I always wondered why the Less Wrong community was so "libertarian" (US-style, ie, pro-free market).
It seems at odds to me with LW views on other topics. Free market is akin to evolution : it's at optimisation process which, given enough time and space, will end up finding local maxima, but it's a blind, uncaring force that doesn't care about the sufferings it produces, that has no long-term vision. It's Azathoth. The same way that good engineering is more efficient than evolution (show me a bird flying as fast as a plane), wouldn't a good partially planned economy be better than free market ?
Or if you look at it from a CS view, especially with the SIAI view on AI (which is not shared by all Less Wrongers, but by most) : we use Azathoth-like solutions (neural network, genetic algorithms, ...) when we don't have a classical engineering solution. Shouldn't we do the same in economy ? Try to have more "engineered" solution when we can do so, and resort to the "free market" as a suboptimal but working default when we don't have an engineered solution ? If you look at EDF or SNCF (french electricity and railroads), it seems there are domains in which the ...
I'm not a principled libertarian who will defend the "free market" consistently (in fact, I think the very notion is rather incoherent), but the sort of "engineering" you're talking about runs into two problems:
We still lack the epistemological means to obtain the expertise necessary for such engineering, except for some basic simple insights that were already known to governments of civilized countries centuries ago. Insofar as any economic engineering interventions have been successful historically, they have been based on this ancient common-sense knowledge. Practically all the other stuff dreamed up by economists during the last hundred (or maybe even two hundred) years is a frightful abomination of cargo-cult science, anti-epistemology, and rationalizations for ideology and rent-seeking. (This also goes for the bulk of "social science" in general.)
Even insofar as such expertise can be obtained, there is still the problem that the intervention must be executed by a realistic government, whose agents have their own venal interests and ideological aims (and delusions). And given the above-described state of the economic "science," even
I understand this point of view, but it doesn't feel to really watch the situation we are in right now.
We are more like with current medicine : we don't yet how to build a purely synthetic body that will not age, be sick, tired, ... and the best we have is the Azathoth-built biological frame, but yet we can do lots to improve that biological frame (like vaccines) or fix its flaws (glasses, painkillers, pacemaker).
Looking at the world, we can see that even if not perfect, there are many cases of things which are done "outside of the market" but does works, from CERN to Appolo project, EDF/SNCF as I said in my original comment, European-style universal healthcare, ... it feels to me that being libertarian in this context is more like akin to refusing vaccines and keeping Azathoth alone.
And it also strikes me as odd that while here at LW we are so enthusiast in mind upload and the like (to fix what Azathoth did imperfectly in our bodies) the common LW opinion is much more to keep Azathoth for the economy than to try to think and test alternatives.
Blood transfusions often failed before we knew about blood groups, but the rational reaction was to consider that sometimes they succeed, and try to tell when they fail and when they succeed, so you can use them, not giving up.
Looking at the world, we can see that even if not perfect, there are many cases of things which are done "outside of the market" but does works, from CERN to Appolo project, EDF/SNCF as I said in my original comment, European-style universal healthcare, ... it feels to me that being libertarian in this context is more like akin to refusing vaccines and keeping Azathoth alone.
When you mentioned economic "engineering," the first thing that occurred to me were various schools of macroeconomics and their proposed measures for economic planning via monetary, fiscal, trade, and other policies. Speaking as someone who has spent considerable effort trying to make sense of this supposed "science," I really don't see anything there but pseudoscience driven by ideology, hubris, political expediency, and rent-seeking.
What you mention here, however, is in the domain of those much older kinds of interventions that I spoke of: public infrastructure spending, wealth redistribution, and patronage of arts and sciences. Unlike the modern macroeconomic "science," you could have an interesting discussion about those even with an ancient Roman statesman. I am ...
I understand the issue, but I'm at odd with it for three reasons :
If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don't see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better. Regulations may be imperfect and biased by lobbying, but having the corporations directly in charge seems even worse to me.
