Punishment is pointless if you cannot expect anyone (who could potentially commit a certain undesirable act) to ever realise any connection between the undesirable act and its punishment. This seems to me to be the case in this scenario as described, so pre-punishing Hitler would be a waste of resources.
If we, however, imagine that we’re living in the future, and the Time Travel Licensing Agency has declared it legal to go around vexating would-be serious criminals, then stealing Hitler’s wallet and publishing the fact would help increase the impact of the TTLA’s deterrent. But this is really a scenario where time travelling doesn’t add anything interesting to the idea.
(Small aside: I’d replace stealing Hitler’s wallet with, say, slashing his bike tires, to more effectively take the issue of guilt-free personal profit out of the equation without invoking the “you don’t need the money” clause.)
Well, if having many time-travelers pre-punishing crimes is useful, then presumably having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility.
Only if (a) people know you did it, and why; and (b) you’re not a one-shot time traveller, so that there is the potential for this kind of pre-punishment to happen again.
It can still be effective if they don’t as I discuss here.
(b) you’re not a one-shot time traveler, so that there is the potential for this kind of pre-punishment to happen again.
[Insert standard TDT argument about how by doing this, you’re acausally increasing the number of other time traveling pre-punishers.]
However, your main point, that the effectiveness of this scales non-linearly with the number of punishers is correct. However, this appears to be more of an acausal co-ordination problem.
It can still be effective if they don’t as I discuss here.
Your argument seems sound—basically, if criminals get enough apparently “random” misfortunes, people will eventually associate criminal = unlucky loser and be somewhat discouraged from that path, am I getting this right?
I would just note that “having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility” doesn’t really seem to fit this system, since a single pre-punishment falls well under the ‘random noise’ threshold so its deterrence effect is effectively zero. (This isn’t really a factual disagreement, it just depends on how you interpret “fraction of utility” in a context where one act is useless but, say, a thousand are useful; is the single act’s utility zero or k/1000? Personally, I straight-up refuse to treat utility as a scalar quantity.)
[Insert standard TDT argument about how by doing this, you’re acausally increasing the number of other time traveling pre-punishers.]
I estimate acausal relationships between the behaviours of different individuals to be negligible.
I would just note that “having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility” doesn’t really seem to fit this system, since a single pre-punishment falls well under the ‘random noise’ threshold so its deterrence effect is effectively zero.
There is no sharp “random noise threshold”. A single act has some positive probability of increasing the amount of belief someone assigns to the proposition “crime doesn’t pay”. Rather the expected value of the change is positive.
(This isn’t really a factual disagreement, it just depends on how you interpret “fraction of utility” in a context where one act is useless but, say, a thousand are useful; is the single act’s utility zero or k/1000? Personally, I straight-up refuse to treat utility as a scalar quantity.)
That’s why I called this an acausal coordination problem.
Punishment is pointless if you cannot expect anyone (who could potentially commit a certain undesirable act) to ever realise any connection between the undesirable act and its punishment. This seems to me to be the case in this scenario as described, so pre-punishing Hitler would be a waste of resources.
If we, however, imagine that we’re living in the future, and the Time Travel Licensing Agency has declared it legal to go around vexating would-be serious criminals, then stealing Hitler’s wallet and publishing the fact would help increase the impact of the TTLA’s deterrent. But this is really a scenario where time travelling doesn’t add anything interesting to the idea.
(Small aside: I’d replace stealing Hitler’s wallet with, say, slashing his bike tires, to more effectively take the issue of guilt-free personal profit out of the equation without invoking the “you don’t need the money” clause.)
Well, if having many time-travelers pre-punishing crimes is useful, then presumably having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility.
Only if (a) people know you did it, and why; and (b) you’re not a one-shot time traveller, so that there is the potential for this kind of pre-punishment to happen again.
It can still be effective if they don’t as I discuss here.
[Insert standard TDT argument about how by doing this, you’re acausally increasing the number of other time traveling pre-punishers.]
However, your main point, that the effectiveness of this scales non-linearly with the number of punishers is correct. However, this appears to be more of an acausal co-ordination problem.
Your argument seems sound—basically, if criminals get enough apparently “random” misfortunes, people will eventually associate criminal = unlucky loser and be somewhat discouraged from that path, am I getting this right?
I would just note that “having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility” doesn’t really seem to fit this system, since a single pre-punishment falls well under the ‘random noise’ threshold so its deterrence effect is effectively zero. (This isn’t really a factual disagreement, it just depends on how you interpret “fraction of utility” in a context where one act is useless but, say, a thousand are useful; is the single act’s utility zero or k/1000? Personally, I straight-up refuse to treat utility as a scalar quantity.)
I estimate acausal relationships between the behaviours of different individuals to be negligible.
There is no sharp “random noise threshold”. A single act has some positive probability of increasing the amount of belief someone assigns to the proposition “crime doesn’t pay”. Rather the expected value of the change is positive.
That’s why I called this an acausal coordination problem.