• 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 17th, 2023

help-circle

  • You are falling for a common pitfall, assuming that intelligence is the dominant factor in success. There is enough evidence to suggest intelligence is a thing and that it does help general ability broadly, but it is basically always dominated by other factors, be it affluence or experience. It’s entirely possible for an expert in 1 field to end up being completely clueless and seeming like a dumbass when talking about anything else. There is even research to suggest people that are experts in one domain can be easier to fool into thinking they are more competent in all domains, actually making them less likely to seek external opinions and ending up worse off.









  • I think the mainstream liberal take is probably very aligned with yours. You have to go further left to get a different opinion. But I hold such an opinion so to give my perspective: I don’t give 2 shits about punishment for punishments sake. If anything I only see that as causing more harm. What I care about is reducing net harm. There have been countless studies that have shown that severity of punishment is an extremely poor deterrent. Often times perpetrators are more concerned with the social impact getting caught will have on their immediate contacts over how long they’ll be jailed for, and frankly, just don’t think that they’ll get caught at all. If we take that for true, and my goal of reducing net harm, the value of jail becomes reforming those who can be reformed, and keeping those who can’t locked away from the rest of society. Neither of these things are intrinsically tied to any period of time. And because of how we treat ex-cons in society currently recidivism rates get worse for having been in prison. Possibly because they can’t get legal work, and possibly because the social reputation damage has already been done, so that fear is no longer holding them back.