As a concrete example, I previously thought that Sam Bankman-Fried should be sentenced to 20-40 years in prison for his fraud, because this was the sort of time that I think most people would no longer be willing to trade for an even shot at getting $10Bs (e.g. when I asked my personal trainer, he said he would accept 15 years in prison for an even shot at $10B; I think many would take more, and also the true upside was higher).
From the above I’ve updated that the diff between expecting 5 years or 50 years in prison wasn’t a primary input into SBF’s repeated decisions to do fraud.
However, I do think he is sufficiently sociopathic that I never expect him to not be a danger to society, so my new position is that life in-prison is probably best for him. (This is not meant as punishment, I would not mind him going to those pleasant Swedish prisons I’ve heard about, I just otherwise expect him to continue to competently do horrendous things with zero moral compunction.)
I like all the considerations you point out, but based on that reasoning alone, you could also argue that a con man who ran a lying scheme for 1 year and stole only like $20,000 should get life in prison—after all, con men are pathological liars and that phenotype rarely changes all the way. And that seems too harsh?
I’m in two minds about it: On the one hand, I totally see the utilitarian argument of just locking up people who “lack a conscience” forever the first time they get caught for any serious crime. On the other hand, they didn’t choose how they were born, and some people without prosocial system-1 emotions do in fact learn how to become a decent citizen.
It seems worth mentioning that punishments for financial crime often include measures like “person gets banned from their industry” or them getting banned from participating in all kinds of financial schemes. In reality, the rules there are probably too lax and people who got banned in finance or pharma just transition to running crypto scams or sell predatory online courses on how to be successful (lol). But in theory, I like the idea of adding things to the sentencing that make re-offending less likely. This way, you can maybe justify giving people second chances.
It seems worth mentioning that punishments for financial crime often include measures like “person gets banned from their industry” or them getting banned from participating in all kinds of financial schemes… But in theory, I like the idea of adding things to the sentencing that make re-offending less likely. This way, you can maybe justify giving people second chances.
Good point. I can imagine things like “permanent parole” (note that probation and parole are meaningfully different) or being under house arrest or having constraints on your professional responsibilities or finances or something, being far better than literal incarceration.
One of the missing considerations is that crime is done mostly by young people, and the rate of crimes goes down the older you get.
A lot of this IMO is that the impulsiveness/risk-taking behavior of crimes decreases a lot with age, but the empirical fact of crime going down with age, especially reoffending is a big reason why locking people up for life is less good than Ben Pace said, because the reoffending rate goes down with age.
I agree there are people who do small amounts of damage to society, are caught, and do not reoffend. Then there are other people whose criminal activities will be most of their effect on society, will reliably reoffend, and for whom the incapacitation strongly works out positive in consequentialist terms. My aim would be to have some way of distinguishing between them.
The amount of evidence we have about Bankman-Fried’s character is quite different than that of most con men, including from childhood and from his personal diary, so I hope we can have more confidence based on that. But a different solution is to not do any psychologizing, and just judge based on reoffending. See this section from the ACX post:
In 2001, the Dutch government passed a law allowing longer sentences for criminals with at least ten previous offense who were not good targets for rehabilitation (eg rejected or had already failed drug treatment). The law allowed judges to increase the typical sentence for petty theft (2 months) to a longer sentence (2 years). A quasi-experimental study found that property crime, though not violent crime, decreased by 25%. It’s not surprising that violent crime didn’t go down since the law was almost entirely deployed against thieves.
Vollaard found that the population affected was extremely criminal; they had an average of 31 past offenses, and on surveys they admitted to committing an average of 256 crimes per year (mostly shoplifting). Before the law was passed, they spent an average of four months per year in jail (probably 2 x 2 month sentences); afterwards, they spent two years in jail per crime.
I should add that Scott has lots of concerns about doing this in the US, and argues that properly doing this in the US would massively increase the incarcerated population. I didn’t quite follow his concerns, but I was not convinced that something like this would be a bad idea on consequentialist grounds, even if the incarcerated population were to massively increase. (Note that I would support improving the quality of prisons to being broadly as nice as outside of prisons.)
This is in part the reasoning used by Judge Kaplan:
Kaplan himself said on Thursday that he decided on his sentence in part to make sure that Bankman-Fried cannot harm other people going forward. “There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future,” he said. “In part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him, to the extent that can appropriately be done, for a significant period of time.”
I want to try out the newly updated claims feature! Here are some related claims, I invite you to vote your probabilities.
Suppose Sam Bankman-Fried is imprisoned for 25 years. After that time, he will be a decent, law-abiding member of society, who is safe to release from prison.Had the prison sentence for Bankman-Fried been life in prison, in this counterfactual world he would not have committed the crimes in the first place.
(This can be for whatever reason you think, such as because his expected value calculations would’ve changed, or because he would’ve taken more care around these particular behaviors, or any other reason you please.)
I can easily imagine an argument that: SBF would be safe to release in 25 years, or for that matter tomorrow, not because he’d be decent and law-abiding, but because no one would trust him and the only crimes he’s likely to (or did) commit depend on people trusting him. I’m sure this isn’t entirely true, but it does seem like being world-infamous would have to mitigate his danger quite a bit.
More generally — and bringing it back closer to the OP — I feel interested in when, and to what extent, future harms by criminals or norm-breakers can be prevented just by making sure that everyone knows their track record and can decide not to trust them.
