I don't think the narrow, decision-theory-oriented definition of "rational" most often used on this site actually has an opinion on whether that's rational. You could construct a well-formed utility function under which it was rational. Whether you choose to adopt that utility function is another question, but you could adopt it or not and still be rational the way people use the word here.
This, of course, limits the usefulness of such a concept of rationality as a guide to deciding what is and is not actually a good idea, and may represent a reason not to get too caught up in that concept.
Hello again,
It probably won't surprise you to learn that I consider my prosecution to have beenirrational. In this post I’ll lay out the reasons why, and you can tell me whether you agree or whether you think I 've erred. We can also use this as a springboard to a broader discussion of society's handling of child porn and sex crimes, if you wish. I admit that I'm curious to know how the rationalist community views these topics, and it was that curiosity which led me to post on your forum.
Let's begin with the foundational principle of “equal justice under law”. This is inscribed on the front of the US Supreme Court, so presumably it is intended to carry some weight in our legal system. Please take a moment to ponder whether my prosecution – when viewed in the totality of the circumstances--advanced or undermined this ideal. Before deciding, consider the following.
At this very moment, there are numerous people roaming around (perhaps in your neighborhood?) who did the exact same things that I did with the girl in this case. Their actions and identities were known to the authorities, yet unlike me they were never prosecuted. Why not? We'll never know for sure, but it's likely due to some combination of chanceand human discretion. They were in different districts than I was, and in the Americancriminal legal system each district is empowered to make its own charging decisions. This tends to create disparate outcomes, as illustrated by my case.
Sentencing disparities between similarly situated defendants are relatively well known and much maligned. But the really insidious disparities are the ones you never see, for they are between the people who got ensnared by the system – like me – and the people who engaged in the same conduct but were never caught or never prosecuted – like the others who hooked up with the girl in my case. Their sentences can’t becompared with mine because they never got sentenced in the first place (save for one other individual, who got 2 years less than I did). They are, for all intents and purposes, invisible. If you're familiar with the work of Tversky and Kahneman, you will recognize which cognitive bias is in play here: WYSIATI. What you see is all there is. To wit, you see me. You don't see the four guys whom she did the gangbang with. They could be gangbanging some other 16-year-old at this very moment, for all we know. And consider this: In a nation of 340 million, how many people are there who have ever banged a 16-year-old? It must be in the millions, perhaps tens of millions. How many high school students are banging their 16-year-old boyfriend or girlfriend right now? If you live in the suburbs, there's a very good chance that you're within a half mile radius of such a person as YOU read this. If you happen to have kids or siblings who are in high school, then you probably have people residing in your house who have done the same things that I did. You've heard of "teen sexting", right? Teen sexting is child pornography. Full stop. Do you see now why my prosecution (andsentence) is deeply problematic from the standpoint of "equal justice"?
If you don't, that's alright. It was deeply problematic from every other standpointas well, as I'm about to show.
Next, I'd like you to consider the statute I was charged with violating: 18 USC 2251 (a). Nothing in the text of the statute (read it yourself or take my word for it) would preclude minors from being charged with producing CP. Thus, if you believe in equal enforcement of the laws and you take a "textualist" approach to interpreting statutes, as conservative jurists (i.e., most jurists) claim to do, then you should be in favor of prosecuting minors who produce CP, even if it depicts themselves (again, nothing in the statute militates against this). As applied to my case, this means the feds should have charged the girl with the same crimes as me, since she knowingly produced and distributed CP images of herself on multiple occasions, both with and without the participation of others. Of course, they did not charge her. That's another strike against “equal justice under law” as well as the legitimacy of textualism.
Now consider the claim, implicit in my prosecution and stated directly in court, that the girl could not have consented to our activities and / or that her stated consent was meaningless, because she was under the federal age of consent at the time. In making this claim, the government was essentially saying that she could not be treated the way an adult would be treated in these circumstances, due to her age. Yet it is well known that in America the government routinely prosecutes minors – often younger than the girl in my case – and charges them “as adults". Indeed, the prisons of this nation are filled with people serving long sentences for crimes committed when they were juveniles. So. the lesson here appears to be that a minor cannot be treated as an adult by the legal system unless it's convenient for the government, in which case they can and will be so treated. A blatant and odious double standard.
