Are you really saying that psychology doesn’t have “any sort of reproducible outcomes,” or are you not including that one in your definition of “soft sciences?” The comment you’re replying to explicitly did, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.
It makes even more sense when you take the law of large numbers into account. The scale we're experiencing most things on is /so/ far removed from the scale on which these probabilities are being expressed.
There are more molecules in a cup of water (on the order of 10^24) than there are cups of water in the ocean. If you have a cup of water's worth of matter, you aren't just rolling 10 dice (or even 1000 dice) and looking for mostly 6s. You're rolling a few septillion dice and hoping for a significantly non-normal distribution. It just isn't feasible.
> But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program.
I believe it was a comment I saw on here once that took it a step further and included the OS and all hardware logic in there as well. I can have two identical desktop computers with only one program installed on each, the only difference being that the program is totally different. Those two devices could ultimate be two seemingly completely unrelated machines to the end user, even though they share far more than 99% of the exact same instructions. The only "code" they wouldn't share is the specific program they run. Everything else from the hardware to the OS is many millions of "lines" that are the same.
Something that plays movies nonstop vs a production database. Photoshop vs Halo: The Master Chief Collection. An IDE vs a point of sale system. Control software vs a web browser. A program that locks you into the software vs one that still gives you access to the OS. The differences can start getting seemingly huge very quickly.
Stars have to have enough mass to have enough gravity to start and sustain a nuclear reaction that constantly blasts energy out in all directions. This limits just how energy-dense they can get. What they lack there, they make up for in size and lifespan.
We can make sustained nuclear reactions in much less space using engineered pressure instead of gravity, so that skews the energy density ratio.
> Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime
Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).
On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.
Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."
Exhibit A. It works, but it seems like it shouldn't work, so we should reject it and do something that keeps not working.
America is a more violent place; it has been for its entire history. Things that work in places with incredible cultural homogeneity don't work here, no matter how many happy images they conjure. What actually works here is policing, and SF is an example of people who believe your post following it off a cliff.
> working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place
The conditions that prevent violent crime are simple: consequences for violence.
Many jurisdictions let people that commit violent crime walk again and again.
From my neck of the woods? The perpetrator of the Waukesha parada massacre had a long history of violent behavior and was out on bail for trying to run someone over with his car a few days prior. Aliyah Perez, the niece of a Milwaukee alderman, was killed in a domestic situation by a man that had previously committed "a brutal domestic attack in which he stomped on, choked, and punched the victim, pulling out clumps of her hair and knocking out a tooth." He was given a minimum sentence only to return to his previous behavior and kill his next victim.
I don't care how our prison population compares to the rest of the world if clearly dangerous and violent people are walking free. The purpose of prison is to separate such people from the rest of society.
If all 2 million people in prison in the US are violent criminals, then there's a _really_ big problem.
Clearly it's better to stop people from becoming violent criminals, then to wait (or push them, e.g. by increasing income inequality, reducing respect for "unskilled" professions, etc.) for them to become violent criminals and then punish them.
Countries with globally low crimes rates are racially homogeneous. (For the liberals: This doesn't mean that racially homogeneity implies low crime rates, of course.)
> It's pretty easy to monitor a handful of test subjects with heritable mutations and make sure they don't reproduce
So just to be clear, what we're talking about here is a protocol for performing eugenics on humans that were bred as part of an experiment, right? And ethically, that isn't a hang-up for you?
> what we're talking about here is a protocol for performing eugenics...
No. What we're talking about is if it's ethical to essentially create a race of monster-people by altering their DNA.
GP is saying, no way it's ethical, because if they have offspring it would be unethical. I'm saying maybe it's as ethical as current medical science, as long as you sterilize them.
You're the only one talking about eugenics.
> ethically that isn't a hang-up for you
Look, ethics is in its core, a public affair. Ethicists are primarily concerned whether general people will find XYZ acceptable, and why or why not.
For me personally, I'm not concerned with academics. I'm concerned with whether I feel it's right or wrong in my personal view. Is genetically altering humans ethical in my personal view? No.
> I'm saying maybe it's as ethical as current medical science, as long as you sterilize them
This is eugenics. You are the one that brought it up saying maybe it's relatively ethical. I'm rejecting that point and saying that it categorically is not ethical.
Dragon's Egg [1] and Starquake [2] by Robert L. Forward are both hard sci-fi novels about fast-moving life on a neutron star. I enjoyed both of them, especially the xenobiology and xenoarcheology.
Flux [1] by Stephen Baxter is also about the inhabitants of a neutron star. Hard sci-fi, but maybe not quite as Hard as Dragon's Egg so far as I recall.
I assume you're still talking about Rocket League? All models in that game fall under 1 of 6 hitbox types [1], each of which are attainable without purchase
Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.
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