quiet_NaN's profile

quiet_NaN 10hr ago

ICE goes after specific people who have a final order of dismissal from an Immigration judge. When they do so, they often find other illegal immigrants living in the same area or working at the same business, as that is the nature of these things. Oftentimes these people also have final orders of removal. And so it goes.

While I have no first hand experience of ICEs operations, I am skeptical.

First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented. Oh, sure, you might catch and deport a few foreigners who overstayed their student visa, but generally the government is unlikely to have a complete list of all the people who illegally crossed the border and try their best to stay out of the governments databases.

Then, I have to say I am somewhat confused. I would assume that ICE would enforce deportation warrants nationwide. So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?

In your opinion, when Vance announced that ICE would go 'door to door', what he meant was that they would politely ask around the neighborhood if anyone had seen a person on their wanted poster?

I mean, technically it is possible that Noem told her department:

The first and foremost priorities of this administration are the rule of law, due process and courtesy. You will only arrest persons for deportation on which you have positive ID and a warrant signed by a judge. If any unidentified person claims that they are a US citizen in English or Spanish, you will not detain them unless they are interfering with your duties. If this means that we only deport a tenth of the illegals we would deport under a more robust regime, that is the price of freedom.

Would this be in character for the Trump administration? Fuck no. Trump bombs whom he wants to bomb, invades whom he wants to invade. His administration lies boldly and blatantly, he wields the justice department as his personal cudgel to bash his enemies with while pardoning his allies (or people willing to pay him). He bombs shipwrecked sailors. How many Venezuelans died in his kidnapping operation, again? Who cares, nobody gives a shit about brown foreigners. What is holding him back from invading Greenland are not moral considerations, but merely strategic ones. When ICE shot Good, Noem wasted no time to transparently slander her as a domestic terrorist.

Last year he hired on a lot of new ICE agents, paying good money for a job with rather few requirements. Of course the MAGA militia cosplayers joined in droves, finally a salary and a badge for doing what they wanted to do for a decade. Do you think these will have procedural doubts about rounding up all the day laborers looking for work at Home Depot? "If it turns out one of them is a citizen, we just let him go, no big deal." To my knowledge, there is no rule that you can not deport someone if you had arrested them without sufficient probable cause.

Trump is aware that he was elected on a platform to deport illegals, and he is very willing to deliver on that. The people who care about snowflake topics like due process are not his voters. And these will cry Nazi no matter what he does, so there is point to playing nice for him. Most administrations would be embarrassed if the SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against them after they claimed that there was nothing to do about someone they had sadly deported to some foreign megaprison without due process "due to an administrative error". But most administrations also have voters who care about such things.

Of course, this extrapolation from my Gestalt impression (which is based significantly on what Trump actually says and does, not what the 'lying mainstream media' reports, btw) does not have to correspond to the truth, exactly. Perhaps Trump's ICE is keeping precisely in the same procedural bounds as Biden's ICE.

Still, in the fog of war, where any and all statements could be lies (perhaps all of the reports of Native Americans getting arrested as illegals are fake news, perhaps Noem had secret proofs that Good was planning a bomb attack, perhaps the Ayatollah has decided that the best way to deal with the protesters is to embrace human rights and due process), extrapolation of character is a useful heuristic (so Noem was likely talking out of her backside, the Mullah regime is likely cracking down on protests without any giving a damn about human rights, ICE is occasionally arresting a Native American for matching their target racial group, and the left might invent another of such incidents for anyone which happens).

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quiet_NaN 18hr ago

From what I recall reading about him, he most certainly did not independently discover integers. I think that he had access to some math textbooks fairly early. Now, I will grant you that he got much further with the sparse resources he had than a billion other people would have in his place, but in a world where nobody taught him to count, he would be busy inventing a sufficient notation for numbers and the like.

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quiet_NaN 18hr ago

No. Hypothetically, I would be willing to pay my fair share of perhaps 100 micromorts as one of the male citizens of a loyalist NATO country. Realistically, I am aware that deaths on both sides would be professional soldiers, as neither side is going to hide among the civilian population of Greenland.

FWIW, I do not generally support feeding the Bundeswehr to the meat grinder of war. I did not vote for a party which would have sent them to Iraq, and might not even have sent them to Afghanistan. I most certainly would not send them to Ukraine.