It seems to me by looking around the world than when a reasonably democratic government starts providing real services to the population (universal healthcare and education, social safety net, ...) the people become less apathetic towards the government, and will get more involved with how the government is runned. It also seems to me that countries with higher wealth redistribution, like Scandinavian countries, have lower corruption.
This is a kind of defeatist arguments. Here at Less Wrong, we speak of defeating death itself, conquering the stars, breaking the FAI problem, getting to the "level above" in understanding of the world, and yet, on this specific issue of politics/economics, we concede defeat so easily ? There are countless ways to "actually control the market" that we could
And since the runtime complexity of the human body is non-trivial, we should give up on medicine and methods as blunt as surgery and drugs ? Sorry, but complexity is not an excuse to let Azathoth rule alone and not try to improve things. Or we would have given up on science and medicine since long.
As for coercion, capitalism relies on it too : coercion to enforce private property, even when it means, for example, expelling a family from its house and sending it to the street because they can't pay the mortgage. If you reject coercion, you reject private property which is enforced by coercion. If you accept some amount of coercion to defend private property, why not some amount of coercion to ensure people have a roof and food ?
OrphanWilde,
Welcome to the site! We are glad to have you. But let me tell you a story:
A man goes to the mayor, asking to remove a fence on public property. He gives reason after reason why the fence should not exist, and how much better life will be once the fence is gone. The mayor listens closely, nodding in agreement, and the man finishes his argument. The mayor pauses for a moment, then asks, "Who put the fence there, and why?" The man waves his hand in dismissal: "I don't know and I don't care." The mayor frowns, replying, "Until you know why that fence exists, I can't let you tear it down."
Moving from the story to advice: reading all of this sequence may be helpful. Around a year ago, I mostly gave up discussing politics after finding Less Wrong, and my life is noticeably better. It's hard to elaborate all of the reasons why- but to start, I find myself less bothered by other people and the world, I find my time much better spent, as I'm reading positive psychology rather than political philosophy, and putting my hope in start-ups rather than political parties.
Instead of testing to see if politics can be discussed on Less Wrong, I suggest an alternate test: see how long you can go without having a political discussion. See what you do with your time and emotional energy instead.
[Meta] I've gone long periods of time without having political discussions. My interest in such waxes and wanes, much as my interest in writing poetry, my interest in writing prose, my interest in programming games, my interest in having any contact with other people, etc. I wouldn't say my life at any point in any of these cycles is better or worse; if it were better, I doubt my interest would wane, if worse, I doubt it would wax.
As for my reasons for introducing this test, it was introduced in response to another individual calling the rule "Stupid," in rather less polite terms. I decided to create a test to see if the fence was actually useful; I didn't create an article calling for it to be torn down, I asked the mayor to create a space in that public property without that fence, to see if it did indeed serve the purpose it was erected for. I'll "conclude" the test sometime tomorrow, and ask people whether, indeed, they found the discussions here constructive or informative. (I've already learned one thing, which I'll elaborate on tomorrow, in my closing poll and commentary. So personally it has already been both constructive and informative.)
I read th...
I think the organ market should be legal. The arguments against it are far to weak to justify so many people dying.
Organs don't work like drugs; allowing sale would greatly encourage smugglers. This would lead to organ theft. Families could also pressure people who don't earn enough to sell their organs.
Organs don't work like drugs
It seems to me that the differences between drugs and organs make organ sale easier to regulate. Surgical operations already have plenty of paperwork and administrative oversight (by the government and insurance companies). And patients probably care more about where the organ came from than they do for drugs.
This policy is plausibly superior to the status quo, but I'm not convinced it is the best available alternative. Can you tell me why you think this would be a better way of doing things than, say, mandating organ donation upon brain-death?
You know, it would probably be possible to benefit from your organs' value while you're alive. Sign a contract to agree to be organ-harvested after your death, and get a stipend for the average estimated value of your cadaver, today! Free money, from your perspective. You could get more if you contractually agreed not to smoke or take certain dangerous jobs.
