g m g D e s i g n . c o m

“The Grey” portrays wolves as bloodthirsty human predators.

“The Grey portrays these intelligent, family-oriented animals the same way in which Jaws portrays sharks,” PETA writes in a statement. “The writers paint a pack of wolves living in the Alaskan wilderness as bloodthirsty monsters, intent on killing every survivor of a plane crash by tearing each person limb from limb. Yet wolves aren’t aggressive animals, and as Maggie Howell, the managing director of America’s Wolf Conservation Center, says, ‘Wolves don’t hunt humans—they actually shy away from them.’”

[…]

“It is not the act of hunting or shooting that makes wolves … wary, but the confident, self-assured manners of armed persons,” he writes, adding, “What must be avoided in the presence of wolves is running away, stumbling, limping, as well as any sign of weakness. Making and keeping up eye contact is essential.”

Wolf attacks of humans is very rare indeed.

Regarding the second paragraph (above)… the same is true of domesticated dogs, with possible exception to dogs with neurological disease (eg, rabies). Showing strength and maintaining one’s ground will avoid being bitten by a dog; showing fear and fleeing is often the worst thing one can do.

The only proviso on the use of eye contact is that, in some cases, over-use of eye contact could also be problematic, if the animal is led to believe that the human is intent on attacking. The key is to show strength without manifesting signals of an intent to attack. The dog (or wolf) will then both fear the consequences of attacking but will have no reason to preemptively strike.

Three reasons, based on my own contemplation on the matter (i.e., consider this subjective and unproven).

1. Informational motivation
2. Affective motivation
3. Experiential motivation

There are many reasons why we might engage in any particular activity. After some contemplation, I compiled a short list of categories that encapsulate multifarious motivations for movie-watching. Note that no claim is made for the comprehensiveness of this list. Further, it’s entirely possible that the motivations herein are pertinent to a variety of activities.

Informational

We might desire to watch movies based on desire to seek new information. Documentaries provide an obvious, literal example of this. But many other movie genres provide informational value despite being very different from a documentary format. For example, a dramatic movie might have information value; a science fiction movie might provide interesting “information” in the form of technology and living standards as they are imagined to be in the near or distant future. A romantic comedy might provide interesting insight into relationships.

Providing an interesting “angle” or perspective on things makes many movies more interesting for the audience. Some movies provide a political or philosophical message. None of this is to say that the information provided in a particular movie is true, or useful. An interesting insight, one that provides a sort of cognitive gratification for those who imbibe the information, will likely suffice.

Consider an antithetical example. Imagine a hypothetical movie that provided no insight at all. Such a “brainless” movie would be uninteresting to some audience members, though some might provide appeal in other respects (for eg, slapstick humor).

Affective / Emotional

A compelling reason we watch movies is to experience particular emotions. Simple examples include suspense movies, action movies, and sad movies. It might surprise some that we often explicitly choose to watch movies that evoke negatively valenced emotions such as sadness (in the case of sad movies) or fear (in the case of suspense movies), but that does not mean that it is uncommon that we do so. We ride roller coasters for this same reason (to experience particular emotions and their after-effects), despite the lack of tangible gain from doing so.

A given movie might be thematically scary, or funny, or sad. Sound effects, sudden movements on-screen, situational uncertainty (“building up” a situation and letting the audience’s imaginations do some of the work) are all crucial emotional “signals” to the audience. Also crucial is this: empathy. In order to relate to the actors, we must empathize with them. When we do so, we experience (to some degree) the emotions that they’re portraying on screen. A crucial difference between a “good actor” and a “bad actor” is the degree to which we empathize with them, and, by extension, the effectiveness in which they portray the emotions pertinent to the situation. The degree in which we are emotionally affected by a movie—be it sadness, fear, elation, or even anger—is, I believe, related very strongly to the degree in which we derive gratification from watching the movie.

Experiential

The experience of doing something different, of being someone else, or somewhere else, provides a motivation for watching a movie. The Harry Potter movies are popular in no small part to the fact that they transport the viewer to a different world. The Die Hard series allows the audience to briefly experience heroism from an unlikely and deeply flawed hero.

