Punishing future crimes

Bongo

Here's an edited version of a puzzle from the book "Chuck Klosterman four" by Chuck Klosterman.

It is 1933. Somehow you find yourself in a position where you can effortlessly steal Adolf Hitler's wallet. The theft will not effect his rise to power, the nature of WW2, or the Holocaust. There is no important identification in the wallet, but the act will cost Hitler forty dollars and completely ruin his evening. You don't need the money. The odds that you will be caught committing the crime are negligible. Do you do it?

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future? Discuss.

Here's an edited version of a puzzle from the book "Chuck Klosterman four" by Chuck Klosterman.

It is 1933. Somehow you find yourself in a position where you can effortlessly steal Adolf Hitler's wallet. The theft will not effect his rise to power, the nature of WW2, or the Holocaust. There is no important identification in the wallet, but the act will cost Hitler forty dollars and completely ruin his evening. You don't need the money. The odds that you will be caught committing the crime are negligible. Do you do it?

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future? Discuss.

I would just note that "having a single time-traveler pre-punish one crime is worth some fraction of that utility" doesn't really seem to fit this system, since a single pre-punishment falls well under the 'random noise' threshold so its deterrence effect is effectively zero.

There is no sharp "random noise threshold". A single act has some positive probability of increasing the amount of belief someone assigns to the proposition "crime doesn't pay". Rather the expected value of the change is positive.

(This isn't really a factual disagreement, it just depends on how you interpret "fraction of utility" in a context where one act is useless but, say, a thousand are useful; is the single act's utility zero or k/1000? Personally, I straight-up refuse to treat utility as a scalar quantity.)

That's why I called this an acausal coordination problem.

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