I think having an easily-findable reputation makes it harder to do crimes, but being famous makes it easier. Many people are naive & gullible, or are themselves willing to do crime, and would like to work with him. I expect him to get opportunities for new ventures on leaving prison, with unsavory sorts.
I definitely support track-records being more findable publicly. Of course there’s some balance in that the person who publishes it has a lot of power over the person being written about, and if they exaggerate it or write it hyperbolically then they can impose a lot of inappropriate costs on the person that they’re in a bad position to push back on.
Suppose Sam Bankman-Fried is imprisoned for 25 years. After that time, he will be a decent, law-abiding member of society, who is safe to release from prison.
I voted 75% because taken literally I think in 25 years AI will be so advanced that he won’t have much of an ability to impact the world at all 🤓
As a concrete example, I previously thought that Sam Bankman-Fried should be sentenced to 20-40 years in prison for his fraud, because this was the sort of time that I think most people would no longer be willing to trade for an even shot at getting $10Bs (e.g. when I asked my personal trainer, he said he would accept 15 years in prison for an even shot at $10B; I think many would take more, and also the true upside was higher).
From the above I’ve updated that the diff between expecting 5 years or 50 years in prison wasn’t a primary input into SBF’s repeated decisions to do fraud.
However, I do think he is sufficiently sociopathic that I never expect him to not be a danger to society, so my new position is that life in-prison is probably best for him. (This is not meant as punishment, I would not mind him going to those pleasant Swedish prisons I’ve heard about, I just otherwise expect him to continue to competently do horrendous things with zero moral compunction.)
I like all the considerations you point out, but based on that reasoning alone, you could also argue that a con man who ran a lying scheme for 1 year and stole only like $20,000 should get life in prison—after all, con men are pathological liars and that phenotype rarely changes all the way. And that seems too harsh?
I’m in two minds about it: On the one hand, I totally see the utilitarian argument of just locking up people who “lack a conscience” forever the first time they get caught for any serious crime. On the other hand, they didn’t choose how they were born, and some people without prosocial system-1 emotions do in fact learn how to become a decent citizen.
It seems worth mentioning that punishments for financial crime often include measures like “person gets banned from their industry” or them getting banned from participating in all kinds of financial schemes. In reality, the rules there are probably too lax and people who got banned in finance or pharma just transition to running crypto scams or sell predatory online courses on how to be successful (lol). But in theory, I like the idea of adding things to the sentencing that make re-offending less likely. This way, you can maybe justify giving people second chances.
Good point. I can imagine things like “permanent parole” (note that probation and parole are meaningfully different) or being under house arrest or having constraints on your professional responsibilities or finances or something, being far better than literal incarceration.
One of the missing considerations is that crime is done mostly by young people, and the rate of crimes goes down the older you get.
A lot of this IMO is that the impulsiveness/risk-taking behavior of crimes decreases a lot with age, but the empirical fact of crime going down with age, especially reoffending is a big reason why locking people up for life is less good than Ben Pace said, because the reoffending rate goes down with age.
I agree there are people who do small amounts of damage to society, are caught, and do not reoffend. Then there are other people whose criminal activities will be most of their effect on society, will reliably reoffend, and for whom the incapacitation strongly works out positive in consequentialist terms. My aim would be to have some way of distinguishing between them.
The amount of evidence we have about Bankman-Fried’s character is quite different than that of most con men, including from childhood and from his personal diary, so I hope we can have more confidence based on that. But a different solution is to not do any psychologizing, and just judge based on reoffending. See this section from the ACX post:
I should add that Scott has lots of concerns about doing this in the US, and argues that properly doing this in the US would massively increase the incarcerated population. I didn’t quite follow his concerns, but I was not convinced that something like this would be a bad idea on consequentialist grounds, even if the incarcerated population were to massively increase. (Note that I would support improving the quality of prisons to being broadly as nice as outside of prisons.)
This is in part the reasoning used by Judge Kaplan:
from https://time.com/6961068/sam-bankman-fried-prison-sentence/
I want to try out the newly updated claims feature! Here are some related claims, I invite you to vote your probabilities.
(This can be for whatever reason you think, such as because his expected value calculations would’ve changed, or because he would’ve taken more care around these particular behaviors, or any other reason you please.)
I can easily imagine an argument that: SBF would be safe to release in 25 years, or for that matter tomorrow, not because he’d be decent and law-abiding, but because no one would trust him and the only crimes he’s likely to (or did) commit depend on people trusting him. I’m sure this isn’t entirely true, but it does seem like being world-infamous would have to mitigate his danger quite a bit.
More generally — and bringing it back closer to the OP — I feel interested in when, and to what extent, future harms by criminals or norm-breakers can be prevented just by making sure that everyone knows their track record and can decide not to trust them.
I think having an easily-findable reputation makes it harder to do crimes, but being famous makes it easier. Many people are naive & gullible, or are themselves willing to do crime, and would like to work with him. I expect him to get opportunities for new ventures on leaving prison, with unsavory sorts.
I definitely support track-records being more findable publicly. Of course there’s some balance in that the person who publishes it has a lot of power over the person being written about, and if they exaggerate it or write it hyperbolically then they can impose a lot of inappropriate costs on the person that they’re in a bad position to push back on.
I voted 75% because taken literally I think in 25 years AI will be so advanced that he won’t have much of an ability to impact the world at all 🤓
(Otherwise 40%)