But part of the core purpose of a defensive army is the implicit promise that they will inflict costs on an aggressor. This goes back all the way to the first system of warfare. A city which always surrenders on the first day of a siege by a force which could eventually starve it out might ask itself why it even maintains a wall in the first place, and can expect to do a lot of surrendering.

At the end of the day, it comes down to decision theory. Causal Decision Theory would reject an action which only inflicts losses on yourself and your conqueror but does not change the outcome you care about. More enlightened branches of DT recognize that this is not game theoretically optimal. Even CDT would recognize the value of precommitting to fighting back before an invasion as a means of deterring it.

If Trump is reasonable confident that he could take Greenland without bloodshed because Europe will retreat once he makes it clear that the alternative is killing, then that makes invading Greenland a no-brainer.

There certainly is a coherent radical pacifist position where you do not have an army and always yield when attacked. But if you have an army (which I support having, thanks to Putin), and are unwilling to commit it to defend your own or allied territory, then you need to ask yourself what the army is actually buying you, and if it would not be cheaper to equip them with guns and tanks made of papier-mâché.

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quiet_NaN 1d ago

To be fair, most humans answering questions on stack overflow are unpaid volunteers. (Sure, a few are Godharding their own score for professional reasons, but the most efficient way of doing this is to plagiarize answers from other people to similar questions.)

Giving advice to people who are advise-resistant can be very frustrating even when you are getting paid for it. Sometimes it emerges that the advice-seeker is planning to do the equivalent of adding helium balloons to a tank to build an air superiority platform, and after a lengthy discussion your only impact is that he is now planning to use hydrogen instead to counter your argument about helium prices.

For me, 99% of the value of stack overflow is that a google search redirects me to a question someone has asked years ago. While it sometimes happen that I try to communicate on IRC, github, SO or the like with random strangers to solve a problem I am having, that is basically an admission of defeat, and I tend not to surrender easily.

The tone on SO should reflect that >90% of the value provided by the site is to passive readers. If you ask a new, interesting, relevant question that is providing a tremendous service to the readers, same as answering such a question. If you are asking a question which was already answered five times because you did not bother to google first, you are wasting everyone's time. If your code or design is shit, then anyone pointing that out is providing a valuable service to the community, given that the question will mainly be read by people with a similar knowledge level.

With IRC (or discord?), this calculation is different, because IRC logs are typically not google-indexed. (Or at least I can not remember finding the answer to a technical question in an IRC log not explicitly generated by a human, ever.) There is not really an audience who is the main beneficiary of the interaction.

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quiet_NaN 1d ago

"Thinking really hard" (to paraphrase Yud) won't give you the necessary theoretical underpinnings that are required to even realize what you're missing, nevermind do something useful in a whole lot of fields.

To be fair, my feeling is that even Big Yud does not think he can solve the big problems of mankind by just thinking really hard about it. Likely he knows that some questions like P==NP or finding a theory of everything are basically graveyards of geniuses who had the maximum amount of domain expertise, and did not spend a month trying to solve either without domain expertise.

His arguable successes writing fan-fiction and raising the sanity waterline were in fields where there were still relatively low-hanging fruits to be picked by a very smart autodidact willing to invest a lot of time. The field he finally went into was one which was just not a thing before he popularized it, and my understanding is that he picked it for practical relevance.

Or are you arguing referring to him claiming that AIs would solve problems by "thinking really hard"?

I would argue that measured as performance divided by training, LLMs today are stupid to a level which would let a human claim disability benefits. If you expose an LLM to as much English as a 10yo got in his life so far, you will not end up with a LLM which will be as fluent as a 10yo, but likely less fluent than a 1yo. Similarly, sending an IQ 110 individual to university for a decade to study DSP for eight hours a day would still expose them only to the tiniest fraction of textbooks and papers which an LLM had in its training data. Yet they would handily outperform the LLM.

The advantage current LLMs have is not that they are intrinsically smarter than humans. Instead, it is that while they need much more training material than humans, it can be scaled up just by burning ever-increasing amounts of money. Think 'an immortal IQ 90 guy with an unlimited time turner and no memory loss'. The LLMs performance for DSP may be subpar, but it will offer a similar performance over virtually every domain from OS/2 security to bird symbolism in medieval Polish poetry.

