I don’t know if anyone knows exactly what Bob is doing, but at a stab, he’s seeing how many unpleasant feelings get generated by imagining the crime, then proposing a jail sentence that activates about an equal amount of unpleasant feelings. If the thought of a homeless man makes images of crime more readily available and so increases the unpleasant feelings, things won’t go well for the homeless man.
To defend poor Bob for a moment, it’s worth noting that we don’t respond to numbers well in a vacuum. A theft involving a hedge fund manager invokes a frame in which a million dollars isn’t that much. A theft involving a homeless person invokes a frame in which a thousand dollars is a lot. I suspect that this magnitude distortion explains more of Bob’s behavior than general negative affect towards homeless people.
ETA: Both to mitigate that annoying LW effect where the top-voted comment on an excellent article is always a correction or quibble, and just because it’s plain true, I should add that I’m thoroughly enjoying this sequence, and that my rate-of-checking-LW has risen sharply over the last couple weeks since I’ve been looking for another installment.
One of the ways to be more correct is to use frameworks of reasoning rather than your intuition. When you see a question like: “What sounds like a fair punishment for a homeless man who steals $1,000?”, you should quickly create a framework for answering questions like that. Yvain’s example for that kind of framework is “jail time = (10 * amount stolen)/net worth”. This significantly helps to anyone be more consistent.
If you want to not just be consistant, but consistantly reflect your preferences (or reflective equilibrium of tendencies), you should validate your framework against a wide range of hypotheticals in the domain before actually using it in the specific case that prompted you to create it.
(Or try to meet the higher criteria of consistancy, not just that you judgments on a sequence of situations are consistant with each other, but that they are also consistant with the judgements made by a copy of you who sees the situations in a different order.)
To defend poor Bob for a moment, it’s worth noting that we don’t respond to numbers well in a vacuum. A theft involving a hedge fund manager invokes a frame in which a million dollars isn’t that much. A theft involving a homeless person invokes a frame in which a thousand dollars is a lot. I suspect that this magnitude distortion explains more of Bob’s behavior than general negative affect towards homeless people.
ETA: Both to mitigate that annoying LW effect where the top-voted comment on an excellent article is always a correction or quibble, and just because it’s plain true, I should add that I’m thoroughly enjoying this sequence, and that my rate-of-checking-LW has risen sharply over the last couple weeks since I’ve been looking for another installment.
One of the ways to be more correct is to use frameworks of reasoning rather than your intuition. When you see a question like: “What sounds like a fair punishment for a homeless man who steals $1,000?”, you should quickly create a framework for answering questions like that. Yvain’s example for that kind of framework is “jail time = (10 * amount stolen)/net worth”. This significantly helps to anyone be more consistent.
If you want to not just be consistant, but consistantly reflect your preferences (or reflective equilibrium of tendencies), you should validate your framework against a wide range of hypotheticals in the domain before actually using it in the specific case that prompted you to create it.
(Or try to meet the higher criteria of consistancy, not just that you judgments on a sequence of situations are consistant with each other, but that they are also consistant with the judgements made by a copy of you who sees the situations in a different order.)
It’s “consistent”.
At least I spelled it the same way every time ;)
Absolutely. You start with a framework of reasoning and you make it less wrong. :)