There may be some other sort of penalty that would both deter recidivism and also deter people from beginning criminality. Corporal punishment, for example.
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It seems unlikely that people would think that way. Taking myself as an example, I favor an extensive reworking of the powers, internal organization, and mode of election of the U.S. House of Representatives. I know that I’m the only person in the world who favors my program, because I invented it and haven’t yet described it completely. I’ve described parts of it in online venues, each of which has a rather narrow, specialist audience, so there might possibly be two or three people out there who agree with me on a major portion of it, but certainly no one who agrees on the whole. That makes me an extreme minority.
There are plenty of extreme minorities I feel no sympathy for at all. Frankly, I think moon-hoax theorists should be shunned.
I’m in. I live in Kenosha, Wi., on campus at UWP. No car.
The bias toward false positives is probably especially strong in criminal cases. The archetypal criminal offense is such that it unambiguously happened (not quite like the Willingham case), and in the ancestral human environment there were far fewer people around who could have done it. That makes the priors for everyone higher, which means that for whatever level of probability you’re asking for it takes less additional evidence to get there. That a person is acting strangely might well be enough—especially since you’d have enough familiarity with that person to establish a valid baseline, which doesn’t and can’t happen in any modern trial system.
Now add in the effects of other cognitive biases: we tend to magnify the importance of evidence against people we don’t like and excessively discount evidence against people we do. That’s strictly noise when dealing with modern criminal defendants, but ancestral humans actually knew the people in question, and had better reason for liking or disliking them. That might count as weak evidence by itself, and a perfect Bayesian would count it while also giving due consideration to the other evidence. But these weren’t just suspects, but your personal allies or rivals. Misweighing evidence could be a convenient way of strengthening your position in the tribe, and having a cognitive bias let you do that in all good conscience. We can’t just turn that off when we’re dealing with strangers, especially when the media creates a bogus familiarity.
Well, unless I’ve remembered it wrong, only two or three people have ever survived that fall. If I’m wrong, substitute a plane. Or a personal unprotected atmospheric re-entry.
Sometime there really are problems that can’t be helped.
Someone just threw you off the Golden Gate Bridge.
There’s one problem thinking won’t much help with.
But then again, to make that point I had to reach for a problem nothing could be done about.
I would argue that people actually take the larger gamble when they enter romantic relationships, certainly when they get married, and probably with some other decisions like that.
So… have you provided her with the arguments?
If I rationalize it to my own satisfaction and/or just don’t care, it’s indistinguishable from being good.
With the added nastiness of not actually being wrong. Except that if you ever notice yourself thinking this the gig is already up.
This argument fails several ways. First as history. Some of the atrocities happened without central organization—e.g., Islamic fundamentalists aren’t all part of any one organization, although they’ve created a variety of more or less hierarchical organizations; the displacement of the Indians (which had essentially nothing to do with religion except as a stock of rationalizations for things people would have done anyway) -- and all the others had important elements of individual initiative.
(I must say I found it amusing that you concede that the crimes against humanity committed by atheist states weren’t solely the fault of religion. When you start saying things like that, you’ve spent much too long seeing arguments as weapons to be used on behalf of “your side”.)
Second, it refutes a position nobody holds. No religionist believes in a flavor of God-implanted moral sense strong enough to overcome all the various temptations to behave immorally; usually they believe quite the opposite, that it was mostly or totally broken by some sort of Fall. If you find yourself triumphantly refuting a view that cannot in any case survive contact with ordinarily accessible reality, you’re probably dealing with strawmen.
Is there a difference between having no subjective experience and having one-millionth the subjective experience of a Tra’bilfin, which are advanced aliens with artificially augmented brains capable of a million times the processing of a current human?
Your usage of “actual” appears to be based on a false cognate.
Anyone who can travel through time can mount a pretty impressive apocalypse and announce whatever it is about the nature of reality he cares to. He might even be telling the truth.
We find bunnies in general cute, but not humans in general—so it makes sense that a baby bunny would be cuter than a baby human. It combines babyness and bunnyness, as compared to a human baby who only has babyness. We care about the human baby more than the bunny baby because we value humanness quite apart from cuteness.
I’m sure you could contrive a way to kill someone with a bunny.
It wouldn’t. That’s supposed to be a side effect.
Not photoshop. That’s a pacifier with plastic buckteeth on the outside. It’s supposed to be funny.
I’m guessing it’s because cute rabbits get eaten less than non-cute rabbits, thus exerting selection pressure in favor of cuteness, which presumably is the same in all… something. Mammals?
Sounds a little strained to me, though.
Most hands of poker are decided without showing the cards. Does that make the cards irrelevant? Of course not; everything that happens is conditioned by the probable outcome if there were a showdown, as judged by the players in the hand. Changing one player’s hand could change everything, even if no one else ever sees it.
A change in the way verdicts are reached will be much more powerful, being seen by both sides. Therefore even if nothing is done about the plea bargain system (and something should be done), the key to the game is still the “showdown”.