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.
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. Bu...
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: