Summary for those who don't want to click: "The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality."
So in theory if we purge the bottom 1% of the population every decade or so, there will be at least 63% less crime?
I think better would be figuring out how to incentivize fathers to remain the fathers to their children, as fatherless men are drastically more prone to crime and risky behavior.
Not really. That purges people through all layers of society.
I think the commenter means to purge the literal socioeconomic bottom. Not, for instance, middle class people who kill their spouse or betray the country by spilling secrets.
the comments here honestly scare me. you're not going to take the stance that literal state sanctioned murder is a bad idea for people who commit regular crimes?
I think that your problem is that using the word “murder” implies “unjust.”
Funny enough, you actually accept “state-sanctioned murder” right now, like it or not. Any soldier who attempts to invade Ukraine may be shot without a trial or a hearing. If “state-sanctioned murder” is always immoral, Ukraine should let them in peacefully, and appeal to higher authorities to diplomatically come to a solution to the “illegal immigration of young Russian men with guns” problem. I don’t think that’s a good idea and I don’t believe you do either.
That’s fine. Invading a country is enough to be threatened with death. Attacking someone’s daughter for the fourth time isn’t.
Murder to me means taking a life without being prompted to do so out of self defense. There is no reason to kill someone locked behind bars where they are physically incapable of doing anyone harm. I am against the death penalty in any form for any reason. This is murder, and it's done out of a sense of justice, which is a childish excuse to make people feel better.
A Ukrainian soldier defending an invasion is just that - defense. I have more nuanced thoughts about pacifism and how it applies to this situation, but it isn't worth getting into because no one here would discuss it in good faith and it's also off topic.
> Just sharing my thoughts, but prisons are only as safe as the local power supply. When things go south, you end up with the Camp Hill Prison Riots.
Having worked inside prisons (in a volunteer capacity) I can confidently say that they maintain safety even without power and that the ability for people to riot in the manner that happened at Camp Hill was the result of procedural problems that mostly don't exist at prisons anymore.
Why is it a bad idea? Abstractly, if I had a 100% reliable way to execute all violent criminals, I'd absolutely do it. The only problem I see are false convictions. Taking people with repeated convictions for separate offenses (3 strikes, and such) would reduce that dramatically. Then you have to weight the remaining potential false convictions against actual victims of violent crime that could be prevented, and maybe indirect damage to society. Violent criminals themselves have no moral value in my book.
People like you scare me more than anyone who's in prison for something violent. You want to universally kill people by the millions for making mistakes. This is a perspective completely lacking any empathy and compassion. These are human beings with lives, families, experiences, and have the opportunity for growth and improvement to become a person who can peacefully integrate with society. Giving up on them and murdering them is ridiculous and I really hope you reevaluate your perspective and learn some compassion.
> You want to universally kill people by the millions for making mistakes.
"Making mistakes"? Really? We are talking about repeat violent crime here. This euphemism combined with below frankly makes me more scared of people like /you/ vs someone in prison for something violent. Unreserved, irrational compassion is really no better than irrational, unreserved tribalism - both are evolutionary baggage making the world a worse place.
> This is a perspective completely lacking any empathy and compassion.
1) I don't really see that as a bad thing. This is a policy decision and as such needs to be based on a rational calculation and values, not the feelings known to be hopelessly biased and generally unreliable.
2) Even so, does your perspective have no compassion for future victims of the non-eliminated, non-reformed criminals?
> These are human beings with lives, families, experiences, and have the opportunity for growth and improvement to become a person who can peacefully integrate with society. Giving up on them and murdering them is ridiculous and I really hope you reevaluate your perspective and learn some compassion.
So I take it you are extremely pro-life on abortion (disclaimer, I am very pro-choice), like no abortion even if there's a risk of mother's death?
Cause aside from experiences, fetus has all the same things; in fact its chance of growth an improvement is much higher, if you compare a probabilistic range of outcomes of a new baby vs an existing criminal. That baby could be the guy who cures cancer! Sure, there's health risks for the mother and potential economic burden on society, but given the typical outcomes for criminals (as per original article), there's also a health risk for others and burden on society from keeping them alive. The only difference is criminals already have past experiences. I think for both cases their "future" is a nonsense argument, and experiences don't make any difference.
> I don't really see that as a bad thing. This is a policy decision and as such needs to be based on a rational calculation and values, not the feelings known to be hopelessly biased and generally unreliable.
I hope future AGI doesn't behave this way or we're all fucked.
> So I take it you are extremely pro-life on abortion
Abortion has way more nuance, there isn't a 100% "right" side, ideally there is never a need for abortion, and as someone without a uterus (and has never had one) I shut my mouth on taking sides because it isn't my place to do so. I support uterus owners protecting their own lives and making this decision amongst themselves.
Anyway this is exhausting. I'm not going to convince you. I hope you decide one day that killing people by the millions, which would largely be disadvantages groups, is not a good decision for humanity.
>> I don't really see that as a bad thing. This is a policy decision and as such needs to be based on a rational calculation and values, not the feelings known to be hopelessly biased and generally unreliable.
> I hope future AGI doesn't behave this way or we're all fucked.
So, given what you're responding to, you prefer AGI to not use some values (e.g. DALYs or whatever) and rational tradeoffs, but instead to be based on fuzzy, biased, unreliable heuristics?
I agree this argument is generally not going anywhere, but this kind of response in particular makes me wonder, because I have hard time finding a a charitable interpretation I could respond to - it just sounds like vacuous platitudes nearly without context. Is there a good argument for empathy that isn't?
Because institutionalizing killing as a response to violating expectations normalizes killing as a response to violating expectations, and does not do anything to assure that people in whom that value is reinforced also have faith in society’s system of assessing violations.
How is it related? That doesn't seem obvious to me. For a different example, does it mean tax law enforcement normalizes taking money from people thus and increases property crime?
People usually have separate magisteria for this kind of thing... it's quite obvious when you see how libertarian try and fail to break thru the latter one, trying to make people think of taxes as extortion. I think it's even more disconnected for death penalty vs murder...
So in theory if we purge the bottom 1% of the population every decade or so, there will be at least 63% less crime?