I was thinking whether, considering the nature of the wizarding world, Azkaban is really that unreasonable a punishment for Death Eaters. Keep in mind that in order to deter crime (to acausally prevent it) a potential criminal calculating the expected utility of committing a crime must get a negative value.
This value depends on:
EB, the criminal’s expected benefit from getting away with it.
SP, the severity of the punishment should he get caught.
p, the probability of getting caught.
Specifically we want (1-p)×EB < p×SP or equivalently (1/p-1)×EB < SP.
In this case the expected benefit of successfully taking over the government and establishing a dictatorship is quite high. Also the Death Eaters were only stopped by a complete stroke of luck, so p is quite small. This suggests we need a very sever punishment to deter would be dark lords and their minions.
The punishment needs to be so sever that even though the would be dark lord and his minions have a good chance of succeeding, they’re still deterred because of how severe the punishment would be on the off chance that they fail.
Given this, condemning them to spend the rest of their lives being tortured by dementors sounds about right.
I have always had the impression that, in real life, people treat very small probabilities of being caught as zero, however severe the punishment. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m right torturing criminals isn’t a good strategy.
Azkaban was not created, in-canon, in order to specifically deter potential Dark Lords. Its history is never stated, but it seems likely that it is a fairly old arrangement between the wizards and the dementors. It was created, instead, as a prison for ordinary criminals (viz. the woman Harry hears pleading while in Azkaban, who is forced to keep reliving the moment of her presumably accidental murder). The Dark Lord and his followers were indeed put in Azkaban when the opportunity arose, but this was for their crimes in the way of murder and such, not for their intention to take over magical Britain. Dark Lords are not very common (the only marginally-modern ones mentioned are Voldemort and Grindelwald, and Grindelwald is not even put in Azkaban, nor ever really messes with Britain except with the Muggle side, aka World War II). With this in mind, I think it becomes very obvious that Azkaban is vastly, awe-inspiringly overkill in the SP.
The Dark Lord and his followers were indeed put in Azkaban when the opportunity arose, but this was for their crimes in the way of murder and such, not for their intention to take over magical Britain.
Many Death Eaters were put in Azkaban, but Voldemort never was. Indeed, there’s no evidence in canon that Azkaban has ever been used to hold a Dark Lord.
Also, and this has come up before although I forget whether it was in this specific thread, increasing the severity of punishments statistically tends not to result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment does. Creating a justice system on the assumption that criminals are good rationalists would be profoundly misguided.
Indeed, there’s no evidence in canon that Azkaban has ever been used to hold a Dark Lord.
I suppose this depends on what we consider evidence. I would personally assign high credence to that based on 2 considerations:
1) that there have been quite a few Dark Lords, such that they are considered a generic natural category and are spoken of collectively; the Harry Potter wikia includes a list of 9 wizards/witches who don’t appear in canon events, but I’m not sure on what basis they are listed.
2) the only other Dark Lord whose disposition we know of was put into an institution much like Azkaban, but not Azkaban for at least 2 plausible reasons (Grindelwald having built that prison himself, leading to it being poetic justice that he be confined there rather than Azkaban; and having rampaged mostly over Europe, and not Britain.)
Given that Grindelwald was not given the death penalty, it seems reasonable to think that captured Dark Lords are not executed out of hand, but imprisoned; and where to imprison the many Dark Lords but Azkaban?
Given that Grindelwald was not given the death penalty, it seems reasonable to think that captured Dark Lords are not executed out of hand, but imprisoned; and where to imprison the many Dark Lords but Azkaban?
What basis do we have to suppose that there have been many dark lords? There have certainly been multiple dark lords, but canon provides us with a grand total of two examples, and the gap between Grindelwald and Voldemort was implied to be atypically short. We don’t know how far back the history of Azkaban goes, and how many Dark Lords have been contemporaneous with it. We only know that the one canonical example of a dark lord who was imprisoned, was not imprisoned there.
What basis do we have to suppose that there have been many dark lords?
That’s my own personal reading of the language scattered over the seven books; obviously, it’s not easy to prove this to someone else who didn’t already pick up on it—I would have to re-read all 7 and take notes where language that could have pointed to Dark Lords being rare as hen’s teeth instead pointed to them being fairly commons (1 or 2 a century, which is 10-20 over the lifespan of Hogwarts).
We don’t know how far back the history of Azkaban goes, and how many Dark Lords have been contemporaneous with it.
Given the powerful magics implied to have been used on it, and the general Golden Age conception in the Potterverse where older=more powerful, again my inference is that Azkaban is hundreds of years old—per above, we could expect >5 Dark Lords contemporaneous.
The only powerful magic in the defense of Azkaban seems to be the fact that time turners can’t be used on its premises, which might be deep old magic, but I’m inclined to suspect otherwise. Aside from that, its defenses seem to mainly boil down to
1) taking away wands
2) anti apparation jinx
3) dementors
4) human guards.
Our impressions may differ based on the fact that I still tend to draw most of my background information from the original canon, which didn’t actually contain the Golden Age element used in MoR. New magic was described as being invented over time, but very little was ever described as being lost, and Voldemort was described as the most dangerous dark wizard of all time, not just the last century, with Grindelwald, his immediate predecessor, a close second. While the two are both referred to as Dark Lords, when they are compared to each other, it’s within the class of dark wizards, and I infer from this that Dark Lord is a prohibitively small class within to draw comparisons.
The only powerful magic in the defense of Azkaban seems to be the fact that time turners can’t be used on its premises, which might be deep old magic, but I’m inclined to suspect otherwise.
That’s Yudkowsky-only, I think. I expect Azkaban to be as well defended as Gringotts in Deathly Hallows—all sorts of intruder spells, monsters (if they can survive), and whatnot.
Our impressions may differ based on the fact that I still tend to draw most of my background information from the original canon, which didn’t actually contain the Golden Age element used in MoR.
I think canon has the Golden Age! The founding of Hogwarts, the heirlooms of the founders, controlling the basilisk, the Deathly Hallows themselves, the Dark spells Voldemort uses, the list goes on. If it’s powerful, it’s probably old. The entire 20th century sees only a few new magical feats: the Philosopher’s Stone (maybe); Inferi; and… some new uses of dragon blood, I suppose.
The part about time turners being unusable on Azkaban premises doesn’t show up anywhere in the original canon, no. There’s nothing in the original books I can think of that suggests that any especially strong magic went into the creation of Azkaban. Its main strengths are that it’s guarded, and that the people who aren’t supposed to get out have their wands taken away.
While plenty of powerful things in canon are old, most of the old knowledge is still available. The Interdict of Merlin is also HPMoR original. Voldemort knew old dark magic because he looked it up, the basilisk was controlled by communicating with it via Parselmouth, and the heirlooms of the founders are presumably powerfully magical, having been made by some of the greatest wizards of the day, but the greater part of their value comes from the fact that they are heirlooms; if you made another sword with all the properties of the Sword of Gryffindor, it wouldn’t be the Sword of Gryffindor. The only founder’s heirloom that actually does anything really remarkable is the Sorting Hat, and while it’s probably a work of magic far beyond ordinary wizards, it doesn’t appear to be treated as an awe inspiring relic of the golden age of wizardry. If Dumbledore hasn’t created anything like it, it’s quite probably because he doesn’t have any incentive to. He already has the Sorting Hat, after all.
