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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26687 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere and I missed it, but Scott recently wrote an essay on prison and crime. I did not love the essay, it seemed very similar to his homelessness essay, where he presents an adversarial system where people have worked very hard to make it expensive/difficult for our society to do something, then he throws up his hands and says given the cost benefit analyses (at the current, inflated prices) it is impossible to do the solution that really sounds like it would work. So I guess we need to do something else (that I just happen to like more).

At least, that is what it felt like to me. I actually wanted to focus on something else though. In the essay he reviews three meta-analyses of the situation, and presents their biases. While it goes unstated (or I missed it), the impression I got was that he was also supposed to be a 'neutral' voice, just looking at the data. However, he got in a bit of an X spat with Cremieux over one aspect of the essay, and in the back and the forth, he said the following,

But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

Which is interesting, because it is bringing in a component that goes totally unanalyzed in the original essay, and yet seems profoundly important to his moral and ethical understanding of the question. Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?

In the original essay he did drop something that sounded weird to me, but I mostly overlooked it on my first reading,

Whatever career skills you once had are ten years obsolete ... Your partner has long since filed for divorce and is happily remarried to someone else. Your kids have long since moved on; if they remember your name at all, it’s as “that guy who was never there for us”. All of your friends have drifted away, forgotten you, or have nothing in common with you anymore.

Which seems to present the modal criminal receiving a lengthy prison sentence as a married father of 2.5 children with a stable career in the tech industry who one day randomly tripped and fell into a ten year felony conviction. Not only does it seem wildly at odds with reality, it also seems at odds with the quote above, where he seems to be saying that the average prisoner is basically retarded.

Is he just saying whatever he thinks will be most convincing depending on the context to arrive at the conclusion he has already decided is morally correct?

I do not read ACX that frequently any more, but this and the homelessness essay, both feel like pieces that 2014 Scott would have torn apart, whither Tartaria indeed.

I worked in a tech hub next to a ghetto. A large number of engineers were terrorized by a small group of young men. There were more engineers who were fit gun owning veterans than there were criminals.

The criminals were generally in poor physical condition, disorganized and not an especially impressive force.

Had the cops not been there the criminals would have been dealt with swiftly. However, the police protected them. If they stole a bike, nothing happened. If an engineer with friends shut it down, they would have had their lives ruined. The criminals didn't mind getting arrested for smaller crimes. The engineers were terrified of even getting arrested. The imbalance in the risk acceptance between tech workers and criminals completely shifted the power dynamic on the street. When they mugged a developer on the way home from work it wasn't by physically overpowering them, it essentially a game of chicken in which the developer was more afraid of going to prison. It is simply cheaper to clean up graffiti on a weekly basis than to spend an night waiting in the bushes with bats and dealing with the problem.

The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street. Ideally the dysfunctional crowd shouldn't be punished but warehoused in a place that provides them with structure, meaning and a well balanced life. Mental asylums need to be scaled up.

I find an interesting contrast between this and a European country I visited, which shall remain nameless.

Some pickpocket stole the phone of a friend of mine but didn't prevent us from geolocating it. We went to the police fully expecting the usual recording of a police report that would never amount to anything but a piece of paper for his insurance.

But no, the local policeman took the info, told us to wait in the precinct, and after an hour or so turned up with the phone and the (visibly beaten) thief, asking us what we wanted to do with him. I got the sense that we could have roughed him up ourselves without even the need for a bribe.

After that I never really doubted that the police having more respect for criminals than law abiding citizens is a choice.

And this is a political choice made by people who are not, themselves, police officers.

I have sufficient IRL far-right street cred to have ordinary cops admit to me that they wish somebody would solve the coordination problem to bring sombra negra here, or ensure that self-help vigilantism was ignored by the legal system.

I'm guessing this was not Northern or Western Europe.

relevant

which shall remain nameless

Why?

After that I never really doubted that the police having more respect for criminals than law abiding citizens is a choice.

I don't think there are many police anywhere that have more respect from criminals than citizens. It's just that different places have different rules/expectations for how criminals can be treated. Unless by "police" you're referring more broadly to the criminal justice system.

I'm speaking in a The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does kind of way.

I have no doubt the French policeman I talked to a few years ago cared more for me than the guy who mugged me, but in the end the guy got off with a slap on the wrist even though he was a known criminal, and I never saw my wallet again.

It didn't have to be this way. Society has chosen that my property and time is less valuable than some known criminal's freedom. And I think that's clearly dysfunctional.

It's like this in prison too. I read extracts from this shocking report about what goes on in US prisons. If it were down to me, this alone would get America expelled from the first world, though considering Rotherham and similar the ranks of the civilized countries would dwindle very quickly:

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html

Joe Schmo gets into prison for some DUI offence. Unfortunately he has a slightly feminine looking appearance and isn't that big. His attitude isn't sufficiently manly, maybe he's not streetsmart, maybe he's too intellectual, maybe he's white...

Punishment for his crime? Vicious anal rape and forced prostitution, HIV infection too.

Wayne "Booty Bandit" Robertson is in prison for murder - life sentence. But he is big and very strong.

Punishment for his crime? Sex on demand with his cellmate and exciting opportunities in the slave-trading business.

This is the reverse of justice. It would be far more humane and civilized to blow Wayne's head off with an autocannon and let Joe serve his sentence in peace. Wayne is a bad hombre and should be liquidated in a spectacular and intimidating way, to demonstrate that we are not in the stone-age anymore, there are more important things than muscle mass and naked aggression.

Imagining a social media intern barging into the HRW editor's office.
"Someone linked your report, sir!"
"Excellent, what conclusion did he draw from it?"
"Um..."

"I want to reduce the prison population."

"Great! The Innocence Project is looking for new advo..."

"That's not quite what I meant..."

According to wikipedia (though others dispute this), the US is the only country on Earth where there's more male-on-male rape than male-on-female, there have been some legal changes but no significant practical improvements since 2001.

It's ridiculous that people who commit the worst crimes are practically untouchable since their sentence can hardly get longer.

I'm fully on board with the death penalty proposal, but also, I don't understand why prison operators can't maintain a monopoly on violence even in its absence. Is it simply jurisprudence that has made corporal punishment and solitary confinement impossible or would it somehow be unaffordable to apply them as needed? A guy alone in a room with food coming through a slot can't rape or intimidate anyone, and I have a hard time believing that the extra number of toilets required wouldn't pay for itself by cutting down on all the violence that prison guards have to deal with, even leaving aside the benefits to cooperative prisoners.

It's mostly incentives. Nobody cares what happens to prisoners, especially at the hand of other prisoners, so if there are benefits to allowing it, it won't be stopped. And there are major benefits to the government for allowing it in general, in addition to all the specific benefits to parts of the system. The prospect of prison rape keeps quite a few Joe Schmos on the straight and narrow.

According to HRW the problem is due to understaffing and overcrowding in prisons (often poorly designed older ones) and a lack of consequences. De facto, lawyers don't want to prosecute prisoners or prisons, they don't feel like there's any good payoff there (especially if they're basically telling prisons they don't know what they're doing). They want to have a cordial relationship with prisons apparently.

Prison guards basically outsource social control to prisoners because they're lazy and don't care. They'll line up 20 people in front of the victim and go 'alright which one was it' - marking the victim as a snitch who recieves worse treatment. It's indirect corporal punishment, like anarcho-tyranny but for prisons (maximum anarchy and maximum tryanny). If they don't like you, they can see to it that Wayne Robertson is your cellmate.

In the worst cases, prisoners are actually placed in the same cell with inmates who are likely to victimize them--sometimes even with inmates who have a demonstrated proclivity for sexually abusing others. The case of Eddie Dillard, a California prisoner who served time at Corcoran State Prison in 1993, is an especially chilling example of this problem. Dillard, a young first-timer who had kicked a female correctional officer, was transferred to the cell of Wayne Robertson, a prisoner known by all as the "Booty Bandit."(412) The skinny Dillard was no match for Robertson, a huge, muscular man serving a life sentence for murder. Not only was Robertson nearly twice Dillard's weight, but he had earned his nickname through his habit of violently raping other prisoners.

Before the end of the day, the inevitable occurred: Robertson beat Dillard into submission and sodomized him. For the next two days, Dillard was raped repeatedly, until finally his cell door was opened and he ran out, refusing to return. A correctional officer who worked on the unit later told the Los Angeles Times: "Everyone knew about Robertson. He had raped inmates before and he's raped inmates since."(413) Indeed, according to documents submitted at a California legislative hearing on abuses at Corcoran, Robertson had committed more than a dozen rapes inside Corcoran and other prisons.(414) By placing Dillard in a cell with Robertson, the guards were setting him up for punishment.

Whether as a purposeful act or through mere negligence prisoners are all too often placed together with cellmates who rape them. A Connecticut prisoner told Human Rights Watch how he too was raped by a cellmate with a history of perpetrating rape:

This is a point which our dear departed permabanned follower of Hobbes liked to make: The government is not there to protect the honest people from the criminals. It is there to protect the criminals from the honest people.

I think about this whenever I see “protestors” shut down highways. If there was a 100% guarantee of no police involvement whatsoever the commuters would physically move them out of the way within a few minutes. But if you did that you’d be arrested and lose your job. Functionally the police are there to protect those obstructing traffic and falsely imprisoning people.

Crime has a very easy and effective solution to it that is known to every civilization: ruthless and immediate enforcement of the law. Delinquents need to be beaten, murderers and rapists need to be hanged, and it all needs to happen as swiftly as possible so as to impress the right connection in the mind of the criminal between the illegal act and the punishment. Criminals need to fear the law as a basis for civilization.

Once you have this basic thing done, you then encounter the two long lasting problems: organized crime and impulsive deviants.

The former is almost impossible to squash totally but can be negotiated with and restrained to specific areas of life (and actually help make law enforcement more practical in some cases).

The latter is the more ugly side of it because if you want to have civilization, the only answer to it is ostracism or death. Some people are functionally incapable of participating in society, and they need to be taken out of it or it ceases to exist.

Now it is not nice to have to face the reality that some people cannot participate in society, that there is such a thing as savages, it's almost unfathomable to Liberal ideology that axiomatically models the individual as a rational educated bourgeois from the 1800s.

But crime as a phenomenon is real, in the sense that it's still there even if you refuse to believe in it. That one guy will reach for a cop's gun in the middle of a precinct because his mind is incapable of connecting fucking around with finding out.

Older Liberals recognized this reality and made some dispensations for it. They just failed to integrate it properly into their ideology and now the logical conclusion of their political formula (helped along by its opponents of course) ends up at absurdities like the idea that the pathological criminal is a victim of society existing, and that we should therefore dismantle society. Conveniently forgetting that in the resulting state, he visits horror upon the innocent.

Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that

They deserve to be excluded from society. Because mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

If you are a violent creature who can't be reasoned with, you are more like a tiger than a human in moral terms, and should be treated as such. Do dangerous animals deserve to be locked behind bars? Perhaps not, but we don't let them feast on human flesh because we don't extend the same moral community to them as we do innocent human life.

Delinquents need to be beaten, murderers and rapists need to be hanged, and it all needs to happen as swiftly as possible so as to impress the right connection in the mind of the criminal between the illegal act and the punishment.

Hence the right to a SPEEDY trial.

The reason the average trial takes so long to commence is defendant delay. If you shoot a clerk at 7/11 and get picked up that day. You'll be charged by tomorrow, in bond court the day after, indicted and arraigned within 30 days, and the prosecution will be ready for trial in 60. But your public defender (because lets be honest you dont have and cant keep a real job) wont be. And you will flirt with a private attorney half a dozen times. And they will lose the discovery the state already gave them and demand the same video surveillance 10x before trying to get you to plea, and you will flirt with said plea for 3 years before demanding a trial that you will lose. But now it will be a big pain for everyone because the murder detective retired to Florida and all the 7/11 employees who used to maintain that video system now work for wal mart on the other side of the state.

If the perp gets picked up the same day, why can't he be tried the same day? It sounds like an optimization problem. Maybe you need a drawn-out trial for something like homicide, but for shoplifting you could have a streamlined sentencing center:

  • the cop takes the perp, the victim, any witnesses and any evidence to the sentencing center
  • there the cop, the victim and the witnesses give their testimonies to a cop-LLM and leave (1h)
  • an on-duty ADA and an on-duty public defender review the testimonies and the evidence and come up with a plea bargain (30m)
  • the public defender meets with the perp and offers him the bargain (30m)
  • if the perp pleads guilty, an on-duty judge stamps it and the perp goes to jail
  • if the perp doesn't accept the deal, they all move into the next courtroom
  • there the DA presents the evidence and the testimonies to the on-duty jury (1h)
  • the public defender tries to present the same evidence in a different way (30m)
  • the jury deliberates minutes and gives a verdict: guilty, not guilty, full-scale trial required (15m)
  • the on-duty judge sentences the perp if found guilty (15m)

It's still a lot of time wasted on the jury trial (just 4 cases per jury each day), but hopefully most crimes will be done at the first step, which takes only 2 hours per crime.

You've denied the perp the right to a lawyer, instead turning his case over to someone who gets his paychecks from the same place the prosecutor (and the judge and the jailers) get them.

Who do public defenders get their paychecks from right now?

Same place; the system is a farce.

Still miles better than an NKVD trojka.

More comments

Even a public defender trying his middle in the system described (finances aside) would not agree to the system proposed. On call PDs dont currently exist. Their job is, on average, super easy, but from time to time they can actually do good and get an innocent person acquitted, and that takes a lot of time. Maybe some woman's wife is dead and he hated her, but establishing the alibi takes months. This is uncommon, but exists.

By the time they guy is arrested and booked our officer and store clerk are probably on hour 10 of their shift. You want them to hang out for another 2 for some sort of preliminary hearing, then another 3 for a jury trial (where are these jurors coming from, and who is doing voir dire by the way?).

No, they just submit their testimonies and leave. The recorded versions are used during the quicktrial.

The jury comes from the same place all other jurors come from, voter rolls? As for voir dire, do you mean juror selection? Whichever assistant attorney and public defender are the first to arrive in the morning can do this.

Do you want speedy trials or not? Because the alternative is Cousin Wang and his merry gang disincentivizing theft on their turf by breaking bones.

I would think no defense counsel would agree to basically any of your plan.

Why should anyone ask them? I'm talking about a judicial reform, is it a federal legislative matter or a state legislative matter?

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OK, to be super explicit:

Crime has a very easy and effective solution to it that is known to every civilization: ruthless and immediate enforcement of the law. Delinquents need to be beaten, murderers and rapists need to be hanged, and it all needs to happen as swiftly as possible so as to impress the right connection in the mind of the criminal between the illegal act and the punishment. Criminals need to fear the law as a basis for civilization.

