momothefiddler comments on Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? - Less Wrong

88 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 June 2007 09:13PM

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

Comments (133)

Sort By: Old

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

Comment author: momothefiddler 24 October 2011 07:32:23PM 4 points [-]

The ideal point of a police system (and, by extension, a police officer) is to choose force in such a way as to "minimize the total sum of death".

It appears that you believe that the current police system is nothing like that, while Eliezer seems to believe it is at least somewhat like that. While I don't have sufficient information to form a realistic opinion, it seems to me highly improbable that 95% of police actions are initiations of force or that every police officer chooses every day to minimize total sum of death.

The largest issue here is that Eliezer is focusing on "force chosen to minimize death" and you're focusing on "people in blue uniforms". While both are related to the ideal police system, they are not sufficiently similar to each other for an argument between them to make much sense.