Is there a academic study of the heuristic of choosing between option A versus option B?
People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing. I have this terrible thought of a quant rapist: juggling their risk that the victim stays quiet or otherwise acts (police or revenge). Deciding on the Kelly Criterion for losing 20 years in prison.
I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly. It is annoying when muderers are cast as being idiots. I imagine the protagonist runs a hedge fund and gets bored of getting away with white collar crime.
In this modern age, I'm rather interested in the inverse: lawmakers doing proper scientific research, and legislating based on that; attempting to discover the sociological or economical truths rather than chasing slogans and acting on beliefs and agendas.
They do that in many countries. Basically they check the likelihood of being a repeat offender and try to minimize that. Tax crimes become harsher than violent crimes because of it, for example… it is not popular amongst the population though.
A behaviorist perspective on justice, punishment, and rehabilitation does not require morality.
1. Pragmatism - Justice can be effectively framed around practical outcomes and societal safety, it requires no moral framework.
2. Remorse and Emotional Response - Feelings of remorse can be understood as conditioned responses shaped by environmental influences rather than as reflections of moral responsibility; remorse does not necessitate moral weight as they can arise from societal conditioning and past experiences.
3. CBT - Cognitive Behavioral Approaches demonstrate that behavioral and emotional changes can occur without delving into moral implications, and requires no moral reflection.
4. Behavioral Accountability - Individuals can be held accountable for their actions based solely on their observable behavior and its consequences, without the need for moral judgments. The focus is on modifying harmful behaviors through interventions and reinforcements rather than assigning moral blame.
So, this framework provides a rational and effective approach to understanding and managing human behavior, focusing on the pragmatic aspects of justice, rehabilitation, and accountability, it does not require an already shaky and subjective moral judgment or moral accountability, and as thus, need not be morally justified.
If you want me to elaborate (with examples, too), I am willing to as my time allows.
I know a woman who was raped by her father. The state is going to release him in a few years, so now her family lives in terror of that day. Where is the justice in that, and what does the rapist bastard being or or not being a ""rational economic actor"" have to do with any of it?
Indeed, a big part of a society's system of justice is "letting most people sleep at night."
Whether there's justice or not in a rapist serving their sentence and going free (given that, one assumes, the sentencing guidelines were decided by dispassionate thinkers trying to reason about society as a whole)... It goes out the window if a family lives in so much fear they decide to "fix" the issue by taking the law into their own hands.
Then the society has to decide whether to jail the family, and so on.
Hammurabi's code seems harsh by modern standards, but at the time it was positively progressive. It was attempting to replace a retaliatory tradition so bloody it could wipe out entire bloodlines. He was trying to impose an upper limit on consequence to allow a society of semi-strangers to reach some meta-stability.
>Is there a academic study of the heuristic of choosing between option A versus option B?
I don't know of a paper on that specific question, but for example, Gary Becker got his Nobel prize because he applied economics to a wide range of human behavior including crime and punishment. Here is a famous paper of his on crime:
> I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly.
At the start of the movie Heat, one of the hot head robbers kills one of the guards. De Niro, the leader of the robbers, immediately kills the other guard and says something along the lines of 'it's capital murder either way so may as well not leave any witnesses'. Ultimately, it's Di Nero being non-rational and driven by emotion that leads to the final scene in the movie.
> People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers.
This imperfection feeds into the argument for not punishing rape as harshly as murder: the rapist is likely to misjudge the chances of the murder being discovered and traced back to them, when doing the risk math to decide how to proceed. If their imperfect thinking leads them to overestimate their chance of pulling off the perfect murder (or the perfect coverup after one) then that pushes the chance of equal punishment leading to more murders higher.
"Doing risk math" oversells it for crimes of opportunity, where decisions about how to keep the action quiet after it has happened is going to be very emotion/panic (rather than facts/stats) driven, but for premeditated attacks I suspect things will flip the other way.
> People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing.
why is that a good thing?
Perfect economic thinkers are good, because they'd be predictable and can be reasoned with. Providing economic incentives to such means you can direct behaviour in an easy and efficient way.
Irrational thinkers cannot be reasoned with via economic rationality. Therefore, either you have to stack the incentives so high that the cost becomes overbearing, or you use some other means of control that's less nice.