Yes, this would be ideal if it could be accomplished on exactly the terms that you lay out.

The obvious problem (and come on folks, you're not really this dumb not to get this) is that if you empower any actual institution composed of human beings with the ability to quickly hang criminals, then control of that institution becomes a key locus of power which ends up being used, as power always does, to take spoils and entrench itself. This is such a recurring pattern in historical record as to be a meme -- oh, look, the body for public safety turning to infighting and executing its founding members -- lol.

This is especially true when building a machinery that can then be turned around when someone decide that "hate speech" is now criminal and starts sending journalists and others to jail (happening right now over the.pond) or whatever-it-is-they-are-on-about-today.

Look, I'm not actually here to preach soft on crime bullshit or to suggest that punishment should be slow or that criminals shouldn't fear the law. But things are the way they are for a very good reason. This isn't even a plausibly-useless fence! It's a fence coated in innumerable layers of blood.

This is especially true when building a machinery that can then be turned around when someone decide that "hate speech" is now criminal and starts sending journalists and others to jail (happening right now over the.pond)

The problem is that what is also happening right now is rapists being let off with a slap on the wrist, so I don't quite see how being soft on crime is supposed to protect anyone from this.

I think you are conflating being soft on crime in a policy sense (e.g. some knob that increases or decreases the relative punishment) and adopting procedural guardrails (e.g. some knob that tradeoff accuracy(x)specificity).

control of that institution becomes a key locus of power which ends up being used, as power always does, to take spoils and entrench itself

Of course. This is essentially impossible to prevent. Power cannot be destroyed. And it's always absolute, however many lies it hides itself behind.

I am simply demanding that whoever holds power act as a responsible steward and punish criminals. A sovereign that doesn't have the power or inclination to do so deserves to be deposed. Which is why many a dysfunctional democracy turn to dictatorship. Not in a tragic bout of madness, but in a quite pragmatic demand for a ruler, any ruler, that will take his basic duties seriously.

If the political system of your nation is designed so as to prevent the consolidation of power to a degree that it becomes impossible to rule, then it is ripe for a coup.

Americans should know this, since this is how their constitution was instituted, in exactly this kind of a coup against the articles of confederation.

Of course. This is essentially impossible to prevent. Power cannot be destroyed. And it's always absolute, however many lies it hides itself behind.

That's not quite true. Power cannot be destroyed, but the utility of power is, at some point, super-linear and so dispersal of power functions in practice to dampen and diminish it. This was figured out (at least) as early as the Roman Republic.

Moreover, power can be bound up into systems of formal ritual and circumstance that act as a similar dampener. Again, the Romans stumbled upon this, as did many other effective ruling structures. Even in absolute rule, the emperor would exercise it from a specific place and in a specific manner.

I am simply demanding that whoever holds power act as a responsible steward and punish criminals. A sovereign that doesn't have the power or inclination to do so deserves to be deposed. Which is why many a dysfunctional democracy turn to dictatorship. Not in a tragic bout of madness, but in a quite pragmatic demand for a ruler, any ruler, that will take his basic duties seriously.

And likewise I am demanding that whoever holds power also refrains from using it against the innocent and, in particular, against threats to their political power.

These are not incompatible goals, but you're kind of glossing over the insane difficulty of it. Creating a system that punishes the guilty and not the innocent with any kind of accuracy/speed and that is resistant to corruption remains an unsolved problem. You're posting here saying "I demand they do it" doesn't actually solve anything.

Of course, within the three goals of accuracy/speed/fidelity, there is a tradeoff margin, and it's totally fair to say "they should prioritize X over Y or Z over X". But that doesn't appear (?) to be the case.

If the political system of your nation is designed so as to prevent the consolidation of power to a degree that it becomes impossible to rule, then it is ripe for a coup.

It is better to be unruled than to fall into dictatorship (or worse). I'm reminded of the last part of this book review in terms of the tradeoffs between ungovernability and ability to slip into collective psychosis.

This was figured out (at least) as early as the Roman Republic.

It was "figured out" by every republican form of government and subsequently refuted every single time by circumstance. As in the case of the Roman Republic which died precisely out of a need to split power which necessarily coalesced interest onto two rival factions with no choice but escalation, ultimately leading to a winner take all struggle and a return to monarchy that neither side wanted.

It turns out however fancy your rituals are, the incentives of consolidation are simply stronger.

Republics try to pretend that they can bound power in ritual. But a keen observer of their inner workings will notice that this is a sham. In the state of exception, they act as arbitrarily and beyond the spirit of their own rules as the most temperamental of personal tyrants.

I'd like to remind everyone we personally witnessed this a few years ago.

You're posting here saying "I demand they do it" doesn't actually solve anything.

I'm tempted to point to the obvious that this place doesn't capture the sum total of my political action.

But if you understand how power works you know that making this demand often and publicly is the only way to get a good ruler if you are not an elite yourself.

The mistreated masses cannot solve this problem. They need a counter elite to form and their best bet is therefore to loudly advertise that they will pledge undying loyalty to their would be saviour. I believe this is called "populism".

But I understand your objection is that I'm not engaging in the liberal game of making sophisticated chains for the State.

All I can really tell you is that it is a fool's errand because the nature of power escapes all such chains, that the separation of powers is a myth that has never been instantiated, that politics revolves around group coalitions, not rituals, that every single political regime ever is a totalitarianism in waiting and that you'd understand this if you had considered politics as it is instead of how it ought to be.

Freedom is not to be found in establishing lasting rules to constrain power, it is found in the cracks that exist when it has no need to consolidate itself at one's expense.

A secure ruler can be far less tyrannical than a feckless one. Consider, for instance, how the gridlock of the US parliamentary system has reemerged as vast executive power and legislation from the bench, the total opposite of the intention. Meanwhile laissez faire is a maxim coined under absolutism.

I don't mean to imply that I hate republics. They are perfectly serviceable. But their political formula is fiction, in no less true a sense as divine right is. Acting as if setting up rules will change political reality is a kind of magical thinking. As above, so below. But that's not how it works. It's the incentives and the people that matter ultimately, not the written rules.

It is better to be unruled than to fall into dictatorship

This is simply not true and the only way you can even have this opinion is because you have never set foot in true lawlessness.

I beg you to actually visit a country that is experiencing it, as I have, and you will see what manner of horrors humanity can produce when it is left to mob rule. I hear Libya is nice at this time of year.

Not that the desirability of government is a matter of any import, since it's restoration is inevitable. Feudal rulers start out as successful bandits after all. But chaos can last for a while, and I happen to value my life and property, so the maintenance of public order is a concern.

Crime has a very easy and effective solution to it that is known to every civilization: ruthless and immediate enforcement of the law.

The problem with that approach is that it will quickly become incompatible with liberal democracy when the swift and ruthless standard is applied with political motivation.

Consider how Jan 6 would have worked out in your system of ruthless efficiency: likely either Trump has Pence arrested, convicted and hanged for subverting an election before sundown, or he himself is hanged for treason. (And no, you can't separate political and non-political trials reliably. The best you might do is to have summary justice for commoners (presumed non-political) and some refined justice system for nobles.)

The stable configuration for your efficient system of punishment is some kind of autocratic regime. This is why in the legal system of western democracies, swift efficiency was not the primary design goal. There is a reason why the designers of the US constitution (and subsequently the SCOTUS) were so big on procedural checks. It is not because they were having too much sympathy for murderers.

As H.L. Mencken said:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

--

Also, you say about organized crime:

The former is almost impossible to squash totally but can be negotiated with and restrained to specific areas of life (and actually help make law enforcement more practical in some cases).

I tend to disagree. Sure, if the law prohibits something which is very popular, such as drugs, gambling or prostitution, then trying to stop can be practically impossible. But just turning a blind eye to the mob's enterprises hardly seems like an adequate solution. I mean, it works fine for the upper crust of society, who are unlikely to frequent harsh gambling dens, be sex workers or consume impure drugs.

A better approach would be to legalize and regulate the vices which society can stomach (likely prostitution), and crack down hard on the vices it can not (e.g. snuff movies).

it will quickly become incompatible with liberal democracy when the swift and ruthless standard is applied with political motivation

This simply isn't true historically, except for very loose definitions of "quickly" or "liberal democracy".

Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and the Englishmen of that era were hardcore believers in law and order and in a standard of liberal democracy that is much stronger than what you probably mean.

The missing ingredient isn't lenience. On the contrary, speedy execution of laws makes everyone know where they stand and political participation an important and sacred part of life, since it has tangible effects on your life.

What it's incompatible with is managerialism.

Once you have this basic thing done, you then encounter the two long lasting problems: organized crime and impulsive deviants.

There's an obvious third problem.

If you've something to say, please say it.

I'm real dumb, can you tell me what the obvious third problem is so I feel less dumb?

I too am failing to see the obvious third problem.

Speak plainly, not with these snide, low-effort jabs that you've been warned about repeatedly now.

They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

It is my impression that the average progressive thinks this same way, just without the IQ obsession. Whether it is nature or nurture, either way it is not the criminal or homeless man's fault, he is simply a victim of his circumstances. This then leads to some bizarre conclusion that we are morally obligated to suffer their depredations as penance for being a functional part of the society that inflicts this life upon them.

Perhaps we don't need to make them suffer, but I don't understand how this doesn't lead to the conclusion that these people should be locked away for life in a minimally-cruel prison, just for the sake of keeping them away from the rest of us.

This question hangs on the Hobbes-Rousseau debate pretty much.

Which is to say, is society good or evil, and is man inherently evil or good.

If you think that man was doing great in anarchy and society was unjustly foisted upon him, creating all his faults in the process, your project is naturally to destroy society and restore the state of nature.

I'm still not quite sure what to make of the fact they were both wrong anthropologically speaking and that society was never created but always was a feature of humans.

It does make ostracism a harsh punishment that is perhaps too cruel, but it also completely destroys any excuse for antisocial behavior.

I mean it quite literally isn’t their fault. We still shouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of their bad behavior, although I will grant Scott’s point that prison is a sufficiently expensive and inhumane way to solve the problem that at least looking for other solutions is very worthwhile.

I mean it quite literally isn’t their fault.

This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

After all, even a dog can be trained.

Heinlein was directly on point:

“Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house . . . and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken—whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?”

“Why . . . that’s the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!”

“I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?”

“Uh . . . why, mine, I guess.”

“Again I agree. But I’m not guessing.”

Note that training dogs with only rewards and no punishments is possible, and is indeed the standard approach in a number of dog sports including the one I am most familiar with (agility). The trainers of serious competitive sheepdogs say that a combination of rewards and punishments is needed in their discipline, and I respect their expertise. But that is the very highest level of dog training, alongside police and military working dogs - and there is an ongoing dispute within the police/military working dog community about whether sufficiently skilled trainers get better performance with or without punishment.

The approach Heinlein suggests to housetraining puppies (or toilet-training toddlers, for that matter) does not work and creates traumatised dogs. You housetrain puppies by appropriately directing their natural instinct not to foul their own dens. A smart dog practically housetrains themselves.

So Heinlein wasn't on point - either he was an idiot or his character was. (Note that Heinlein was a libertarian, so we can be reasonably certain that he did not endorse the decidedly non-libertarian Terran Federation as correct about everything).

I’m a redneck with a GED. Who do you think is supposed to train them to act civilized? Man isn’t born knowing how to behave.

Neutral questions: Then what is anyone's fault? What model of responsibility do you espouse?

Interesting analogy, because most people would say that if a dog behaves it isn't its fault. The fault belongs with the human who failed to teach the dog how to behave, not the animal which is gonna follow its instincts without guidance.

But you also put down murderous dogs. Once they get that way, you can’t untrain it easily and there’s nothing to gain by imprisoning it.

Sure, I agree that is the logical conclusion of this line of thinking (although people ascribe a higher value to human life than animal life so it isn't likely to fly). I was just commenting how the analogy doesn't really do much to dissuade the "it's not their fault" thinking.

One reason we get unchecked crime is the excuse that criminals don't have agency when committing crimes, but must be treated as if they have agency otherwise. As long as that and similar thought patterns are ascendant, any attempt to fix the problem systemically will fail

No, the only reason we get unchecked crime is that people choose to allow crime to go unchecked.

If you're making a post about a link, please actually link it.

Scott clearly still has some of the progressive aversion to harming criminals even when it's positive sum. However, he's still right (reality is complicated, you can be wrong about one thing and right about a different more important thing).

This is his final, bolded conclusion: "Prison is less cost-effective than other methods of decreasing crime at most current margins. If people weren’t attracted by the emotional punch of how “tough-on-crime” it feels, they would probably want to divert justice system resources away from prisons into other things like police and courts."

This is, IMO, just true. Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.

The biggest problem with fighting crime isn't that prison sentences are too low, it's that the police and justice system - in large part due to progressive activists, but in even larger part due to general government stasis and lack of ambition - has gotten worse at policing. They should'v gotten better at policing at a pace matching the advance of technology! Crime could be so much lower than it is today with just a bit more proactive policing, use of computers, and shaping of culture.

This is, IMO, just true. Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.

First hypothetical: Many, many police officer hours will be needed to achieve it. Perhaps, within a generation, people will learn not to steal.

Let me present a small variation to your first hypothetical. The police will appear within a minute of attempted theft in 90% of all attempts, and everything happens as you write, the thief gets a week in jail. In 10% of cases, nothing happens to the thief. It is still super unrealistic clearance rate in any country not governed by totalitarian surveillance dystopia of magical fairies, but more realistic, as there will no be human society where the police are 100% effective.

In this altered hypothetical, I expect that thievery will be extremely common. What is one week in prison for almost unlimited amount of free stuff, and you get to network with other prisoners? I expect the police would be so demoralized that they soon stop enforcing the rules. They may join the thieves, even, and the whole 90% rate will collapse.

In your converse hypothetical, assuming it happens as stated, with 100% effective police but 5 year lag period for enforcing a life sentence to thieves -- my conclusion is totally opposite. I presume that stealing will dramatically drop in after the 5 years lag, and possibly wither to nothingness in following decades. If you read statistics in the ACX post, it is quite clear that most crime is done by repeat offenders, who are incapacitated in prison. Some or many first-time offenders become repeat offenders as they enter the criminal way of life in prison, but in your hypothetical they have life sentences without parole and that is not a problem.

Again, realistically, it would be terribly expensive and assumes magically competent cops. Thieves would also become more violent if there is only a little difference between the punishment for a theft and murdering witnesses to the theft.

Yeah. All the prison reform projects I even fisk run into the issue that the primary purpose of prison is incapacitation.