Rather than the founders of Hogwarts setting an unreachable standard, Dumbledore is described as the greatest headmaster Hogwarts has ever seen (albeit by a probably biased source,) and Voldemort and Grindelwald are referred to as the most dangerous dark wizards of all time.
The Deathly Hallows have powers which surpass ordinary magical objects in the original canon, but their powers are not that outstanding compared to other, non legendary magical objects, and while they were probably not actually made by Death, the people who did make them never divulged the methods of their creation.
All in all, the wizarding world of the original canon certainly didn’t demonstrate the sort of meteoritic rise in knowledge that the muggle world does, but the general trend seemed to be that while individual wizards might not be getting more competent, knowledge is being added to the community on net, rather than being lost.
I’m not sure. I seem to recall that the language implied that Dumbledore co-created it with Flamel, which would mean 20th century, after all; it’s not clear how long wizards naturally live, speculation based on apparent size of Magical Britain to the side.
But it’s also possible Flamel created in the 1600s, this is how he survived to the 1900s, and the brilliant young Dumbledore hearing of Flamel’s stone, independently reinvented it. Or something.
I’m not sure. I seem to recall that the language implied that Dumbledore co-created it with Flamel, which would mean 20th century,
The wording in book one which you may be thinking of just says that Dumbledore and Flamel did alchemical work together. Flamel’s construction of the philosopher’s stone is not mentioned until much later when Hermione finds the reference and there it just says that Flamel is the only person known to have made one.
I don’t recall any language suggesting that Dumbledore worked on the Stone with Flamel, only that he worked on alchemy with Flamel (reported on his Chocolate Frog card). And I don’t recally anything to suggest that Dumbledore ever had a Stone of his own, only Flamel’s for safe keeping. In MoR, Dumbledore cites Flamel’s expertise, not his own, for his conclusion that Voldemort couldn’t create a Stone. In canon, Dumbledore reports that Flamel has destroyed his own stone, without saying anything about himself.
Well, all that may be true. It has been a very long time since I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (Although I could have sworn Dumbledore was implied to have been using the elixir, and this was one reason it wasn’t surprising that he he died later on.)
Not that you should just take my word for it, but I reread the books about this fall, and I’m confident that Dumbledore didn’t use the elixir. According the the Wikia (which is more authoritative than I), he died at age 107 (not unusual for a Wizard, although he was killed), and it says nothing about his using the Stone.
It’s also useful, if you’re going to do this kind of equation, to decide ahead of time how many innocents tortured for how many years you’re willing to exchange for a reduced chance of political insurrection… and to develop as realistic a sense as you can of how reliable your courts are, so you don’t fool yourself into thinking the quantity is lower than it is.
I’m considering doing a more detailed calculation, including such things as false positives and the fact that you don’t have perfect information about criminal’s utility functions as a top level post.
(nods) This sort of thing is worth thinking about cautiously before supporting, even in theory. A few other points worth considering in a more detailed analysis:
Beliefs vs. actuality
It’s not the actual probability of getting caught that matters for deterrence, it’s the potential criminal’s belief about that probability.
That is, if I only have a 1% chance of being caught but I believe I have a 99% chance of getting caught, I’m easier to deter. Conversely, if I have a 15% chance of getting caught but believe I have a 0.0001% chance of getting caught, I’m difficult to deter (at least, using the kind of deterrence you are talking about).
Similar things are true about EB and SP—what matters is not the actual expected benefit or cost, but rather my beliefs about that expected benefit/cost.
Magnitude vs. valuation
People’s valuations of a probability of a cost or benefit don’t scale linearly with the magnitude of either the cost/benefit or the probability.
Which means that even if (1/p-1)×EB < SP is a manageable inequality for crimes with moderate risks and benefits, SP might nevertheless balloon up when p gets small enough and/or EB gets large enough to cross inflection points.
So the threat of a lifetime of psychological torture might not be sufficiently unpleasant to deter certain crimes. Indeed, it might be that for certain crimes you just aren’t capable of causing enough suffering to deter them, no matter how hard you try.
Knock-on effects
Official policies about criminal justice don’t just influence potential criminals; they influence your entire culture. They affect the thinking of the people who implement those policies, and the people whose loved ones are affected by them (including those who believe their loved ones are innocent), and of their friends and colleagues.
The more extreme your SP, the larger and more widespread the knock-on effects are going to be.
Addendum
For my own part I think Azkaban, and the whole theory of criminal justice that creates places like Azkaban, is deeply flawed and does more harm than good. I could use stronger terms like “evil,” I think, with some justice.
Also, I think the endpoint of the kind of reasoning illustrated above is in practice the conclusion that our best bet is to instill in everyone an unquestioned belief in a Hell where people suffer eternal torment, and unquestioning faith in an infallible Judge who sends criminals to Hell. After all, that maximizes perceived SP and perceived p, right?
Unfortunately, the knock-on effects are… problematic.
I suspect you can answer this question yourself: think about all the crimes you don’t commit. Heck, think about all the crimes you didn’t commit today. Why didn’t you commit them?
If your answer is something other than “fear of being caught and punished,” consider the possibility that other people might be like you in this respect, and threatening to punish you might not be the most cost-effective way to keep them from committing crimes, also.
But if you want more concrete answers, well, off the top of my head and in no particular order:
Increase P
Compare attributes of people (P1) who commit a crime given a certain perceived (p,EB,SP) triplet to those of people (P2) who don’t commit that crime given the same triplet, and investigate whether any of those attribute-differences are causal… that is, whether adding a P2 attribute to P1 or removing an attribute from P1 reduces P1′s likelihood of committing the crime. If any are, investigate ways to add/remove the key attributes to/from P1.
Decrease perceived EB—for example, if a Weber’s-law-like relationship applies, then increasing standard of living might have this effect.
Arrange your society so that there are more benefits to be gotten by participating in it than by attacking it, and make that arrangement as obvious to the casual observer as possible.
think about all the crimes you didn’t commit today. Why didn’t you commit them?
If your answer is something other than “fear of being caught and punished,” [...]
If your answer is something other than that and other than “being considered or treated as a bad person by others despite absence of legal proceedings”, then I would be very interested in hearing about it.
It doesn’t happen every day, but I often have the urge to commit petty theft (technically a crime, but probably not worth prosecuting) under circumstances in which my expectation value of punishment (including extralegal punishment such as you suggest) is well below my expectation value of the item that I might steal. Nevertheless, I almost always resist the urge, because I know that my theft will hurt somebody else (which effectively reduces the value of the item to me, since I should also include its value to others).
I evolved to care more about myself than about other people, but reason allows me to (partially) overcome this; it doesn’t reinforce it.
But once I do, I can notice my selfishness and work to overcome it.
But why do you work to overcome it? You’ve said it’s not due to evolution or to rational reasons, but if it’s due to e.g. social conditioning, why would you use your reason to assist this conditioning?
I can think of reasons to do so—although I am not sure they are weighty enough—but I’m interested in other people’s reasons, so I don’t want to reveal my own as yet.
Because I care about other people. I expect that social conditioning, especially from my parents, has led me to care about other people, although internal exercises in empathy also seem to have played a role. But it doesn’t matter where that comes from (any more than it matters where my selfish impulses come from); what matters is that I consider other people to have the same moral worth as I have.
