There may be some other sort of penalty that would both deter recidivism and also deter people from beginning criminality. Corporal punishment, for example.
It seems unlikely that people would think that way. Taking myself as an example, I favor an extensive reworking of the powers, internal organization, and mode of election of the U.S. House of Representatives. I know that I'm the only person in the world who favors my program, because I invented it and haven't yet described it completely. I've described parts of it in online venues, each of which has a rather narrow, specialist audience, so there might possibly be two or three people out there who agree with me on a major portion of it, but certainly no one...
I'm in. I live in Kenosha, Wi., on campus at UWP. No car.
The bias toward false positives is probably especially strong in criminal cases. The archetypal criminal offense is such that it unambiguously happened (not quite like the Willingham case), and in the ancestral human environment there were far fewer people around who could have done it. That makes the priors for everyone higher, which means that for whatever level of probability you're asking for it takes less additional evidence to get there. That a person is acting strangely might well be enough -- especially since you'd have enough familiarity with that...
Well, unless I've remembered it wrong, only two or three people have ever survived that fall. If I'm wrong, substitute a plane. Or a personal unprotected atmospheric re-entry.
Sometime there really are problems that can't be helped.
Someone just threw you off the Golden Gate Bridge.
There's one problem thinking won't much help with.
But then again, to make that point I had to reach for a problem nothing could be done about.
Alas, rigorous truth is the constant enemy of the aphorism.
I would argue that people actually take the larger gamble when they enter romantic relationships, certainly when they get married, and probably with some other decisions like that.
So... have you provided her with the arguments?
If I rationalize it to my own satisfaction and/or just don't care, it's indistinguishable from being good.
With the added nastiness of not actually being wrong. Except that if you ever notice yourself thinking this the gig is already up.
This argument fails several ways. First as history. Some of the atrocities happened without central organization -- e.g., Islamic fundamentalists aren't all part of any one organization, although they've created a variety of more or less hierarchical organizations; the displacement of the Indians (which had essentially nothing to do with religion except as a stock of rationalizations for things people would have done anyway) -- and all the others had important elements of individual initiative.
(I must say I found it amusing that you concede that the crimes...
Is there a difference between having no subjective experience and having one-millionth the subjective experience of a Tra'bilfin, which are advanced aliens with artificially augmented brains capable of a million times the processing of a current human?
Your usage of "actual" appears to be based on a false cognate.
Anyone who can travel through time can mount a pretty impressive apocalypse and announce whatever it is about the nature of reality he cares to. He might even be telling the truth.
We find bunnies in general cute, but not humans in general -- so it makes sense that a baby bunny would be cuter than a baby human. It combines babyness and bunnyness, as compared to a human baby who only has babyness. We care about the human baby more than the bunny baby because we value humanness quite apart from cuteness.
I'm sure you could contrive a way to kill someone with a bunny.
It wouldn't. That's supposed to be a side effect.
Not photoshop. That's a pacifier with plastic buckteeth on the outside. It's supposed to be funny.
I'm guessing it's because cute rabbits get eaten less than non-cute rabbits, thus exerting selection pressure in favor of cuteness, which presumably is the same in all... something. Mammals?
Sounds a little strained to me, though.
Although I don't have any references handy, I've seen people argue that Kyoto-like changes in our lifestyles are necessary on ethical grounds apart from global warming. More often they'll simply dismiss any sort of technological solution as a "quick fix" or even as the thing that caused the problem in the first place.
There are quite a few people who would like to abdicate control over the physical world.
The study described in the link only exposed the subject to a single article. The effect might be different for different amounts of exposure.
In my own experience this seems to be the case. When I briefly read politically opposing blogs I find them so obviously stupid that I'm amazed anyone could take the other side seriously, but when I spend a long while doing it I find my views moderating and sometimes even crossing over despite not being convinced by any of their actual arguments, and begin to be embarrassed by figures I normally admire even though mos...
Well, yes. That's textualism: the decision was made and it's written down right here.
A Council of Elders who make the decision for us is something else altogether.
However fundamental they are, they're still subject to some kind of decision-making. There's no way around the difficulty: whoever makes the decision has interests, including an interest in expanding his/their own power. If the decision is too fundamental to be made by the people, then we're saying that precisely the most important matters should be decided by people with interests that may not be those of the people whose interests we're actually trying to promote, which is the general public. If they're that much better than us that this makes sense, it'...
The Constitution is not a complete system of law (it is, if I remember correctly, the shortest national constitution currently in force) -- so, even if we dismiss the amendment process as airily as you do, the strictest originalism doesn't amount to "live under the exact framework set up by a bunch of very flawed 18th century white dudes forever", because most of that framework was in the form of statutory law. It's not clear to me that the amendment process deserves to dismissed the way you did. You call the Founders "very flawed", whi...
Most people prefer milder drugs over harder ones, even though harder drugs provide more pleasure.
If whoever controls the simulation knows that Tyrrell/me/komponisto/Eliezer/etc. are reasonably reasonable, there's little to be gained by modeling all the evidences that might persuade me. Just include the total lack of physical evidence tying the accused to the room where the murder happened, and I'm all yours. I'm sure I care more than I might have otherwise because she's pretty, and obviously (obviously to me, anyway) completely harmless and well-meaning, even now. Whereas, if we were talking about a gang member who's probably guilty of other horrible ...
What possible world would that be? If it should turn out that the Italian government is engaged in a vast experiment to see how many people it can convince of a true thing using only very inadequate evidence (and therefore falsified the evidence so as to destroy any reasonable case it had), we could, in principle, discover that. If the simulation simply deleted all of her hair, fiber, fingerprint, and DNA evidence left behind by the salacious ritual sex murder, then I can think of two objections. First, something like Tyrrell McAllister's second-order simu...
Perhaps it's being downvoted because of my strange speculation that the stars are unreal -- but it seems to me that if this is a simulation with such a narrow purpose as fooling komponisto/me/us/somebody about the Knox case is would be more thrifty to only simulate some narrow portion of the world, which need not include Knox herself. Even then, I think, it would make sense to say that my beliefs are about Knox as she is inside the simulation, not some other Knox I cannot have any knowledge of, even in principle.
But surely any statement one could make about Amanda Knox is only about the Amanda Knox in this world, whether she's a fully simulated human or something less. Perhaps only the places I actually go are fully simulated, and everywhere else is only simulated in its effects on the places I go, so that the light from distant stars are supplied without bothering to run their internal processes; in that case, the innocent Amanda Knox only exists insofar as the effects that an innocent Amanda Knox would have on my part of the world are implemented. Even so, my be...
Most hands of poker are decided without showing the cards. Does that make the cards irrelevant? Of course not; everything that happens is conditioned by the probable outcome if there were a showdown, as judged by the players in the hand. Changing one player's hand could change everything, even if no one else ever sees it.
A change in the way verdicts are reached will be much more powerful, being seen by both sides. Therefore even if nothing is done about the plea bargain system (and something should be done), the key to the game is still the "showdown".