Movies that transport us to different worlds, that take us places that we can’t go in our mundane lives, provide a sort of surreal gratification, a means of attaining situational novelty more cheaply than would otherwise be attainable (if attainable at all).

Movie-Watching Motivations

Most movies will fulfill more than a single motivation category. The Matrix (part 1) provides experiential gratification and informational insight and novelty. Marley & Me provides an emotional experience that elicits various emotions:  happiness, love/caring concern, frustration/anger, and of course, intense sadness interspersed with guilt (at the end).

If the aforementioned motivational taxonomy is accurate, then it implies that the most interesting and compelling movies fulfill all categories. That is not to say there are movies that will appeal to everyone. There remains broad variation in personal preferences. However, there will likely be general appeal to movies that successfully provide two or three of the above categories. Movies that present novel ideas, provide an interesting experience, and that elicit particular emotions will likely glean broad appeal in the box office.

Bill would end overtime pay requirement for many more IT workers

A bill recently introduced in Congress would greatly expand the exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act for IT employees, ending overtime benefits for many more types of workers, including network, database and security specialists.

[…]

But a bill sponsored by Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC), titled the "Computer Professionals Update Act," takes the exemption’s 131-word text and bumps it up to 205, adding job classes such as database and network specialists and security professionals along the way.

Reading through a random sampling of the comments, most people responded derisively to this news. Underlying this derision is, I suspect, a lack of belief in the free market to set wages, despite the fact that IT workers attain much higher than the mandated wage minimum.

There’s a possibility that this law, if it takes effect, would have the positive impact of increasing wages for IT professionals, such as in cases where companies are more likely to approve additional work (beyond 40 hrs in a week) at the normal hourly rate. In other words, I think concerns over this legislation are unfounded, as is the belief that government should be in the business of wage-fixing.

DoJ: Take AT&T/T-Mobile trial off the fast track

AT&T’s $39 billion bid to acquire T-Mobile hit a new snag today. The Department of Justice has told a Federal judge that the government plans to ask the court for a motion to stay or even withdraw in the trial considering the government’s attempt to block the merger. The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription) that a DoJ attorney is arguing that a fast track for the case is no longer necessary; after all, AT&T and T-Mobile withdrew their merger application from the Federal Communications Commission several weeks ago.

For some reason, Atlas Shrugged comes to mind when I read stuff like this (not saying the analogy is perfect). Does the Justice Department and the FCC really need to get involved in this? Do businesses that hope to succeed really have to grease the palms of the political class to do normal business activities?

Thomas Sowell: Peerless Nerd

If he were the obfuscating sort, he might have made Harvard don; if he were the cheaply poetical sort, he might have made U.S. president.

[…]

Now 81 years old, Sowell is known as a libertarian-leaning conservative, which he is, and he has a thriving sideline in debunking racial platitudes. But he is first an economist, which means he is first an observer and reporter of facts, and if those facts take him to uncomfortable places, so be it.

This isn’t to say Sowell is always right. Instead, the point is this:  Sowell, unlike so many others, is willing to be intellectually honest to a degree that has become increasingly rare among today’s public intellectuals. He is a “nerd” in the best sense of the word, residing at the intersection of intellectualism and audacity, coupled with honesty and integrity. How many other public intellectuals or politicians could be described as such?

Many people are understandably outraged at high unemployment, corporate welfare, ineffective politicians, and so forth. These sentiments are understandable, and there is nothing wrong with peaceful protest (not that Occupy movements always adhere to that principle).

However, what is lost in the populism is that the college degrees that actually correlate to prosperity aren’t very popular among college students. Alex Tabarrok (of MarginalRevolution) has a great post on that subject. We’re graduating roughly the same number of computer science, chemical engineering, and math majors as we did twenty five years ago. However, the number of degrees awarded to performing arts and communication (among other non-science majors) has increased non-trivially.

