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Xachariah comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong
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You could just strip their magic.
If there exists any ritual that happens to permanently remove a portion of somebody's magic (Unbreakable Vow), then you could just repeat that ritual meaninglessly until that person was completely stripped of magic permanently. Or you could use other rituals which require similar permanent sacrifices until you achieve the same effect. Keeping a permanently magicless wizard imprisoned is a trivial task, and obviates the need for dementors.
Side Note: That's actually my pet theory on why Dementors as prison guards are acceptable to the public. It could be that governments used to use rituals to permanently strip prisoners of magic before imprisoning them. This would make them a revenue center instead of a funds sink. This would naturally encourage the magical government to find more and more excuses to imprison people, similar to how the 'tough on crime' cycle is accelerated by the for-profit prison systems in some places. A police state would be soon to follow. Then, after a cultural revolution, Dementors were adopted as the less evil option to house criminals. It also helps explain why so many rituals are banned. It's unlikely to be true in HPMoR, but it'd be a nice thought for another fanfic.
Another problem with this system is the permanence. People get sent to Azkaban for less than lifetime sentences, but if you use this to strip someone of magic it's gone forever. I suppose you could use degrees of magic removal as punishment but that seems hard to balance to different powerlevels of wizard.
A permanent loss of magic is probably much more ethically justifiable than a temporary period of torture.
This statement contains at least three assumptions that need to be unpacked before it is of any use.
What do you mean by ethically justifiable?
What do you mean by temporary and torture? 2a. To reduce it to absurdity, I would rather be slapped than lose my hand painlessly. Where do you draw the lines on temporariness and tortureness? Is living without magic after having it a form of torture? How much life expectancy does it take before a permanent disability is worse than a temporary pain?
Why is "probably much more ethically justifiable" a fact about either of these things rather than a fact about how you feel about them?
Sorry for the slow response, I was at gencon.
Also, welcome to posting!
Thanks, drethelin!
How deep of an analysis do you want? Ultimately, what I mean is that torture tends to foreseeably decrease the net positive valence of all experience to a greater extent than does incapacitation.
We both know those are fuzzy terms. And as a utilitarian I acknowledge that some extremely minimal torture could in principle be more justifiable than an especially severe incapacitation. But everyday cases of what we call 'torture' are intuitively much more painful and dehumanizing than, say, permanently depriving a person of a firearms or automobile license. Do you think that one's long-term ability to use magic would tend to cluster on the other side of torture, on a scale of resultant human suffering?
Descriptively, most ethical systems would, I think, agree with my assessment; so if 'ethically justifiable' just means 'able to be justified under what various people take to be the right ethical principles,' it is an empirical statement. But I'll instead take the approach of stipulating what I mean by ethical justifiability in psychological terms, the felt positive and negative valence of experiences. If this is a real property of mental states, what I call 'ethical justifiability' will rest on the distribution of those states. I am responsible for how I use my words, but my words are not on that account 'about me.'
Based on your description it seems more sensible to put torture on a continuum with incapacitation rather than holding it separate, as if it decreases future positive utility it seems like another sort of incapacitation to me. At this point I think we're down to math/data on happiness of post torture experiences versus post incapacitating experiences, which because it is 1 am and I have already taken melatonin I am too sleepy to want to look into. My intuitive leaning is that the effects of torture fade with time more than the effects of incapicitation, eg because I might eventually begin to forget how bad being tortured was but can never forget how I have one fewer limb, but this is only an intuition.
Our ability to fruitfully debate this issue, while we remain in fiction, is probably very limited. It may be underdetermined whether losing one's magic feels more like losing a driver's license or like losing a limb. If I'm conceiving of magic loss more in the former terms (magic as a toolbox), you more in the latter terms (magic as an intimate part of the magician), then it's unsurprising that we'll arrive at different intuitions.
That said, I'm unclear on what your argument is for treating torture and incapacitation as a 'continuum.' I of course think they can be placed on a continuum of suffering; and I concede that their distribution over the continuum partly overlaps, though I think the bulk of torture involves more intense aggregate suffering than does the bulk of incapacitation. But you seem to be making a different claim now -- that torture IS a kind of incapacitation, or that incapacitation is a kind of torture.
The latter claim I can understand, but reject; incapacitation can sometimes be used to torture someone, but it does not follow that incapacitation itself is always just watered-down torture, for the same reason that the existence of 'Chinese water torture' does not imply that drinking water is, in any interesting sense, on a continuum with torture.
The former claim, that torture is a kind of incapacitation, seems more paradoxical. Is the suggestion that inflicting involuntary pain on someone is nothing but depriving that person of a certain ability -- the ability, presumably, to be happy during the torture, or the ability to not suffer flashbacks afterward? I'm not sure this is a useful reframing, though it is interesting.