You know, it would probably be possible to benefit from your organs' value while you're alive. Sign a contract to agree to be organ-harvested after your death, and get a stipend for the average estimated value of your cadaver, today! Free money, from your perspective. You could get more if you contractually agreed not to smoke or take certain dangerous jobs.
That's a brilliant idea and it is a travesty that it isn't in place now. (The whole "moral hazard" thing would need to be solved but there are ways to solve it.)
There's no more reason to take their organs when they die than there is to take their money and spend it on saving lives.
If people were routinely burning all their assets when they died, preventing anyone from getting any use out of them, I think I would be in favor of a policy that mandated the donation of the property for life-saving purposes. In the property case, one could at least make the argument that mandating redistribution after death would disincentivize people from working hard during their lifetimes. I don't see a similar disincentive associated with mandatory redistribution of organs after death.
I'm pretty convinced that mandatory organ donation upon brain-death is an unmitigated good thing. Are there any sound arguments against it, besides the pragmatic difficulty of selling the policy to people? So the important question for me is: Should we institute an organ market for living donors in addition to requiring donation upon death? There are costs to the organ market, as has been pointed out in the comments. Also, an organ sold by a living donor is one less organ harvested from a cadaver, so an organ market wouldn't increase the number of organs available for trans...
Meta: Reading through this thread was pleasant and rewarding. I feel like I learned as much about the practical ethics of organ donation in ten minutes here as I would from an ordinary two-hour-long argument in real life, and I feel a lot better now than I'd feel after a two-hour-long argument.
I don't see the implication. If I upvoted a post for its eloquence, would you infer that I assume without further analysis that any eloquently phrased idea has greater benefits than costs?
I figure political discussions are perfectly fine as long as they're quarantined. Just make periodic threads like this one to discuss politics, and make the rule to not discuss politics in non-political threads.
LessWrong threads aren't quarantined from each other; all comments show up in recent comments and in the sidebar.
Because on a different site, the users would be different, i.e. I wouldn't be talking with people I knew I share a certain mindset with.
Clutter, distraction, drama.
(ETA: Very much confused by downvotes. Are these not relevant considerations that differ relevantly between the scenario where politics is discussed in threads on LessWrong, and the scenario where politics is discussed on a different site inhabited by LessWrongers?)
I believe government should be much more localized and I like the idea of charter cities. Competition among governments is good for citizens just as competition among businesses is good for consumers. Of course, for competition to really work out, immigration should not be regulated.
Of course, for competition to really work out, immigration should not be regulated.
How does this follow? Unless I'm having a severe case of reading misapprehension, this is equivalent to arguing that there should be a market in housing because competition between landlords will result in good housing with reasonable rents -- and then adding, as if it were obvious, that for competition to work out, landlords should not have any rules for screening potential tenants.
(Under the Politics is the Mindkiller test post. Incoming WALL of an argument.)
The typical view of capital punishment by the American right wing voter is correct. I'm speaking of the view that "we damn well know s/he's guilty so don't bother putting them in jail just give 'em a bullet to the head." I will argue that this is the correct course of action for running a justice system under uncertainty.
I'll be crystal clear. I am advocating execution of convicted persons without the special protections traditionally afforded to death penalty cases and without mandatory appeals which reach state supreme courts. I am not advocating for the current system of death penalty, which I consider worse than having no death penalty. "We know they're guilty so lets just kill 'em" can be considered an accurate description of my viewpoint. Also, getting this out of the way, the death penalty does nothing to deter crime more than threat of life imprisonment, and this argument does not rely on any special deterrence properties from capital punishment.
((Lets define some facts so we're working with mutual data. Since 1973, 1267 convicts have been executed, 140 death row inmat...