The other issue with prison reform is that all these problems are correlated. If your prisons are expensive, it is because progressive activists have won a lot of victories, why do you think policing and the courts aren't similarly being tied up by progressive activists?

why do you think policing and the courts aren't similarly being tied up by progressive activists?

Well, they are; progressive prosecutors and judges use paper bags to determine whether they should prosecute or not (or how they should sentence), and they absolutely will prosecute police who fail to use them.

The Summer of Love 4 years ago is conclusive evidence that a significant minority of Americans believe this is just and correct.

The hypothetical was an extreme to illustrate the point. Yes, in practice, enforcement isn't perfect, so a week is too short and you want escalating sentences. The point that effective policing is higher leverage than increasing sentences remains.

Again, realistically, it would be terribly expensive and assumes magically competent cops

... no? Like stores do, currently, have security guards. We could just empower them to arrest shoplifters. That would be fine. (edit: this includes fixing the laws that create extreme liability for doing that)

I presume that stealing will dramatically drop in after the 5 years lag, and possibly wither to nothingness in following decades

Isn't most crime committed by young people? There's a steady supply of fresh young people, and arresting them 5 years after they're young isn't even going to stop them from having kids to form the next (on average) generation of criminals. Like the US, today, does up arresting most violent criminals for long periods of time eventually, and it hasn't fixed the crime problem.

We could just empower them to arrest shoplifters. That would be fine.

They're already empowered to arrest shoplifters. It's just so much of a liability concern that it's cheaper to tell them not to in almost all cases.

Yeah, what I mean by empower them to is remove all of the obstacles like that that prevent them from doing so. The liability concerns are a consequence of specific laws and precedents, and laws can be changed.

The hypothetical was an extreme to illustrate the point. Yes, in practice, enforcement isn't perfect, so a week is too short and you want escalating sentences. The point that effective policing is higher leverage than increasing sentences remains.

I am not convinced it is relevant to the point or real life. The police that appears within a minute to 100% of crime scenes is practically impossible yet causes major consequences of the stated hypothetical. You can make many points with similarly strong but unrealistic assumptions.

If I assume an existence of a 100% effective at 1-month drug and crime rehabilitation program (criminal turned into citizen who will never commit a crime and is no longer drug addict), it is obvious that we should use such program to rehabilitate all criminals. I believe lot of progressive politics are result of median democrat who believes in such program, that with "enough" social services, one could disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, problem solved. To some extent modern prisons are outgrowth of similar Victorian era ideas. The problem is that such programs don't exist.

Coincidentally, I agree that the legal processing time from arrest to punishment should be reduced. It is more effective to discuss it more realistic assumptions .

Isn't most crime committed by young people? There's a steady supply of fresh young people, and arresting them 5 years after they're young isn't even going to stop them from having kids to form the next (on average) generation of criminals. Like the US, today, does up arresting most violent criminals for long periods of time eventually, and it hasn't fixed the crime problem.

Your hypothetical did not stipulate age limits, by the way. Most criminals start young, too, as teenagers, so a shoplifting 14-year old would be in prison before they turn 20. And even in the US, most prisoners go free eventually. Most crime can't committed by re-offenders unless they have an opportunity to re-offend. If you get to "tag" every criminal today and put them all permanently away with 5 year lag, all habitual criminals are gone after the first wait period, and there will be left only those criminals who started committing crime during those 5 years. Further 5 years down, they are also permanently removed from society. Within the rules of thought experiment, I think this should work to reliably but slowly reduce the number of criminals around.

I agree that realistically it wouldn't be like this, but again, the experiment as specified is not realistic.

Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime?

A huge explosion. It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught. It generalizes very poorly to other crime as well. Want to murder somebody? If you're caught, you're looking at one week. Rape? One week. Million-dollar fraud? One week. I don't think a solution exist which doesn't contain punishment which is highly unpleasant for the punished.

I think bringing back violence might actually be an improvement here. I personally dislike it, but if it works on animals, it probably works wonders on really stupid people as well (unlike more abstract punishments). It seems to work for Singapore (Singapore doesn't have a lot of stupid people, though).

And most of what's wrong with society now is not handled effectively by the government or the police as its social issues. Minor crime and inappropriate behaviour is handled through social norms, social pressure, culture, etc. The government should go after corruption and bigger issues plaguing society rather than wasting time harassing individuals for minor things (inappropirate jokes, building shreds in their gardens, not reporting birthday money to taxes, and things of this nature)

It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught

The assumption for the hypothetical is that you're caught every time. It's a slap on the wrist, but you can't actually benefit! So organized small groups stealing over and over wouldn't pop up, because they wouldn't benefit from it. That example was specifically for shoplifting and stealing cars. My argument is they would go down, because you wouldn't actually be able to benefit from doing them anymore. It wasn't intended to apply to rape or fraud. I don't really think there's much you can do about rape on current margins, absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times, and fraud's a whole different thing anyway.

So it's basically the idea that, if your criminal actions are effectively undone with zero benefits, then you learn not to engage in them. In a mathematical sense, I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work. If I steal a cake and eat it, you cannot make me uneat it, for instance. I think it's difficult to get real-life benefits from this thought experiment. A best case scenarios requires surveillance worse than what China has, so I regard it as an expensive solution for that alone

Absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times

I think one of the dangers of low punishments is that, even with the punishment, the actions may still worth worth it. Even if you punish rape and murder, the crime is not undone and the victim still suffers. Two wrongs balance out in a sense, but not in a way which cancels the wrong. I think large companies break a lot of laws because the fines they get are smaller than what they gain doing it. Large companies generally do whatever is the most profitable, so it's quite important that we make crime not worth it financially (companies are amoral after all)

In a mathematical sense, I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work

Yes, this was the point of the extreme hypothetical, which I which I should've been more clear about.

I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work

It works for repeated or organized theft, where the criminal's doing it because they're going to resell the goods for money - you can almost entirely stop that by just making costs > benefits.

I think one of the dangers of low punishments is that, even with the punishment, the actions may still worth worth it

Yeah, I'm not proposing low punishments for rape, because the benefit is intrinsic to the act itself and also a very primitive one that's hard to punish, rather than an economic one you can take away.

The point is that criminals are not deterred by the length and severeness of the punishment but by the likelihood and immediacy of the punishment.

Is that true if the cost is very small?

I mean, the thought experiment is comparing two extremes' effect on irrational actors, but any sane policy would adjust punishments so that it doesn't at the same time create unfortunate incentives for rational actors.

But that’s the problem. There can be a bunch of assumptions but do they describe the real world?

But that's just not true. If we imagine that there's only a 50% chance of getting caught, there'd be a vast different in attempts with a 1 week cap on sentences vs. a 1 year cap on sentences, I'd think?

It depends what kind of criminals you're thinking about, but most of them don't do any kind of reasonned risk/reward analysis. They simply believe punishment doesn't matter because they won't get caught. It's like reckless driving; a likely result is death, the harshest punishment, but it's infrequent enough that the people doing it discount its possibility to zero. Or teens and unwanted pregnancies, even when there wasn't an easy way out, it still happened all the time because the punishment was infrequent enough as to seem unlikely to happen.

Are you really suggesting that, in the example I suggested, you'd have equal crime rates?

More comments

I think the implicit assumption that most harm society suffers from criminal action is likely untrue.

Cutting the profit incentive through magic will certainly remove some crime (and likely most of the organized crime), but plenty of crime would remain.

Tax fraud would be eliminated, but murder would likely not drop much. Clearly, we will disincentivize killing your grand-mother for the inheritance or murder-for-hire, and indirectly eliminate some murders conducted in organized crime and other for-profit crimes (such as robberies), but plenty of murders would be wholly unaffected.

The thought experiment was intended to be scoped to things like shoplifting and car theft, should've been more specific about that. But I actually think it'd have a moderate effect on murder for a subtle reason - it'd break up cultures of crime by making the moderately profitable activities they sustain themselves not profitable anymore. Like if you couldn't sell drugs, and couldn't steal stuff, and couldn't do welfare fraud, and so on, that culture becomes less attractive

Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.

You're treating the situation as if there exist a pair of control sliders marked "prison time" and "policing power" and that if you slide the former down to 0/10, then you're automatically able to slide the latter up to 10/10 and create godlike supercops. In reality the sliders are demarcated in dollars or man-hours rather than in simple outcome generation, and there isn't enough money in the world (much less in the prison budget) to create a police force of infinite capability that solves every crime in sixty seconds.

"Within a minute of attempting to shoplift [...] the police arrest you" is quite possible at reasonable (if significant) cost. Put policemen at all store exits so that the RFID tags going off (or using an emergency exit in a non-emergency, or triggering the metal detectors with a Faraday cage) gets you immediately arrested.

Car theft is harder, though. You could do okay with mandatory biometrics and self-driving and having cars drive thieves to the police station, but it'd be very expensive in money and false positives and still wouldn't get to 100%.

This sounds like it would require a lot of cops.

Robot cops!

I don't think so? Grocery stores have security guards, you can just let them arrest people.

You'd have to beef them up significantly and/or alter the design of stores (emergency exits unusable unless triggered by central authority (and even then, I suppose there's the "set a fire so that you can shoplift" option), main entrance with lockable gates after the RFID scanners) to avoid the "shoplifter outruns security guard" problem; lots of security guards are would-be police that are too fat to pass the physical.

I mean fixing the laws would allow stores to do the cost/benefit analysis on that themselves, and if they think it isn't then they're probably right.

The 'minute' part was hyperbole, but I think a day or two should be trivial? If we can modify the design of the car, just have it disable itself in a way that can't be undone without the owner's consent (have many different components do the verification on their chips so the thief can't just swap out one), and broadcast its location. Just location broadcasting (only with the owner's consent once it's stolen) would be trivial to retrofit existing cars with very cheaply. And then you just, like, have the cops go pick up the car whenever it's stolen.

Wouldn't get 100% (most obvious and effective bypass is to turn the theft into a robbery - "turn over control of the car or I shoot you" - and there's also "EMP the car, pick it up with a truck and repair it later"), and would still be expensive in false-positives (i.e. when the car doesn't recognise the owner).

Also, with most forms of "disablement" that can't be worked around, you'd need to clean up auto manufacturers' cybersecurity to avoid megadeaths the next time somebody goes to war with you and mounts a cyberattack, although frankly some of the "safety features" of modern cars (as well as ~all self-driving cars) are already reaching that threshold (TTBOMK without the necessary cybersecurity in nearly all cases) because safetyists are apparently Mr. Topaz and assume blithely that software will do what they want and not what they don't want (and also don't think probabilistically and thus dismiss the tail risk of the Long Peace failing to hold).

I think those are reasonable points, I'm not expecting that a few minutes of my thinking about this will solve it, just that a few years of smart tech people will. But I think just the location sharing part would be enough - you'd have to make it hard for the thieves to disable without totaling the car, but I think that's doable (just put it on the car's main board? put it in a random location? idk), and then if the cops just reliably physically repossess the car a few days after it's stolen that should make car theft a lot less attractive. A lot of new cars already have GPS and data.

  1. The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.
  2. I think it might be hard to render it impossible for thieves to disable without totalling the car without catastrophic issues. After all, the chip's no good without the antenna, and it might be a bit tricky to enforce "the antenna is capable of transmitting to something" (not broken, and also not shielded) without enforcing "the antenna is in communication with a specific system" (the latter of which means any failure in that system or in connectivity bricks All Of The Cars).

The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.

At an extreme, make it only transmit for a few seconds every 24h?

For 2 I don't mean enforce it at a software level, just make it physically difficult to disable

It was an unrealistically simple and extreme hypothetical to illustrate the point. Grocery stores have security guards.

It's a hypothetical that boils down to a scenario where the resources for law enforcement are near-infinite versus one where they aren't. Grocery stores having security guards doesn't mean we can reduce all prison terms to a week-long timeout and expect to be fine.

It’s a valid point that long sentences mean little if people aren’t getting caught. Also, I think people here find it hard to model high-time-preference, low IQ criminals. We can likely imagine the abject horror of a 10 or 20 year sentence in a way they can’t.

I think your hypothetical made sense, and I understood what trade-offs you were trying to highlight. I also appreciate that you linked the actual original article.

The biggest problem with fighting crime isn't that prison sentences are too low, it's that the police and justice system - in large part due to progressive activists, but in even larger part due to general government stasis and lack of ambition - has gotten worse at policing. They should'v gotten better at policing at a pace matching the advance of technology! Crime could be so much lower than it is today with just a bit more proactive policing, use of computers, and shaping of culture.

I'm a little less sure on this. It seems some aspects of policing have gotten easier. Cameras and evidence are more ubiquitous, but not as much in high crime areas. Other aspects remain difficult or have gotten worse. Physically restraining an uncooperative human is just as difficult. Tasers have made this somewhat easier. New drugs have have made this harder. Seems easier for people that were likely to cooperate anyways, and harder for people that were unlikely to cooperate anyways. Courts have certainly gotten worse, due to wait times and case loads. I think technology has helped courts handle some of that (remote sessions). But they are still fundamentally limited in getting people to be physically available at a given time, shortly after a crime, and provide enough time for a judge and some lawyers to talk through the case.

I mainly don't think technology is doing much to help. Culture could probably help a bit. But mainly it would be more people involved. More active policing, a much larger court infrastructure to clear out the dockets way faster, and more monitoring or jailing of known past criminals. I just don't know if myself, or voters are really willing to pay the costs necessary for crime reduction. There are diminishing returns at some point.

The biggest problem is the lack of will to impose the sentence and make it stick. Until the policing and prosecution system are doing that, the sentences don’t matter. What happens right now is that the police come by and take a report. Often, that’s the end of it, there’s a report in a desk drawer somewhere. If you’re lucky the police will do an investigation. If a short investigation leads directly to a suspect or the news media makes them look bad, they’ll arrest someone. Then you go to prosecutors who might prosecute, maybe.

With a system like that, crime, essentially, pays. The 1/25 or so chance that someone arrests you is definitely worth the risk. Especially since in larger cities you need to steal a lot of stuff to reach the felony threshold. In California, you can steal up to $1000 before it’s worth arresting you. In other areas, it’s $500. As long as the TV you’re boosting is on sale for $497, nobody is going to do anything about it. If you and 5-6 buddies go an each boost one of those TVs and sell them, it’s easy money. Drugs are basically not enforced either. People can do them pretty openly on public streets without worrying that the cops are going after them.

While funding plays a role here, the police and prosecutors seem to have lost the spine necessary to do so. I think quite often it’s about the look. You don’t want to be seen as racist for arresting and jailing too many black and Hispanics. You don’t want to look like you’re being mean to poor people. Easy answer is just let them go. Or come up with silly “reforms” that are essentially release but have a service requirement that nobody will actually enforce. If there was one thing I’d do to curb crime it’s to get arrest rates up and prosecute everyone to the full extent. Once it becomes clear that the cops are now back in the crime fighting business, crime should drop.