If AIs will ever have an intrinsic intelligence advantage over humans, that would be much closer to what Yudkowsky expects. I think that you require a huge intelligence advantage to outperform domain knowledge. The IQ 140 mathematician whom nobody teaches to count will probably not discover any mathematics not known to a society who has spent a few 10k person-years of IQ 100 mathematicians on the subject. One would need to make the gap more extreme, perhaps she would discover more than any IQ 80 mathematicians would ever discover.

Of course, there is also no reason to suppose that an AI system will not have the better part of the collective knowledge of humanity at the tips of its tentacles. We are blasting the damn things with it during training so that the tiniest amount sticks, after all. Even if we did not, once it has access to the internet, it can basically become a domain expert on any subject it cares about. Even if it avoids libgen and the like, just reading what is available on the non-copyright-infringing open web is enough to get anyone with enough time and brains pretty close to the cutting edge, certainly close enough that it could use its intelligence advantage to make original discoveries.

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quiet_NaN 1d ago

Giving that this is CW, it is probably about Star Wars being too woke?

I find this a bit of a strange objection. "Oh, I am fine with Disney pimping out the rotting corpse of a once beloved, childhood-defining franchise for as long as there is anyone still wanting to pay for it, but I draw the line at politics I disagree with."

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quiet_NaN 1d ago

While this might be a ruse (you never know with Trump), I think it is excellent news for fans of the international rule-based order. It certainly looks like the orange man-child is throwing a tantrum because it turns out that he can't get the thing he really, really, wants to get.

As a (non-SJ) left-liberal, I do not often feel pride in my nation. Merz, that slimy manifestation of upper class interests and inept populism, is certainly not my chancellor. When Putin attacked Ukraine, what I felt towards my country of birth was mostly relief -- at least this time it was not us bringing large-scale war to Europe, like usually.

Today is the first time I might feel something akin to national pride. Mild pride, mind you, making it clear that we would honor article 5 is a decent thing, not a heroic thing after all.

As @BurdensomeCount has observed, Germany has long been a good little bitch to the US. Abduct our citizens to your extralegal torture prisons, and our spineless politicians will just keep smiling. Tap the phone of our chancellor, and she will voice mild disappointment. When Trump tried to sodomize us with his tariffs, a kink of his which was not expressed by our previous masters and which we definitely do not share, we negotiated for a bit of lubrication but otherwise let him do as he pleased. I suppose Trump was surprised that we have any limits when he announced his intent to fuck Denmark in the eye socket and we actually stood up to him for once.

I don't think that loyalist NATO has the military force to stop the US from taking Greenland. Nor would I want WW3 started over it. However, even if we would lose, I would want soldiers on both sides to die over it, perhaps on the order of 10k. No reason to let the bully get what he wants without making him pay some price in the process, plus visibly cementing our relationship change.

Giving that Trump just broke the US-EU tariff deal, some poor EU diplomats are probably having to start talking with MAGA all over again. Personally, I do not feel it is worth it. Just declare reciprocal tariffs of whatever Trump imposes this week and call it a day. Dealing with the Chaotic Evil Tantrumthrower is just too much of a bother, and we would be better off trading with the Neutral Evil that is China. We should probably try to sell them some ASML EUV machines while they still need them, it is not like they are threatening the peace of the EU.

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quiet_NaN 1d ago

Polynomial division is IMHO a curiosity.

Long division crops up every time you need want to split the bill.

Polynomial division might crop up in the wild if you want partial fraction decomposition, which I guess you might want if you are dealing with rational functions and want to numerically evaluate them or calculate their anti-derivatives. While I am sure that rational functions have their uses, my gut feeling is that they are both too narrow to pop up in physics a lot (where you will frequently have square roots placed so that your functions can not easily be transformed into rational functions) and too inconvenient to be preferred for empirical models.

Factorization of an integer is a hard but finite problem. Factorization of a polynomial is in general just not possible exactly. You can test if 7, 13, 17, 19, 23, ... etc happen to divide 3071 to factorize it. You can not test if x-1, x-1.1, x-sqrt(42+sqrt(42)) etc are factors of 5x5+4x4+7x**2-2x-2, because there are countably many algebraic numbers which could be a root.