'Bednets would be a more efficient use of those resources' is a nearly-fully-generalizable argument against the vast majority of spending within the United States. Reducing US government spending on X by $2 million and increasing spending on bednets by $2 million would be an improvement for nearly all values of X, even if X is something that you support like scientific research, hiring police officers, repairing roads, lead abatement, or early childhood education.
Spending the money on optimal philanthropy is the wrong counterfactual to consider because the money that will be saved, if your proposed capital punishment reform is enacted, will not be spent on optimal philanthropy. My guess at the 4 most likely places where that money would go are:
it's more worthwhile than 1,000 Africans
This is an implicit rate of $500 per life. GiveWell claims less efficiency than that for their top charities now, more like $1,600 to $4,000 (not including example effects of promoting efficiency or transparency and distant indirect effects).
Their number is probably better than Yvain's for talking about available marginal opportunities.
Mainly, I think it's bad news for probably mistaken estimates to spread, and then disillusion the readers or make the writers look biased. If people interested in effective philanthropy go around trumpeting likely wrong (over-optimistic) figures and don't correct them, then the community's credibility will fall, and bad models and epistemic practices may be strengthened. This is why GiveWell goes ballistic on people who go around quoting its old cost-effectiveness estimates rather than more recent ones (revisions tend to be towards less cost-effectiveness).
Until the last paragraph, you only made the case that death penalty is better than life imprisonment, not that it is good. So I suggest moving that last paragraph higher up. Also, you suggest the only alternative to life imprisonment or death penalty is setting them free; how about fines, penal labour, torture à la A Clockwork Orange, pillory, etc.?
I realized now that I hadn't made a sufficient argument for execution specifically. I left out quite a few things, but It's such a monolith I'm not sure where to add things in.
There's a few competing options. A non-exhaustive list includes imprisonment (status quo), execution, legalization, rehabilitation, and fines/labor.
Imprisonment is bad and because it's the status quo I focused on it entirely. I consider it the worst of all options except fines/labor. Execution is a terrible option but, as I argue above, better than imprisonment. Fines/labor is the worst because it could incentivize people to increase the number of people who commit crimes in order to get free money/labor, as is already happening with red light cameras causing accidents just to generate more money. Legalization or setting them free is the best option for several classes of crime, but as I mentioned murder isn't one of them.
Rehabilitation / Clockwork Orange's system seems interesting depending on the data. Not the torture part; torture is something I don't condone since it would be expensive and ineffectual. However, ignoring Clockwork Orange's implementation, the idea of perfect rehabilitation is a pow...
Meta: please make one comment per argument. Otherwise you can't distinguish "one very good and one very bad argument" from "two unremarkable arguments".
Hazing is not unethical, nor should it be illegal. Hazing is like BDSM, minus the sex. When it is safe, sane and consensual, hazing promotes group cohesion and intimacy. It is a fast-track to camaraderie, which is why so many fraternity/sororities use it.
I make this comment after being hazed myself, and deciding I couldn't handle it. But several of my friends completed hazing, and went on to haze other people. I see effects as being net positive.
Fraternity hazing seems to regularly involve drunkenness. Combining drunkenness with BDSM seems to be considered a bad idea in the BDSM community, both in terms of consent and safety.
None of the 44 states with laws against hazing make an exception for consensual hazing, and some laws directly say that consent is not a legal defense.
Officially, my university had zero-tolerance policy towards hazing. In practice, hazing was permitted so long as wasn't dangerous. Some organizations inevitably pushed the line; they were punished. But my organization did not push the line.
Some activities I was a "victim" of:
So... what conclusions can we draw from this experiment?
I learned a few things; first, http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/dsv/is_politics_the_mindkiller_an_inconclusive_test/73ug included a link to a more fully reducted form of the argument I was posing which I had previously been unaware of. (It relies on a metaphor, which I'm generally cautious of, but I think in this case it's a good metaphor.)
Second, I learned LessWrongians don't like rules on upvoting/downvoting. Either that or the fact that the comments here appeared in the comments section messe...