I mainly don't think technology is doing much to help.

Tech papers over the cracks. The US might have Brazil tier crime rates without it. European countries that have seen big demographic upheaval have only preserved low crime rates through it. London has an almost 100% homicide solve rate, and ubiquitous CCTV is a big part of that, both at the police level and when it comes to convincing a jury.

Courts have certainly gotten worse, due to wait times and case loads. I think technology has helped courts handle some of that (remote sessions). But they are still fundamentally limited in getting people to be physically available at a given time, shortly after a crime, and provide enough time for a judge and some lawyers to talk through the case.

I actually think reforming prosecution and courts to simply take advantage of technology is going to be a huge part of this. Our court system was designed for a century ago. Just adding zoom to the old mountains of process doesn't hurt, but there's a lot of room for efficiency gains without compromising on accuracy or anything else. And just hiring more prosecutors and judges and staff is exactly the kind of thing Scott's suggesting doing in his post instead of spending money on police. (Although I think political energy/will, more than money, is the main constraint)

Technology is a force multiplier for IQ, and criminals are not, actually, that smart. So if you can have some very smart people figure out how to use drones with cameras, or warrants to track phones, or etc etc, in a more systematic way than they currently are (not that that isn't being done, it just isn't being done efficiently because government is slow), that's just good.

I thought it was well known that certain American states which will remain unnamed are addicted to prison labor. They want a large populace of manual labor they can pay nothing and can put to work.

If crime went down, they'd actually have less free labor.

It's "well known", certainly, but is it true?

I mean, it's kind of trivial to look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States

AP I consider a bit more reliable than other mainstream news sources. https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

Fine, news is news, what bleeds leads. So here's an investor report from Northstar Asset Management... written to clarify that they themselves don't invest in that kind of thing: https://missioninvestors.org/sites/default/files/resources/Prison%20Labor%20in%20the%20United%20States%20-%20An%20Investor%20Perspective.pdf

The list of prisoner-made goods that we have uncovered is both staggering and very likely incomplete. Inmates in the U.S. are involved in sectors ranging from agriculture to defense contracting, from simple electrical wiring to solar panels.

And then there's, you know, the whole kerfluffle over this. It's actually been on the ballot several times and failed each time. https://capitolweekly.net/private-prison-firms-make-big-money-in-california/

Okay, so let's not look at the private sector. Firefighting, asbestos removal, making COVID hand sanitizer. https://www.vera.org/news/from-fighting-wildfires-to-digging-graves-incarcerated-workers-face-danger-on-the-job

A study that examined the disaster plans of the 47 states that make them publicly available found that 30 of them have explicit instructions to use incarcerated people for disaster relief. The jobs for incarcerated people detailed in these plans ranged from making sandbags or clearing debris to specialized or especially dangerous tasks like cleaning up hazardous materials.

I don't have the link to it, but I did once read an article detailing just how extensively prison labor is used. I think ConAgra Foods was one of the users of prison labor mentioned in the article.

I have noticed that men prisoners behave like literal children, like six year olds with sex drives and muscles. Obviously there’s a certain amount of compassion to be had there(I am not a nature über Alles IQ maximalist even if I acknowledge the very strong influence thereof), but at the same token- uh, you can’t let six year olds do whatever they want, and adding sex drives and muscles does not help. If we had some other solution it’d be great but we don’t and won’t.

For me, Scott's write-up is valuable because he (a) surveys the best of the field, (b) reasonably summarizes the findings in layman terms, and (c) does his best to distinguish his own editorial ideas.

Do prisons work to reduce crime? I am sort of interested--my tax dollars support the system, and I and mine are subject to the laws that have the potential to land us there--but I am not sufficiently interested to actually do my own deep dive into the matter. Thus, it's useful to know (and I will trust Scott on this) that, in the vast and varied field of criminology studying the question, there are three meta-studies that are worth a damn. It's useful to know that they (and most criminologists studying the question) share a reasonable framework of Deterrence / Incapacitation / Aftereffects. Knowing how academic research gets done, I am not at all surprised that even the three meta-studies disagree on specifics. However, it's useful to have a general synthesis of how much they agree, and an analysis of the likely roots of their disagreement. Plus, Scott provides a simple though very useful additional framework where effectiveness of a change in incarceration rate depends on current level of incarceration and current level/type of crime.

And it took me a leisurely hour or so to read Scott's post, whereas my own deep dive would have taken me days and I wasn't going to do it anyway.

In regards to the IQ thing, I can sympathize with Scott. People get a bad roll of the genetic dice and end up with low IQ and high impulsiveness. Then they grow up in a broken home in Flint or Camden, go to a failing public school and end up a common criminal. It’s hard to walk the straight and narrow in those circumstances.

But we can’t just let these people murder and steal either.

The ideal intervention seems obvious. Far longer prison sentences but also prisons which are far less cruel.

Scott’s cost analysis assumes government waste (maybe fair) but doesn’t factor in the cost of criminals having children which might dwarf even the cost of their crimes.

Far longer prison sentences but also prisons which are far less cruel.

I agree completely, along with a more formal separation between prisons for violent and non-violent criminals (rather than the somewhat arbitrary system that exists now), where allocation is also affected by behavior while in the prison system.

Then they grow up in a broken home in Flint or Camden, go to a failing public school and end up a common criminal. [...] The ideal intervention seems obvious. Far longer prison sentences but also prisons which are far less cruel.

Based on your post, I'd say two even better interventions would be to encourage intact homes and improve the failing public schools.

If there was a way to do that, sure.

I don't think executing criminals is outside the Overton Window at all. The death penalty is on the books in most of the world and has remained popular even in countries where it has been abolished, consistently polling majority support in many such nations. Most people want to do it. And lots of people will readily confess that they want murderers and rapists to be executed.

It is specifically unpopular in Western elite circles, for reasons both reasonable and unreasonable, but that's a very unique crowd.

Perhaps an archipelago solution would be an idea.

No, not that kind. The good kind.

The US has partly outsourced running prisons to private enterprise. This is bad because the incentives of prison companies are not the same as the incentives of society.

Instead, one could outsource the rehabilitation process on a voluntary basis, as an alternative to state-run prisons which can be opted out of at any time.

Any organization could, with the prisoners consent, offer them an alternative to state run prisons. If they rehabilitate prisoners at better rates than state prison, they can pocket the costs they saved the criminal justice system. If they do worse, they pay that difference instead.

All kinds of for-profit and not-for-profit orgs could compete. Think that what the criminals really need is Jesus? Just incorporate JesusPrison. Think corporal punishments are the way to go? Fine, as long as you stay within BDSM norms, the prisoners safe word is 'state prison'. Have a shortage of plumbers in your enterprise? Invest in the education of prisoners and offer them jobs afterwards, and benefit from their limited options on the job market. Want to treat criminals for some psychiatric diagnosis? Same rules, with strict oversight. Want to teach the prisoners how this is all societies fault for being racist against them? Whatever you think, as long as you are able to pay the recidivism fine.

Of course, the organizations should be somewhat vetted (the mafia running a 'sex and drugs' based rehabilitation center for their own members is likely not what we want), and the orgs would have to have some kind of liability insurance, but otherwise something like this could work.

Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not the (horrible) revised edition.

Ok, I ran a quick eyeball-based diff, and it looks like in the revised edition, the first two sections were cut, with references to a conworld he ran with Alicorn from which the very name Archipelago was adopted.

The revised edition is much de-nerdified, with the power grantor becoming some generic wizard.

I can see both why Scott wanted a revised edition (which is spending fewer weirdness points on a backstory ultimately not terrible relevant to the point he is making) as well as why you might believe the original version instead of the watered down version edited for mass appeal.

Part of it is that, yes, replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, but the other part is that deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.

Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?

Utilitarianism doesn't just lead to insane antisocial results in bizzare edge cases, it leads to insane antisocial results in real life. You see it with SBF and FTX, you see it with the shrimp welfare people, and you see it here.

There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract. There may be contengent reasons to care about their suffering (i.e. family members of impulsive low IQ prisoners who themselves are capable of agreeing to and following the social contract), but this is distinct from the utilitarian framing.

You can't blame this on utilitarianism, almost every ethical system yields insane results if you try to take it seriously as direct truth instead of just treating it as a grab bag of heuristics. Like, most people would find your second paragraph permitting causing extreme suffering to mentally disabled people without living relatives insane (I don't find it insane personally). You're objecting to 'similarly-weighted universalism among humans', and replacing it with 'universalism among people who can agree to the social contract'. You can easily have a utilitarianism among people who can agree to a social contract, or utilitarianism focused on the health of society. You can also have a deontology that cares deeply the suffering of people who don't agree to the social contract.

The way scott's comment calls out our society's choice to "create" these people also hints at another solution, one he's named more explicitly in the past - choose, instead, to not create them. (Or, if you prefer, use genetic enhancement to "create the same person, but with better genes", but I don't think there's a moral difference between gene-editing a sperm and an egg before fusing them and discarding that sperm/egg and instead using different sperm/eggs)

Well. I think utilitarianism has its weaknesses. One thing to mention here is that you have to actually put a value to every good in view. Shooting everyone who shoplifts baby formula from Walmart will stop that crime, but you’d have to balance it with other goods — justice, humaneness, aesthetic values (pretty sure nobody wants to step over corpses to go shopping), and so on. I’m not even entirely clear how you’d determine whether a given individual was permanently unable to live by the social contract. Perhaps some can actually be rehabilitated,

I’m much more impressed by deontology which simply declares that certain things are simply off limits, and certain things are absolutely required to be a moral society. I don’t think things like collective responsibility or arbitrary detention or punishment make much sense. At the same time I don’t think a moral society would refuse to punish based on a misplaced compassion. That would quite clearly create unsafe and produce more people willing to commit a crime.

I'm not impressed by deontology because those declarations have to come from somewhere, and in practice they either come from explicit utilitarian-ish cost-benefit math done by some philosopher or elite in the past, or from cultural selection on random views where the selection is, also, doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis on what gets selected for. (Well, generally a mix of both)

I'm not impressed by deontology because those declarations have to come from somewhere, and in practice they either come from explicit utilitarian-ish cost-benefit math done by some philosopher or elite in the past, or from cultural selection on random views where the selection is, also, doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis on what gets selected for. (Well, generally a mix of both)

No, traditional they come from divine revelation and religious precepts.

I'm claiming that historically, materially, the reason the divine revelations / religious precepts are what they are are the above - the religious elites actually did think a lot about what the right precepts are, and precepts and revelations were selected across cultures and generations for working and propagating

There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract.

Indeed.

And yet there is a valid question about whether you should care about creating such a person as compared to them not existing or as compared to being someone that can follow the social contract.

This is rich. You complain about utilitarianism leading to antisocial outcomes, and then you continue:

There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract.

Did you just say that it is ok to torture two-year-olds to death? At least if they are without guardians who would care about them, they are terminally ill (so they won't grow up to be an ethics-capable person) and you keep it secret (so you won't upset the general population).

Utilitarianism certainly has its share of problems, but at least it gets "pain is universally bad, even if it is felt by some entity who could never reciprocate with you" right without having to add any epicycles.

I think that hypothetical is correct. It shares a lot of similarities with post-birth abortion, which, while aesthetically repugnant, is probably okay in the strict metaethical sense I am talking about.

Surprised to see less coverage of these points from the article:

But the deterrent effect of crime being illegal at all, as opposed to basically legal and not even resulting in arrest, is very very strong.

There is substantial evidence that increasing the visibility of the police by hiring more officers and allocating existing officers in ways that materially heighten the perceived risk of apprehension can deter crimes.

Part of me wants to take some time to dunk here on the Defund The Police movement. The really do hate the most at risk communities. But, that's probably mostly fruitless, especially on the Motte.

The fact remains that Scott's article points to the fact that one of the most cost effective ways to reduce the occurrence of all crimes (leaving aside incarceration and rehabilitation dilemmas) is to have more cops all over the play. In one of Roland Fryer's papers, I seem to remember a similar conclusion.

The culture war angle to this is that, as long as I can remember, Cops have been the victims of cultural denigration on the left. This can range from the goofy-humorous (Chief Wiggum on the Simpsons, the trope of donuts, Sooper Troopers and smiliar movies) to the naked hostile; ACAB, Fuck Tha Police, 90s gangster rap that clearly identifies street cops as the primary bad guy in the hood (not the, you know, murderous criminals that kill the friends of the protagonist). Even more nuance depictions of cops often share tropes of personal failings and issues with leadership and corruption - Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, Matthew McCanaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective. The biggest pop culture cop show is probably Law an Order and its many spinoffs. Most of the cops here are pretty immaculate in their personal conduct, with the primary conflict in each episode generally being the dramatic discovery of a smoking gun or other key piece of information. Still, it being a drama, many episodes feature a less than comforting ending where a bad person goes to prison, but the victim is still victim-itized and has an implied hard life after the credits role. Law and Order: SVU had a rolling subplot about the emotional toll of those cases on the lead detectives.

Suffice it to say; the Culture War isn't great for cops. So, if one of the best solutions to crime is to have lots more cops, and we assume some sort of political minor miracle wherein we all agree on this and fund it, I worry about our ability to fill the ranks. Interestingly, this kind of dovetails with the other big thread this week on fertility collapse and population issues - women don't have good incentive to be Moms and we ought to improve the status of motherhood. Id argue that the status of cops - an implicitly male and patriarchal role - is also quite low and in need of some rehabilitation.

The unpersoning of Roland Fryer is quite telling. The whiff of possibility that the US 'carceral state' is not actually a product of systemic racism is so antithetical to the dominant intellectual theme that it must be quashed lest any doubt fester and spread to other 'systemic' narratives.

To recap, Roland Fryer is a black academic at Harvard who focused on racial disparities in minority vs white outcomes. He lead a successful minority-focused program (Opportunity NYC) that had positive ROI in terms of dollar spend to material outcomes. He is most controversially known for his 2016 paper on statistical encounters between police and minorities. Unlike the vast, VAST majority of black and minority studies academics, Fryer concluded that police encounters resulting in shootings or incarceration of minorities is statistically identical (if not actually less harsh) than white encounters when factoring in weapon possession, prior arrests, cooperation or other material factors.

https://jimgeschke.substack.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-redemption-of-roland

He was tarred and feathered by multiple academics subsequently, and a Title IX complaint against him resulted in his exile from academy.

