Bugmaster comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1430)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Bugmaster 04 January 2012 04:52:23AM 0 points [-]

To say such things, you must override your moral beliefs, which is not a good habit to be in, and not a good image of yourself to cache.

This may be a nitpick, but it's not clear to me that "removing all sociopaths from society" will even be beneficial to the remaining society. It's entirely possible that our society requires a certain number of sociopaths in order to function.

I have no hard evidence one way or the other, but I'm pretty sure that, historically, plans that involved "remove all X from society" turned out very poorly, for any given X.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 January 2012 03:29:46PM 0 points [-]

yeah good point. Not all sociopaths are murderers, just cut the middleman and do whatever with the murderers.

Proxy tests (are you a sociopath, are you black, do you have a shaved head, etc) are a terrible idea.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 05 January 2012 03:33:21PM 0 points [-]

By "murderer," here, do you mean someone who has actually committed murder?

Comment author: [deleted] 05 January 2012 09:18:38PM 0 points [-]

yeah. mostly. Though it would be nice to catch murderers before they kill anyone. At this point tho, I dont think we are generally rational enough to figure out in advance who the murderers are without huge collateral disutility.

I'm going to stop discussing this because it is about to get dangerously mindkillery.

Comment author: Strange7 05 June 2012 05:05:38AM 0 points [-]

Depends how far in advance you're looking. Aiming a loaded gun, or charging forward while screaming and brandishing something sharp and heavy, provide very solid evidence before any injury is done, and modern medicine can turn what seemed like successful murder back into 'attempted' by making it possible to recover after the injury.