The impression I get is not so much that we avoid politics on principle but that there are more important "political" issues out there than those that most people understand and argue about. If more people would "taboo" (avoid) these arguments they would come across these more important issues much faster rather than being distracted before they get there.
Abortion for example: Even if we bite the right-wing bullet that humanity is killing thousands of innocent pre-conscious human entities (babies!) per day, it seems less significant in ...
It's like religion. If you accept that God and Hell are real, then becoming a fundamentalist Christian and trying as hard as you can to convert as many people as possible is the only ethical option.
Nonsense. That is the most ethical of the options that your brain is willing to provide you when you ask it "what is the best option?" But if someone actually had that belief a more ethical option would be to murder as many Muslims, Atheists and Buddhists (of child bearing age) as you can. The chance that you will successfully convert any given individual is tiny and if you allow them to live to breed they will raise children doomed to hell.
An even better option is to kill all males who will not convert and keep all women (Christian and otherwise) pregnant constantly with twins (IVF, fertility drugs). The children are to be taken and raised to be loyal to your faith.
(Or you build an FAI to tile the universe with Christians with the minimum possible lifespan to qualify for heaven.)
META: I think it's an interesting experiment. However, I wouldn't want to get involved if it violates LW's posting rules. There's a longstanding community norm against discussing politics, but I don't know if it is actually violating the rules to do so. Can the mods please clarify?
Edit: I've observed that at least three people have voted this comment down. I'm unsure why.
It wasn't a mod-given verdict; it's just a (very beneficial, I think) norm that's arisen, partly due to the post this refers to.
It's worth noting that the actual enforcement of the norm-- downvoting of any comment remotely perceived as political-- is a dramatic enlargement of the recommendation actually made in that post.
I'm not saying that I think Overcoming Bias should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia's ideal of the Neutral Point of View. But try to resist getting in those good, solid digs if you can possibly avoid it. If your topic legitimately relates to attempts to ban evolution in school curricula, then go ahead and talk about it—but don't blame it explicitly on the whole Republican Party; some of your readers may be Republicans, and they may feel that the problem is a few rogues, not the entire party. As with Wikipedia's NPOV, it doesn't matter whether (you think) the Republican Party really is at fault. It's just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics.
Instead of merely downvoting the "good solid digs" and color politics people will downvote anything that even pattern matches with a contemporary policy issue. This, I would argue, actually exacerbates any political thinking because commenters then feel like they're being attacked and respond in kind.
The other half of this is that discussing politics is goddamn useless, and I say that as someone who really enjoy's discussing and thinking about politics. Even if you were to make really fast progress in coming to sound conclusions about politics it would still be useless because almost everyone has very little political power and thus changing their minds has very little effect on the world.
People here usually value having true beliefs for their own sake. It's hard to imagine convincing someone of the efficacy of NGDP futures targeting or humanitarian military intervention is actually more useless than convincing someone of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or Bayesian epistemology. There is no shortage of Less Wrong discussions involving people trying to persuade others to hold beliefs that will have no impact on the world and I don't think that criteria is diagnostic of whether or not a discussion should take place on Less Wrong.
And then we can discuss whether having all the discussions about whether to discuss politics is really less costly than simply discussing politics :D
"Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it."
It can't be a good counterargument if there's a good obvious counterargument to it. obvious but not good is fine, good but not obvious might be/is sorta fine but not both. You could well have meant either, as a forward slash tends to mean or, but...
Moldbug is less wrong than most political scientists, many historians and quite a few sociologists.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
--Peter Thiel, The education of a libertarian
This has been my opinion as well since late 2011.
I think the problem with politics is that people forget that societies are like people: they change. So, to quote some Popperian philosophy: "The fact that change is never going to stop renders the very notion of a blueprint for the good society nonsensical, for even if society became like the blueprint it would instantly begin to depart from it." Imagine that instead of trying to tell society how to be perfect you had an even easier job: how to instruct a single human being in the art of perfection. I don't think that would be a very easy task -...