The intense backlash against a successful black intellectual is quite fascinating, and identical to the contempt expressed towards any black man who explicitly rejects grievances. Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWorther. The common thread all these men have is that they do not accept that the USA is foundationally racist and that blacks failures are due to external societal factors.

The reason for costs spiralling in the USA for government spending is this externalization of responsibility: the state must prove that the disparate outcome is NOT due to the state failing an unspecified deliverable. The existence of the disparate outcome is taken as proof that the state - as the legal responsible entity of last resort - has failed in its responsibility and therefore must invest even more resources into whatever is required by these champions of the dispossessed. And when these proposed solutions - prison furloughs, death penalty appeals, welfare enhancements that differ by state, special treatment for self declared medical (including mental) conditions, redress of human right violations - fail to change recidivism rates, then it is taken as further proof that even more must be done.

The only way to break this cycle is for a criminal to accept their own responsibility and cooperate with the justice system. But with increasing resources afforded to the noncooperative, why would anyone consider cooperating? There is unlimited incentive to costlessly defect, and minimal incentive to cooperate. The prisoners dilemma fails in real life game theory because iterated games punish defectors in the next round. If there is no punishment now or forever for defecting, and the calculation is performed by do-gooder externals, then dr robotniks pressing that defect button with the biggest smile on his face.

Suffice it to say; the Culture War isn't great for cops. So, if one of the best solutions to crime is to have lots more cops, and we assume some sort of political minor miracle wherein we all agree on this and fund it, I worry about our ability to fill the ranks

It isn't just the Culture War; the left isn't 100% wrong. We actually don't have angels in the form of police officers, and a lot of cops get into law enforcement because they get to exercise power over others. We also have a lot of laws which would allow them to do so legitimately. Greatly increase the number of cops, and even if you avoid the anarcho-tyranny trap and do reduce crime, you also make the place more of a stifling police state for people you wouldn't normally consider 'criminals'.

and a lot of cops get into law enforcement because they get to exercise power over others.

I'd argue this is 100% culture war. Has there been any study that replicates that can point to a major motivating factor of police recruits being authoritarian impulses? Related, is there any data that backs up the (goofy) claim that X% of people who join the military do so in order to be able to kill people.

How would such a study even be constructed? Self-surveys? Big 5 personality traits? This is exactly the kind of data that can always been squinted-at in just the right way so as to "back-up" a latent intent kind of assertion.

I don't know about the military claim, but I base my belief in that canard on my own perspective. I knew people as a youth who became cops and they were people who abused power in their teens and went on to abuse power as police. I have daydreamed about being an anti-hero, doing bad things for justice, could I resist the temptation to live out those fantasies if I was in a position to actualise them? I believe I could, I have been tested and stayed strong in the past. And I believe I could the second time and the third and fourth and so on for a while, but the 2054th time? The 20,743rd time? I like to think I would. I don't have that faith in anyone else on this planet however.

Beyond that though, we live in the era of justification. Everything can be justified if you widen or narrow your focus a bit! Principles are for contemptuous chumps and losers who are coping about their failure to win by any means necessary. The DNC came out and said they spent the entire campaign period lying to their supporters and the public in general, telling them they were winning when that was never true and people aren't mad at them for lying, they are mad at Joe Rogan for believing in dragons. That's for the highest office in the land and you think cops are going to be more honest? I'd guess nybbler was wrong saying it was a lot of people joining for power, but it definitely happens more than it should.

and a lot of cops get into law enforcement because they get to exercise power over others.

I'd argue this is 100% culture war. Has there been any study that replicates that can point to a major motivating factor of police recruits being authoritarian impulses?

What difference would it make? If there were, you would (quite possibly rightly) accuse the researchers of bias. But have you ever met any cops? Did you know people in school who grew up to become cops?

Yes. Dozens. Military as well.

None of the cops comes across as authoritarian-seeking power trippers. Most are deeply committed to the idea of justice. A minority are just doing what their Dads did. In High School, they were all athletes except for one who was just sort of a meathead.

I think both perspectives might be accurate. I lived in a conservative area and then a liberal area. The first was pretty pro-cop the second was not.

The cops coming from the pro cop area seemed universally better than the candidates coming from the anti cop area.

And talking to cops, they also tend to know who the shitbags on the force are.

Yes. Most cops expect to make a good living doing rewarding work that benefits the community, and have a job that is high status in the circles they tend to come from.

But have you ever met any cops? Did you know people in school who grew up to become cops?

Yes, a few regular cops, a campus cop, and a couple conservation officers. (All have arrest powers with varying jurisdictions. I'm using a slightly-broad definition, but nothing too crazy.)

I'll pit my anti-authoritarian anecdotes against your vague implications any day.

have you ever met any cops? Did you know people in school who grew up to become cops?

Yes, have you?

There are in fact circles where becoming a cop is high status and seen as remunerating well. The police force pays quite well by the standards of a job requiring an associates degree(it doesn’t pay fintech level but nothing does), it’s a popular career option in many working class and culturally conservative communities.

But the qualifications for it are in fact difficult. MIP’s and minor pot violations are disqualifying; debt levels are restricted; physical health is checked. The police force is a most attractive offer to the bottom half of the middle of society, and well, a high percentage of the early twenties male population in working class America has a history of the sorts of very minor legal problems and health issues that preclude police academy but don’t impact a more regular career.

I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

Is he saying we should practice eugenics?

Not that I'm opposed, but...he knows about heredity and the poor track record of educational interventions above and beyond what we're already doing, so what else could he mean by "creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society?"

Relevant post on his Tumblr from 2017 when he was doing child psychiatry:

Public service announcement: if you have a kid with some kind of horrifying predatory criminal, and now your kid is a horrifying predatory criminal, and you have no idea how this happened because the father left before he was even born and your new husband is a great guy and you’ve both always done your best to raise your kid well and give him a good home, your kid’s psychiatrist will listen empathetically to your story, and then empathetically give you a copy of The Nurture Assumption.

…maybe not actually. But it will definitely be on his mind. And maybe it would get people to stop having so many kids with horrifying predatory criminals. Seriously, I’m doing inpatient child psychiatry now and I get multiple cases like this every day.

This part of the followup post also seems relevant:

2 Did you know there are whole institutions for dealing with kids who sexually molest other kids? And these institutions are always full? The world is much worse than anybody thinks and I cannot finish up my child psychiatry rotation quickly enough.

I don't think the tweet Spookykou quoted is nessesarily saying "putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children", he was just comparing IQ and self-restraint as he said. But note that some of the people who need to be locked up are children. (This also brings to mind the bit in his post Against Against Autism Cures regarding those who are locked in personal sensory hells regardless of whether they also need to be physically restrained or not.)

It doesn't take a super-Straussian read of Scott's material to know that he is into eugenics. I suppose he has always towed the line of encouraging eugenic reproduction rather than discouraging dysgenic reproduction, so this does feel like a newer take.

he has always towed the line

Ah, my favorite pet peeve rears its ugly head again: it’s toe the line

Hm, you learn something every day. For some reason I had always imagined this idiom arrived from something nautical and pictured... a tugboat? Towing some kind of line?

Always nice to encounter a fellow member of C.A.N.O.E.!

And since that's apparently impossible to google, try this.

I think the Tumblr post about "do not have kids with psychopaths" was on the discourge-dysnenics side of the line.

I expect that what he has in mind would be something like government-sponsored genetic engineering or embryo screening for prospective underclass parents.

It seems pretty clear that Scott would favor a voluntary eugenics program and/or genetic engineering.

He's explicit about it in this old post

The more things turn out to be genetic, the more I support universal funding for implantable contraception that allow people to choose when they do or don’t want children – thus breaking the cycle where people too impulsive or confused to use contraception have more children and increase frequency of those undesirable genes. I think I’d have a heck of a lot easier a time changing gene frequency in the population than you would changing people’s locus of control or self-efficacy or whatever, even if I wasn’t allowed to do anything immoral (except by very silly religious standards of “immoral”).

I mean, I think what he’s leaving out is that a lot of underclass single motherhood is essentially voluntary- the girl is baby crazy and bad at future planning, and she’s a hormone addled teenager so she gets pregnant from the sexy bad boy not the guy working to get out of the hood. And there are no marriageable men in most of these ghettos; they leave, so she knows she’s not getting married anyways.

Back in 2015 he had a fictional op-ed exploring some of the questions about "voluntary" here:

Everything Not Obligatory Is Forbidden

In 2064 there were almost 200 murders nationwide, up from a low of fewer than 50 in 2060. Why is this killer, long believed to be almost eradicated, making a comeback? Criminologists are unanimous in laying the blame on unenhanced children, who lack the improved impulse-control and anger-management genes included in every modern super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy package.

I see in the comments of the post he also established his position more explicitly:

I mean, I am pro voluntary designer babies, although I’m only confident about this in cases where it’s clear enhancement (eg giving kids genes that make them healthier) and not control (eg giving kids genes that make them want to always do what their parents say).

I don’t think I’m pro mandatory designer babies. You might be able to convince me depending on the exact details of the situation. But it probably wouldn’t be through an argument like this.

That “transhumanism is simplified humanism” post at the bottom explains where I’m coming from pretty well.

Scott has literally donated money to sterilize drug users.

That link does not warrant that conclusion.

He announced his intention to donate money to sterilize drug users.

On the spur of the moment he said he "thinks" he "probably" will, but also expressed reservations about it. I wouldn't hang a man for such an offhand comment in an informal setting.

I mean on the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, we can assume people do the things they say they would like to do, absent evidence to the contrary.

Disagree. I'd like to do all kinds of things I never get around to. And at times I also find myself expressing interest in doing something which, upon later reflection, I don't actually have.

The link does not indicate that Scott donated money to sterilize drug users and that's that.

genetic engineering

I think most people would support this given the conditions that everyone gets a leg up and it was applied society wide IE the rich are not allowed to just make themselves genetic lords over the rest of humanity.

I am opposed, but I find this excerpt you quote ironic since there's reason to believe that harsher criminal justice systems in the past created eugenic effects (but largely without the horrible effects of modern eugenics programs, since the object was not eugenics but rather justice).

That's such a cop-out and a distraction. Criminals shouldn't have been born in the first place? Unless you have a time machine that's entirely irrelevant as to how to punish them in the meantime.

I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

I read that as "if we could retcon reality so that someone who has received a decade of prison sentences had never been born, that would be the moral thing to do".

While we do not have the power of retroactive birth control, we likely prevent the births of some children who are most at risk of becoming criminals themselves. A violent criminal who is locked up for a decade during his 20s or 30s will likely cause fewer accidental pregnancies, which are likely (through either genetics or environment) to later end up in the criminal justice system. I have discussed that here.

That doesn't sound like the sort of position Scott would hold or endorse. I could be wrong though. I'm reading it more along the lines of his UBI post where he argues that because modern society has created all of these artificial restrictions in exchange for massive productivity increases, we owe a share of that to the people modern society has disadvantaged via this bargain. Just in this case its forgiveness/charity/social-services rather than cash.

Is he just saying whatever he thinks will be most convincing depending on the context to arrive at the conclusion he has already decided is morally correct?

Probably, because the idea underlying Scott's belief that imprisoning people is equivalent to torturing children is that those people are blank slates whose actions can be >80% (but for convenience just round up to 100%) attributed to socioeconomic factors and "um, purely socioeconomic factors" and so they have no real moral culpability for their crimes. But that sounds too insane to state directly outside of rationalist circles so you have to reach for an argument that normies are willing to consider. I agree that 2014 Scott would have been a lot less sloppy.

But that sounds too insane to state directly outside of rationalist circles so you have to reach for an argument that normies are willing to consider

Hasn't that been the "normie" and popular position for the past 10-15 years? It's long seemed a radical opinion with no public support to entertain the concept of moral culpability.

In blue tribe areas maybe, but support for punishment (as opposed to rehabilitation) is still quite strong in red and purple areas IME.

Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?

Maybe not all people, but if you create rules that some people are too stupid/impulsive to ever follow and you severely punish them for it, what do you consider this morally equivalent to?

Being an IQ realist means you see these people as not much different from the losers in a hypothetical society where failing a test in college level Differential Equations dooms you to a life of misery.

IQ realist here. When those rules are things like "thou shalt not murder" and "thou shalt not steal", I consider enforcing them by severely punishing the ones who break them to be basic human decency. If they are too impulsive and stupid to abide by such elementary moral standards, then they are not fit to live in civilized society.

"Do not steal, do not rape, do not murder: these are rules which every man, of every faith, can embrace. These are not polite suggestions - these are codes of behavior!"

Steve Rogers pointing, I understood that reference.

Let's distinguish between common-sense consequences and torture. When someone has demonstrated that he cannot be trusted with liberty because he'll use it to do great harm, he must be restrained. There's room in the calculus for social censure, seizure of assets, corporal punishment, incarceration, maiming (e.g. losing a hand), exile, and execution. These can all be reasonable responses given certain assumptions.

What doesn't make sense is inflicting unnecessary suffering upon the person.

The objective here is to safeguard the functional, not be cruel to the dysfunctional for cruelty's sake.

sure, we can shoot murderers into the sun for all I care

but last time I visited the county jail, the primary offense was for driving with a suspended license

not saying driving with a suspended license is fine, just clearly a thing where people are being needlessly tortured because the way society is arranged doesn't suit their level of intelligence

After learning about how difficult it is for sub 80 IQ people to function in society, I honestly became open to the idea of some form of light slavery or second-class citizenship to prevent them from causing too much harm to themselves and others. Sounds terrible, but so did institutions before we had tent jungles and streets filled with poop and needles.

However, he got in a bit of an X spat with Cremieux over one aspect of the essay, and in the back and the forth

Come on, let's have the link!

I've never linked to X before, lets see if this works.

People who are not logged into Twitter can only see the linked Tweet, not the context.

Here's the whole thread:

Crémieux Recueil: I just saw a cost-benefit analysis of prisons where prisons save society money until you factor out $50,000 per prisoner per year for "suffering", then they cost society "money".

Scott Alexander: I think this is an inaccurate description of the study.

It costs society money if you take the author's mainline beliefs, if you adjust for current incarceration costs (I didn't do this adjustment because then you'd have to inflate crime costs as well, and I didn't know how to do this, but plausibly cost disease has driven up incarceration costs faster than inflation), or if you're thinking about blue states (which have higher incarceration costs than red states). I described it as saving society a small amount of money under the most generous possible assumptions, but being net negative otherwise.

But also, it does seem like low-key torturing hundreds of thousands of people, ~5% of whom are innocent, is a "social welfare cost". The process used to value that cost at $50,000 is no sillier than the process used to value a murder at -$9.4MM, or any of the other crime numbers in the paper.

Crémieux Recueil: I think it is sillier, since a point of prison for many is to punish, whereas there's no justification for murder.