Looking over this conversation, I think that I haven’t been very clear. Your comments, especially this one, seem to take as an assumption that all rational people (or maybe, in context, only rational criminals, or even rational Death Eaters) value what happens to their future selves and nothing else. (Maybe I’m reading them wrong.) Some people do, but most people (even most criminals, even most Death Eaters) don’t; they care about other people (although most people aren’t altruists either).
I think that this is some of what TheOtherDave was getting at here. And it is certainly the reason why I myself don’t commit petty thefts all the time, and why I feel bad when I do commit petty theft: because I care about other people too. Almost all of the people that I know are in a similar position, so I’m surprised that you would find it interesting that we don’t commit crimes, even when we can get away with them (completely, not just legally). That’s the point of my original response to you.
(Actually, I do commit some crimes that I get away with, and without regret, because criminal law and I don’t agree about morality. That’s also important in the original context, but I didn’t address it since I don’t actually want the penal system to be effective in deterring such crimes.)
(Also, I’m not really an altruist either, but I still feel that I should be: I’m a meta-altruist, perhaps, but I’m still figuring out what that means and how I can be an altruist in practice. I probably shouldn’t have brought up altruism; it’s enough that I care about the people in my immediate vicinity, since they’re the people that I have the opportunity to get away with crimes against.)
Well, there are a huge number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I feel no particular impulse to commit them.
And there’s a smaller number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I’ve internalized social prohibitions against them, such that even if the external threat of being punished or considered/treated a bad person were removed, I would nevertheless feel bad about doing them.
I suspect this is true of most days, and of pretty much everyone I’ve ever met, so I’m not sure what’s so interesting about it.
Well, there are a huge number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I feel no particular impulse to commit them.
Well that’s given; I meant other than crimes you don’t want to commit in the first place.
And there’s a smaller number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I’ve internalized social prohibitions against them, such that even if the external threat of being punished or considered/treated a bad person were removed, I would nevertheless feel bad about doing them.
A heuristic, a learned behavior. As a rationalist I see value in getting rid of misapplied heuristics of that kind. It would puzzle me if this wasn’t the default approach (of rationalists, at least). Granted, most of the social conditioning is hard or impossible or dangerous to remove...
Your answer sums up to “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. This is the standard (human) answer, and not very interesting.
This is the standard (human) answer, and not very interesting.
Well, you were the one who said “if you have any reason other than X or Y then I’d be very interested to hear it” where X and Y don’t cover the “standard answer”, so it hardly seems reasonable for you to complain that the standard answer isn’t interesting.
(I also think it’s highly debatable whether those internalized social prohibitions are best described as “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. You’ve certainly given no reason to think that they are.)
I agree with your points in general; however, note that unlike increasing SP your suggestions can’t simply be implemented by fiat.
Also given these things weren’t done, I believe TDT requires us to use the values of p and EB at the time the crime was committed when calculating SP because those are the values would be dark lords are using to determine whether to start an overthrow.
Re: by fiat… yes, that’s true. In behavior-modification as in many other things, the thing I can do most easily is not the thing that gets me the best results. This is, of course, not an argument in favor of doing the easiest thing.
Re: TDT… I don’t see where TDT makes different requirements from common sense, here.
Re: using p/EB at the time of the crime… of course. If I want to affect your decision-making process now, the only thing that matters is the policy I have now and how credibly I articulate/ that policy. But that’s just as true of my policy around how I investigate crimes (which affects p) as it is of my policy around how I select punishments (which affects SP).
Relatedly: yes, most of my suggestions require lead time; if you’re in a “ticking time bomb” scenario your options are more limited. That said, I distrust such claims: it’s far more common for people to pretend to exigent circumstances than it is for such circumstances to actually occur.
My point is simply that you shouldn’t reduce the punishment after the fact, by say rescuing Bellatrix, simply because you have since changed the value of p and/or EB.
On the account you’ve given so far, I don’t see why not.
If I’ve followed you correctly, your position is that severe punishment of prisoners is justified because it deters crime in the future.
But if I implement a 100% effective crime-deterrent—say, I release a nanovirus into the atmosphere that rewires everyone’s brains to obey the law at all times—then from that moment forward severe punishment no longer deters crime. That is, I will get the same crime rate in the future whether I punish my current prisoners or not.
So why should I continue punishing them in that case? It seems like wasted effort.
Granted, none of the suggestions I’ve proposed are 100% effective. But it seems like the same argument scales down.
You’re claiming that in order to deter crime today, I should establish an SP inversely correlated with p (among other things). If I raise p today, then, it follows that I should lower SP today to keep deterrence constant. What benefit is there to continuing to punish existing prisoners under the old SP?
If I assume that changes to SP are retroactive but that changes to p and EB aren’t… for example, if I assume that if today I increase my ability to catch criminals (say, by implementing superior DNA scanning), this only affects criminals who commit crimes today or later, not criminals who committed a crime last year… then I agree with you.
If that’s not true, then I don’t agree. The same logic that says “Dave will probably lower SP in the future, so I should apply a discount factor to his claimed SP” also says “Dave will probably raise p in the future, so I should apply an inflation factor to his claimed p.” And since what’s driving the reduction in SP in this toy example is precisely the increase in P, the factors should offset one another, which keeps my level of deterrence constant.
Now, I grant you, this assumes a rather high degree of rationality from my hypothetical criminal. In the real world, I strongly doubt any actual criminals would reason quantitatively this way. But in the real world, I strongly doubt any actual criminals reason quantitatively from EB, SP, and p in the first place.
If I assume that changes to SP are retroactive but that changes to p and EB aren’t… for example, if I assume that if today I increase my ability to catch criminals (say, by implementing superior DNA scanning), this only affects criminals who commit crimes today or later, not criminals who committed a crime last year… then I agree with you.
Well, retroactive changes to p tend to be much smaller since most evidence degrades with time.
Also in this case since the crime is attempting violent overthrow of the government retroactive changes in p are almost non-existent, after all a successful overthrow by its nature virtually eliminates your chances of getting punished for it.
Well, retroactive changes to p tend to be much smaller since most evidence degrades with time.
That’s a fair point. So, yes: if p is effectively constant and SP is not, you’re right that that’s a good reason to keep applying the old SP to old prisoners. I stand corrected.
Also in this case since the crime is attempting violent overthrow of the government retroactive changes in p are almost non-existent, after all a successful overthrow by its nature virtually eliminates your chances of getting punished for it.
So are you saying the SP-setting strategy you’re proposing doesn’t apply to crimes that don’t destabilize the criminal justice system itself?
So are you saying the SP-setting strategy you’re proposing doesn’t apply to crimes that don’t destabilize the criminal justice system itself?
I’m saying what I said and hopefully what’s true, redo the calculations yourself if you like. Here I’m saying that if a crime has the potential to destabilize the criminal justice system itself, that should be taken into account when calculating p.
I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.
The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice).
On the other hand, reducing the deterrent for potential dark lords, increases your probability of winding up living under a dark lord at which point your chances of suffering horrific torture, either in Azkaban or somewhere else, is greatly increased. Assuming you don’t consider being wrongly punished in Azkaban under the current administration vastly worse then being punished and/or tortured under a dark lord, you can’t simply declare certain punishments out of bounds.