(shrug)
Hydraulic engineering is not an exercise in identifying the "perfect state of fluids" and then trying to fix fluids in that state. It is an exercise in identifying the properties of fluids that govern how they respond to various forces, and then using that knowledge to build fluid-dynamic systems that behave in useful ways.
Done right, politics is similarly an exercise in identifying the properties of humans that govern how they respond to various forces, and then using that knowledge to build human-dynamic systems that behave in useful ways.
The fact that individual humans change in the process of traveling through these systems is undeniable, but no more relevant to the perfectibility or imperfectibility of politics than the fact that different water flows through my pipes every day is to the perfectibility or imperfectibility of plumbing.
(Under the Politics is the Mindkiller test post. Incoming WALL of an argument.)
The typical view of capital punishment by the American right wing voter is correct. I'm speaking of the view that "we damn well know s/he's guilty so don't bother putting them in jail just give 'em a bullet to the head." I will argue that this is the correct course of action for running a justice system under uncertainty.
I'll be crystal clear. I am advocating execution of convicted persons without the special protections traditionally afforded to death penalty cases and without mandatory appeals which reach state supreme courts. I am not advocating for the current system of death penalty, which I consider worse than having no death penalty. "We know they're guilty so lets just kill 'em" can be considered an accurate description of my viewpoint. Also, getting this out of the way, the death penalty does nothing to deter crime more than threat of life imprisonment, and this argument does not rely on any special deterrence properties from capital punishment.
((Lets define some facts so we're working with mutual data. Since 1973, 1267 convicts have been executed, 140 death row inmates have been pardoned or otherwise exonerated. About ~140,000 inmates are currently serving life in prison. For ballpark averages, the cost to house an average inmate is ~$35,000 a year, the cost to house an inmate over 50 years old is ~$100,000 per year, the cost to house a death row inmate ~$125,000 per year (though interestingly this study linked to from the ACLU's case against the death penalty claims death row incarceration costs were practically identical to non-deathrow inmates convicted of similar crimes). The actual execution costs are trivial; one Texas paper was complaining that the cost of injection drugs jumped over 2000%... from about ~$80 to ~$1800. The primary cost increase (approx 85%) of death penalty cases is due to the trial process: death penalty dual trials, mandatory appeals, and increased likelyhood of appeals being granted and the level of those appeals.))
First, I hold that life in prison without parole is not an efficient use of resources. In Efficient Charity, Yvain talks about how money, being fungible, can be used to save 1 painting or 110 children via medicine or 1,100 children via nets. You may argue about the merits of saving lives vs eyeglasses vs paintings, but whichever charity you choose, there is one which does the job best. If the ACLU is to be trusted, we're spending $125,000 per year for death row inmate or LWOP. We value keeping someone locked up in Azkaban for a year more than we care about saving 250 African lives per year, or hiring 2 teachers full time, or funding x-risk charities, or covering 4000 people for cryonics so they'll live forever in case they die that year. If we want to save lives, keeping people in prison is the wrong choice. Hell, for the price of one year of incarceration, we could kill them and freeze them cryonically, hire a teacher for a year, save 20 African lives, AND have $30,000 to give to x-risk research. And that's just one year's savings, we get even more value each year thereafter.
((Yes, I'm aware that if we just pumped funds into malarial nets it would quickly lose low-hanging fruit to target (in fact, by being givewell's top charity it already passed the marginal point into 2nd place, and IIRC is now hovering around $2000 per life saved but I'm not certain on that so I'll stick with Yvain's numbers), and you couldn't just directly trade lives saved. But it's psychologically easier to compare lives with lives, than lives with money. If you don't like African lives, trade some other unit of terminal value. Anyhow I digress.))
Wouldn't we be killing innocent people? Yes. We will get it wrong and kill some innocent person. They won't deserve it and that will be sad. People like Amanda Knox will die just because we want to save money. However, just like the FDA prevents 5,000 casualties per year but causes at least 20,000-120,000 casualties by delaying approval of beneficial medications, our justice system is trading fewer visible, blamable deaths for more deaths that are harder to see.
