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ialdabaoth comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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Effective disincentives can have secondary consequences that make them Bad Things overall, even if they have a small positive net utility in specific contexts.
Example: Tribal law in Afghanistan might actually have a {real} deterrent effect on thievery, but it comes with a world of heinous secondary consequences, so altogether it is a Bad Thing.
Prison rape is presumably similar. Remember, a decision's net utility is equal to its TOTAL future utility gains and losses.
Suppose you have a bunch of different utility equations, each of which contributes to the total system. You plug in "prison rape" and get the following set of conjugals to sum into your dot product:
-10, -5, -33, -1075, +2, -4, -22, -15
If your alternatives are hovering around a total of +5 to +20, then saying "but look at that +2!" (i.e., "look at that disincentive to risking jail time!") doesn't seem particularly relevant, considering its surrounded by a larger collection of absurdly weighty negatives.
EDIT: {real} was originally {legitimate}
The key word is legitimate - which I deny is appropriate in the context of prison rape.
Sure, making prisons less pleasant may decrease crime - although behaviorism suggests immediacy and salience are more important. Nonetheless, talking about societal benefits of particular prison arrangements is a kind of societal endorsement of those arrangements.
(Edit:)
After all, talking about the incentives of life threatening injuries from serious car accidents towards safer driving is creepy. I think there is very reasonable and widespread moral disapproval of the practice.
Sure we do. Have you ever heard of "Red Asphalt"? It was an entire series of rather disgusting videos produced in the 80's to show teenagers who were about to get their drivers' licenses. It didn't just talk about the incentive of life-threatening injuries; it exploited them.
I never saw them, and apparently succeeded in scrubbing their existence from my mind - probably based on my disapproval of the creepiness of the message. Still, you make a good point - I'll edit.
Original message so ialdabaoth's response makes sense:
This may be pedantic, but even your edited statement strikes me as false. There SHOULD be reasonable and widespread moral disapproval of the practice, but in point of fact there isn't, really. (Nor with drugs, actually). "Scared Straight" is still a STRONGLY favored tactic for most authoritarian regimes in the United States. "Sex Ed"/Health classes love showing disgusting pictures of advanced STD cases; high school principles love inviting DARE officers to come arrest kids and drag them to jail to teach them how horrific it would be to get caught; our culture really does approve of this entire style of argument. It's as pervasive as it is irrational, and is actually part of the interlocking kyriarchial systems that status-based primates tend to fall back on when thinking is hard.
Hmm . . .
My sense is that >35% of Americans would agree that using graphic car crash images in a safe driving class was inappropriate. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that people would generalize the moral principle in any coherent way - or even realize that DARE is a parallel at all.
Do you think I'm overly optimistic in my estimation?
I very, very much do. Want to help devise a sociology experiment to find out?
After collecting additional data (just one date point, but I trust my wife), I'm forced to concede that I was wildly overestimating the percentage of Americans who would disapprove. My new estimate is well into "Aliens are real" / "Elvis is alive" territory.
Sigh.
I'd still feel better if there were formal studies we could both point to, to verify or refute our assumption (and hopefully to shed some light on why it happens).
My instinct is that it has to do with favor for authoritarian parenting and similar primate dominance hierarchies, but I'd need to do way more research to be able to speak with any kind of confidence on the matter.
Eh? The possibility of life threatening injuries from serious car accidents is the primary reason for requiring people to acquire and prove their competence before being allowed to drive on the public roads. What's creepy about that?
Dunno, thinking of serious injury risk as an incentive seems implicit in the idea of risk compensation, which is quite popular:
Try replacing "legitimate" with "real", which is how I interpreted it.
That does make the sentence true, and morally less objectionable. But "legitimate" is not usually a synonym for "real," particularly in this context.
Huh. It didn't occur to me to interpret it any other way until you mentioned it, TBH. I guess because they're manifestly agreeing with me.
The whole political science concept of legitimacy is under appreciated in this community.
will do, thanks.