Thanks for clearing that up, I think I was confused because it's hard to imagine putting compassionate crime prevention strategies together with a strict death penalty for repeated shoplifting.
It would be far more moral and cost-effective to focus on prevention, through increased policing, economic opportunities or similar interventions.
Executions and lifelong prison sentences both suffer from leaving families seperated which leads to more crime and other negative externalities many of which can only be speculated upon.
For example, American culture seems to be resistant to overreach from the government. I can imagine far more civil unrest from a heavy handed execution policy than in a country such as Singapore.
I'm curious about the purpose of this post. I think I understand the concept of steelmanning, but I’m struggling to see the specific goal here.
The post doesn’t address countries with low crime rates that don’t use the death penalty, and just seems to double down on executing vast number of criminals rather than any number of other possible options to reduce crime. Also speculating here but I imagine the impacts on social cohesion and flow on effects from ease of executions (political prisoners etc) would make the cure worse than the disease.
Is excluding these concerns part of the steelmanning process? I think the post could have been a bit clearer on what is being steelmanned and what are arguments you are making.
I'm also interested in what I see as the most important part of any diet, how you resist temptations. As noted in your Scott Alexander link, almost any diet works as long as you stick to it, the hard part is sticking to it. I'm assuming that even if the boring diet reduces hunger you will still be tempted when offered a cookie or a bacon and egg roll.
It felt a bit strange reading through the evidence that willpower is not important and that CICO doesn't work when that's the exact approach I used to lose 30kgs and keep it off for over 10 years now. I did combine it with intermittent fasting and generally high protein intake but to maintain my weight I rely on calorie minimalisation. CICO had a lot of advantages to me but it's possible it just clicked with my personality. I think it's fairly likely that the boring diet clicks with your personality and that it wouldn't work for me (I'm the sense I would quickly give up).