= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1430)
I don't understand your objection. Are you saying you wouldn't be more afraid, on average, if murder were legal?
I mean that a world where there is someone who would want to kill me, and the only reason why they don't is that they're afraid of ending up in jail, is not so much of a world in which I'd like to live.
It's not that anyone hates you; they might kill you because they're afraid of you killing them first, if there were no legal deterrent against killing.
In particular, if you had any conflict with someone else in a world where killing was legal, it would quite possibly spiral out of control: you're worried they might kill you, so you're tempted to kill them first, but you know they're thinking the same way, so you're even more worried, etc.
At least in my country, killing someone for self-defence is already legal. (Plus, I don't think I'm going to threaten to kill someone in the foreseeable future, anyway.)
Right, but "I accidentally ran over his dog, and I was worried that he might kill me later for it, so I immediately backed up and ran him over" probably won't count as self-defense in your country. But it's the sort of thing that traditional game theory would advise if killing was legal.
This really is a case where imposing an external incentive can stop people from mutually defecting at every turn.
If killing were legal (in a modern state with available firearms, not an ancient tribe with strong reputation effects), threatening to kill someone would be the stupidest possible move. Everyone is a threat to kill you, and they'll probably attempt it the moment they become afraid that you might do the same.
I don't get it... He wouldn't gain anything by killing you (ETA: other than what your father/wife/whoever would gain by killing him after he kills you), so why would you be afraid he would do that? (Also, I'm not sure the assumptions of traditional game theory apply to humans.)
If this was the case, I would expect places with less harsh penalties, or with lower probabilities of being convicted, to have a significantly higher homicide rate (all other things being equal). Does anyone have statistics about that? (Though all other things are seldom equal... Maybe the short/medium term effects of a change in legislation within a given country would be better data.)
I haven't read it yet, but I think this is basically the thesis of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature.
Have you seen The Dark Knight? This is exactly the situation with the two boats. (Not going into spoiler-y detail.) Causal decision theory demands that you kill the other person as quickly and safely (to you) as possible, just as it demands that you always defect on the one-shot (or known-iteration) Prisoner's Dilemma.
Anyway, I think you shouldn't end up murdering each other even in that case, and if everyone were timeless decision theorists (and this was mutual knowledge) they wouldn't. But among humans? Plenty of them would.
I'm not sure where you live, but is killing someone who you think will try to kill you some day actually considered self-defense for legal purposes there? I'm pretty sure self-defense doesn't cover that in the US.
No. I guess I misunderstood what orthonormal meant by “afraid of you killing them first”...
As opposed to where? We can ban or allow murder. We can't yet do personality modifications that deep.
As opposed to this world. I don't think that, right now, there's anyone who would want to kill me.
So, if Alice murdered Bob, she had always wanted to kill him since she was born (as opposed to her having changed her mind at some point)? Probably we can't deliberately do personality modifications that deep (or do we? The results of Milgram's experiment lead me to suspect it wouldn't be completely impossible for me to convince someone to want to kill me -- not that I can imagine a reason for me to do that).