Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders. Thomas Sowell
The problem of ‘justice’. Over what time scales do we refer to when we say ‘justice’? Near ‘justice’ can be in reality a far tyranny. And vice versa. Thoughts?
Some of them are also on death row because the courts were too harsh and put them together with other criminals and got them to join a gang to survive in a harsh enviroment.
This happens exceedingly rarely. The thing you should understand about the American court system before judging it is that non-murderers rarely get sent to prison for more than a year for a first-time offense. If it’s truly non-violent drug possession or dealing then in all likelihood a first-time offender won’t get more than probation. The prison system is not creating felons by punishing people too harshly.
Look at the kid sent to prison for 7 years for threatening to shoot up his school on runescape. That’s one of those examples of a way over-harsh punishment only given to send a message. The kid didn’t fall in with a bad crowd because he was never a bad person. Prison doesn’t force good people to become murderers when they get out. This kid did his unjust sentence, got out, and he’s still a nice a dude.
It’s fairly easy to picture violent criminals as similar to you but unlucky to have grown up in a worse situation or been screwed by the system. It’s hard to understand them as they are: people who are incredibly different from you and have a value system that is not aligned with society.
Sounds like a possible scenario as well. Are they both just, both unjust, one or the other, variable?
And what period of time should we use as a standard?
The same for both scenarios, lenient punishments encouraging more severe crimes later on, and onerous punishments also encouraging more severe crimes. since both lead to the same outcome?
When it comes to interacting with complex systems expecting them to work according to your own preconceptions is generally a bad idea. You want policy to be driven by evidence about effects of interventions and not just based on thought experiments. You want to build feedback system into your system to optimize it’s actions.
You want to produce institutions that assume that they can’t know the answer to question like this just by thinking about but that think about how to gather the evidence to make informed policy choices.
Well that’s all well and good but all organizations, including all conceivable institutions, will eventually seek to optimize towards goals that we, present day people, cannot completely control.
i.e. they will carry out their affairs using whatever is at hand through their own preconceptions, regardless of how perfect our initial designs are or what we want their behaviours to be or how much we wish for them to lack preconceptions. They will seek answers to similar questions, perhaps with the same or different motivations.
So then if we proceed along such a path the same problem appears at the meta level. How do we take into account what future actors will consider what period of time they should use as a standard? (In order to build the ‘feedback system’ for them to operate in)
Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders. Thomas Sowell
The problem of ‘justice’. Over what time scales do we refer to when we say ‘justice’? Near ‘justice’ can be in reality a far tyranny. And vice versa. Thoughts?
Some of them are also on death row because the courts were too harsh and put them together with other criminals and got them to join a gang to survive in a harsh enviroment.
This happens exceedingly rarely. The thing you should understand about the American court system before judging it is that non-murderers rarely get sent to prison for more than a year for a first-time offense. If it’s truly non-violent drug possession or dealing then in all likelihood a first-time offender won’t get more than probation. The prison system is not creating felons by punishing people too harshly.
Look at the kid sent to prison for 7 years for threatening to shoot up his school on runescape. That’s one of those examples of a way over-harsh punishment only given to send a message. The kid didn’t fall in with a bad crowd because he was never a bad person. Prison doesn’t force good people to become murderers when they get out. This kid did his unjust sentence, got out, and he’s still a nice a dude.
It’s fairly easy to picture violent criminals as similar to you but unlucky to have grown up in a worse situation or been screwed by the system. It’s hard to understand them as they are: people who are incredibly different from you and have a value system that is not aligned with society.
Sounds like a possible scenario as well. Are they both just, both unjust, one or the other, variable?
And what period of time should we use as a standard?
The same for both scenarios, lenient punishments encouraging more severe crimes later on, and onerous punishments also encouraging more severe crimes. since both lead to the same outcome?
Or different?
When it comes to interacting with complex systems expecting them to work according to your own preconceptions is generally a bad idea. You want policy to be driven by evidence about effects of interventions and not just based on thought experiments. You want to build feedback system into your system to optimize it’s actions.
You want to produce institutions that assume that they can’t know the answer to question like this just by thinking about but that think about how to gather the evidence to make informed policy choices.
Well that’s all well and good but all organizations, including all conceivable institutions, will eventually seek to optimize towards goals that we, present day people, cannot completely control.
i.e. they will carry out their affairs using whatever is at hand through their own preconceptions, regardless of how perfect our initial designs are or what we want their behaviours to be or how much we wish for them to lack preconceptions. They will seek answers to similar questions, perhaps with the same or different motivations.
So then if we proceed along such a path the same problem appears at the meta level. How do we take into account what future actors will consider what period of time they should use as a standard? (In order to build the ‘feedback system’ for them to operate in)