If you think about it, the notion of a bright-line age of consent is irrational to the point of absurdity. By virtue of this notion, conduct is deemed legal or illegal solely on the basis of when it occurred. The very same act, with the very same people, miraculously transforms from being a major felony to fully legal conduct overnight, in the eyes of the legal system. What other category of crime can that be said about? Certainly, none that I can think of. If I rob, rape, kill, injure, or defraud you, my criminal liability will be the same whether I commit the act today, next month, or next year. As it should be. But when it comes to those crimes to which age of consent applies, suddenly the distinction between today and next month or next year makes all the difference in the world. For instance, I wouldn't be in prison if I'd met the girl a year-and-a-half later than I did. Every single other detail of our interaction could have remained exactly the same except for the calendar date. That 's patently absurd, but that's age of consent for you. There's a strong case to be made that age of consent, as currently applied by our legal system, is one of the greatest absurdities evercodified into law. I well understand that society doesn't want adults having sex with children, but surely, we can do better than this bright-line idiocy. Why not use a simple competency / maturity test instead?
From a just desserts standpoint my punishment is completely indefensible, because no one ever claimed to have been harmed by my actions. If we go by JS Mill's harm principle, I should never have been prosecuted. To those who suggest that the girl may at somepoint come to regret the existence of the content I produced, I can tell you I considered that possibility and took steps to mitigate any future harm by anonymizing all of the images I sent out. She's unrecognizable there and she knows it, so I very much doubt that she has lost or will lose any sleep over it. I have every reason to believe she moved on from this a long time ago, even before my arrest. After all, she started a new life in NYC after our meetings were concluded, just as I started a new life in LA.
Then the feds came knocking and insisted on turning our two hookups into a felony. They created the narrative of a crime as well as the roles of victim and perpetrator. It was their idea entirely – not mine, not the girl's and not the public’s. Grand juries were originally conceived to guard against this sort of thing, but we know how that turned out (*cough* ham sandwich *cough*). In the future – that is, après national divorce – it will probably be necessary to return to privately run prosecutions, which were the norm during the founding era. Government actors simply have too many perverse incentives to be entrusted with the power to prosecute citizens.
Next, we have the familiar argument, favored by conservatives, which essentially holds that "the law is the law and it must be enforced whether it's rational or not, or else society will descend into anarchy". To this I would retort that the law isn't always enforced, and this is no accident but a deliberate policy decision. As Justice Scalia wrote in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), “A well established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes". In fact,law enforcement in this country is almost entirely at the discretion of police and prosecutors. Every single day, they decide which cases and persons to pursue and which to pass on – anarchy does not result. As Attorney General (later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson remarked all the way back in 1940, "Law enforcement is not automatic. It isn't blind. One of the greatest difficulties of the position of prosecutor is that he must pick his cases… If the [DOJ] were to make even a pretense of reaching every probable violation of federal law, ten times its staff would be inadequate". If that was true in 1940, how much truer must it be today? It is my contention that the authorities should have used their ample discretion to pass on this case. Surely the Department of Homeland Security could have found something better to do than chasing down a slutty teenage girl and her paramours.
Finally, there is the public safety argument. If you believe that my actions make me a potential threat to minors, you might find my incarceration warranted on the grounds of preventing some future harm. Of course, this sets up a dilemma, as I am no more capable of proving that I won i t harm minors in the future than you are capable of proving that I will. We could rely on actuarial instruments, the most prominent onebeing STATIC-99, but these come with their own set of problems. As always, the devil is in the details. All I can really do (and did do) is point out what I consider to be relevant factors that bear upon my sexual proclivities and risk of reoffending, such as the following: 1) A 16-year-old isn't a 6-year-old. It's not the same ballpark, not even the same league; 2) The 16-year-old in this case was no ordinary 16-year-old, and I would never have even met her if she hadn't made a dedicated effort to pursue adults for sex online; 3) Most so called "child predators" don't move across the country to pursue a career in the adult film / sex industry. What I was doing in LA had nothing to do with minors, and the feds knew it; and so on. We'll leave for later the important question of whether such public safety concerns are truly warranted, premised as they are on the assumption that all sex experienced by anyone under 18 is inherently harmful (as you may suspect, I do not share this assumption).