One commenter posited a reductio that should probably be addressed: by this logic is everything you can buy free after accounting for "joy" or "forgone suffering"?

Scott Alexander: Not just free, but positive sum! If we didn't count the value of joy in buying things, we would have to model all trades as exploitative - stupid people getting tricked into giving companies money for no reason.

If we discount the suffering involved in prison because prisoners are bad people, we should also discount the suffering involved in murder insofar as murder victims may also be bad people (eg drug dealers, gang members, etc). I think a virtue-weighted utilitarianism would be fun to think about, but I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.

Crémieux Recueil: A voluntary purchase should be positive-sum to an individual, but if I buy an expensive truck, I may strain the family budget enough to turn it negative at the household level regardless of my personal enjoyment of the truck.

If I'm involuntarily committing someone to prison and generating enormous surplus for society, throwing in suffering for them, that relatively few outside of prison care about, messes up the whole equation by mixing up costs and benefits across levels of aggregation and treating all the numbers alike when they aren't. If the weight for suffering was adjusted to reflect that, that might make things fine, but no one can reasonably stand on a high estimated cost of prisoner suffering if they're doing cost-benefit analyses for the society we live in.

Given that criminals are generally disliked, suffering is being given a value above prisoners' incomes outside of prison (before and after imprisonment), and false-positive rates are low (especially for long-term prisoners), suffering probably adds value to society anyway. That's part of the now academically neglected retributive function of prison.

Scott Alexander: I think this is a good place to apply Thatcher's Law ("there's no such thing as Society"). Benefits go to individuals - people who don't get robbed, people who don't get stabbed, etc. Even indirect benefits go to individuals - people who live in nicer communities. It's perfectly valid to count costs to other people against the benefits to these people.

But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

I'm totally fine with the consequentialist position of weighing their suffering against the suffering of their victims, I could even potentially be convinced that this suggests incarceration at or above current margins. I just don't see why we have to add "desert" into it, which I think implies some kind of failure to exercise a self-restraint that these people never had in the first place. You wouldn't say that a kid deserves to suffer super hard for some arbitrary number of years because they hit their sibling. You'd give them whatever punishment you expected, through deterrence and/or incapacitation, to either make them a better person or protect their sibling in the future. Why hold criminals to a higher standard?

Crémieux Recueil: Making the analysis entirely individual-level is consistent with what I've said. But I don't think the analysis as it was done actually does that adequately, and it ends up extremely overweighting the suffering of criminals beyond all reason. If you're being "based and IQ-pilled" this stands up: those people average far lower incomes before imprisonment than even $50k/yr.

Now regarding desert, having it as a guiding principle in criminal justice doesn't mean to engage in exorbitant punishment, but it does mean to punish people fairly and equally. If you kill a stranger in cold blood and Bob with a 75 IQ kills a stranger in cold blood, you should both receive the same punishment even if Bob didn't really know any better. If you remove desert from the equation, you necessarily move towards illiberal justice, and I have a strong preference for liberalism and find it hard to imagine rational and workable criminal justice without it.

He's charitably describing even the best-case scenario of someone who was at least functional before going to prison, something blue-collar or menial, had a wife he slapped around occasionally and kids he'd over-discipline when drunk. Not a great human being, but a step or two above the functional scum they are now.

This is fair, but I highlighted the ten year obsolete job skills for a reason, blue-collar and menial jobs just do not change much on that time scale.

Yes they do. The bottom end of my trade overlaps with the top end of people who go to jail- my memories are that guys who went to jail for aggravated assault or making sex tapes with their teenaged girlfriends or whatever lost their career skills in the meantime.

Obviously, they weren’t top of the field to begin with. And they could usually start over at the very bottom instead of somewhat near the bottom. But still.

I mean, maybe that is true in your trade specifically? I was thinking of jobs that I have done, like working at a bar, or a restaurant, or working retail, or working at UPS loading trucks, even working at an auto-shop the loss of a couple years is basically nothing. I am not even sure what 'skill loss' looks like for most of the menial labor I have done such that it is a coherent concern.

Fair enough, but it can come up at least potentially.

had a wife he slapped around occasionally and kids he'd over-discipline when drunk

We're definitely too soft on that sort of crime.

he seems to be saying that the average prisoner is basically retarded

He found a median I. Q. of 76.2 (on a basis of 16 years as mental maturity) and made the sweeping conclusion that "the median intelligence of every racial group of prisoners lies either in the middle borderline or upper moron group of intelligence."

Survey of the Intelligence of Illinois Prisoners

Yeah, kind of.

Which seems to present the modal criminal receiving a lengthy prison sentence as a married father of 2.5 children with a stable career in the tech industry who one day randomly tripped and fell into a ten year felony conviction.

Married father of 2.5 children is quite plausible - the marriage is somewhat less likely, but criminals do make kids pretty often. See e.g. the description of Henry here.

Technology's advancing fast enough now that, while the tech industry is certainly the most affected, the majority of jobs are changing somewhat (usually from communications tech or automation) over a ten-year span.

Scott’s essay made clear to me how much of this is really a cost issue. Or to put it another way, the reason we have crime and a raft of other problems is because of cost-insensitive idealists. Although it could solve the crime problem, incarceration simply costs too much. So we should look into physical punishment, maiming, the stocks.

But I’d like to propose the fairest and cheapest solution: randomized death sentences. When you’re convicted of a serious crime, they hand you a pair of dice, and if you roll snake eyes, you get two in the back of the head. If not, you’re freed. Incapacitation-wise, it’s the equivalent of a long prison sentence for all who roll for a fraction of the cost. And you avoid negative after-effects for being institutionalized with criminals. "Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot."

Who put Two-face in charge of the criminal justice system - let's kill everyone who commits a serious crime.

I don't want the lucky 35/36 of the El Salvedoran 'Drug, Murder and Satanism 5000' gang back on the street.

Yeah, we're setting some sort of record for bad takes here.

This dice rolling system would make crime downright cool. That alone would increase the crime rate. But since we're also releasing the other 97% of criminals, it would cause crime rates to absolutely soar.

Say it with me: The best way to reduce crime is to keep criminals in prison where they can't commit crime.

This is a solved problem. We don't need "one weird trick". Anything you think of while stone is probably a bad idea. Also, the Purge was just a movie.

We've been offered the false choice of "rehabilitation vs. punishment" for so long that it needed Bukele to break the spell and bring "containment" back into the Overton Window.

Say it with me: The best way to reduce crime is to keep criminals in prison where they can't commit crime.

The best way to reduce crime is to hang criminals, which is no only much cheaper than prison (or at least it would be if progressives hadn't deliberately made the process as expensive as possible) but also prevents a future administration from releasing the criminals.

I don’t see any evidence that you can influence criminals by making their punishment “less cool”. If there was, we should spank them in public or something.

We’re dealing with total morons here. They don’t really understand cause and effect. They basically have no awareness outside of the next ten minutes, if that.

I admire the endless optimism of people who try to whisper in the ear of criminals : ‘Hey…. Man…. We fiddled with the judicial reform knobs again, and now instead of a low chance of getting caught and a heavy sentence, you get a high chance of getting caught and a light sentence, so can you please do less crime, please?’

“Sir, that is a similar expected sentence per crime. As a rational man, I cannot change my behaviour on that basis.”

Actually, he’s not going to say that, because he did not understand the previous sentence. Incapacitation is the only one who really works because it does not require criminals to understand anything, unlike deterrence and aftereffects.

Last year, a new film adaptation of The Three Musketeers came out. (French, Part 1, Part 2)

I watched Part 1 first; the fight scenes are amazing. The scene of the arranged duel between D'Artagnan and the three musketeers that turns into a brawl with the Cardinal's men is particularly fantastic. The style has a flavor of Cinéma vérité in that it's a continuous and somewhat shaky take from a point of view of an unseen witness who keeps turning to catch the action while ducking away from danger, but it deviates from Cinéma vérité in that everyone fighting is super-competent. In this seemingly-continuous shot, one catches glimpse of feats of martial arts moves, all geared towards dispatching the enemy, none are for show. It's very cool and impressive, and worth watching for that scene alone.

Every film adaptation makes decisions about how much of the original material to use, and how closely to stick to the plot. When it does, that's a deliberate choice on the part of those who made the film. Sometimes it's a little change: Porthos is bi; Constance is not married and yet runs a hostel while working in the queen's chambers. It's annoying to have such present-day sensibilities undermine the portrayal of a society very different from mine, but I figured that at least these changes didn't utterly contradict an essential part of the story.

And then I watched Part 2.

Milady from the book is one of my favorite villains. She is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious, and above all feminine. She wields femininity as a weapon far more effective then mere swords and muskets. Why dirty your hands, when you can manipulate men to do it for you?

In this adaptation, Milady is a sword-wielding girl-boss.

When an otherwise-good adaptation takes an awesome feminine villain and replaces her with someone who might as well be a man, that's a deliberate choice. That choice dismisses the idea that femininity can be dangerous to one's enemies or efficacious for achieving one's goals. It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.

Fiction is not associative: strong (female character) != (strong female) character.

It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.

Well, no, it's not ironic at all actually. The writers know exactly what they're doing, at least at a subconscious level. The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.

Feminism as a concrete social movement is about advancing the material and social interests of women (or at least, the interests of a certain subset of women). It's not about "giving people the freedom to explore their identities" or "recognizing the complexity of every human" or any claptrap like that.

Well, no, it's not ironic at all actually. The writers know exactly what they're doing, at least at a subconscious level. The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.

I think it's far darker than that. They want to erase the notion that women can ever be manipulative or duplicitous from men's cognitive toolkit to make them easier abuse victims.

I remember when I first discovered the term "passive aggression" in my late teens. Somehow I had never encountered it, or any concrete definition of it, in all my childhood and teenage years under matriarchal rule at home and at school. And suddenly, when I discovered it, it made years and years of exiting every interaction with a female peer or woman with authority over me with profound negative feelings about myself make sense. "Oh, this is how they've been attacking me all these years, why didn't anyone ever tell me this was a thing?" Well, all the people guiding my intellectual development were women, so of course they never told me. And for whatever reason the men in my life were too cowed to pull me aside and explain to me the emotional weapons women have at their ready, or how to defend myself from them.

Maybe it's just me. I don't know. But it seems there is a constant conspiracy of silence about the ways women can victimize men, such that there is a perpetual effort to erase it from culture and bodies of common sense.

Possibly, in some circles even probably, but historically (I write that without solid support beyond my assumption) this type of behavior has been invisible. To be too brazen or overt (by, say, throwing a shoe, or, imagining Connie Corleone, breaking a bunch of dinner plates and sloshing the pitcher of wine over the veal) is to reveal oneself as an aggressor and thus drop the plausible deniability (if I may borrow a CIA term).

Any physically vulnerable or weaker player will necessarily develop strategies to compensate for this weakness, and passive aggression done well is like an art form. Its sisters, cattiness, backstabbing, intrigue, manipulation, these are the fey but effective weapons of the court (or dining table) as opposed to the battlefield or backyard. And to repay cattiness with a smack up the mouth is forbidden (and ineffective), just as to answer a blow to the jaw with a withering comment doesn't win fights.

This is nothing that everyone here is not already aware of (probably. Some might take issue ) I suppose my point is that this behavior gets modeled and copied, the same way swagger and volume of voice and strongarm get modeled for growing boys. Modeled without being so much overtly talked about.

The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.

Except that they are still portraying a woman who is manipulative and dangerous. The difference is that their character is dangerous in a direct way (sword-though-your-guts), and manipulative in a direct manly way (overt seduction). Why isn't this character a bad look for women? Is it because she is so unbelievable that the audience disregards her as an obvious fiction (like they would Wonder Woman or She-Hulk)?

If that's the case, maybe that's what makes the original Milady such a compelling character. She is extraordinary, but not beyond the realm of possibility. We can indeed imagine a smart, resourceful, and utterly amoral woman who is a master of feminine wiles.

Why isn't this character a bad look for women?

Because she is a man.

Feminism as a concrete social movement is about advancing the material and social interests of women (or at least, the interests of a certain subset of women). It's not about "giving people the freedom to explore their identities" or "recognizing the complexity of every human" or any claptrap like that.

Until men or other women disagree with it, whereupon they retreat to "Feminism is simply the radical notion that women are people!" (This is why it is helpful to replace the symbol with the substance; yes, I Am Once Again Asking You To Read The Sequences.)

I don't think anyone is thinking about it that deeply - it's just a denial of difference born of the fear that women will be discriminated against if differences like this are acknowledged* (which you are right would hurt women inclined to full competition with men).

If progressives wanted to avoid the perception that femininity could be dangerous they wouldn't have imposed toxic femininity - e.g. totally unchecked forms of feminine-coded social combat like gossip and cancelling- on everyone, enforced by female HR reps and public figures.

* This is what also leads to the attempts to make big game hunting gender egalitarian. I guess going to hunt == work while doing all of the essential work around the community == 1950s suburban nightmare. So it can't be divided by gender.

1950s suburban nightmare

I am fascinated by this genre of "horror" (loosely described) having such a hold on women. I truly don't understand it. Don't Worry Darling, Revolutionary Road, Stepford Wives, Jeanne Dielman. To me it's reminiscent of a corresponding male genre that expresses existential horror at the idea of a boring office job (Fight Club, Office Space, The Matrix).

Although satirical I have to share this related classic

The universal root of horror is not death or pain, it's powerlessness. For women it tends to be loss of social power. For instance, desperately pleading to someone for help only to be ignored or dismissed, or being unable to exert any influence on others. That second one is what a lot of this "suburban 50s" genre is playing to.

I'd add onto this that it's not just powerlessness, but a dismissal of what people thinks gives them value in favor of something the victimizer cares about more. It's not just enough to be powerless, it's to be pursued and victimized because you could otherwise be something better as you see it, but that isn't the value in you that the tormenter sees and so your values are disregarded.

In Stepford Wives, the women could be better than stepford wives- more independent / autonomous / successful - but what they were valued for, and taken for, was their superficial femininity instead. The thing they cared about as raising them above Stepford Wives (independence / ability) was not what they were valued for, and so was thrown away. Similar things in the Handmaid Tale- the personal value is in the potential for emotionally fullfilling relationships (love on a personal level), but the oppressor is valuing women for another value (breeding).

In a very loose sense, this is analogous for the horror of 'the devil comes for your soul' genre horror. In those, the value people feel they have (the ability to live a good life / have healthy relationship) is disregarding for something they often care little about but which hell cares very much about- the soul. By taking the soul and damning the rest, the value of life and living is dismissed as irrelevant in the eyes of that higher power.