The degrees that are associated with real innovation and that are generally quite lucrative aren’t being sought after by students. Collegiate education is, for good reason, subsidized, meaning that we are subsidizing degrees that aren’t awarded by the market and whose recipients are facing unemployment or employment in non-related areas of the market.

Should we instead be protesting our own, collective bad choices with regard to higher education? Perhaps students and the unemployed should protest bad advice by career counselors. Many of us have been told to major in what we feel like, or what we enjoy doing. But if that doesn’t translate to a job after graduation, then the suggestion is far more damaging than insightful.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s Green Tech initiative has become a policy disaster — not only at Solyndra but at one program after another — because its champions ignored basic practical considerations. They were befogged by their own visions of purity and virtue.

Maybe it’s part of living in a postmaterialist economy, but nearly every practical question becomes a values question. You get politicians and commentators whose views are entirely predictable because they don’t care about the specifics of any particular issue.

Or read the full editorial. Good points.

Different expressions of emotion can be categorized into disparate headings. The acronym “RAID” can be used to recall this taxonomy of expression. Credit goes to emotion researchers going all the way back to Darwin (who wrote “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,” an excellent guide on the subject) and to Paul Ekman (in his own follow-up book on the subject, also an excellent work on the topic).

R – Re-directed
Emotional expression that is re-directed is diverted away from the source of the originating emotion. Animals (or children) who are bullied might then bully a “lower” animal (on the dominance hierarchy). Someone who is ill-treated at work by his boss might similarly direct that emotion elsewhere.

A – Antithetical
Many facial expressions have opposing, antithetical counterparts. A frown can be inverted to form a smile. A menacing stare is antithetical to a non-threatening avoidance of eye contact. Some primates differentiate a threatening stare and a “play face” based on whether the gaze is averted (non-threat), or not (threat).

I – Intentional
Intention movements are those that represent an intent, such as a slight movement forward, which betrays a desire to act or to move in a certain direction. Dogs frequently betray their intentions by, for example, moving slightly forward in a desired direction, or moving slightly backward after barking ferociously at a potential threat, indicating their actual desire of avoidance rather than confrontation. Intention movements in facial expression appear most obviously with anger and fear. In both cases, in the lower hemisphere of the face, the jaw muscles tense, as though to prepare oneself to bite a potential threat (either in offense as in anger or defense as in fear).

D – Displacing
Bodily movements of displacement represent a miscellaneous category of “other” movements that seem afunctional and nonsensical from a utility perspective. Displacement movements might include suddenly scratching oneself when nervous or situationally non-confident.

Male and female words-per-day:  conclusion of study (one page, textual pdf).

Spoiler (concluding sentence)

We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded.

In other words, men use as many words per day as females, if this study is accurate (and it might not be, as it used a homogeneous group). I’d like to see a study that involves other age and socioeconomic groups and samples from different parts of the world.

For now, however, the evidence suggests gender parity applies to talkativeness.

From the Scientific American article, here’s an interesting tidbit (emphasis added).

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

Link to related publication by same researcher (it’s a PDF, but text is actually scanned images)

Interesting insight (start on first line with word “Immediacy”):

Info on terminology used above (and throughout paper) (explains terms “Immediacy,” “Making Distinctions,” “The Social Past,” and “Rationalization”:

Another interesting point:

Other publications by this same researcher (Pennebaker) can be found on his publications page.

Criminalization of poverty

Barbara Ehrenreich strikes again. She’s updated her “Nickel and Dimed” book and recent economic events have given her plenty of fodder. I don’t agree with her “solutions” at the end (a stereotypical left-wing checklist of simplistic solutions), but her insight into the problem is informative.

For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization, and one is debt. Anyone can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t pay fines for things like expired inspection stickers may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.

More commonly, the path to prison begins when one of your creditors has a court summons issued for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another, such as that your address has changed and you never received it. Okay, now you’re in “contempt of the court” ….

The second — and by far the most reliable — way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you’re “littering”; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”

Her solution list is summarized here:

…higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.