Another way to think of this is that any government that fails to provide sufficient deterrent to prevent successful overthrows will be overthrown. This process will continue until you get someone who is willing to be sufficiently brutal. So it doesn’t matter how nice your ideal government would be; if it can’t prevent overthrows, you won’t get to live under it.
That certainly seems like the relevant Star Goat probability. (I speak of the One True Star Goat, braise His mane, who will devour the souls of all who believe in God and make them stew in His Holy Bile for eternity, not the vile worship-demanding blasphemy proposed by the Restored Church of the Star Goat.) The Anti-Pascal’s Wager argument may not work here, though.
The part of your argument that deals with Dark Lords overthrowing each other until we reach sufficient SP assumes that some possible deterrent will stop them—although canon!Voldemort clearly did not fear Azkaban after enlisting the dementors’ aid, and he allegedly altered his own mind, ensuring himself another dreadful fate if he lost. The argument also seems to assume an inexhaustible supply of at least minimally competent Dark Lords. It may further assume that said Lords themselves can make a subjective distinction between ‘different’ people who’ve altered their own minds, repudiated their original names/origins and left bits of soul strewn around the countryside, since otherwise Voldemort would have no rational reason to object if some ‘other’ Dark Lord of this kind tried to possess him. More on that later.
In practice, the ambiguity in the term “Dark Lord” makes it hard to show that reducing deterrent increases the probability of Azkaban or some other torture >= Azkaban. Offhand I don’t recall canon!Voldemort personally doing anything worse than kill people, give them brief though intense pain or try to use the Imperius curse on them. I just realized something that makes our disagreement seem silly, but I’ll finish for the sake of completeness: while canon!Voldemort used dementors against Muggle-born wizards in a horrific way, I don’t believe we know if he favored prolonged happiness-free death such as we find in Azkaban. So wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort’s version. A lot of Fudge’s victims might have living friends and relatives who would have died under canon!Voldemort, but the victims themselves wouldn’t remember.
Now, as I say, while I wrote this response it took on a certain deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel. Because it turns out the dementors, once they’d accepted canon!Voldemort’s offer, started multiplying (“like fungi”, according to J.K. Rowling, which seems compatible with the hole-in-the-world theory) in anticipation of having more victims to eat. As I understand it, no single Patronus works very well against dementors that attack from behind, from above and possibly from below you as well as in front of you. Nor can you shoot them in the head. If genuinely immortal predators multiply enough I think “deterrent” and “Dark Lords” cease to matter. So a non-Azkaban version of your argument might hold true with a vengeance if not for the plausible claim (by MoR!Voldemort) that the Ministry keeps increasing the use of dementors precisely to give the impression of grasping deterrence to the nominal decision-makers, and the established fact that Dolores Umbridge sends dementors after canon!Harry while serving the elected government. She didn’t seem to care if the evil creatures killed Muggles, whose population far exceeds that of Muggle-born wizards. The set of Muggles who nobody would miss probably exceeds Muggle-born wizards in number. Assuming Azkaban continues to exist indefinitely, what probability would you assign to the claim that nobody would ever try sacrificing them in order to enlist the aid of dementors for personal gain? Even if people who want to stop the ensuing disaster catch the culprit, the culprit can’t go to Azkaban, because we’ve already established that dementors can agree to release people in return for more victims. Going back to Dolores Umbridge for a second, we know she seems eager to join in the possibly apocalyptic Holocaust once canon!Voldemort takes over. This brings me to the last of my original points:
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator. If the government he secretly takes over will do whatever it takes to deter normal usurpers, people may not notice the change. Except that MoR!Voldemort might have a greater chance of shutting down Azkaban and finding some relatively certain way to avoid an existential threat. All hail the savior, MoR!Voldemort.
Although for him to know this would work he might need, say, a dictator with a known propensity for trying on Horcrux-ed rings, or a dictator who contained a Horcrux from the start.
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator.
We don’t know if he can possess people against their will. In canon, Quirrel allowed Voldemort to make use of his body. Even if he can, He’s claimed that he’s trying to set Harry up at the ruler of the country, and Harry is one person he almost certainly can’t possess.
In canon, Voldemort did possess people against their will, including Harry (despite his mother’s protection) in the climactic Ministry scene in Book 5 (although it was a struggle that Harry shortly won).
He inhabited Harry briefly, but it’s not clear that it afforded him a useful degree of control over Harry’s body, and as Dumbledore noted, inhabiting Harry caused Voldemort excruciating pain. Considering the way their magic has been shown to interact in MoR, I’d think any attempt to possess Harry would turn out even worse in this canon than that one.
wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort’s version.
Furthermore even if one is a pure consequentialist, there may be a case for acting like a deontologist in some cases. While a perfectly rational entity can properly weight costs and benefits, people can’t. Chances are if a person’s moral code says “it’s a good idea to subject some people to mind rape for decades” that person has made a mistake, and one should account for that.
No, that only assumes that society in general exhibits certain patterns attributable to rational agents behind the scenes. Groups, memes, corporations, tournament players, lottery organizers, markets, butterbeer optimizers can all be rational. The smarter villain is, the more aligned with rationality (all things considered) his behavior is. Stupid baddies have higher probability of failure even with deterrents not working on them as intended.
Just because somebody has a significant degree of irrationality doesn’t mean they will necessarily fail- skill is a far more important factor (and people can be rational in some areas but not others). How would you deter irrational crooks?
For example if they’re exhibiting availability bias, make punishments public and memorable. Maybe put the mutilated corpses of criminals on display in public places.
For overconfidence bias if they’re underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.
For overconfidence bias if they’re underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.
That won’t work. If the prospective criminal in question is being flat-out irrational, thinking that the probability of being caught is arbitrarily low or zero, no logistically-feasible increase in severity will compensate for that.
Instead, you should attack the subject’s confidence directly. Brag about your analysis of some form of evidence that can’t be effectively suppressed, tell fictional but realistic-seeming stories about crime scene investigators with mythic levels of competence and dedication. To make it clear that you’re not bluffing, capture some people who thought they’d never be caught and extract confessions from them. Ideally, these would be people who’ve actually committed serious, well-concealed crimes, but depending on your other governmental priorities almost anyone could serve as such an example.
Yes, that strategy gets ugly if you carry it far enough. There’s a reason ‘police states’ aren’t fashionable anymore.
Instead, you should attack the subject’s confidence directly. Brag about your analysis of some form of evidence that can’t be effectively suppressed, tell fictional but realistic-seeming stories about crime scene investigators with mythic levels of competence and dedication. To make it clear that you’re not bluffing, capture some people who thought they’d never be caught and extract confessions from them.
So have lots of cop shows on TV? That seems to be the best strategy given how much people generalize from fictional evidence.
There’s a simpler explanation: people like watching cop shows with mythically competent investigators because it helps them maintain the pleasant belief that most crime will be detected and punished. This not only makes them feel safer, but also helps them rationalize away any feelings of cowardice or subordination associated with choosing to follow society’s rules.