It's not my argument, I thought it was yours. When you talk about torture decreasing future positive utility of all experiences that seems pretty clearly to me the same reason to dislike disability.
The reasons to dislike acute torture and superpower incapacitation are the same only in the very reductive way in which any two bad things are, given a monistic meta-ethics, bad for 'the same reason.' Sexual assault and poor dinner etiquette, if (monistically) bad, are bad for 'the same reason' in some attenuated sense. But for practical purposes this is not very informative, and I was trying to be at least a little practical in comparing the costs of torture and incapacitation.
Likewise, superpower incapacitation can be worse than torture mostly in the sense that any two generic acts can be dustspecked. This falls out of quantitative sensitivity in ethics (especially consequentialist ethics) as a boring side-effect, just as reducibility of reasons falls out of monism as a boring side-effect. In both cases, it has no special relevance to the topic at hand, and noting these general features of utilitarian tradeoffs doesn't prevent us from also noting that typical real-world torture tends to produce more net suffering than typical real-world superpower incapacitation. (To make magic loss a counterexample to this trend, one would need to better flesh out what one takes magic to be.)
Beware political examples where they are not necessary.
Azkaban is commentary on Muggle prisons. I really hope people got that.
I've been reading about muggle prison conditions lately, and while I've understood that "prison conditions are terrible and torturing people is pointless etc" for both systems, it did not occur to me that you were making a commentary.
In general, how does one determine whether X in HPMOR is supposed to [represent / be commentary on] Y? I could make up a connection between Azkaban and Muggle prisons, probably by running it through my black-box mental model of Eliezer, but I don't feel any kind of justified in the connection.
Usually it more or less outright says it in the title.
It actually made me sit and think for a minute (though not the full five - oops) about whether there was any way I could contribute to improving conditions in prisons, that was comparatively low-cost, that I had overlooked.
I didn't think of one, but it's worth thinking about some more, probably.
It seems much more like a commentary on the American prison system than anything else. The Western European systems don't generally suffer many of the problems of American Muggle prisons, or the problems they do share are often to a smaller degree. Britain is one of the middle range countries in this regard, but this may be enough for some people to not get the point.
While American prisons may indeed be worse (on average) than their Western European counterparts, the latter are still more than bad enough for the commentary to apply.
In any case, most of the suffering of imprisonment is psychological and derives from having one's freedom restricted and status reduced (to put it mildly). So the (physical) conditions of the facility may be almost beside the point (despite the fact that this is what it is most socially acceptable to focus on).
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that massive institutionalized rape is not beside the point.
Ahem:
...not to mention the fact that the behavior of persons is arguably not within the scope of "the (physical) conditions of the facility".
In short, the comment contained more than enough hedging to preclude such a retort.
Even if it did, orthonormal's point contains a significant subclass of the suffering that occurs in prisons. Hence ignoring it or sweeping it under a hedge seems somewhat strange.
Let's back up. Here is the history of this conversation:
Eliezer stated that "Azkaban is commentary on Muggle prisons".
JoshuaZ replied:
Notice what this says: Western European prisons are so good that Eliezer's commentary is really only about American prisons. (Also note the implication that the Muggle world is partitioned into two regions: Western Europe and the United States.)
3. I -- having become familiar with the similarities and differences between the U.S. and European criminal justice systems as a result of the Amanda Knox case -- disputed this, in a comment whose point was to argue that Western European prisons are not pleasant places. They are, in fact, really awful places. Yes, they may not be as bad as U.S. prisons, but they are still bad: places of torment, suffering and despair, despite the fact that the facilities may be a little nicer. They are bad enough that the Azkaban metaphor applies. (And U.S. prisons are nowhere near as bad as those in other, non-Western-European parts of the world -- so was Eliezer's commentary "only" or "mostly" about China, Iran, or North Korea, and not really about the American justice system at all? Of course not.)
Furthermore, at the time he was writing the Azkaban-rescue sequence, Eliezer knew that Amanda Knox -- then trapped in a Western European prison -- was among his readers. This is just one of many reasons why it simply isn't plausible that the commentary was meant to be geographically (and thus, in effect, politically) limited to the United States.
4. Some people (bizarrely) downvoted my comment and attempted to educate me about the evils of United States prisons, as if I were unfamiliar with the subject. This is completely missing the point. My comment argued that European prisons are bad, not that American prisons are good. My point was that the fact that European prisons have (for example) bidets does not make them spas. I did take a slightly "extreme" line -- that the real torment of incarceration is psychological. But this is not actually an absurd position by any means. I expect that relatively few who have actually been incarcerated would disagree -- even among those who had been imprisoned in terrible physical conditions. For one thing, such treatment often has a specifically psychological purpose.
