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gjm comments on Open thread, Sep. 21 - Sep. 27, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (133)
Your comment could mean "obviously this wouldn't work" or "obviously this is politically infeasible" or even "I find it convenient to be vaguely derisive at you for some reason". Would you care to be more specific?
(I think it is fairly obviously politically infeasible and probably wouldn't work; my objection to what you wrote isn't that I think it's terribly wrong.)
All of the above :-) It would neither work, nor is politically feasible. I am vaguely derisive because one doesn't spend too much time disproving claims that a rainbow-producing perpetuum mobile strapped to a unicorn will convert the entire world into a happy place.
It would be hilarious if it weren't serious.
The best lulz are produced by very very serious people :-D
I'll bet you 10$ that within 5 years there will be a test for virtual reality in prisons, and that it will have some statistically significant positive effects.
I don't know about Lumifer, but I'd certainly be willing to take that bet.
I am not sure what that means.
In any case the my point is a bit different. I am rather amazed at the suggestion that locking someone up in a solitary cell so that she sees no human beings, not even a patch of sky or a blade of grass for her entire sentence can be compensated by a pair of VR goggles.
I mean, right now, no. But that's not really the point the post is trying to make (I think). The point is that in 50 years when VR has gone through the adoption curve and become ubiquitous, when as many people are on a metaverse as are one facebook, when haptics are mainstream and computing power has improved enough that we can render near photoreal experiences, then maybe, a proposal like the one in the post will be feasible.
The point of my bet (which, after reflection, was probably overconfident), is that there are dozens of steps to the future above, and that just because the end results seems unimaginable, it's not hard to imagine other, smaller things that are likely, and which when added up will lead to the unimaginable future of the post.
I think the OP wasn't trying to make a point. I think he is afraid of prisons (and specifically afraid of prison rape), so he decided to design a prison system which he, personally, would find tolerable. The only solution to his fears that he found was full isolation -- and the rest follows from there.
None of what you list will make this proposal feasible.
This seems non-obvious to me (obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have said it).
What's needed to make the proposal feasible is that VR is seen as a plausible substitue for in-person interaction, and that the cost of VR for every prisoner is less than the cost of the correspending physical actions. All of what I mentioned in the post goes towards those two things.
Not "seen", but "is". Do you think photorealistic VR can be a full and complete substitute for human interaction? Is it a problem that can be solved by pushing more pixels through the goggles?
Don't forget that your prison population isn't particularly smart, tends to have mental health issues, and you would like them to adequately function in the real world after release.
Why? All that it takes for policy change is perception, not reality.
What do you mean?
Come now, it's not that bad. I mean, it might be politically possible to get it done at least as a small experimental project, and it might at least achieve some of the things it says it would. Admittedly, I wouldn't be much more optimistic than that about it.
(It was not I who downvoted you.)
This isn't far off from how Nordic prisons work. And they have amazing crime statistics.
This is VERY far from Nordic prisons.
For example, note that the proposal puts everyone into permanent solitary confinement and assumes that playing a MMORG in VR glasses is sufficient to satisfy all needs for human interaction.
Given this:
it seemed like you were scoffing at not punishing prisoners as opposed to scoffing at the VR; that's what I was addressing.
I was scoffing at the OP's map being hilariously far away from territory -- in more than one aspect.
That seems unnecessarily cryptic. Are you really a retributive justice kind of guy? Do you really think punishment is the way to go? How do you fit the Nordic example into your map?
I did not intend to be cryptic and I don't see what any of that has to do with punishment. The proposal is funny stoopid not because it picks a particular approach to incarceration -- but because it makes assumptions that are very far away from reality.
It's like attempting to deal with poverty in Africa by air-dropping an iPad for everyone and going "now that they are plugged into the global information economy, they would rapidly lift themselves to the first-world level".