I think that we learned both polynomial division and solving quadratic equations around grade eight. Solving quadratics in something which I would call bloody useful. Quadratic functions are the first non-trivial functions students can tackle, and quadratic equations pop up all the time in high school physics.

I strongly disagree with the sentiment that math skills which are less readily automated are more valuable. To grok (I'm reclaiming that word) how multiplication and division work doing long multiplication and division is definitely more useful than just using a calculator. Nobody needs the numeracy to be actually excellent at these operations any more. Anyone whose job actually requires them to multiply five-digit numbers will hopefully have the good sense not to try that by hand.

My more general point might be that I do not want students to be excellent at applying any algorithm. They will always suck very hard compared to the simplest of computers. Still, it is useful to demonstrate that you can apply an algorithm, even if it is just at toy-sized problems.

Also, applying a pre-learned algorithm is not math. Some algorithms (e.g. solving an equation for a variable) are genuinely useful in proofs, and thus are valid technical skills to learn to be able to engage in math, same as being able to write symbols with a pencil. And of course, 'can you apply an algorithm halfway reliably?' is also a good way to check if someone has a basic understanding of the algorithm in question (even if it does not probe if they understand why it works), which is why rotating trees by pencil is a staple in CS exams.

Still, for school math, I feel that 'can apply pre-learned algorithms' should earn a passing grade, not an actually good grade, which should require thinking.

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quiet_NaN 2d ago

I think the obvious danger is the blood bond. You would want a lot of vitae donors, preferably late generation, so you can feed them using blood of non-human animals.

The effects of drinking the mixed vitae from a lot of different donors i poorly studied, but there is some cause for concern. The side effects of being a ghoul seem manageable, possibly frenzy checks.

To my knowledge, nobody has yet written up an EA impact analysis of ghoulifying the human population.

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quiet_NaN 2d ago

This is equivalent of doing multiplication and eventually memorizing the multiplication table during elementary school.

No, that is my whole point. Knowing the multiplication table up to 9*9 is a prerequisite for the following:

Do long multiplication to calculate the product of any positive integers
Efficient long division (technically you could build up a multiplication table for the divisor using addition, though)
Factorize integers (through inefficient brute force multiplication, because factorization is a hard problem)
Simplify fractions (through factorization)

Anyone who is arguing that kids do not need to learn what 7*8 is denying the need for learning arithmetic at all. (There are probably people arguing that you do not need to know arithmetic because computers exist. I disagree. Knowing how to arrive at a result without a computer in principle, even if a million times slower and error prone, is useful in itself. Besides, with LLMs, this argument generalizes against anything you learn in high school.)

I am fine with busywork which is an instrumental goal for something worthier. I learned my multiplication table because I knew that it would enable me to do long multiplication in base 10. Then in fifth grade, they tried to make me learn 2..9 * 11..19, and I was not having it. If you are in base 10, the utility of knowing non-trivial products of integers takes a sharp dive after 99. I felt that if I gave in and learned what 137 was, they would come around in sixth grade and demand I learned by rot what 1315 or 237 was. (For factorization, the useful thing would be to quickly identify a prime factor in any integer in a given range, but even this obviously does not scale.)

A lot of the stuff kids learn in math class, painful as it may be, is actually useful in some fields. I don't think that youths should be forced to learn what a logarithm is, but they should be clearly told that any subject up to the softest social sciences will expect them to know, so that they can make an informed decision.

Other stuff has value because it teaches core concepts of math, such as proof by induction or the definition of real numbers. Sadly, people only learn what real numbers are when they go to university, and proof by induction in high school is turned into a mockery by turning it to just another pointless algorithm which can be used to prove increasingly pointless sum formulas by rote.

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

For the Nazis, a central example of inferior races would be the Slavic peoples. Obviously they should be replaced with Germans for most purposes, but for the time being they could still serve the Reich better through labor than death.

By contrast, the Jews were considered a parasite race. I think that an analogy would be to imagine that we suddenly discover vampires (e.g. of world of darkness) are living among us, killing with impunity, enjoying superpowers, making life miserable for the mortals through manipulating state affairs like they have been doing for millennia.

I do not think that most humans would support a policy of "merely take away their civil rights and companies, but leave them otherwise in peace to use their supernatural skills to scheme their way back into power".