The two "sides" in this argument are: people who think the Azkaban metaphor applies universally (me), and people who think its scope is restricted to the United States (JoshuaZ). Everything I have said in this thread should be understood in that context. In no sense am I downplaying any bad aspect of American prisons. To "correct" me on such a point is to increase the noise and decrease the signal.
This is not a case of me not reading the previous thread before commenting.
In my opinion, you're reading too much into the original comment. There are fewer Western Europeans in prison than Americans. Aside: their "Western Europe" is much larger than the traditional one, which already has a higher population than the United States, and so we can also say there are fewer prisoners per capita in Europe than the United States.
It'd be surprising if American prisons didn't tend to have more problems.
For all narrative purposes, the only regions of the Muggle world that significantly matter to the story are Europe and the United States, so your aside seems a misplaced criticism.
I more or less agree with your assessment of the metaphor, but there is no purpose to letting a poorly-grounded argument carry through just because one agrees with the conclusion.
Aye, but pray, where was the signal in the first place?
It's not under the scope of "having one's freedom restricted and status reduced", either. Sorry if I misinterpreted you, but it looks as if I'm not the only one who thought you were omitting the most significant part of the horror of modern prisons.
What specific commentary were you trying to make? The possible commentaries that I can think of:
a) prisons are too brutal. If so how brutal do you think prisons should be?
b) prisons should be replaced with a different form of punishment. If so what punishment do you have in mind?
c) criminals shouldn't be punished at all.
d) I haven't really thought about these issues at all but saying "boo, prisons!" is a great way to signal that I'm compassionate.
The people who seem to agree with Eliezer's commentary should feel free to specify which commentary they agree with.
Here's one more option:
e) People don't think enough about the level of brutality in prisons, and when they do think and talk about it they find it easier to applaud brutality; because anyone who spoke against it "would associate themselves with criminals, with weakness, with distasteful things that people would rather not think about", while speaking in its favor make you look tough on crime.
Given political discussions I've partaken in other forums, I know full well that whenever I condemned prison rape and suggested ways in which it might be reduced/prevented, the typical response was something to the effect of "Why do you love criminals so much?"
For example: Punish rapes among inmates in the same manner that other rapes of citizens by other citizens. Punish rapes of inmates by wardens in the same way with the additional loading that should be applied to all abuses of authority, particularly state sanctioned authority. But to do that we would need to replace Uncle Sam with Uncle Ben.
That would be by sending them to prison, which is not much of a punishment to someone who's already in prison.
Yes it is. Not all sentences are life sentences. Then there are the obvious differences in types of imprisonment - including level of security and whether they have access to other prisoners or are confined to solitary.
Not all, but entirely too many. If someone is already going to be in a big concrete box for the next ten years no matter what they do, and doesn't expect to survive more than five years in that environment, what more can you do to them?
Put them in a smaller concrete box and with other prisoners that lower that estimate of their lifespan?
Locking criminals up for years, away from everyone else, seems like a horrible way of scaring others into not committing crimes.
Following this train of thought, ideally prisons should be replaced with a more public/visible type of punishment. Maybe caning?
I dunno. In the real world, I know a lot of people who seem awfully frightened of prisons. But sure, maybe they'd be more frightened of public caning.
My $0.02: there are several different functions person A can perform by punishing person B for some action C.
For example:
(a) lowering B's chances of performing C in the future
(b) lowering the chances of observers performing C
(c) encouraging observers to anti-identify with B
(d) encouraging observers who anti-identify with B to support A
(e) encouraging observers who identify with B to oppose A
IME, conversations about how prisons should work become really confused because people aren't very clear about which of those functions they endorse.
Personally, it seems clear to me that (b) is by far the most valuable of these goals. That said, prison policy has almost no influence on (b); law enforcement and courts are far more relevant, and their current implementation pretty much screens off the effects of prison policy.
People who are interested in (a) and also value B's continued existence will tend to be interested in punishment as a behavioral modification tool, and will happily set it aside in favor of more effective behavioral modification tools as science develops them.
People interested in (a) who don't value B's continued existence will be uninterested in punishment, since simply killing B is more efficient.
AFAICT, the folks who establish the policies that govern prisoner punishment (as distinct from prisoner restraint) are primarily motivated by the desire to obtain political support, which suggests minimizing (e) and maximizing (d), which does seem to be what most of our prison policies are designed to do. Maximizing (c) is one way to minimize (e), though there are many others.
This isn't obvious at all. In particular if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect would be much less no matter how law enforcement and the courts worked. One could argue that the policies in the current Overton window aren't significantly different from each other, but that argument would have to be made.
Agreed that if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect due to the threat of punishment would be lower than it is now.