Wait, doesn't the death penalty costs more because of trials? It does, and that's why I suggest dropping death penalty trials to the same standard as LWOP trials. I hold that extra-stringent trials are not an efficient use of resources to save innocent lives. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, non-death penalty murder trials average $1.1 million, while death penalty trials cost $3 million before appeals. That means we're spending $1.9 million to maybe save one life from wrongful execution (instead of false imprisonment for life). Vaniver's value of information has an illuminating insight (which Elizier also wrote about in Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence): When Bayesian evidence is good enough, requiring legal evidence can be costly. In this case, it's ~3,800 Africans costly. I sincerely doubt this information really has a value more than 3.8 thousand African lives, or sending a couple of doctors through medical school who otherwise couldn't pay for it, or funding 3 Singularity Institutes for a year. LWOP trials are already decently accurate, and death penalty trials aren't significantly more accurate to justify the expense. At some point we have to say that the evidence is "good enough" and make our decision, and I hold that the existing trial cost for LWOP is, if not optimal, a good schelling point.
I'd also like to note that this is essentially paying for a dust spec removal program, and all it costs is some torture (well, execution). In a way, I consider it a repugnant conclusion of the dust spec line of thought, except this one's actually correct (though I'm not prepared to prove that at this moment).
So the question is, are we justified in making life or death choices based on Bayesian evidence instead of legal evidence? I posit that we already do. Supporters of SIAI give over $500,000 each year because we think it's more worthwhile than 1,000 Africans. After the matching drive finishes, we'll have 'killed' more people than there have been capital punishment executions since 1976 when the constitutionality of it was affirmed. There are people who would be alive if we donated one way instead of another, and yet we do it because our reasoning told us that the greater good weighed on the side of SIAI. And yes, SIAI is the right choice. We made a decision under uncertainty that costs lives. We're rationalists; decision making under uncertainty is what we do; our uncertain decision making has mortal consequences whether we recognize it or not. The death penalty is no different.
There are many counterarguments. Some would argue that a guilty LWOP person's life is still worth living even in prison, and I'm neglecting the value that I'm destroying there. Hanson might argue that execution to free up funds would lead to inevitable unintended consequences. Eliezer would probably counter with something regarding Ethical Injuctions, which is a great mini-sequence. Or even "for the good of the tribe, do not execute people even for the good of the tribe". Yet I still find these objections unsatisfying. If I randomly found a Death Note binder that would only work on people convicted of murderer (Is that how it works anyway? I haven't actually seen that anime)... I would start writing down names and hoping our government used the savings to spend more on teachers, R&D, and health care. And even though I'd be sad about each potential innocent I'd killed, I'd keep doing it because it balances out to the right thing.
The right wing ideal of Capital Punishment is correct. "We know they're guilty well enough so lets just kill them" is the correct action for a justice system to take until we reach the singularity and can afford better options.
(NB: You should note, this logic has a flip side. Why not set them free? The answer is that we should iff the expected damage they do is less than the expected cost of enforcement (taking into account non-enforcement encouraging more law breaking). Murderers cost more than this value but a lot of crimes are under this value. Since we're not following politics is the mindkiller here, I'll just flat out state that I think this line of logic explicitly requires legalization of drugs and certain other offenses. However, this thread seems best for political arguments that people find offensive and not for those which everyone, I suspect, agrees with)
Hanson might argue that execution to free up funds would lead to inevitable unintended consequences.
If you have a more specific version of this objection, could you spell it out?
We know that the current way of spending this money is corrupting: both prison guard unions and private prison corporations lobby for stricter sentences. Taking money from a specific use to the general fund seems to me less corrupting than spending money in any particular place. Of course, loss aversion may cause existing interests to react badly to the removal of money.
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.