This contrasts with genres of existential horror in which the subjects have no value whatsoever. Worse than malice is disregard, as the negative consequences don't even have the selfvalidation of 'well my soul has value.' Lovecraftian cosmic horror is most notable for this in the sense that the old ones likes Cthulu don't portend the end of humanity because they hate us or need us gone for their plans, but simply as a consequence of their movements and our fragile, meaningless existence.

But this is less common than it appears outside of existential horror. There's a weird psychological dynamic in a fair bit of horror in that it is self-validating in some way.

For example, a revenge-horror rests on the premise that you once were strong and were able to torment your now-tormenter. Punishment-for-your-sins horror elevates the protagonist's agency as central to the events- if they had not sinned, this would not occur, so their sinfulness was important. Even monster horror typically places the protagonists in some form of competition or power relation in the context of the monster- either the monster is a result of human folly (humans have agency/responsibility), or this is a contest of survival (even if doomed, you had a chance and thus have ability), or even if you are prey the thing wants you (Alien is interspecies rape-murder, but you still have value to the cycle).

A lot of horror thus targets what people their place in the world is, but in doing so helps cement their centrality to it. Even if impotent, they are stilll important enough to be tormented.

I am fascinated by this genre of "horror" (loosely described) having such a hold on women.

Heck, I'm surprised horror-qua-horror has such a hold on women! All the people I know who are into horror movies are women. Not to mention True Crime!

It seems like women are either really not into horror, or they're really, really really into horror.

It’s a civilizational horror of mediocrity. A deracinated and atomized people always, from every perch, know deep down that they don’t matter. In the Anglosphere you aren’t born someone unless you happen to be born into the British royal family; to not make something notable of yourself is to be no one.

In other societies- the ones humans are designed to live in- everyone is someone. Male or female, slave or free, old or young- there is a role, a set of marching orders from the top of society to the bottom, and it is no great sin to be average at whatever your role is. In the Anglosphere, to be average is to be so bad as to not have a role, not have a spot in society.

This may have gotten worse over time, but it is not a new problem- the plot of It’s a Wonderful Life is about Mr Bailey despairing at being no one and being convinced that he is some one. Further back, Great Expectations was already deconstructing the trope with Pip heading off to become someone.

Further back, Great Expectations was already deconstructing the trope with Pip heading off to become someone.

I've always considered that in particular to be a good demonstration of the sin of Pride. I've known plenty of people who thought only the Important People could be prideful, as if to be full of pride required something to be justifiably proud of. I've tended to disagree- the phrase 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' seems suitable characterization of prideful people of modest means.

I don't think anyone is thinking about it that deeply

Sure, but you don't need to think deeply about it to have an intuitive understanding of what things (policies, ethical commitments, artistic portrayals, etc) will be helpful or harmful to your agenda. People tend to have good noses for these things.

If progressives wanted to avoid the perception that femininity could be dangerous they wouldn't have imposed toxic femininity - e.g. totally unchecked forms of feminine-coded social combat like gossip and cancelling

I mean, the point of accruing power is that you have to exercise it at some point, and that's necessarily going to generate some pushback. That's unavoidable. That's where the thought policing comes in, to try and minimize dissent.

That choice dismisses the idea that femininity can be dangerous to one's enemies or efficacious for achieving one's goals. It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.

From my understanding, currently feminist deny there is anything female-coded women are better at. Not that femininity can be used for good or bad, rather they demand be erased. I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.

If they were to admit that women posses certain strengths which men lack, it would naturally to the question of existence of male strengths which women lack.

I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.

I don't want to get too bogged down in the object level discussion of Aloy, but I think her having peach fuzz is a defensible choice. In our world, there are products to remove such hair. But Aloy is living in a post-apocalyptic world in 3040, isn't she? It's not hard to believe at all that grooming habits have changed, and women with peach fuzz just leave it as is.

Honestly, this kind of thing is something that takes me out of a lot of media. While we know that the Romans were big about hair removal, we also know plenty of ancient societies that weren't, and it's always strange to see "cave man" media where the women look like they stepped out of a modern Instagram photo, with shaved legs and armpits. I think a lot of creators across time have been cowards, unwilling to contend with the fact that humans are all, men and women, hairy apes.

In real life female peach-fuzz/vellus hair is normally very short, very fine, and barely-noticeable. Videogames generally do not depict details that tiny, so if a videogame model tries to depict something like that there's a good chance of it ending up being bigger and more prominent than it almost always is in real life. Compare to something like the left side of this stock photo. The real face has an incredibly subtle fuzz, with 3 tiny strands of longer hair, while Aloy's face seems covered in hair as long as those 3 strands. Or this set of 279 photos of women without makeup.

There is of course a range of exceptions (all the way up to women with full beards), and either those are the target audience for peach-fuzz removal products or they use them as examples while expecting the actual audience to be women with a more normal amount. But it's pretty far from typical. Now, I don't think the developers outright planned to have her be an outlier, I think it was probably "we have graphics so good we can have this incredibly fine detail", and then when that wasn't actually true and it was too prominent they were woke enough that nobody was willing to point that out.

IMO, the more recent Steven-Universe-style trend of depicting intentionally homely looking women came later. And you notice that the character here looks, at least in the still, pretty good, for what they were going for; she's less uncanny and more intentionally obese.

I am almost certain that is intended to be a male.

[EDIT] - Aw man, it was a good post! Why delete? I thought about adding a picture of Ellie from borderlands, to give a better example of the point you were making!

Agreed, I think the anger at Aloy is often misidentified, even by the people that are angry themselves. She’s just a 5/10, and there should be a place in media for people that aren’t attractive, there’s really nothing objectionable about her in isolation. The issue is that she’s a product of a movement that doesn’t just seek to establish representation for unattractive women but also seeks to abolish representation of attractive women: see replacing Lara Croft.

The frustrating thing about the Aloygate is that the changes to her are entirely plausible: not every woman ages gracefully, especially not a post-apocalyptic tribal. Well, not in six months, but such changes in six years are far from impossible.

However, this framing would require the creators to acknowledge that they've made her less attractive and defend this as a natural process that women go through and are very sensitive about. And since the unspoken rule is that every woman is 10/10, the whole thing devolved into a shouting match of "you've made Aloy ugly" - "no we haven't".

Living the life of a rugged warriors, not always having enough to eat, wouldn't cause ones face to become more similar to that of Nikocado (before his weightloss) in terms of fatness.

But becoming a chieftain, settling down and having children would.

I think the moniker "a woman in real life" (as in "those incel gamers have never seen a woman in real life") is meant to acknowledge that Aloy is depicted below the 70th percentile or wherever "less attractive" starts for you.

At the risk of sounding like a pervert, I associate that peach fuzz with some pretty good memories. In particular, a couple of my more innocent exes had some light fuzz, but because they were relative ingenues they hadn’t absorbed the cultural messaging around hair removal. So I associate it with a certain kind of wholesome unaffected young womanhood.

When I read the first sentence I thought you were going an entirely different direction with that. Either way it’s based

This argument suffers from linking a thread about Aloy having a bodily feature that women are known to have, rather than any examples of her looking mannish or behaving in a masculine manner.

I mean, you can clearly also see she has Ron Perlman's jaw. Which as it turns out is actually a disorder?!

I just think the picture is at a bad angle. In this picture, Aloy looks fine. She's not a supermodel or anything, but she looks like a woman.

That screenshot is from Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, the one people complained about/mocked was her changed model from Horizon Forbidden West in 2022. Here is her 2017 model compared to her face-model Hannah Hoekstra, while here is a comparison with her 2022 model. Also here is her early Zero Dawn concept art and here is the famous comparison with mukbang Youtuber Nikocado Avocado.

This comment suffers from implying that a woman having a bodily feature that women are known to have can't also make the woman look mannish.

I'm so glad you linked that manga, it's a ton of fun.

Never attribute to feminism what can be adequately explained by endumbening.

Substituting cartoony physical stuff for nuanced dialogue and subtle social powerplays has been a trend in youth media for a while now. Women's YA novels should be the peak medium for wordy scenes of deception and covert social manipulation, and even those regularly pull out some kind of broad screen-ready Loony Tunes thing these days, not necessarily girlboss swordplay but someone being punched or shoved, or physically restrained, or exploded (!), in interactions that would have been subtle verbal insults or manipulations a few decades ago. There's maybe some element of fantasy about women wreaking physical revenge, but equally often it's evil moms and boyfriends inflicting violence on girls, or just the universe conveniently providing violence to fill up plot holes, so I don't think it can be purely a girl power thing.

My bet is on a combination of progressively lower social intelligence in younger cohorts (if you're raised without freeform peer play, how would you learn to recognize and understand negotiation or manipulation strategies?), worsening verbal/logical ability in writers, and possibly some studio mistrust of audiences. Say what you will about sword-swinging girlbosses, but they're easy to write, don't need to say much, and reliably capture a viewer's attention.

There is no good reason to ever watch or read anything made after 2012 and doubly so after 2016. There's enough great material to last you a lifetime from before then.

Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).

I generally agree with BurdensomeCount, but I don't think he's trying to say there is literally nothing made after 2012 or 2016 that is worth your time. It's just that so much of it isn't, that the juice isn't worth the squeeze attempting to sift through it. Especially when you can just pick virtually anything that was considered "good" prior to 2012 and not find it offensively ideological. Compared to today where even the "good" games are often full of marxist or gender ideological talking points in degrees from "I can roll my eyes at this and get on with my day" to "My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined".

My intuition is that films and TV have dropped off a lot more in the last 8 years than videogames, with some incredibly vivid and memorable successes very recently. While the Sweetbaby stuff has definitely tainted a lot of AAA games, the kind of games most affected are those that were mass-market slop anyway. I can’t think of many titles where it’s true to say “this would be great were it not for the DEI nonsense”.

Well, like I said, depends what your threshold for bullshit is. I'm so fucking exhausted by it, I nope out the moment I see "Body Type" instead of male or female, or if a game lets you pick your pronouns. Is that petty? Perhaps. Am I missing out on otherwise good games? Once again, perhaps. I just fucking can't anymore. I'm tired. And yet those are increasingly standard features across AAA and indie games. Even a lot of those Switch games being held up as standout titles in a world of AAA slop are getting that nonsense.

Well, like I said, depends what your threshold for bullshit is. I'm so fucking exhausted by it, I nope out the moment I see "Body Type" instead of male or female, or if a game lets you pick your pronouns. Is that petty? Perhaps.

It doesn't seem petty to me at least. I have much the same reaction. It's often not even because things are obnoxious in and of themselves, but because I know (given the current climate) that they are likely to be deliberate inclusions of politics. Like, 20 years ago I wouldn't have thought much about "body type A/B", but these days the odds are very high that someone made the game that way as a deliberate reflection of their culture war beliefs. And like you, I have very little patience for it because games (and other entertainment) are my escape from all the unpleasantness of the world. So when they push it back in my face, it's so much more annoying.

See I care less than I did a few years ago. My politics haven’t changed, but I think I’m probably less afraid of these people than I was, so I’m more willing to accept it in the “weird quirks of a foreign culture” way.

I'll be frank, this does look like deliberately seeking to be offended by woke, given that phrasing "male/female" as "body type" is about one of the least intrusive things ever. Are you "exhausted", or are you hypersensitive?

You ever have the same argument with a family member over and over again for decades? To the point where the moment they slip in an oblique reference to your deep seated differences in world view, all those negative feelings come rushing back in. Especially because they give you a look when they do it that says they know exactly what they are doing? And yeah, the people who don't know might look at your (possibly restrained) anger towards what you know is a direct provocation like you are being over sensitive. But your antagonist knows exactly what they are doing.

It's like that.

Horse!

Mule!

Horse!!

Mule!!!

HORSE!!!!

MULE!!!!!

(Fiddler on the Roof, referenced by Slate Star Codex, March 2016.)

This is just the "what does it matter to you that we support Basic Human Decency, seems like you're the problem" gaslighting trick everyone's seen a billion times. It's manipulative and vile, and weird to keep using on someone who's immune to it.

"Our world-view is Basic Human Decency/Objectively Correct Reality; therefore, explicitly acknowledging it as true is un-remarkable, while disagreeing with it, or even not explicitly affirming it, is Shoving Your Politics In My Face."

What do you have against basic human decency? What it looks like is exactly the same as wokes getting triggered by a nonmixed heterosexual family because it's a dogwhistle for fascist racism or something.

And if I were, in fact, aiming to manipulate, it's not like I would be cowed by you declaring that you're immune to my manipulations.

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One side of this political debate believes in consciousness-raising uber alles. They deliberately seek opportunities to shoehorn (and then brag about shoehorning) their values. They want people more aware of this stuff and why they do it.

It works. People become "hypersensitive" (aware) as a result. Some people appreciate it and go along, some won't. But they don't get to pretend it isn't a result of their actions.

I'm far less aggro and boiling with resentment than @WhiningCoil, to say nothing of some of our other posters. But I recently posted this about my own exhaustion with the eternal celebration of rainbow folx, and got a response from @HaroldWilson that was much like yours: "Why does this bother you? It's not intrusive, no one is making you do anything, it's just basic decency!"

And yeah, I'm not exactly being forced to wear a pronoun badge (yet), but it is just really exhausting to be constantly reminded that these are the most marginalized and oppressed people ever and the slightest hint of impatience or annoyance with them is a genocidal wish for them not to exist, and meanwhile we have to celebrate them everywhere every day, in films, in games, in books, nothing can be published without Representation and god fucking forbid any work feature all gender-conforming straight white people (or any two out of those three) because that's a hate crime.

I want to "just show basic human decency." I do show basic human decency. I do not hate anyone and I do not want LGBTQ people harmed, harassed, or shoved into a closet. And that's not enough. Because I have hateful, bigoted, genocidal beliefs (like maybe trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports, and it's just possible that some sex offenders with penises who want to be sent to women's prison are not sincere about their gender identity, and also they are like 0.5% of the population so maybe everything doesn't have to be about them!). Like, I can say this (and I do), but I know I am picking a fight when I do, so I have to decide if it's worth it, and which people I am going to alienate.

What is "basic human decency" to you?

Are there some righties looking for opportunities to flip out every time they see "woke"? Yes. Just like there are lefties looking for excuses to call anyone who doesn't hate JK Rowling and Trump enough a Nazi. I try very hard not to let myself get sucked into that hate-and-seethe rabbit hole (i.e., every day on Twitter, and most days here on the Motte - seriously, some of you people do need to touch grass). But, you know, it's pretty tiresome when you can't find good faith on either side.