Being perfect economic thinkers doesn't mean they are all powerful. How does one go kill one guy without consequence? The only person this perfect economic thinker has access to is himself, and surely, he values his own life at infinity.
Ethics is an agreement between people in society, which cannot be captured via economic rationalism alone, but economic rationalism can take into account current ethics, as well as other actors' propensity for more or less ethics.
Like Germany and the UK?
However, it's no problem at all for them to supply Israel with support in their murder of 18,000+ children. Remote killing good, local killing bad?
agreed, which was also my point, but you seemed to think I was making the mistake, common on this site, that American rules pertain all over the world, which was not even what the discussion was about!
on edit: got confused as to who was whom in the nesting.
on second edit: I also don't know if there is anywhere that has execution for rape, it was a hypothetical as I read it.
Would be rapists and murderers simultaneously aren't deterred from committing their crime in the first place by the threat of execution, but also will escalate their crime in response to the threat of execution. Very curious.
Liberal Europeans and Americans like to say that no civilized country executes criminals, but in fact several developed democratic countries in Asia do, and to say they aren't civilized seems absurd. Executing criminals seems to work well for them. Very curious.
> no civilized country executes criminals, but in fact several developed democratic countries in Asia do, and to say they aren't civilized seems absurd.
If you're saying the first bit, you're saying that it's a disqualifier from the second.
And I'm saying that anybody who claims Japan, South Korea or even Singapore isn't civilized is being absurd. Their own country is almost certainly more dangerous than those, there are very few countries with lower intentional homicide rates than those three.
It is, perhaps, worth observing that one of the stories told about how English law pulled back from death-penalty-for-thievery was that if a thief had their life on the line already, they may as well murder too.
It's an interesting story, but the historical record of how English law changed is, I think, a bit more interesting. Kids in London would steal. They'd go on trial. A jury of Londoners would see what looked like a twelve-year-old in the docket and just flat-out refuse to find them guilty because they couldn't sleep with themselves thinking they'd sent some kid to the gallows. This pattern became such an issue that merchants petitioned the King to pull back the penalties because as the system was implemented, it was going to stop protecting their property from thievery.
The wildest thing about European colonialism is that it was kicked off to get more spices for European food. Then in the worlds most bizarre twist European food gave up all spices a few centuries later and colonies had to invent something else to sell back to the colonial centre.
"All the spices", save for tea, coffee, and sugar, which continued to be imported in quantity. And are addictive to boot.
A century or so later, laudenum.
The spice trade itself didn't shrink so much as it was subsumed by other trade, I think, particularly as shipping capacity, reliability, and safety increased.
My point being that 1) the UK continued to import luxury consumables and 2) probably maintained spice imports, though I don't have hard data.
If you have data to bring to the discussion I'd be interested in seeing it.
Sugar is included in what were termed spices, FWIW:
In the medieval and early modern periods, ‘spice’ was a term liberally applied to all kinds of exotic natural products from pepper to sugar, herbs to animal secretions.
From the sources I'm finding (relatively few and vague, granted), my interpretation is less that total trade in spices (however construed) fell in absolute tonnage than that the per-tonne value dropped as the goods fell in price and were consumed by far greater shares of the population. It wasn't that spices were less a part of culinary culture, but that because they were so common (both senses of the word) they became less significant. Total tonnage and likely overall value were all but certainly increasing, but the importance attached to formerly exotic goods (pepper, ginger, cinnamon, etc.) fell as anybody could attain these.
Look to the history of the pineapple (of which there were once temples built in its honor in Europe) from exotic to highly mundane fruit for another example:
It also can't really be overstated how helpful it is as an ML engineer to simply spend the time going through thousands of examples yourself. If you abstract yourself away from the data and just "make metric go up" you'll be missing out on valuable insights about how and why your model might be failing.
It's almost as if (bear with me ...) these "artificial intelligences" actually need "human intelligences" to guide them. Maybe we can think up a "system" where "experts" can codify rules for the "artificial intelligence" to follow.
Ok the sarcasm got too thick but my point is if the engineer has to spend the time to comb thousands of examples then you don't have AI you have a man in a box pretending to be a machine that plays chess.