That said... when the mechanism that results in my being punished for an act is perceived as unreliable and capricious (including, but not limited to, cases where it is unreliable and capricious), the correlation between the severity of the punishment and the intensity of the deterrent effect is much, much lower than when the mechanism is perceived as fair and reliable.
So if law enforcement and courts were perceived as fair and reliable (that is, reliably assigning punishment to criminals and not assigning punishment to noncriminals), I expect making prisons equally unpleasant would create a much greater deterrent effect (to being a criminal) than it does now.
If my goal is to maximize deterrent effect, then, I expect that I would do better to invest my efforts in increasing the perception of law enforcement and courts as fair and reliable than to invest them in increasing the perception of prisons as unpleasant.
But, as I say, I don't think many people involved in setting prison policies are primarily motivated by maximizing deterrent effect.
Depending on what you mean by "unreliable and capricious", I find this dubious. At the very least it seems to me that brutal dictatorships are much better at reducing crime (at least the crimes they care about) than democracies. For example, Mussolini's successful campaign against the Sicilian mafia.
What I mean by enforcement being unreliable and capricious is, roughly. that agents believe that their performing the act is not well-correlated with their being punished.
It sounds from that wiki article like Mussolini created an environment where people believed that being a mafioso would reliably result in being punished.
I suspect they also believed that not being a mafioso stood a good chance of being punished, which has other consequences; when punishment occurs in the absence of a reliable and controllable cue, the result is learned helplessness. But if we care about deterring criminals and we don't care about the effect on noncriminals, punishing 90% of criminals and 5% of noncriminals can work OK, even if only 5% of the people we punish are criminals.
Of course, if we care about things in addition to deterrence, that may not be a great policy, but that's another conversation.
So what you're saying is that in modern developed states committing crimes is not well-correlated with being punished? I find this highly dubious.
By the way, I believe the rescue of Bellatrix was around the point in the story that Amanda Knox had gotten to when she made it out of Muggle Azkaban herself.
Really? I understood from the human interest fluff pieces I tried to avoid that she had used her time in Azkaban very well, learning Italian to a high level and catching up on a great deal of high-quality reading. I don't think Bellatrix would regard their stays, pound for pound, as equivalent.
I think you misunderstood me: by "point in the story she had gotten to" I meant literally the point in the actual story (MoR). It wasn't some kind of figure of speech about her experience. (I wonder how many other people misunderstood my comment in this way; it's an interpretation that never occurred to me. I thought people knew she was a MoR reader.)
However, her experience itself was no picnic, fluff pieces notwithstanding.
It's been mentioned in Author's Notes. For what it's worth, I thought gwern's comment was a non sequitur on first reading.
I took your original post to mean this, and looked for other information about it, and found none.
See here.
I thought it was a nice commentary, but I hadn't realized it was intentional (on either your or Rowling's part). If you want anyone to get it, you need to slip in anal rape or something, and even then most readers will miss it.
IAWYC but don't actually make it a rape.
I think the "anal rape" was a joke on Gwern's part; I oppose such jokes on political grounds.
Do you oppose jokes involving rape because of social consequences of rape being found to be funny, jokes involving rape because of direct consequences on people hearing the joke, jokes about prison rape because of consequences of prisoners, or something else?
All three of those, and I could probably think of other adverse consequences given time.
I was quite serious. And why not? Murder is worse than anal rape, and that has already been included; besides that, people have argued we see at least one kind of rape already in MoR.
Especially those of us who deliberately try to avoid drawing conclusions about authorial intent from text. Whether the author is trying to make an analogical point with a fictional construct is not something I think about too much while reading fiction, though of course correspondences I notice (intentional or not) inform my reading.
Yeah, but due to the politics is a mind-killer thing, we don't really comment on it... just like a lot of other political hints are left alone (at least on my behalf) and I try to focus on making predictions and figuring out where the agents in this story will go given their apparent rationality (or lack thereof) and value sets. That's the reason why I read this: it's well-written entertainment I can use to train my ability to predict and phrase said predictions. Plus I like to see theories put to practice.
I wasn't aware that was a particularly politically charged example since it's not currently on either side's discussion plate.
I do think it's somewhat relevant with them both being profit motivations that encourage increasingly stricter laws and enforcement. Then again if I'd been able to notice the problem I wouldn't have put it in there in the first place.
Taking your advice, do you think I should edit it out and remove the example? Or better yet, could anyone think of an example that's not so politically proximate that illustrates the same effect? I'd image a similar thing would occur in ancient Rome with slaves, or maybe colonial-era governments with indentured servitude, but I'm not quite as familiar with those.
Edit: And thank you for reminding me, I've edited.
I'm pretty sure "tough on crime" is associated with the "right wing".
That said, it might seem better if you just left out "in America", or replaced it with "in some places".