For the Nazis, the two existential threats to the Reich were also Jewish in nature: the US (controlled by Jewish bankers) and the USSR (based on the writings of the Jew Marx, with plenty of Jews among the Soviet elite).

The analogy of the people as a human body ("Volkskoerper") is a common Nazi one. For the Nazis, the Jews were basically a potentially life-threatening infectious disease (like smallpox) of the body of the people, whose eradication was imperative. (I'd argue that they would have viewed the 'gypsies' as a less serious infection, an annoyance which should be wiped out where found but ultimately not a threat to the survival of the Reich.)

This explains why the Nazis started the Shoa before they had won their war, and spent a lot of resources direly needed in what they considered the war for the survival of the German people on their genocide project. Why they kept up the killing even when the Allies advanced and it became apparent that they would not win the war. The holocaust was never a bonus objective for them. It was an independent goal which was arguably as important to them as winning their war.

(In case I am somehow unclear: the Nazis were, in my not so humble opinion, horribly wrong about the Jews (among other topics). The group responsible for millennia of human misery is not the 'Jewish race' or some blood-sucking monsters, but good old h. sapiens torturing his own, and the fucking Nazis were clearly prime examples of their species in that regard.)

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

This is silly. Nazis borrowed heavily from American Eugencists and FDR borrowed heavily from Mussolini. Modern leftism derives a lot of its roots and ideas from 1920s American Progressives, 1920s Eugenicists, Facists, and the USSR Communists.

That is American Eugenicists -> Fascists -> FDR -> American Progressives -> Modern Leftists. If I'll give you the last one for free, which still leaves four degrees of separation.

I will grant you that the early pro-choice movement likely did not consider every possible child equally valuable for society for reasons of genetics and race as well as environment. (Apart from the race aspect, I do not think they are totally wrong. "You exist because your daddy was too drunk to wear a condom correctly and your mum too optimistic to go for plan B, and because abortion is illegal" is not a great set of dice rolls for a new character. Giving the women choice is a non-evil (unless you are Christian) to counter the unfortunate selection effects of g-dependent birth control).

there is a very fine line between a modern progressive and a person who thinks we should re-start mass sterilization, and most of that fine line is IQ denialism.

Okay, walk me through this.

The SJP are the ones in IQ denial, correct?

What exactly is IQ denial for you? The negation of HBD? The rejection of intelligence as a concept of colonizers? Accepting IQ, but denying any heritability (blank-slatism)?

I have to admit that 'a SJP who embraces HBD' does not invoke a particularly coherent image in my head, same as for 'a nihilist who finds Jesus' or 'a triangle without corners'.

Is the idea that they would embrace HBD and basically advocate for forced sterilization of low g people to raise population intelligence? Or that they would embrace white supremacism? Or that they would double down on their initial ideas about group differences, and try to form the world towards their own ideals, forcibly sterilizing smart Ashkenazim and stupid members of what they identify as low-g races to create an utopia where race is uncorelated with intelligence?

Given that forced sterilizations seem bad and any woke could be reading our conversation at this very moment, do you think it is safe to make them even aware of the fact that you consider them in IQ denial lest they cross your thin line and turn into monsters?

Or is it possible that you were simply signaling 'boo outgroup' by saying 'if $enemy realized ${thing they deny}, they would do ${evil action}'.

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

It thus had a practical (but of course wholly unethical) purpose and was unique in the world in the sense that it meant extermination and not only sterilization of socially undesirables

For the Nazis, the individual was completely subordinated to the Volk. The victims of T4 were considered genetically inferior, so they would not give birth of the Germans of tomorrow, and also unable to work for the present needs of their Volk, so for the Nazis they served no purpose, and were thus killed.

To be considered a useless mouth to feed, being disabled was not enough. After all, a woman who has lost a leg in an accident can still serve her people and fatherland by giving birth to a lot of soldiers and soldier-birthers. Only being disabled because of a genetic disease was worthy of death by CO poisoning in a van, because in that case she might contaminate the gene pool of the next generation.

For this reason I’s argue that it cannot be considered an example of eugenics, which wasn’t even a word the Nazis used (“racial hygiene” was used instead).

The difference between eugenics and Rassenhygiene seems like a particularly fine hair to split.

Eugenics is basically: "Not all genetic variants are equally valuable and we should strive to increase the quality of our gene pool."

