but couldn’t.
So whoever was picking up skateboarding again in their 30s, but just suffered a hip injury after a fall. I voted that it is time for you to give up like four times. (Which i stand by as an opinion, but perhaps I shouldn’t be so overrepresented in your jury?)
I had two huge yes/no boxes that I thought where missing an image. So I reloaded and lost my question.
I get why you decided not to include commentary, but I think in some cases it would be useful. For example, if I have a moral dilemma, I might be interested in the moral framework used by each juror; if a juror makes a judgment based on a moral framework I disagree with (or, worse, find reprehensible), I might discard some responses and come up with a different verdict. But it would take a lot more time for a juror to write down a rationale than just picking from two options, so that would make JuryDuty more onerous, and it would take longer than 3 minutes for people to get their responses.
I tried JuryDuty and the first question was just "Israel or Palestine?" And... ooof... there is no way to boil that down to a binary decision. I am frankly not interested in choosing either one over the other without any ability to provide commentary or nuance.
This indeed sounds fishy.
People can be trolling. That is the kind of over the top, obviously silly question where I personally might also answer a silly answer. And out of those two the "Neighbor is culpable" is sillyier and funnier.
Seems like a fun idea, if it worked.
If you’re waiting on a response there’s no way to get to the next question besides answering it.
I had no way to answer a particular question (too little information) so I reported it but ... I was still stuck on that question, seemingly forever.
I would suggest two improvements:
1) "report question" workflow should have a text input where the reporter describes why they are reporting the question.
2) "report question" should proceed to the next question.
- Don't force people to participate in jury duty when waiting for jury answer. Many of them will just click random answers.
- Provide "I don't know/Skip" as an answer. Otherwise the options are "Pick a random" and "Logout"
- Allow jury to write text feedback or at least give them a button saying "All provided answers are wrong / NA / Fallacy / ... "
- "your verdict is simulated by AI" if there aren't enough people logged in. Don't do that. I have no interested in that answer.
for example, i got "Q: Is Luigi Mangione guilty of murdering the CEO of United Healthcare?"
Well yes, he shot the guy on camera. Due process and all of that, he's probably guilty. It's like asking is the sky blue. What's the point? That's a low quality question. Did you mean "is jury nullification a good choice" or "is what he did morally right"?
Also got asked if I ever had a physical fight with a sibling.
Well, I don't have one, so no. Perhaps not what the question was intending.
Truly diverse panel? You have no idea what the diversity is. Far removed from your peer group? You have no idea. "Just a verdict"? Jury duty is not a duty to pronounce judgement. It's a duty deliberate on evidence. There's no evidence, here, and no deliberation.
This is no celebration of collective human intelligence. This is silly and cynical.
And over. There seems to be something amiss in the question pipeline.