To the extent that network execs push cop shows with happy endings for ideological reasons, it’s much more likely that they simply applaud when they see “criminals get caught” than that they follow any hypothesis as complicated as “the best way to deter crime is to lower criminals’ confidence that they will escape detection by propagating fictional evidence that people will erroneously generalize from.”
Increasing the severity of punishments generally does not result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment produces a reliable if weak reduction. Trying to overcome criminals’ overconfidence bias by means of draconian punishments appears to simply not work.
Re-Edit: Thanks, I thought that I did that the first time around, but it just caused the text to vanish. I must have mistyped.
Markup here is the same for all links; just put the link in the second set of brackets and the text you want it to linkify in the first set. LessWrong is just an example, they could have easily used Google. Of course, it might help foster the interlinking.
I was thinking whether, considering the nature of the wizarding world, Azkaban is really that unreasonable a punishment for Death Eaters. Keep in mind that in order to deter crime (to acausally prevent it) a potential criminal calculating the expected utility of committing a crime must get a negative value.
This value depends on:
EB, the criminal’s expected benefit from getting away with it.
SP, the severity of the punishment should he get caught.
p, the probability of getting caught.
Specifically we want (1-p)×EB < p×SP or equivalently (1/p-1)×EB < SP.
In this case the expected benefit of successfully taking over the government and establishing a dictatorship is quite high. Also the Death Eaters were only stopped by a complete stroke of luck, so p is quite small. This suggests we need a very sever punishment to deter would be dark lords and their minions.
The punishment needs to be so sever that even though the would be dark lord and his minions have a good chance of succeeding, they’re still deterred because of how severe the punishment would be on the off chance that they fail.
Given this, condemning them to spend the rest of their lives being tortured by dementors sounds about right.
I have always had the impression that, in real life, people treat very small probabilities of being caught as zero, however severe the punishment. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m right torturing criminals isn’t a good strategy.
That depends on how available the punishment is.
Azkaban was not created, in-canon, in order to specifically deter potential Dark Lords. Its history is never stated, but it seems likely that it is a fairly old arrangement between the wizards and the dementors. It was created, instead, as a prison for ordinary criminals (viz. the woman Harry hears pleading while in Azkaban, who is forced to keep reliving the moment of her presumably accidental murder). The Dark Lord and his followers were indeed put in Azkaban when the opportunity arose, but this was for their crimes in the way of murder and such, not for their intention to take over magical Britain. Dark Lords are not very common (the only marginally-modern ones mentioned are Voldemort and Grindelwald, and Grindelwald is not even put in Azkaban, nor ever really messes with Britain except with the Muggle side, aka World War II). With this in mind, I think it becomes very obvious that Azkaban is vastly, awe-inspiringly overkill in the SP.
Many Death Eaters were put in Azkaban, but Voldemort never was. Indeed, there’s no evidence in canon that Azkaban has ever been used to hold a Dark Lord.
Also, and this has come up before although I forget whether it was in this specific thread, increasing the severity of punishments statistically tends not to result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment does. Creating a justice system on the assumption that criminals are good rationalists would be profoundly misguided.
I suppose this depends on what we consider evidence. I would personally assign high credence to that based on 2 considerations:
1) that there have been quite a few Dark Lords, such that they are considered a generic natural category and are spoken of collectively; the Harry Potter wikia includes a list of 9 wizards/witches who don’t appear in canon events, but I’m not sure on what basis they are listed. 2) the only other Dark Lord whose disposition we know of was put into an institution much like Azkaban, but not Azkaban for at least 2 plausible reasons (Grindelwald having built that prison himself, leading to it being poetic justice that he be confined there rather than Azkaban; and having rampaged mostly over Europe, and not Britain.)
Given that Grindelwald was not given the death penalty, it seems reasonable to think that captured Dark Lords are not executed out of hand, but imprisoned; and where to imprison the many Dark Lords but Azkaban?
What basis do we have to suppose that there have been many dark lords? There have certainly been multiple dark lords, but canon provides us with a grand total of two examples, and the gap between Grindelwald and Voldemort was implied to be atypically short. We don’t know how far back the history of Azkaban goes, and how many Dark Lords have been contemporaneous with it. We only know that the one canonical example of a dark lord who was imprisoned, was not imprisoned there.
That’s my own personal reading of the language scattered over the seven books; obviously, it’s not easy to prove this to someone else who didn’t already pick up on it—I would have to re-read all 7 and take notes where language that could have pointed to Dark Lords being rare as hen’s teeth instead pointed to them being fairly commons (1 or 2 a century, which is 10-20 over the lifespan of Hogwarts).
Given the powerful magics implied to have been used on it, and the general Golden Age conception in the Potterverse where older=more powerful, again my inference is that Azkaban is hundreds of years old—per above, we could expect >5 Dark Lords contemporaneous.
The only powerful magic in the defense of Azkaban seems to be the fact that time turners can’t be used on its premises, which might be deep old magic, but I’m inclined to suspect otherwise. Aside from that, its defenses seem to mainly boil down to
1) taking away wands 2) anti apparation jinx 3) dementors 4) human guards.
Our impressions may differ based on the fact that I still tend to draw most of my background information from the original canon, which didn’t actually contain the Golden Age element used in MoR. New magic was described as being invented over time, but very little was ever described as being lost, and Voldemort was described as the most dangerous dark wizard of all time, not just the last century, with Grindelwald, his immediate predecessor, a close second. While the two are both referred to as Dark Lords, when they are compared to each other, it’s within the class of dark wizards, and I infer from this that Dark Lord is a prohibitively small class within to draw comparisons.
That’s Yudkowsky-only, I think. I expect Azkaban to be as well defended as Gringotts in Deathly Hallows—all sorts of intruder spells, monsters (if they can survive), and whatnot.
I think canon has the Golden Age! The founding of Hogwarts, the heirlooms of the founders, controlling the basilisk, the Deathly Hallows themselves, the Dark spells Voldemort uses, the list goes on. If it’s powerful, it’s probably old. The entire 20th century sees only a few new magical feats: the Philosopher’s Stone (maybe); Inferi; and… some new uses of dragon blood, I suppose.
The part about time turners being unusable on Azkaban premises doesn’t show up anywhere in the original canon, no. There’s nothing in the original books I can think of that suggests that any especially strong magic went into the creation of Azkaban. Its main strengths are that it’s guarded, and that the people who aren’t supposed to get out have their wands taken away.
While plenty of powerful things in canon are old, most of the old knowledge is still available. The Interdict of Merlin is also HPMoR original. Voldemort knew old dark magic because he looked it up, the basilisk was controlled by communicating with it via Parselmouth, and the heirlooms of the founders are presumably powerfully magical, having been made by some of the greatest wizards of the day, but the greater part of their value comes from the fact that they are heirlooms; if you made another sword with all the properties of the Sword of Gryffindor, it wouldn’t be the Sword of Gryffindor. The only founder’s heirloom that actually does anything really remarkable is the Sorting Hat, and while it’s probably a work of magic far beyond ordinary wizards, it doesn’t appear to be treated as an awe inspiring relic of the golden age of wizardry. If Dumbledore hasn’t created anything like it, it’s quite probably because he doesn’t have any incentive to. He already has the Sorting Hat, after all.
Rather than the founders of Hogwarts setting an unreachable standard, Dumbledore is described as the greatest headmaster Hogwarts has ever seen (albeit by a probably biased source,) and Voldemort and Grindelwald are referred to as the most dangerous dark wizards of all time.