Rassenhygiene is: "The gene pool (not that they had the word, but certainly an equivalent concept) of our noble Volk is under assault from both without and within. Other, lesser races try to contaminate our noble bloodlines with their inferior heritage, and undesirable traits manifest themselves sometimes even within pure-blooded families. Like dog breeders, we must therefore prevent our women from coupling with inferior men and cull anyone whose blood would weaken the German Volk no matter their heritage."

If this does not convince you, consider the positive eugenics the Nazis engaged in. Lebensborn was the program led by Himmler himself. This included finding racially superior children among the Untermenschen in the occupied territories, which were then kidnapped and Germanized (or gassed, if they the SS doctors thought they had genetic problems or were not racially valuable enough to contribute to the Volk).

So I am with @self_made_human here, Nazi Germany went all-in on both positive and negative eugenics, albeit with a clear flavor of racial purity.

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

I think that a case could be made that what made SJ so appealing to the upper-middle (and middle) class was that by denying class, it made them free to be as classist. Before SJP, expressing contempt of the working class would have gone badly in mostly left-leaning academic circles.

Now, it is totally permissible, because being working class does not make you oppressed. After all, with blank-slatism, everyone who does not manage to earn a degree in grievance studies despite not belonging to an oppressed group is clearly just lazy.

So if you are a white woman whose daddy paid for your college so you could work in HR, you a free to feel vastly superior to the proletariat in a way which would have utterly embarrassed any upper-middle person in the 50s. Just take care to refer to them as "deplorables" or "MAGA base" who can not even bother to educate themselves about what is really the secret handshakes of your class membership (like the updates to the pride flag, pronouns, or knowing when you are supposed to do a land acknowledgement) but what you conveniently pretend is the basis of being a decent person.

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

In Paul Fussell's nomenclature, the class of a math professor is definitely the 'upper-middle' class, not the upper class. Math is much too useful to appeal to the upper class (except perhaps as an eccentricity signal 'I am feeling so confident in my place in society that I can pick a subject used by people who need to think to earn a living, because nobody could possibly mistake me for them').

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

I think that math class is probably the worst offender for pointless busywork.

Case in point: Polynomial long division. 100% "we make you learn an algorithm as a proxy for intelligence", 0% "something you will need to know as a prerequisite for understanding something else." The correct place for it would be "Having just discussed the properties of polynomial rings in general, here is as a curiosity a technique of dividing polynomials. You know that it will not be relevant for you exam because it involves just playing an algorithm (possibly even with concrete quantities)."

Instead you get tasks like "one of the factors of x^3+5x^2+7x-3 is (x+3). Factorize x".

People whose skill is to pass 'math' class in high school do not need to worry about being replaced by LLMs, because they were presumably replaced by WolframAlpha in 2011.

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

While I agree with your defense of meritocracy, I also think it is possible to over-fetishize g.

The reason I took a longer time for writing my master thesis than most of my peers was (if I say so myself) not that I was dumber than them. Instead it was about a lack of ambition, depression, substandard social skills and so forth. So "can this candidate finish a 12 months thesis in a year?" actually tells you something useful about a person, apart from "what IQ did this guy have at age 10?"

(Of course, your NBA argument applies: differences in g are small within select groups because their effect is oversized. You can study physics while being alarmingly pathological on a lot of different axes. But no amount of conscientiousness, well-adjustedness, healthy eating habits, mental balance, social life, and so will compensate for the handicap of having an IQ of 90. So anyone who struggles with their thesis is unlikely to struggle because of g.)

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

Civil right legislation aside, I think that in many cases the market would solve this problem to everyone's satisfaction.

If you have five food trucks, and one of them is run by a KKK member who only wants to serve White people (and not the wrong White people, either), I think the market can solve this. Likely he will mostly be serving burgers to Neonazis, and the four wiser food truck owners will pick up his mainstream customers.

There are of course situations where a market failure is more likely. If our KKK member has leased the only cafeteria at a workplace, or is the only decent ISP in an area, they might deserve more regulation. (Things get messier if there is a prevailing sentiment of customers distorting the market, like "places willing to serve Blacks are low-class". Or if the government leans on businesses, but I already mentioned that.)