So, there it is. As far as I can tell, my prosecution served no purpose other than to give some government bureaucrats another notch on their belts. I was a warm body fed into the machinery of the criminal legal system and the prison-industrial complex. Job security for cops, judges, and jailers. What else did my prosecution achieve? It didn't promote justice for victims, since there were no victims in this case, justtwo consenting parties who met briefly and then went their separate ways. It couldn't promote respect for the law because the law was extremely selectively applied and led to a ludicrous outcome in any case. Conceivably, my prosecution may have furthered the criminological goal of general deterrence, as there may be people who think twice abouthooking up with a minor (not to mention filming it) after hearing about what happened to me. But what price deterrence? We could deter theft by lopping off the hands of larcenists, as is the practice in Islamic societies, but we don't do that, because it would violate a competing principle that we in the West claim to hold dear, namely that the punishment must be proportional to the crime. My own punishment represents a gross violation of that principle, and is in fact closer to the Islamic ideal. It is quite remarkable – and I should think alarming – that a person in a supposedly democratic society can earn 30 years in prison
without a single private citizen having comeforward against him to allege harm or request his prosecution. In case you missed this point in my first post, I will reiterate it now: there was no victim’s Impact statement in my case, no testimony from the girl at all. Or her family. Or anyone, besides the feds. Like the British prime minister, I'm serving my term entirely at the pleasure of the government.
I believe that covers all the major bases. Judged by first principles, my prosecution / incarceration was (and is) an ethical travesty. But it was perfectly legal. I would submit that this reveals something terribly important about the nature of law and thelegal system. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has commented on this ("My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal"), as have many others going back to antiquity.
Unfortunately for me and fortunately for the government, the arguments I have made here are precisely the types of arguments that one is not allowed to make in court, before a jury. One is not permitted to question the legitimacy of the prosecution or the underlying assumptions on which it rests. Had I been allowed to make these arguments I would have run circles around the government's sanctimonious bullshit. But judges consider that sort of thing to be an attempt at jury nullification and they shut you down immediately if you try it. The First Amendment does not apply in courtrooms, much to the advantage of the US Attorney's office. That is another glaring defect in our present system that will need to be rectified when the Constitution is rewritten for modern times, with the benefit of hindsight. It's fundamental: In a free society, a person facing the loss of his liberty must be allowed to say anything he wants in his own defense, and he must be allowed to say it directly to members of the jury who will decide his fate. It really doesn't get any more basic than that. Am I right or wrong?
Hey @seth_tins, I just wanted to say this is the saddest thing I've read on LessWrong, and I truly feel for you.
Don't be discouraged by the lack of a real response here. This site is a home for rationalism, which is not exactly the same thing as rationality. While posters here do tend to be more rational than average, rationalism is a movement whose overriding goal is to slow down AI progress through political means. Therefore its adherents want to build credibility in the eyes of the public, and since the age of consent stuff is the ultimate heresy in their region and time period, they won't touch it with a ten-foot pole. I think your post would have been much better received on a site dedicated only to truth-seeking.
Obviously, what you said was completely correct, the way you were treated was insane and cruel, and every thinking person knows it. It's not even really a question of rationality or persuasion, since it's so obvious to everyone. It's more a question of who is courageous enough to speak honestly about it, and who would rather dance around it making vague allusions to "unsayable truths."
What stung me most about your story wasn't the mistreatment you suffered, but the fact that you're clearly a person with extraordinary potential. Your writing is extremely good, and you are highly likable. It should have happened to someone else.
Although I wonder, did you ever speak out against this kind of insanity before you fell victim to it? If not, then I guess there is a sort of cosmic justice to this. Maybe you can imagine you're being punished for your cowardice instead of the outlandish reasons in the sentencing document. And in that case the punishment fits the crime: you're sharing the fate of the people you were not brave enough to defend, and you remain imprisoned precisely because the masses on the outside are as cowardly as you were before this became your problem.
Of course, it's still grossly unfair that all the other cowards are getting off free, let alone the sadists who eagerly participate in this flavor of persecution.
Thank you for your sympathetic and thoughtful remarks. If Less Wrong isn’t the best place for my post, can you suggest an alternative venue? I had considered Reddit, but it has many sub forums and I don’t know which of them would be most appropriate for this. It’s a shame because I was genuinely curious to know what the RC thought of this subject. Though what people may want to ignore it, this issue is not going anywhere. I know that there are numerous people out there who have done and are doing some of the same things that landed me in prison. You have several generations that have been raised on teen sexting and instant porn access. And now you have people using generative AI to create deep fakes and underage porn. This is the new normal, yet society is still trying to address it with legislation that was written by people that were born in the 1940s. Sooner or later there will be a reckoning and the laws will have to change, or else every young male will be a felon. I hope to be a decisive voice in that conversation, when it occurs (the bigger question is how to get that conversation started).
