RowanE comments on Stupid Questions March 2015 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Gondolinian 03 March 2015 11:37PM

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Comment author: RowanE 04 March 2015 02:02:32PM 5 points [-]

I think the evolutionary origin of ideas of "deserving punishment" is basically a need to incentivise others not to defect against you, but the actual intuition in most people's heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of "bad people" in some proportion with how bad whatever they've done is. Also the concept of free will as most people use it is pretty confused and gives confusing results if you have it interact with other concepts like "incentives".

Comment author: seer 05 March 2015 07:33:09AM 8 points [-]

but the actual intuition in most people's heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of "bad people" in some proportion with how bad whatever they've done is.

Of course, for the incentives to work you need a precommitment to punish, but once the person has defected, that's done and punishing him no longer benefits you. Hence the requirement to assign utility to the suffering of bad people.

Comment author: RowanE 06 March 2015 01:11:40PM -1 points [-]

Oh, yeah, I see why, tbh I thought /u/DeVliegendeHollander was being weird in not seeing things that way, but I didn't want to typical-mind.