Oh, I should also add that I think public shaming is an under-explored punishment. It has the same issues as corporal punishment, but I think it is less problematic overall and has some benefits, such that I wish it got more attention.
Yeah! An interesting thought! I did some looking into corporal punishment a while ago and came away with an early impression that it's more half-baked than some Rationalists make it out to be.
For starters, different people respond to things like pain really differently. And while people might respond to imprisonment differently, I think there's less variance, and thus it's a more fair punishment. The main advantage of corporal punishment is that it's fast and cheap (for the government), but fines are even faster/simpler and are cheaper (positive revenue, even!). Ideally, everyone who isn't an active threat to society should just be getting fined. Is flogging or whatever a better backstop for people who can't or don't want to pay their fine than imprisonment would be? Maybe? I think it's hard to tell. I feel worried about tough guys showing how tough they are and getting out of punishment too easily as a result. For people who are an active threat to society, imprisonment seems like a necessary response. Some folks just can't be trusted with freedom or they start stealing/murdering/etc regardless of whether it's in their long-term interest. And some part of me thinks that if we're going to be imprisoning people anyway, it makes sense to have imprisonment be the consistent backstop upon which we allow people to opt-into being fined.
But I could be wrong. I'm gearing up for a sequence on criminal justice more broadly, so I'll probably revisit the topic. If you have any thoughts/links/resources, I'm curious.
Oh, and regarding corporal punishment, it would be interesting if you talk about in your series about the impacts of corporal punishment in countries where there actually is corporal punishment such as lashings.
Yeah, our interests were both kicked off by the trickiness of California Prop 36. I'm not going to be as focused on the specific question he looks at, but it'll overlap. (Note: As usual, my blogging time is irregular, so it might be a while.)
Speed limits are a blunt force instrument wielded as though they were a scalpel. A grandma in an old car in the rain at night needs to go tens of miles per hour slower than a person with great eyesight and reflexes in a safe car in the daytime.
All rules are suggestions for the ignorant. If you know what your capabilities are, it's your ethical responsibility to stay within them. If you don't know, follow the rules.
In order for either freedom or responsibility to have meaning, people must be free to make their own decisions. If they're not capable of that, why do they have a license, and if they are, why do they need one?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. I definitely agree that the 'right' speed in any given moment is highly contextual – depending on the driver, the car, the weather, the road itself, and the driver's own capabilities, as you point out. A single number on a sign is indeed a blunt instrument when viewed from the perspective of an individual making a perfect judgment call.
However, where our perspectives seem to significantly diverge is on the likely real-world consequences of relying solely on that individual judgment across millions of drivers sharing the same roads. While the ideal of the responsible, capable driver self-regulating perfectly is appealing, the empirical reality suggests that removing systemic rules and enforcement would lead to greater speed variance and a higher frequency of choices that, in aggregate, create danger for everyone.
The freedom for the highly capable and attentive driver to operate unconstrained seems inseparable from the freedom for the overconfident, the momentarily distracted, or the simply less capable driver to do the same. My assessment is that the world you seem to be advocating for—one without enforced speed norms or potentially even licensing based on demonstrated minimum capability—would almost certainly be significantly more dangerous, resulting in more accidents, injuries, and deaths than even our current, deeply flawed system.
Is this increase in physical risk a necessary or acceptable tradeoff for the principle of individual liberty you're championing? My proposals aim to find a balance that maximizes freedom within the bounds of what seems necessary for systemic safety and coordination on shared infrastructure.
If a person is licensed to drive that Means they are capable of making good decisions in that regard. Anything beyond generic watchfulness is tyranny by default. There only needs to be one rule on the road - drive safely, and chips need to be public servants with minimal power and maximum trust so that they can be counted on to only intervene when necessary, which is a condition under which every citizen or ethical person has the same right as any cop to intervene. For practical purposes, all traffic control is either necessary ( drive on the right ) or advisory ( stop here bc it's hard to see, this corner should be approached slowly). Tyranny inherently expands itself so we end up with stop signs where yield signs will produce the exact same safety effect, speed bumps everywhere that ruin everyone's comfort, ubiquitous surveillance, status offences utterly disconnected from harm or danger, less safety bc people are watching for cops instead of watching the road, red lights in the middle of the night with no traffic in sight, fines for minor infractions that keep poor people off the road indefinitely, cups who ignore basic human decency and common sense, and on and on. Whatever you think of safety, there's no rational justification for any of those things. It would only take a handful of reasonable suggestions ( stay away from everything, brake early, don't overcorrect ) rather than an insistence on following rules to produce safer roads than we have now. No amount of safety can justify tyranny. If driving is inherently dangerous, that's why we have tests and a license. If that cannot be trusted there is Only tyranny and enforcement is arbitrary on relation to danger. I could go on…
What about corporal punishments?
Oh, I should also add that I think public shaming is an under-explored punishment. It has the same issues as corporal punishment, but I think it is less problematic overall and has some benefits, such that I wish it got more attention.
Yeah! An interesting thought! I did some looking into corporal punishment a while ago and came away with an early impression that it's more half-baked than some Rationalists make it out to be.
For starters, different people respond to things like pain really differently. And while people might respond to imprisonment differently, I think there's less variance, and thus it's a more fair punishment. The main advantage of corporal punishment is that it's fast and cheap (for the government), but fines are even faster/simpler and are cheaper (positive revenue, even!). Ideally, everyone who isn't an active threat to society should just be getting fined. Is flogging or whatever a better backstop for people who can't or don't want to pay their fine than imprisonment would be? Maybe? I think it's hard to tell. I feel worried about tough guys showing how tough they are and getting out of punishment too easily as a result. For people who are an active threat to society, imprisonment seems like a necessary response. Some folks just can't be trusted with freedom or they start stealing/murdering/etc regardless of whether it's in their long-term interest. And some part of me thinks that if we're going to be imprisoning people anyway, it makes sense to have imprisonment be the consistent backstop upon which we allow people to opt-into being fined.
But I could be wrong. I'm gearing up for a sequence on criminal justice more broadly, so I'll probably revisit the topic. If you have any thoughts/links/resources, I'm curious.
Oh, and regarding corporal punishment, it would be interesting if you talk about in your series about the impacts of corporal punishment in countries where there actually is corporal punishment such as lashings.
Look forward to the series, I assume you'll be responding in some ways to Scott's recent article on prison length
Yeah, our interests were both kicked off by the trickiness of California Prop 36. I'm not going to be as focused on the specific question he looks at, but it'll overlap. (Note: As usual, my blogging time is irregular, so it might be a while.)
Speed limits are a blunt force instrument wielded as though they were a scalpel. A grandma in an old car in the rain at night needs to go tens of miles per hour slower than a person with great eyesight and reflexes in a safe car in the daytime.
All rules are suggestions for the ignorant. If you know what your capabilities are, it's your ethical responsibility to stay within them. If you don't know, follow the rules.
In order for either freedom or responsibility to have meaning, people must be free to make their own decisions. If they're not capable of that, why do they have a license, and if they are, why do they need one?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. I definitely agree that the 'right' speed in any given moment is highly contextual – depending on the driver, the car, the weather, the road itself, and the driver's own capabilities, as you point out. A single number on a sign is indeed a blunt instrument when viewed from the perspective of an individual making a perfect judgment call.
However, where our perspectives seem to significantly diverge is on the likely real-world consequences of relying solely on that individual judgment across millions of drivers sharing the same roads. While the ideal of the responsible, capable driver self-regulating perfectly is appealing, the empirical reality suggests that removing systemic rules and enforcement would lead to greater speed variance and a higher frequency of choices that, in aggregate, create danger for everyone.
The freedom for the highly capable and attentive driver to operate unconstrained seems inseparable from the freedom for the overconfident, the momentarily distracted, or the simply less capable driver to do the same. My assessment is that the world you seem to be advocating for—one without enforced speed norms or potentially even licensing based on demonstrated minimum capability—would almost certainly be significantly more dangerous, resulting in more accidents, injuries, and deaths than even our current, deeply flawed system.
Is this increase in physical risk a necessary or acceptable tradeoff for the principle of individual liberty you're championing? My proposals aim to find a balance that maximizes freedom within the bounds of what seems necessary for systemic safety and coordination on shared infrastructure.
If a person is licensed to drive that Means they are capable of making good decisions in that regard. Anything beyond generic watchfulness is tyranny by default. There only needs to be one rule on the road - drive safely, and chips need to be public servants with minimal power and maximum trust so that they can be counted on to only intervene when necessary, which is a condition under which every citizen or ethical person has the same right as any cop to intervene. For practical purposes, all traffic control is either necessary ( drive on the right ) or advisory ( stop here bc it's hard to see, this corner should be approached slowly). Tyranny inherently expands itself so we end up with stop signs where yield signs will produce the exact same safety effect, speed bumps everywhere that ruin everyone's comfort, ubiquitous surveillance, status offences utterly disconnected from harm or danger, less safety bc people are watching for cops instead of watching the road, red lights in the middle of the night with no traffic in sight, fines for minor infractions that keep poor people off the road indefinitely, cups who ignore basic human decency and common sense, and on and on. Whatever you think of safety, there's no rational justification for any of those things. It would only take a handful of reasonable suggestions ( stay away from everything, brake early, don't overcorrect ) rather than an insistence on following rules to produce safer roads than we have now. No amount of safety can justify tyranny. If driving is inherently dangerous, that's why we have tests and a license. If that cannot be trusted there is Only tyranny and enforcement is arbitrary on relation to danger. I could go on…