Unfortunately, things aren’t so simple. Raising minimum wage—esp non-trivial increases in low cost-of-living areas—will lead to many people suddenly becoming unemployable. These include many at-risk people (esp young and inexperienced). And unemployment is what we’re trying to avoid here. Good schools are tricky too:  greater funding doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcome. It would be nice if it were so simple, but that isn’t the case. Nonetheless, Ehrenreich’s discussion of the problem—and especially the “criminalization of poverty”—is interesting throughout.

Incarceration for kickbacks

A judge allegedly had children incarcerated (“kids for cash”) for direct financial benefit.

Prosecutors say former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella used children as pawns, locking them up unjustly in a plot to get rich. Ciavarella is accused of taking nearly $1 million in kickbacks from owners of private detention centers in exchange for placing juvenile defendants at their facilities, often for minor crimes.

There’s not as much video of the suspect as I’d like. Ciavarella is unmoved by a mother of an adolescent convicted and imprisoned by him (who later killed himself). Ciavarella’s reaction is odd; it doesn’t seem like what most people would do in his situation (whether they’re innocent of the crime or not). He seems oddly unaffected by the mother’s passion. I would have expected either avoidance or engagement (for eg, a moving away from someone; or, alternately, a confrontation)—again, a reaction is normally present whether one is guilty of a crime or not.

Ciavarella brushes off the possibility of culpability despite the rather strong evidence against him. He seems to lack the normal empathy that the majority of the population would have, even if they truly were innocent and merely felt as though they were doing their duty. This judge seems devoid of those feelings entirely. (Of course, it’s simply not possible to tell from this video alone with certainty if someone really is devoid of empathy; it might be that he is minimally expressive of such emotion. However, it is nonetheless worth pursuing further.)

I suspect this sort of thing is rare—on this scale, at least. Adolescents and children tend to get benefit of the doubt. Most people just can’t tolerate the idea of sending children to prison for years for minor crimes. The good news is that this judge is an outlier. The bad news is that this outlier was identified too late for so many people, mostly children and adolescents, caught in his wake.

False confession

People readily confess to crimes that they didn’t commit. (Below, emphasis added.)

SINCE 1992 the Innocence Project, an American legal charity, has used DNA evidence to help exonerate 271 people who were wrongly convicted of crimes, sometimes after they had served dozens of years in prison. But a mystery has emerged from the case reports. Despite being innocent, around a quarter of these people had confessed or pleaded guilty to the offences of which they were accused.

Under the right circumstances, anyone will admit to anything. The United States (hypothetically) doesn’t condone torture of suspects, but adding that to the mix would further exacerbate matters. But even non-physical tactics work. Subjecting someone to stress, sleep-deprivation, and a healthy dose of manipulation by police will likely suffice for a fraction of the population, especially the fraction without sufficient financial resources to hire their own lawyers.

From the Harvard Business Review; the implication is that the “rational actor” concept is not entirely accurate (i.e., it paints an incomplete picture, or is only purely applicable to a subset of the population).

In experiments about cooperative behavior, a large minority of people—about 30%—behave as though they are selfish, as we commonly assume. However, 50% systematically and predictably behave cooperatively. Some of them cooperate conditionally; they treat kindness with kindness and meanness with meanness. Others cooperate unconditionally, even when it comes at a personal cost. (The remaining 20% are unpredictable, sometimes choosing to cooperate and other times refusing to do so.) In no society examined under controlled conditions have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly. [note: emphasis added]

The above would not happen if our genes were so firmly biased in favor of selfishness. But perhaps even apparent altruism is itself a manifestation of underlying selfishness. In other words, what if acts of apparent generosity were actually performed in anticipation of future gain? If so, we would come back to the “rational actor” idea, wherein most people are innately selfish.

I don’t believe this to be the case, however. In summary, our phylogenetic development and likelihood of survival and procreation was enhanced, not detracted, by cooperative behavior. The genes that predispose us to cooperate with one another aided our survival rather than hindered it. This idea of survival-by-cooperation is seen in many other species. Ant colonies epitomize cooperative behavior. Without any capacity toward higher-order thought, they seamlessly cooperate in the acquisition of food and in defense of their territory.