Who are these people who need to touch grass, the implication being that they are so opposed to the woke they make this (and @WhiningCoil) look tame in comparison -

it is just really exhausting to be constantly reminded that these are the most marginalized and oppressed people ever and the slightest hint of impatience or annoyance with them is a genocidal wish for them not to exist, and meanwhile we have to celebrate them everywhere every day, in films, in games, in books, nothing can be published without Representation and god fucking forbid any work feature all gender-conforming straight white people (or any two out of those three) because that's a hate crime.

I want to "just show basic human decency." I do show basic human decency. I do not hate anyone and I do not want LGBTQ people harmed, harassed, or shoved into a closet. And that's not enough. Because I have hateful, bigoted, genocidal beliefs (like maybe trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports, and it's just possible that some sex offenders with penises who want to be sent to women's prison are not sincere about their gender identity, and also they are like 0.5% of the population so maybe everything doesn't have to be about them!).

Because it looks to me like that there is precisely what the vast majority of the anti-woke - particularly on the motte - have been screaming exasperatedly for the past decade and it is the same gaslighting that you point out here - which has only started dying down recently (since the election made it clear the progressives weren't ordained by God is how it looks to me) and was previously much much more ubiquitous - that has made them apoplectic.

(like maybe trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports, and it's just possible that some sex offenders with penises who want to be sent to women's prison are not sincere about their gender identity, and also they are like 0.5% of the population so maybe everything doesn't have to be about them!). Like, I can say this (and I do), but I know I am picking a fight when I do, so I have to decide if it's worth it, and which people I am going to alienate.

Isn't this just part of the 'no politics at work' taboo? Now I know you're complaining about the asymmetry that you're frowned upon for expressing your views but a certain kind of affirmation politics is permitted. But I don't think they're necessarily equivalents. I doubt even a DEI seminar would ever take an explicit position on policy questions like prison or sports legislation.

everything doesn't have to be about them

I don't think everything is...

I don’t think so. It’s just that after a certain saturation point of woke, you just get tired of picking up a game that you just want to turn off the world for a while and play in another universe. Except you don’t ge5 to escape because the designer insisted that he can’t keep away from real world politics for 10 minutes.

I feel the same way, I’m rewatching old sci-fi movies from the 1980s because honestly it’s absolutely refreshing to jus5 see a story that doesn’t have to preach at you.

Hypersensitive, perhaps. Deliberate seeking, certainly not. I can assure you that the reaction (to the aforementioned video game features) is as spontaneous and vigorous as the left’s reaction to, say, confederate flags and statues.

Is it materially important? No.

it is a signifier that the whole "Sex is not the same as gender!" argument is attempt to dismantle the opposing argument rather than a genuinely held belief, because it should be rather uncontroversial to simply state that you are choosing whether the character's sex is male or female.

I would suggest that the reason for this is that the total number of people designing video games is growing much faster than the same number producing TV and film*. If you had mentioned Stardew Valley and Dwarf Fortress, you'd have one- and two- man games, but Rimworld and Factorio are small groups heavily inspired by mods. The newest Factorio expansion came about because they hired a modder who did it for free. The dedicated auteur, working alone, is thriving in video games in a way that is not true for hardly anything else.

*The existence of the youtube professional is the comparable medium. These are episodes of TV, or sometimes movies, and they pay the bills. It isn't exactly high art, but this is where a similar sort of small enterprise is thriving.

I would argue that game devs are worse than ever, even the auteurs.

By way of comparison, I was listening to a podcast Dan Carlin did, talking to some boxing historian. And they mused over the fact that most athletes today are better than they ever were. I mean, just look at the records for any particular sport.

And then there is boxing. Boxers of old had a much higher pace of fights, as well as much more polished defensive capabilities because they didn't want to risk injury and losing their meal ticket. While a champion today might have 20 fights, a champion back in "the day" might have 200. Compare anyone who has competed in 200 events versus 20, and who is superior is usually obvious.

If you don't buy that argument, there is always the story of The Beetles, and how they played tens of thousands of hours of gigs before they emerged as The Beetles and went down in history.

Game devs these days might ship 2 games in 10 years. In the 90's it could be as much as 10 or 20. Look back at id software's pre-Wolfenstein days for Softdisk for instance. For a good chunk of the 80's and 90's, if you weren't on a yearly release schedule or higher, you were struggling. It wasn't until the late 90's that id software and Blizzard took on a "when it's done" attitude, but even that might be 2 or 3 years tops. Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.

On the plus side, bugs actually get noticed and fixed now. We don't usually get deus ex style "hey we broke a bunch of maps, all the plasma weapons, and some random character interactions, have fun dealing with that for the next 25 years. Buy the sequel. Devs out"

Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.

Everytime I see facts about this game, the budget and development time grow larger.

Wikipedia currently lists an 8 year dev time for Concord. But it's not directly sourced, and it doesn't seem to match reality. The studio that created the game wasn't even founded until 2018. Maybe some of the founders were had an idea for a hero shooter in 2016, but if you included all ideation for a game everything would have ridiculous development times

I would suspect that boxers and musicians of today lack something that old-time pugilists and rockstars had: chemical enhancement to aid that greater grind.

Games specifically take longer because they're often scoped bigger, are more complex, and the technology that builds them is more complex. In a few hours, one could crank out a barebones Mario-style platformer in 2D. Making that same game into a Metroidvania-style game would take an order of magnitude more time (let's say weeks). Make it 3D, and the time horizon for development extends to months at the minimum.

id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.

Games can be made in short timeframes like the old days, but you will notice the difference that lack of extra time makes. Go look at any game jam on Itch and play a few submissions, they're often very barebones, sometimes obviously crude, and typically quite short on content.

old-time pugilists and rockstars had: chemical enhancement to aid that greater grind.

You think boxers used to be on more effective drug stacks than they are now? I'm quite skeptical of this for any sense of "used to", but particularly a sense of "used to" that includes, like, John L. Sullivan. For that matter, I'd be sort of surprised if it was true for musicians either.

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Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?

I do think there is something to be said for raw numbers of fights. A similar thing happened in baseball where basically every record based on sheer volume has some unbreakable record from 1910 when pitchers pitched complete games every day. This is undoubtedly largely a result of player pay, if your pitcher has a 300 million dollar contract you are going to treat him like a priceless artifact and handle him incredibly gently, you're never really going to want to push him to the absolute breaking point. When contracts were at most a few hundred thousand a year, yea you can ride him like freaking Secretariat until his UCL turns to dust. So I think there is some truth to the idea that the most resilient players today are probably being held back from achieving their true potential out of fear of injury. Nolan Ryan definitively shows that some humans are capable of throwing at modern speeds for a vastly higher volume of games than pitchers today ever approach.

Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?

And lets lump @HalloweenSnarry in with this too

id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.

My point in bringing up id software's Softdisk days, or Westwood's workmanlike porting jobs, or Bullfrog's start writing business software or ports, is not that these were obviously geniuses from the jump, who've godlike talent was plain as day in everything they did. It's to point out you don't get good at anything working on a single project for 10 years. You need to crank out 10-20 workman like finished projects before you make your first Doom, or your first Command & Conquer. I'm not harping on the notion that the programming was better (though I think it was), or that the games had better core gameplay loops (though I think they do). I'm pointing out that these game developers racked up feedback on their products at a much faster pace than game devs today who slave away on a single mediocre arena shooter for Sony for 10 years straight.

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I actually agree with the fact about great videogames still being made today. Some of the very best video games ever came out not too long ago (of course mixed in with all the usual trash) even if you rule games out for having even a single morel of prog shit.

Even continually updated video games like Dota are hitting it out the park at the moment (the mechanics and content that is, not the bot and win trader addled playerbase) and I'd say have never been better. Dota is miles nicer to play from a mechanics point of view today than it was in 2012.

I attribute this to improving technology. Technologically books today are no different from books of the 1970s but the average PC today is many orders of magnitude more capable than the devices running Pong half a century ago. That on its own opens up huge amounts of design space in video games that was locked off back then. This is not true of either books, television or music though.

BG3 is mid. The game is okay but the writing is crap.

Stellaris is also mid and in many ways more of a role-playing game than a strategy. In terms of depth it has the same sort of 'fake' depth other Paradox titles have, and is not in any way deeper than an ordinary Civ-game from before they got hit by the stupid ray.

Also true of music

There's been very very little of worthwhile music made since the mid to late 90s outside metal, some niche genres (which don't include so-called "indie", anything related to EDM or what most people call "electronic music") and legacy artists who are now at or beyond retirement age.

This is a hill I'm willing to die on.

This is likely the classic case of musical preferences solidifying around age 18. I get plenty of music I like in my Spotify recommendations released post 2000 (although I must admit I do see the 90s as a special period for music).

Huge exaggeration, in my opinion.

I think it’s unlikely that you’d find a triple A piece of media produced after 2012. Indy stuff can still be okay, but if you’re looking at big companies producing art, you aren’t going to find much worth the effort. I dunno, so much of it just feels like people ticked off boxes in a spreadsheet and had ChatGPT produce the script. It’s boring, predictable, politically correct, and generally lacks things like plot, characters, or charm. Indie stuff is better simply because you can still find stuff that genuinely creates characters and situations that you actually care about, plots that don’t feel like long setups for the cool action sequence to follow, or contrived “will they won’t they” love interests (who totally will).

I really liked Beau is Afraid, which had a budget of 35 million. And I liked Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Top Gun: Maverick was solid. Joker was a good experience in the theater, although it may not be a work of pure genius.

I enjoyed Witcher 3 tremendously. Cyberpunk seems very well liked, though I haven't played it myself. Civ VI also seems well liked. I usually only buy games on steep discount so more recent stuff isn't exactly on my radar.

The Substance was fantastic and definitely had a lot to say, and that came out just this year.

But that would mean not watching Tár, which is perfect.

I would counter your assertion by raising the example of Hardcore Henry, but that was a year short of your second cutoff point.

Were there a table before me I should pound upon it, sir!

Shame about the character.

Have you seen the Three and Four Musketeers movies from the seventies? If so, how does this iteration compare? And if you can speak to it, then where does the 2011 version fit in?

Alas, I can't comment on those three. I put the first one on my viewing list because on it's on the streaming service I have.

However, I do recommend the 1994 "Queen Margot" (French, "La Reine Margot"), which is a very good adaptation and does a great job developing the logic of that story consistent with the norms of the time. Its two main female protagonists (Margueritte and her mother Catherine de Medicci) use various aspects of femininity to secure their positions. They do not wield swords, and they're no strangers to wounds or death.

I'm more curious as to how it stacks up with the 1993 version featuring Tim Curry as Cardinal Richelieu, which is objectively the most enjoyable to watch. Not the best, perhaps, but most enjoyable.

Milady from the book is one of my favorite villains. She is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious, and above all feminine. She wields femininity as a weapon far more effective then mere swords and muskets. Why dirty your hands, when you can manipulate men to do it for you?

Cardinal Richelieu is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious. He manipulates dumber men to do his dirty deeds for him. And yet he's a magnificent bastard worthy of respect, while Milady is put down like a viper. She's not exactly portrayed as a role model by Dumas.

Men hate when women characters like this are empowered. We've had a discussion of Heartbreakers on the Motte recently and I think we have discussed Gone Girl as well. So of course the old manipulative Milady was replaced with the new one, the one that can escape in the final reel.

Glad you brought up Richelieu. In the book, he and Milady are aptly juxtaposed because of these very qualities: smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, and seeking power. The difference is that Richelieu (for the most part) uses that accumulated power to make the state of France strong, while Milady (when not kept on a tight leash) uses it to pursue her own passions, including murder and revenge. That is Milady's one ultimately-fatal flaw: whatever her intelligence and talents, she ultimately serves her baser instinct. It's what makes her such great villain, while Cardinal Richelieu is merely an antagonist who aptly pursues goals contrary to whose of the protagonists.

She's not exactly portrayed as a role model by Dumas.

Exactly: Dumas develops her as a villain, not an anti-hero. And as a villain, she is absolutely the tops. She has her own clearly developed story arc. She has a great back story. She grows as a character. Her resourcefulness gets developed and revealed and stages. By the time of the "boss fight" scene, the reader really believes that it indeed takes four musketeers and a professional executioner to finally kill her. All that, and the only time she lifts a weapon is to pretend to wound herself.

Men hate when women characters like this are empowered.

You know, I have never met a man who likes the Dumas books but was incensed that too much time gets devoted to this Milady character, or how it's bullshit that she's so powerful. Dumas chose to devote many more chapters to Milady. The chapters about her mission to kill the Duke of Buckingham are from her point of view. Dumas published the chapters serially, a lot of his readers were men, and I take it as evidence that he responded as much to popular demand as he did to his own creative urges.

I mean, how much more empowered can a character get? The Duke, forewarned by a lucky fluke, captures Milady, imprisons her, puts an incorruptible guard over her. In a few short days, she not only gets that guard to help her escape, but to carry out her ultimate mission: kill the Duke. I mean, damn! that's Power!

You know, I have never met a man who likes the Dumas books but was incensed that too much time gets devoted to this Milady character, or how it's bullshit that she's so powerful. Dumas chose to devote many more chapters to Milady. The chapters about her mission to kill the Duke of Buckingham are from her point of view. Dumas published the chapters serially, a lot of his readers were men, and I take it as evidence that he responded as much to popular demand as he did to his own creative urges.

I think I wasn't able to communicate my idea clear enough. You are correct that Dumas wrote her as a competent villain of the selfish, ignoble, scheming kind. And she meets her end in a way that is appropriate for this kind of villain: desperate, groveling, clutching at every straw until her head is struck down into the mud. However, this puts the modern writers in a bind: they need a "strong female character" and Milady as she has been written doesn't work as one:

  • if she meets her end on the bank of the Lys, she's no longer a suitable self-insert for female viewers
  • if she ultimately escapes her punishment, this will anger male viewers

The writers chose the easiest way out: Milady now competes with men in the male sphere: she's a dashing rogue now, someone who, even after sending Constance to her death, has the possibility of a redemption arc. No longer are underhanded tactics implicitly coded as feminine. Could the writers have come up with a different Milady, one that could attract female viewership, not alienate male viewership and at the same time not be an ahistorical girlboss? In theory, yes, but no one has time for this kind of tightrope walking in practice.

Or they could... y'know... follow the book. A pox on directors who think that they should make significant deviations from the source material when adapting books for the screen.

But it's so... outdated and sexist! How can modern audiences relate to Dumas' female characters if they aren't brought up to date and empowered?

I believe that the classic answer in this scenario is "fuck em". But seriously though, the idea that all things need to try to appeal to all possible people is ruining art. It's ok if some people don't enjoy the character of Milady, or even the movie as a whole. The director shouldn't water down the material just to try to be inoffensive to all (which, ironically, is itself offensive to some people).


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