For my one foray into ML, in 2020, I also built my own labeling system. It was stupidly simple; IIRC, it was a Jupyter Notebook that presented you with text to label, and you’d do so by hitting 1-5, which were mapped to sentiments / emotions. If you got bored, or just wanted to see how it performed with X% training, you could save progress and quit. It worked well enough, and I think I labeled a couple of thousand entries using it.
I ALSO have resorted to building my own labeling even though there are great generic labeling tools out there. I think this is a missing piece of the landscape but I don't know enough about the space yet to say what the solution should be.
Or, reform your Presidency to be a constitutional role only, with executive power devolved to the party or parties of your elected representatives that is able to show the head of state that they have the numbers to govern.
E.g. like the President of Ireland, or the King of England (via the Governor General proxy) in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Also, the Electoral College is an archaic anachronism, and may I recommend a system of proportional representation?
Devolution to "states rights" is exactly that, a devolution.
Britain ran a global empire using this model, why wouldn't it work for the US?
Maybe read up on how it works before rejecting it out of hand?
Britain has a bicameral parliament, with the leader of the majority of the lower house forming the executive, but the head of state retains the constitutional ability to dissolve parliament and order new elections if the current government is unable to function.
Having an apolitical head of state might be worth looking into.
> Britain ran a global empire using this model, why wouldn't it work for the US?
The “global empire” was systematically disenfranchised under that model, which is a big reason why it broke up, and that was specifically called out by the US when it left.
I mean, there are arguably good examples of parliamentary democracy working at significant scale in a state, but the UK’s government at home while the empire was managed through a bunch of other systems is very much not one of them.
> What works for a country the size of a New York neighbourhood doesn't work for a country the size of a continent.
While I personally think the problem with the US system is much more in lack of proportionality in the electoral system used for the legislature , but, even so, I can recognize thet parliamentary government doesn't only work at small scales.
Alternatively: we need to rein in the powers of the presidency. Right now we've got a dynamic of "the president says what to do and the legislature obeys" (or, recently, "the president does stuff on his own"); we might be better off with "Congress decides what to do and the president makes it happen".
How long will California maintain GDP dominance when major parts of business are in the pocket of Trump? Won't they just pack up and leave, tanking Californias economy with it?
It's not terribly interesting. There have always been two strains of thought for the Democrats in the US. Once has been that we must move the whole country in the right direction kicking and screaming - this has been the ideology that has been in ascendency since Kennedy. The other that we must be allowed to be as progressive as possible without interference from the Federal government. That's not been in vouge since the end of the new deal.
I'm completely in the second camp and would move back to the US if it were possible to get it adopted at the national level.
To Republicans' credit, they have not flipped on states' rights even when they dominate DC. Maybe this is a good time for everyone to (pretend to) be aligned on states' rights and ram through some measures to that end.
There are inklings of a change there. You can see it in things like proposing to prevent women from traveling to another state to get an abortion, or forcing states to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement. I expect we will see more of that if it helps them get to their desired policy goals.
Absolutely. "Conspiracy to commit abortion" is being proposed if not partly a thing in many states, and runs the gamut of anything from looking up info online, to traveling, to financially supporting or even giving a place to stay for someone doing this.
Homer Simpson was meant to be a fat idiot barely hanging on.
In the 40 years since the first episode he's gone to being average weight and fitness.
Economically he's now wildly successful for being able to own a house on a single income with three kids. There are people making over $800,000 today who can't afford that.
> I suggest you look up how much raising children costs today vs the 1980s in both money and time.
I’m married, living in suburban California raising two of them on a single income much lower than $800,000 (much lower than 2/3 of that, too, since the hypotherical was 3 kids and I don't want that go be a distraction), I don't need to look up anything about a 1980s comparison to know that that $800k claim is sheer insanity.
> Two kids today are a much bigger status symbol than a 5 million dollar house.
No, they aren't. I mean, don't get me wrong I’d rather have my kids than the $5M house, but they definitely are not more of a status symbol than the $5M house would be.
If the punishment for rape is harsher than the punishment for murder than anyone committing it may as well remove the evidence by using a blender.