Did I ever speak out about this insanity before it ensnared me? If you consider various posts on message boards challenging the conventional wisdom about underage sex, then the answer is a partial yes – I did make my opinions known on at least a few occasions. Being fairly well versed in current affairs and coming from a libertarian political background, I had an awareness that American sex laws were irrational and draconian. I recall reading a blog circa 2011-13, possibly titled Human Stupidity Blog and very much in the rationalist bent, which commented on these issues, amongst others. Of course, I didn’t do or say as much as I could have. But at least I can claim to have remained consistent.
I you are correct that I had much potential. I’d just relocated to the West coast 6 months prior to my arrest. I was in the prime of my life and things were going very well for me. It’s funny. One of the last things I did before my arrest was hook up with an older woman I’d met through a fitness message board. Colleen was in her 40s and worked for Apple (the feds saw those videos, too). I mention this only because I know that most of the AI community is centered around the Bay Area. So I was in your neck of the woods during my last few weeks of freedom. But I’d like to think I may yet realize my potential. We are living in very interesting times. Everyone under the age of 50 will see monumental changes in their lifetime.
What you said about cosmic justice is poetic, but ultimately I don’t believe in such concepts – they are anthropomorphic projections. I believe the universe is completely indifferent to human concerns. The only justice is that which we make for ourselves. I have suffered, it’s true, but others have suffered more. Think of the untold millions who died needlessly in gulags and concentration camps during the last century alone. For most of human history, cruelty and stupidity have been the norm. In the larger view, my experience is unexceptional. I expect nothing from the cosmos, least of all justice. But I set high expectations for myself, and I’m still in this fight. Do you have any thoughts on how to take this conversation to a wider audience?
Sorry for butting in!
I've got no horse in this race[1] (although I am sorry that you're in prison!), but you might find people willing to discuss honestly at www.datasecretslox.com
As best I can tell, it's a forum for readers of slatestarcodex, and perhaps because it's less search-indexed and more pseudonymous than e.g. LessWrong, people seem more willing to discuss controversial ethical issues, including prosecution of sex crimes (www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,10660). The site is a bit complicated to sign up for, though (because you need to ask for an account, and wait about a month until you're emailed back with login info), and that might be tricky - IDK the specifics of how you're interfacing with the internet through snail mail.
I would not recommend reddit.
Various questions I've got (kinda rude, probably) about your experience & opinions & stuff, feel free to disregard:
I'm an asexual and I'm +/- uniformly grossed out by sex; "Should it be more legal for 25yos to have sex with consenting 16yos?" feels unknowable to me, like a math problem from from a subject area I know nothing about.
Hello All,
I am serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison for production of child pornography. This is my story.
When I was 25 years old, I met a girl on an adult BDSM site who turned out to be a 16-year-old minor. After talking with her online for several months (and learning her true age), I agreed to meet with her in person. We met on two separate occasions, a year apart. Both times, I picked her up, drove her to a local motel, filmed us having sex, and then drove her home. All this was done with her knowledge (we'd planned it out beforehand) and enthusiastic participation. She was 16 the first time and 17 the second. After our two hookups, we parted ways amicably.
Some time later, the girl went "missing', i.e. ran away from home to live in a different state with a guy she'd met on another BDSM site. She didn't tell her mom where she was going. Because she was still a minor at the time (17½), this triggered an Amber alert and a missing person search. The feds got involved and subpoenaed her Gmail account records. There, they found her old email exchanges with me, along with screenshots I'd sent her of our encounters, which she had requested from me. They then proceeded to track me down and arrest me about 7 months later. I had no idea they were coming. I simply opened my front door one morning and my life was over, just like that. By that point the girl had already been found living in NYC with her new boyfriend and working at a sex club. She turned 18 the same month I was arrested.
I was originally charged with production and distribution of CP plus enticement of a minor. This carried a maximum sentencing exposure of life plus 50 years for a 1st time offender, which I was (yes, you're reading that right). After having raided my home and seized my electronic devices, the feds accused me of (but never charged me with) having a large collection of underage porn. I did, in fact, have such a collection and admitted it, but pointed out that underage porn was only one of many categories of porn on my computer, and did not constitute the bulk of my collection by far. Furthermore, the hard drive that contained the underage porn had suffered a mechanical failure some years prior and was inoperable at the time of my arrest (the feds tried numerous times to image it and failed). I had demonstrably made no further attempts to obtain new underage porn after my hard drive broke. And I was never accused of trying to meet any other minors besides the girl in my case. At the time of my arrest, I was working in the adult industry in LA and my sex life reflected that. I had actually moved across the country to live and work in San Fernando Valley, aka "Porn Valley".