The Deathly Hallows have powers which surpass ordinary magical objects in the original canon, but their powers are not that outstanding compared to other, non legendary magical objects, and while they were probably not actually made by Death, the people who did make them never divulged the methods of their creation.
All in all, the wizarding world of the original canon certainly didn’t demonstrate the sort of meteoritic rise in knowledge that the muggle world does, but the general trend seemed to be that while individual wizards might not be getting more competent, knowledge is being added to the community on net, rather than being lost.
Flamel’s stone presumably dates from the 17th Century, since that’s when Flamel himself (a real historical figure) dates from.
I’m not sure. I seem to recall that the language implied that Dumbledore co-created it with Flamel, which would mean 20th century, after all; it’s not clear how long wizards naturally live, speculation based on apparent size of Magical Britain to the side.
But it’s also possible Flamel created in the 1600s, this is how he survived to the 1900s, and the brilliant young Dumbledore hearing of Flamel’s stone, independently reinvented it. Or something.
The wording in book one which you may be thinking of just says that Dumbledore and Flamel did alchemical work together. Flamel’s construction of the philosopher’s stone is not mentioned until much later when Hermione finds the reference and there it just says that Flamel is the only person known to have made one.
I don’t recall any language suggesting that Dumbledore worked on the Stone with Flamel, only that he worked on alchemy with Flamel (reported on his Chocolate Frog card). And I don’t recally anything to suggest that Dumbledore ever had a Stone of his own, only Flamel’s for safe keeping. In MoR, Dumbledore cites Flamel’s expertise, not his own, for his conclusion that Voldemort couldn’t create a Stone. In canon, Dumbledore reports that Flamel has destroyed his own stone, without saying anything about himself.
Well, all that may be true. It has been a very long time since I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (Although I could have sworn Dumbledore was implied to have been using the elixir, and this was one reason it wasn’t surprising that he he died later on.)
Not that you should just take my word for it, but I reread the books about this fall, and I’m confident that Dumbledore didn’t use the elixir. According the the Wikia (which is more authoritative than I), he died at age 107 (not unusual for a Wizard, although he was killed), and it says nothing about his using the Stone.
It’s also useful, if you’re going to do this kind of equation, to decide ahead of time how many innocents tortured for how many years you’re willing to exchange for a reduced chance of political insurrection… and to develop as realistic a sense as you can of how reliable your courts are, so you don’t fool yourself into thinking the quantity is lower than it is.
I’m considering doing a more detailed calculation, including such things as false positives and the fact that you don’t have perfect information about criminal’s utility functions as a top level post.
(nods) This sort of thing is worth thinking about cautiously before supporting, even in theory. A few other points worth considering in a more detailed analysis:
Beliefs vs. actuality
It’s not the actual probability of getting caught that matters for deterrence, it’s the potential criminal’s belief about that probability.
That is, if I only have a 1% chance of being caught but I believe I have a 99% chance of getting caught, I’m easier to deter. Conversely, if I have a 15% chance of getting caught but believe I have a 0.0001% chance of getting caught, I’m difficult to deter (at least, using the kind of deterrence you are talking about).
Similar things are true about EB and SP—what matters is not the actual expected benefit or cost, but rather my beliefs about that expected benefit/cost.
Magnitude vs. valuation
People’s valuations of a probability of a cost or benefit don’t scale linearly with the magnitude of either the cost/benefit or the probability.
Which means that even if (1/p-1)×EB < SP is a manageable inequality for crimes with moderate risks and benefits, SP might nevertheless balloon up when p gets small enough and/or EB gets large enough to cross inflection points.
So the threat of a lifetime of psychological torture might not be sufficiently unpleasant to deter certain crimes. Indeed, it might be that for certain crimes you just aren’t capable of causing enough suffering to deter them, no matter how hard you try.
Knock-on effects
Official policies about criminal justice don’t just influence potential criminals; they influence your entire culture. They affect the thinking of the people who implement those policies, and the people whose loved ones are affected by them (including those who believe their loved ones are innocent), and of their friends and colleagues.
The more extreme your SP, the larger and more widespread the knock-on effects are going to be.
Addendum
For my own part I think Azkaban, and the whole theory of criminal justice that creates places like Azkaban, is deeply flawed and does more harm than good. I could use stronger terms like “evil,” I think, with some justice.
Also, I think the endpoint of the kind of reasoning illustrated above is in practice the conclusion that our best bet is to instill in everyone an unquestioned belief in a Hell where people suffer eternal torment, and unquestioning faith in an infallible Judge who sends criminals to Hell. After all, that maximizes perceived SP and perceived p, right?
Unfortunately, the knock-on effects are… problematic.
There are better approaches.
Such as, …
I suspect you can answer this question yourself: think about all the crimes you don’t commit. Heck, think about all the crimes you didn’t commit today. Why didn’t you commit them?
If your answer is something other than “fear of being caught and punished,” consider the possibility that other people might be like you in this respect, and threatening to punish you might not be the most cost-effective way to keep them from committing crimes, also.
But if you want more concrete answers, well, off the top of my head and in no particular order:
Increase P
Compare attributes of people (P1) who commit a crime given a certain perceived (p,EB,SP) triplet to those of people (P2) who don’t commit that crime given the same triplet, and investigate whether any of those attribute-differences are causal… that is, whether adding a P2 attribute to P1 or removing an attribute from P1 reduces P1′s likelihood of committing the crime. If any are, investigate ways to add/remove the key attributes to/from P1.
Decrease perceived EB—for example, if a Weber’s-law-like relationship applies, then increasing standard of living might have this effect.
Condition mutually exclusive behaviors/attitudes.
Arrange your society so that there are more benefits to be gotten by participating in it than by attacking it, and make that arrangement as obvious to the casual observer as possible.
If your answer is something other than that and other than “being considered or treated as a bad person by others despite absence of legal proceedings”, then I would be very interested in hearing about it.
Altruism?
It doesn’t happen every day, but I often have the urge to commit petty theft (technically a crime, but probably not worth prosecuting) under circumstances in which my expectation value of punishment (including extralegal punishment such as you suggest) is well below my expectation value of the item that I might steal. Nevertheless, I almost always resist the urge, because I know that my theft will hurt somebody else (which effectively reduces the value of the item to me, since I should also include its value to others).
I evolved to care more about myself than about other people, but reason allows me to (partially) overcome this; it doesn’t reinforce it.
And what is your rational reason to care about other people?
It’s the same as your rational reason not to: none at all.
But once I do, I can notice my selfishness and work to overcome it.
But why do you work to overcome it? You’ve said it’s not due to evolution or to rational reasons, but if it’s due to e.g. social conditioning, why would you use your reason to assist this conditioning?
I can think of reasons to do so—although I am not sure they are weighty enough—but I’m interested in other people’s reasons, so I don’t want to reveal my own as yet.
Because I care about other people. I expect that social conditioning, especially from my parents, has led me to care about other people, although internal exercises in empathy also seem to have played a role. But it doesn’t matter where that comes from (any more than it matters where my selfish impulses come from); what matters is that I consider other people to have the same moral worth as I have.