Given the inherent advantage in cooperative behavior, perhaps it is more surprising that some members of a species manifest socially deviant characteristics. The book “Evil Genes” delves into this question and provides that author’s answer to it.

From The Nation:

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners….

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states.

I don’t agree with the “corporate profits soar” jab at the end. This isn’t an economic problem; it’s a political one. We (in the United States) have laws on the books that criminalize behavior that, objectively speaking, isn’t criminal in nature.

From the NY Times:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

The Times suggests that democracy (elected judges) is primarily to blame.

Lying in popular culture, and patterns of deception in the face, gestures, posture, vocals, and verbal narrative

“Lie to Me” is the title of a now-defunct show wherein the main character, Cal Lightman (Tim Roth), attempts to determine fact from fiction, truth from fantasy. The show was based on real behavioral science; the scientific consultant for the show? None other than Dr Paul Ekman, whose name bears resemblance to the main character.

Of course, I have as many criticisms of the show as compliments. They should have broadened the scope of the show a bit to avoid the predictable scenes where facial expressions and pupil dilation are examined ad nauseum. Latter episodes avoided the science altogether to make the show a kind of dramatic soap opera. Instead, discussions of how expressions of emotion might be related to underlying cognition would make sense, factoring in individual behavioral patterns and psychopathological traits.

Not that the show should have used such jargon, or focused too heavily on the science aspect. That would be interesting only to a small subset of the population (i.e., people like me). The real science could be breezed over quickly, with enough verisimilitude to keep the “technical” people on board, but with the real focus on good story development, which “Lie to Me” lacked. The “structure” of the show was too chaotic, with episodes failing to properly build atop previous episodes, and melodrama replacing good character development. Cal Lightman’s character could have been better modeled after the main character in “House.” In “House,” the legendary diagnostician Gregory House is both impulsive and pensive, two seemingly contradictory characteristics that make him more profound and more interesting. In contrast, Cal Lightman was impulsive, but lacking the profundity and depth of the real Paul Ekman.

The focus on “lie detection” by the general public is, I think, a mistake. After all, what is a lie? Is a “white lie” whose intent is altruistic considered “deceptive"? What about benign lies, such as saying “Yes, it’s beautiful” when your spouse asks how her dress looks on her? Is that mendacity, or is it compassion? Are there times when telling a lie can be far more kind than speaking the truth? The answer is yes, I would say.

Although I think the zooming in on lie detection is itself a mistake, depriving one of seeing a larger emotional picture, I simultaneously (and somewhat contradictorily) find some level of fascination in it, perhaps because so many other people find it fascinating. First and foremost, there is no “magic” in this process. There is no single facial expression that determines that someone is lying. Instead of looking for a single “tell,” I believe it is more prudent to look at the whole emotional picture—the aggregate of all facial, gestural, postural, vocal, and verbal observations, coupled with context and a behavioral “baseline” of the person being evaluated. Following the preceding process allows one to not just determine “truth,” but to determine what is meant rather than merely what is said.

Direct and Indirect Deception

I categorize deception into two broad categories:  direct and indirect. Excluded from lying or deception are false statements or implications that are made but that, in context, are obviously false. An example would be the “emotional lying” of actors. It is implicit that they are playing a role. A gray area might be a fortune teller:  is fortune telling purposeful deception, or is it implied that they’re providing entertainment?

On direct deception, I make no sub-categories, and I define it in a very clear sense. It is a direct, untrue statement meant to deceive. For example, if someone who committed a crime flatly denies doing so, then he is making a direct lie. In contrast, if he dances around the issue, responding with statements that are, technically, true statements, but with intent to deceive, then he is making an indirect lie. Think of former US president Bill Clinton in this regard. When asked if he had had sexual relations with a White House intern, he persistently danced around the question, re-defining terms so as to avoid being caught in a direct lie. The clue in this case is the failure to directly answer the question that he clearly wished to avoid.

