The root of the “dilemma” just seems to be that we find it unlikely that a trustworthy model would really say such a thing. Human brains have trouble granting false premises, even hypothetical ones.
It’s not a problem with human brains; that’s how it should be. If completely eliminating all punishments for crime lowered the crime rate, there would have to be something very deeply weird going on, and it would be foolish to try to make policy judgments without knowing what that weird thing was.
Thinking about it for sixty seconds, the only ways I came up with to make “zero punishment yields smaller crime rate than small punishment” true, would be if the punishments were actual mislabeled rewards; or receiving punishment turns people into criminals somehow (such as by putting them in the company of other criminals). Both of these would be resolved by taking “severity of punishment” off a numeric scale and looking at it qualitatively.
It’s not a problem with human brains; that’s how it should be. If completely eliminating all punishments for crime lowered the crime rate, there would have to be something very deeply weird going on, and it would be foolish to try to make policy judgments without knowing what that weird thing was.
Thinking about it for sixty seconds, the only ways I came up with to make “zero punishment yields smaller crime rate than small punishment” true, would be if the punishments were actual mislabeled rewards; or receiving punishment turns people into criminals somehow (such as by putting them in the company of other criminals). Both of these would be resolved by taking “severity of punishment” off a numeric scale and looking at it qualitatively.