Looking over this conversation, I think that I haven’t been very clear. Your comments, especially this one, seem to take as an assumption that all rational people (or maybe, in context, only rational criminals, or even rational Death Eaters) value what happens to their future selves and nothing else. (Maybe I’m reading them wrong.) Some people do, but most people (even most criminals, even most Death Eaters) don’t; they care about other people (although most people aren’t altruists either).
I think that this is some of what TheOtherDave was getting at here. And it is certainly the reason why I myself don’t commit petty thefts all the time, and why I feel bad when I do commit petty theft: because I care about other people too. Almost all of the people that I know are in a similar position, so I’m surprised that you would find it interesting that we don’t commit crimes, even when we can get away with them (completely, not just legally). That’s the point of my original response to you.
(Actually, I do commit some crimes that I get away with, and without regret, because criminal law and I don’t agree about morality. That’s also important in the original context, but I didn’t address it since I don’t actually want the penal system to be effective in deterring such crimes.)
(Also, I’m not really an altruist either, but I still feel that I should be: I’m a meta-altruist, perhaps, but I’m still figuring out what that means and how I can be an altruist in practice. I probably shouldn’t have brought up altruism; it’s enough that I care about the people in my immediate vicinity, since they’re the people that I have the opportunity to get away with crimes against.)
Well, there are a huge number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I feel no particular impulse to commit them.
And there’s a smaller number of crimes I didn’t commit today because I’ve internalized social prohibitions against them, such that even if the external threat of being punished or considered/treated a bad person were removed, I would nevertheless feel bad about doing them.
I suspect this is true of most days, and of pretty much everyone I’ve ever met, so I’m not sure what’s so interesting about it.
Well that’s given; I meant other than crimes you don’t want to commit in the first place.
A heuristic, a learned behavior. As a rationalist I see value in getting rid of misapplied heuristics of that kind. It would puzzle me if this wasn’t the default approach (of rationalists, at least). Granted, most of the social conditioning is hard or impossible or dangerous to remove...
Your answer sums up to “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. This is the standard (human) answer, and not very interesting.
Well, you were the one who said “if you have any reason other than X or Y then I’d be very interested to hear it” where X and Y don’t cover the “standard answer”, so it hardly seems reasonable for you to complain that the standard answer isn’t interesting.
(I also think it’s highly debatable whether those internalized social prohibitions are best described as “fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there’s nothing to fear”. You’ve certainly given no reason to think that they are.)
I agree with your points in general; however, note that unlike increasing SP your suggestions can’t simply be implemented by fiat.
Also given these things weren’t done, I believe TDT requires us to use the values of p and EB at the time the crime was committed when calculating SP because those are the values would be dark lords are using to determine whether to start an overthrow.
Re: by fiat… yes, that’s true. In behavior-modification as in many other things, the thing I can do most easily is not the thing that gets me the best results. This is, of course, not an argument in favor of doing the easiest thing.
Re: TDT… I don’t see where TDT makes different requirements from common sense, here.
Re: using p/EB at the time of the crime… of course. If I want to affect your decision-making process now, the only thing that matters is the policy I have now and how credibly I articulate/ that policy. But that’s just as true of my policy around how I investigate crimes (which affects p) as it is of my policy around how I select punishments (which affects SP).
Relatedly: yes, most of my suggestions require lead time; if you’re in a “ticking time bomb” scenario your options are more limited. That said, I distrust such claims: it’s far more common for people to pretend to exigent circumstances than it is for such circumstances to actually occur.
My point is simply that you shouldn’t reduce the punishment after the fact, by say rescuing Bellatrix, simply because you have since changed the value of p and/or EB.
On the account you’ve given so far, I don’t see why not.
If I’ve followed you correctly, your position is that severe punishment of prisoners is justified because it deters crime in the future.
But if I implement a 100% effective crime-deterrent—say, I release a nanovirus into the atmosphere that rewires everyone’s brains to obey the law at all times—then from that moment forward severe punishment no longer deters crime. That is, I will get the same crime rate in the future whether I punish my current prisoners or not.
So why should I continue punishing them in that case? It seems like wasted effort.
Granted, none of the suggestions I’ve proposed are 100% effective. But it seems like the same argument scales down.
You’re claiming that in order to deter crime today, I should establish an SP inversely correlated with p (among other things). If I raise p today, then, it follows that I should lower SP today to keep deterrence constant. What benefit is there to continuing to punish existing prisoners under the old SP?
Otherwise your new value of SP isn’t credible. After all, you’re likely to lower it again in the future and then apply the change retroactively.
If I assume that changes to SP are retroactive but that changes to p and EB aren’t… for example, if I assume that if today I increase my ability to catch criminals (say, by implementing superior DNA scanning), this only affects criminals who commit crimes today or later, not criminals who committed a crime last year… then I agree with you.
If that’s not true, then I don’t agree. The same logic that says “Dave will probably lower SP in the future, so I should apply a discount factor to his claimed SP” also says “Dave will probably raise p in the future, so I should apply an inflation factor to his claimed p.” And since what’s driving the reduction in SP in this toy example is precisely the increase in P, the factors should offset one another, which keeps my level of deterrence constant.
Now, I grant you, this assumes a rather high degree of rationality from my hypothetical criminal. In the real world, I strongly doubt any actual criminals would reason quantitatively this way. But in the real world, I strongly doubt any actual criminals reason quantitatively from EB, SP, and p in the first place.
Well, retroactive changes to p tend to be much smaller since most evidence degrades with time.
Also in this case since the crime is attempting violent overthrow of the government retroactive changes in p are almost non-existent, after all a successful overthrow by its nature virtually eliminates your chances of getting punished for it.
That’s a fair point. So, yes: if p is effectively constant and SP is not, you’re right that that’s a good reason to keep applying the old SP to old prisoners. I stand corrected.
So are you saying the SP-setting strategy you’re proposing doesn’t apply to crimes that don’t destabilize the criminal justice system itself?
I’m saying what I said and hopefully what’s true, redo the calculations yourself if you like. Here I’m saying that if a crime has the potential to destabilize the criminal justice system itself, that should be taken into account when calculating p.
I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.
On the other hand, reducing the deterrent for potential dark lords, increases your probability of winding up living under a dark lord at which point your chances of suffering horrific torture, either in Azkaban or somewhere else, is greatly increased. Assuming you don’t consider being wrongly punished in Azkaban under the current administration vastly worse then being punished and/or tortured under a dark lord, you can’t simply declare certain punishments out of bounds.
Another way to think of this is that any government that fails to provide sufficient deterrent to prevent successful overthrows will be overthrown. This process will continue until you get someone who is willing to be sufficiently brutal. So it doesn’t matter how nice your ideal government would be; if it can’t prevent overthrows, you won’t get to live under it.
That certainly seems like the relevant Star Goat probability. (I speak of the One True Star Goat, braise His mane, who will devour the souls of all who believe in God and make them stew in His Holy Bile for eternity, not the vile worship-demanding blasphemy proposed by the Restored Church of the Star Goat.) The Anti-Pascal’s Wager argument may not work here, though.