Are there general clues to deception—direct or indirect—that can be useful across a broad spectrum of the population? My response is yes, though it comes with the general proviso that “lie detection” shouldn’t be the sole goal. If the goal is to determine if someone is lying, then you are faced with a situation in which you must make a black and white choice between truth-teller or liar. It is rarely so simple in real life, and perhaps no less complex in the interrogation room. Further, it is too easy to be susceptible to pride (no one wants to be “fooled” by the liar) and confirmation bias (bias toward supporting one’s own beliefs on the matter).

With the aforementioned provisos in place, there are generalized patterns that one can discern to augment the belief that someone is being deceptive. Most are applicable to both direct and indirect lying, though indirect lying carries some additional clues. There are three particular affective states that might be applicable to someone trying to deceive. They are:  apprehension, guilt, and enjoyment.

Read more…

From ABC News …

Two of the potential issues Anthony could suffer from are borderline personality disorder and psychopathology, the experts said. The main thing these issues have in common is a total lack of empathy, according to LeslieBeth Wish, a psychologist and licensed social worker in Sarasota, Fla.

Above, I think the writer meant “psychopathy” rather than “psychopathology.” The former is the personality disorder people are referring to when they use the term psychopathic; the latter is a more general term for a pathology that pertains to the psyche.

Anyway, this is kind of a no-brainer, is it not? Of course Casey Anthony will be hard to “cure.” Psychopathy and related “anti-social” disorders are notoriously difficult to treat. And anyway, what incentive does Anthony have to pursue treatment, or to change at all, if substantial treatment were even possible? Not much.

Having said that, as a society, we should avoid over-reaction, notwithstanding what many people—myself included—believe to be a grievous injustice. It is not uncommon for those with socially deviant characteristics to divide people, pitting potential enemies against each other so as to keep them at bay, playing them like pawns. It would be shameful if we did this to ourselves, doing the work of the societal predator on her behalf.

I don’t normally post non-issues like this, but I’m genuinely confused at the controversy here.

An editorialist at The Atlantic is complaining about inordinately priced wine that Rep Paul Ryan purchased at a dinner. The editorial itself links to this article, which provides the detail minus the commentary.

Paul Ryan is a libertarian-leaning Republican who favors fiscal austerity in the context of government spending. The article doesn’t state that anyone other than Paul Ryan (among others at his table, who split the bill) paying for the wine. I.e., there was no mention whatsoever of taxpayer money being used to purchase the expensive beverage.

I’m not sure what the issue is. Libertarianism at no point states that private citizens can’t spend their own money—quite the contrary. Libertarianism is a philosophical and political ideology emphasizing personal, political, and economic freedom, namely from government. The government didn’t compel or discourage Ryan’s purchase. He made it freely and paid for it himself.

In the TPM article (second link), Ryan states that he didn’t even order the wine; someone else at the table did. He chipped in the full price of one bottle (of the two), despite only having one glass.

If the purchase of expensive beverages by private citizens were the issue, the editorialist (first link) should have specified that that is his position. That probably would have made no sense to his readers, but at least it would have been less misleading.

I completely agree with this Huffington Post editorial. The so-called Caylee’s Law that is popping up in various states is a bad idea.

Although I believe Casey Anthony committed murder without a shred of remorse (read my recent post), I also:

• Strongly defend the jurors – they did their job under difficult circumstances. The idea that they should now have to fear their own safety is reprehensible.
• Defend “the system” as a whole. Actually, I worry that the system is becoming too harsh, punishing people who aren’t actually criminals.

Casey Anthony’s case is an outlier. There is no need for more legislation for her behavior:  her presumed crime is already illegal and punishable by death or lifetime incarceration. The prosecution just failed to convince the jury beyond reasonable doubt. If my opinion that she has an underlying psycho-pathology is correct, then that can conceivably be a consideration in her trial, but her behavior should not criminalize the average person’s behavior. Note that the legal system, and members of the jury, protect all of us—average citizens—from being stripped of our liberty on a whim by the state.

The HuffPost editorial sums things up better than I can, so I’ll defer to it rather than re-summarizing the argument.