= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
V_V comments on Another Critique of Effective Altruism - 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 (108)
And the impact of abolishing jails altogether is 10k/year *-... oh wait!
You are assuming there is a net utility gain to society from all imprisonments. I think, given what we know about, say, the War on Drugs, that this is obviously false.
No, I'm just mocking your grossly naive calculation which assumes that keeping people in jail has only costs and disregards the obvious benefits which are the whole point of having jails in the first place.
Except that I was making an "exists such that" point, not a "forall" point.
I think you could have made that clearer when making the point in the first place.
So, anyway, the suggestion is that it might be very high-impact to be a judge who keeps people who shouldn't be in jail but would be jailed by many other judges out of jail. It might ... but I wonder how many such cases a typical judge actually encounters (I think casualties of the War On Drugs don't make up that large a fraction of the prison population) and how much power they have to keep those people out of jail (aren't there mandatory sentences in many cases?). Do you have the relevant information?
The point is that if N is, say, 0.2 then our hypothetical 6-figure earner could easily be giving more than that in charitable donations.
One other really important point. Altruistic impact is not measured in dollars but in utility. Giving N(X+Y)10k to the government may do much less good than giving it to an effective charity.
Do you mean "from all" or do you mean "from each"?
I mean that he appears to believe society gains net utility from keeping each individual prisoner in jail, versus releasing them, but also keeping all the prisoners in jail as a group, versus releasing them all. I'm choosing not to distinguish between the admittedly separate effects of one person being released versus an entire organized/self-organized group being released together.
I'm just saying that I think there are many obvious cases in which we could release prisoners at a net gain to society.