The part of your argument that deals with Dark Lords overthrowing each other until we reach sufficient SP assumes that some possible deterrent will stop them—although canon!Voldemort clearly did not fear Azkaban after enlisting the dementors’ aid, and he allegedly altered his own mind, ensuring himself another dreadful fate if he lost. The argument also seems to assume an inexhaustible supply of at least minimally competent Dark Lords. It may further assume that said Lords themselves can make a subjective distinction between ‘different’ people who’ve altered their own minds, repudiated their original names/origins and left bits of soul strewn around the countryside, since otherwise Voldemort would have no rational reason to object if some ‘other’ Dark Lord of this kind tried to possess him. More on that later.
In practice, the ambiguity in the term “Dark Lord” makes it hard to show that reducing deterrent increases the probability of Azkaban or some other torture >= Azkaban. Offhand I don’t recall canon!Voldemort personally doing anything worse than kill people, give them brief though intense pain or try to use the Imperius curse on them. I just realized something that makes our disagreement seem silly, but I’ll finish for the sake of completeness: while canon!Voldemort used dementors against Muggle-born wizards in a horrific way, I don’t believe we know if he favored prolonged happiness-free death such as we find in Azkaban. So wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort’s version. A lot of Fudge’s victims might have living friends and relatives who would have died under canon!Voldemort, but the victims themselves wouldn’t remember.
Now, as I say, while I wrote this response it took on a certain deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel. Because it turns out the dementors, once they’d accepted canon!Voldemort’s offer, started multiplying (“like fungi”, according to J.K. Rowling, which seems compatible with the hole-in-the-world theory) in anticipation of having more victims to eat. As I understand it, no single Patronus works very well against dementors that attack from behind, from above and possibly from below you as well as in front of you. Nor can you shoot them in the head. If genuinely immortal predators multiply enough I think “deterrent” and “Dark Lords” cease to matter. So a non-Azkaban version of your argument might hold true with a vengeance if not for the plausible claim (by MoR!Voldemort) that the Ministry keeps increasing the use of dementors precisely to give the impression of grasping deterrence to the nominal decision-makers, and the established fact that Dolores Umbridge sends dementors after canon!Harry while serving the elected government. She didn’t seem to care if the evil creatures killed Muggles, whose population far exceeds that of Muggle-born wizards. The set of Muggles who nobody would miss probably exceeds Muggle-born wizards in number. Assuming Azkaban continues to exist indefinitely, what probability would you assign to the claim that nobody would ever try sacrificing them in order to enlist the aid of dementors for personal gain? Even if people who want to stop the ensuing disaster catch the culprit, the culprit can’t go to Azkaban, because we’ve already established that dementors can agree to release people in return for more victims. Going back to Dolores Umbridge for a second, we know she seems eager to join in the possibly apocalyptic Holocaust once canon!Voldemort takes over. This brings me to the last of my original points:
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator. If the government he secretly takes over will do whatever it takes to deter normal usurpers, people may not notice the change. Except that MoR!Voldemort might have a greater chance of shutting down Azkaban and finding some relatively certain way to avoid an existential threat. All hail the savior, MoR!Voldemort.
Although for him to know this would work he might need, say, a dictator with a known propensity for trying on Horcrux-ed rings, or a dictator who contained a Horcrux from the start.
We don’t know if he can possess people against their will. In canon, Quirrel allowed Voldemort to make use of his body. Even if he can, He’s claimed that he’s trying to set Harry up at the ruler of the country, and Harry is one person he almost certainly can’t possess.
In canon, Voldemort did possess people against their will, including Harry (despite his mother’s protection) in the climactic Ministry scene in Book 5 (although it was a struggle that Harry shortly won).
He inhabited Harry briefly, but it’s not clear that it afforded him a useful degree of control over Harry’s body, and as Dumbledore noted, inhabiting Harry caused Voldemort excruciating pain. Considering the way their magic has been shown to interact in MoR, I’d think any attempt to possess Harry would turn out even worse in this canon than that one.
As far as Harry goes, I agree, but possessing some other dictator would be much easier.
Hear, hear!
Furthermore even if one is a pure consequentialist, there may be a case for acting like a deontologist in some cases. While a perfectly rational entity can properly weight costs and benefits, people can’t. Chances are if a person’s moral code says “it’s a good idea to subject some people to mind rape for decades” that person has made a mistake, and one should account for that.
Doesn’t that assume people are rational?
No, that only assumes that society in general exhibits certain patterns attributable to rational agents behind the scenes. Groups, memes, corporations, tournament players, lottery organizers, markets, butterbeer optimizers can all be rational. The smarter villain is, the more aligned with rationality (all things considered) his behavior is. Stupid baddies have higher probability of failure even with deterrents not working on them as intended.
Just because somebody has a significant degree of irrationality doesn’t mean they will necessarily fail- skill is a far more important factor (and people can be rational in some areas but not others). How would you deter irrational crooks?
That depends on which biases they’re exhibiting.
For example if they’re exhibiting availability bias, make punishments public and memorable. Maybe put the mutilated corpses of criminals on display in public places.
For overconfidence bias if they’re underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.
That won’t work. If the prospective criminal in question is being flat-out irrational, thinking that the probability of being caught is arbitrarily low or zero, no logistically-feasible increase in severity will compensate for that.
Instead, you should attack the subject’s confidence directly. Brag about your analysis of some form of evidence that can’t be effectively suppressed, tell fictional but realistic-seeming stories about crime scene investigators with mythic levels of competence and dedication. To make it clear that you’re not bluffing, capture some people who thought they’d never be caught and extract confessions from them. Ideally, these would be people who’ve actually committed serious, well-concealed crimes, but depending on your other governmental priorities almost anyone could serve as such an example.
Yes, that strategy gets ugly if you carry it far enough. There’s a reason ‘police states’ aren’t fashionable anymore.
So have lots of cop shows on TV? That seems to be the best strategy given how much people generalize from fictional evidence.
That is a chilling thought. The preponderance of cop shows on TV is real-world social engineering to predispose individuals not to commit crimes?
There’s a simpler explanation: people like watching cop shows with mythically competent investigators because it helps them maintain the pleasant belief that most crime will be detected and punished. This not only makes them feel safer, but also helps them rationalize away any feelings of cowardice or subordination associated with choosing to follow society’s rules.
To the extent that network execs push cop shows with happy endings for ideological reasons, it’s much more likely that they simply applaud when they see “criminals get caught” than that they follow any hypothesis as complicated as “the best way to deter crime is to lower criminals’ confidence that they will escape detection by propagating fictional evidence that people will erroneously generalize from.”
Right; stupidity (or at least, weakness to bias) is a much better explanation than malice.
Agreed.
Even if there’s an attempt at social engineering, the audiences would have their own motivations for watching.
Anyone have information about whether such shows are popular with people who are subject to obviously corrupt and/or arbitrarily violent policing?
Infallible police shows might also be popular because people identify with the police—it would be fun to be right all the time and able to enforce it.
Not in most cases, but in some.
Increasing the severity of punishments generally does not result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment produces a reliable if weak reduction. Trying to overcome criminals’ overconfidence bias by means of draconian punishments appears to simply not work.
Re-Edit: Thanks, I thought that I did that the first time around, but it just caused the text to vanish. I must have mistyped.
Markup here is the same for all links; just put the link in the second set of brackets and the text you want it to linkify in the first set. LessWrong is just an example, they could have easily used Google. Of course, it might help foster the interlinking.