I think most businesses are aware that preemptively banning outgroups means opening a can of worms which they do not want opened. "We do not preemptively ban anyone" is an easy Schelling point to defend. Once you saying you will not serve people who are convicted of sex crimes against children, that is as good as saying that you are positively willing to serve people who have committed sex crimes against adults, or non-sexualized violence against children, or murder, or large scale fraud. And once they also ban all of these, people will demand they ban people with BLM or MAGA outfits, and no matter what they decide they will lose a fraction of their customer base.

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quiet_NaN 3d ago

If you read my quote very carefully, you will notice that the fourth word is "paternalistic".

Putting someone into forensic psychiatry for crimes they committed is not paternalistic, it is clearly 'for the good of society', not 'for their own good'.

I have no problem with putting people into forensic psychiatry, provided that that get their day in criminal court, that their maximum stay duration is no longer than the penalty the law provides for their offense, and that they have the option to transfer to regular prison if they want to.

So if you jurisdiction allows for sentencing a sane person to life in prison for their third unqualified assault (which might set bad incentives on its own, however), I have no objection to you locking up a psychotic offender in forensic instead.

Of course, this also involves society being willing to pay the costs of keeping someone locked up in a psych ward long term, not only for patients who are naturally inclined towards violence, but also towards any patients which might prefer this to being left to their own devices, if they exist (because qualifying on purpose would be trivial).

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quiet_NaN 4d ago · Edited 4d ago

Okay, here is my hot take. Get rid of paternalistic involuntary commitment, and you will cut down the instances of violence by half. (Most of the remainder will probably be prisoners in forensic psychiatry, e.g. people who committed (mostly violent) crimes but were found not guilty for reasons of insanity. These are probably best considered prisoners first and patients second, just like normal, sane, sociopath serial killer serving life who also has a bad toothache is unlikely to be rendered less of a danger because of his medical condition.)

Specialties of medicine which respect patient autonomy presumably have a vastly lower incidence of patients turning violent. Take oncology. Breaking off a promising chemotherapy is probably among the treatment decisions which carry the highest QALY cost, outside of outright committing suicide while healthy. Yet for adult patients, society and healthcare professionals generally accept that it is the patients decision. Very few cancer patients will attack a nurse out of desperation, because if they want to leave, they are just one signature of their own death warrant ("leaving against medical advice") away from getting out.

Contrast with specialties which do not give a damn about patient's autonomy, psychiatry first and foremost. I wish I could say that a month in a psych ward had the same long term QALY gain associated with a month undergoing a promising chemotherapy, but while both treatments may share a similar quality of life during treatment (i.e. utter misery), the long term outcomes of these intervention are as different as different as a shot of rum and fentanyl are for pain management: in my experience, the main goal of psychiatry is to keep their patients alive for another day. A mostly functioning patient going into a locked ward for debatable psychotic symptoms might emerge a month later addicted to benzodiazepines (which effectively removes them as a further treatment option), prescribed some antipsychotic (which he will stop taking at the earliest opportunity), having experienced physical restraint (because people who mostly cope with life in freedom sometimes cope badly when put in very stressful situations) and a life-long conviction that anything related to the mental health system is utterly evil and terrible (which further limits their treatment options). (On reflection, likening this to rum for pain management seems optimistic, and it might be closer to chewing glass for pain management.)

(I am fine with people who attempt to kill themselves without success or are expressing the intend to commit suicide spending a few days locked up for their defection around social norms. There is no intrinsic right to fail to kill yourself or distress others with your plans. Just let them out after a few days, and hope that they have overcome their acute suicidality, learned their lesson either about threatening suicide, or the lesson about which way to cut and keeping their mouth shut -- suicide is a human right, after all.)

If a base jumper falls to his death, that is sad, but not particularly upsetting. After all, when he took on his hobby, he was perfectly aware that humans are ill-suited for gliding close to the ground.

If someone who has made it their profession to lock people up without them having violated criminal laws gets attacked by one of his prisoners, that is also sad (and generally wrong and evil on the part of their prisoners, because typically it will not lead to them escaping), but also not particularly upsetting. Treating people as unable to make decisions about their own life (which is why you lock them up, after all), while also expecting them to respect norms of polite society e.g. about not sticking a cake fork into through your eye socket seems to be both hypocritical and utterly foolish.

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