All of the above was known by my judge at sentencing. Furthermore, there were absolutely no statements from the girl reflecting her view of the case. When asked about it, the prosecutor said she had chosen not to submit a victim's impact statement. To the best of my knowledge, she never claimed I hurt her or supported my prosecution in any way (the feds interviewed her twice but didn't turn over the transcripts). Neither did anyone else. No private citizen ever asked for me to be prosecuted or imprisoned, as far as I'm aware. I had taken a plea that dropped my charges down to CP production only, which carried a mandatory minimum of 15 years and a statutory maximum of 30 years. My advisory sentencing guidelines were astronomically high, as they are in most CP cases (42 points corresponds to life--I scored 47). The judge could have given me as little as 15, but he said he saw no grounds to vary downwards and thus gave me 30, a guideline sentence. In case you're wondering, I did not do anything to piss him off. He was very gracious and polite as he effectively consigned my life to the dustbin. No one called me a monster. Judging by the civil tone in the courtroom you'd have thought I was getting a $360 fine, not a 360-month sentence. It was just another day in the feds. I felt like the narrator in The Stranger by Camus.
There is one more detail. You know the things I mentioned doing with the girl in terms of finding her online, taking her to a motel, having sex with her, recording it, and so on? It turned out she did the exact same things with numerous other people she met off the internet. And yeah, the feds knew about that, too. Some of the other guys’ names even turned up in my paperwork. However, for some strange reason that I still struggle to understand 12 years later, they only ever charged me and one (1) other person. I guess I made it easy for them to prosecute me by recording HD videos with a camcorder, but it still blows my mind that there weren't more prosecutions related to this girl. I mean, she did a 4-man gangbang for her 16th birthday (I took no part, but I saw the pics later--as did the feds). She was sexually adventurous to put it mildly, but if I say this about her, I am "victim blaming', according to my prosecutor, and "minimizing" my crime, according to your average sex offender treatment therapist. I would counter that by pointing out that they are denying the girl's sexual agency and treating her essentially as if she were an object who could only be acted upon, not capable of acting herself, which is highly demeaning to her.
So here I sit in federal prison, typing this out on a Swintec 2410 CC typewriter (MS Word hasn't made it to the feds as of 2026). I 've already been in for over a decade, and it would appear that I'm on track to spend half my life in prison.
When they finally release me in my fifties, I'll have an additional 15 years of what’s called "supervised release" on the outside, which means I’ll be under the thumb of a probation officer and subject to numerous restrictions. Fun fact: I'm not allowed to look at adult porn while on supervision which means I’ll be pushing 70 by the time I 'm legally permitted to browse PornHub. America, fuck yeah. I 'm pretty much the ultimate example of "one and done". Anyone who'd had a ten-minute conversation with me would have seen that I was an intelligent, sensitive, and thoughtful young man, but I don't think the American criminal justice system cares about such things.
My chances of overturning my conviction are effectively nil. I’ve already been shot down on appeal. I can request executive clemency, and have. The only problem with that is no president has ever granted clemency to a sex offender. A second problem, perhaps even bigger than the first, is that I don't have an extra million dollars to donate to Trump's golf club. A third and final problem is that my name is not Matt Gaetz.
I do have one card left to play, that being deportation. As it happens, I am a naturalized US citizen who was born in a different country, under whose laws I should never have lost my original citizenship. Although I no longer have ties to that country, I hope to convince the US to deport me there (or to any other country that will accept me). Under the current administration, I think I may have a chance. I'm offering to renounce my US citizenship if they agree to deport me immediately. This is my only real shot at-having a life at this point. I have just family member left and they probably won't be around in 2039, when I'm due to be released. It 's start over from scratch in Europe or...nothing. That's pretty much where I'm at right now.
Rationalist community, I pose the following question: Was my conviction and/or sentence rational? If so, how come? If not, what should be done about it? What would a rational society do?
Thank you for reading my story, and please allow some time for a response as I am not at a facility that has access to illicit cell phones. Thus, I'll have to do this via snail mail.