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Humans consistently make the same mistake about understand the motivations, the inhibiting and promoting pressures of other people. We assume that everyone else

Humans consistently make the same mistake about understand the motivations, the inhibiting and promoting pressures of other people. We assume that everyone else is exactly like us. Therefore, when we build systems and institutions that attempt to alter behavior, we encode our own motivations and desires as the impetus. I.E. why we have UX researchers, do user testing, A/B testing etc when we develop products. Our instincts about what other folks will pay for/want/value/use are rarely totally accurate. “I don’t want to go to jail, therefore, jail will be a globally effective crime deterrent” is demonstrably false for this subset of the population. From a purely behavioral science perspective, we know that humans deeply discount uncertain future downsides compared to short term certain upsides. If you are interested in this sort of stuff, I strongly suggest reading Mark Kleinman, particularly his work on “swift, certain, fair” as an effective means to address this population and challenge.

splitrocket 9y ago
Let me put it this way: the current “standard” criminal justice system is exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime, but those folks are not the population that in fact commit crimes.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal and only criminalize the activity of people not like them.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    > More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal This is true by definition. Anyway, what sort of violent crime do you propose to legalize?
    - lostlogin 9y ago
      Here is one that is fraught where I live - disciplining children with a smack. Many people think hitting children in a disciplinary context should be legal.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Hitting or smacking? Smacks are a very limited subset of hits.
      - bradknowles 9y ago
        How do you define a “smack” versus a “hit”?
        stordoff 9y ago
        You probably also need to consider things like how often is physical discipline being used, and is it actual discipline or just an excuse for abuse.
        ygaf 9y ago
        What is more wrong - a parent physically abusing their child when they feel like it (bear in mind the parent is also taking care of said child)? a parent bound by society reduced to moaning at their child (think kids under 10) hoping to control them? I know which is more perverse.
        DanBC 9y ago
        You don't. All forms of hitting children are abusive.
        dane-pgp 9y ago
        Shouting at, or ignoring, children is also (emotionally) abusive. Should we lock up parents who ever act in one of those ways towards their children? Also, what about when children hit their siblings, or their parents, or their class mates? I don't think that locking these children up is conducive to their welfare either.
- weberc2 9y ago
  To play devil's advocate, maybe the system is very, very good as evidenced by all of the people who aren't running around committing crimes. In other words, survivorship bias.
  - olavk 9y ago
    To verify if this is the case, you should compare incarceration rate and crime rate with otherwise similar countries.
- singlow 9y ago
  Tautology - People who are effectively deterred from committing crimes do not commit crimes. The system may be very effective at deterring many would-be criminals. Any system will be ineffective against some subset and so this statement would still apply. Under any system, most crime will be committed by those whom that system does not effectively deter.
  - splitrocket 9y ago
    Yes, true. So, in order to improve the system and reduce crime, you need to understand those who are currently not effectively deterred. More of the same is not going to work if you hope to improve outcomes.
    - Anon1096 9y ago
      But you don't want people who currently aren't committing crimes to begin doing so. Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        That seems to start from the assumption that everyone would commit crime if they could.
        oddlyaromatic 9y ago
        They specifically referred to the "deterred subset" ... which is much smaller then "everyone". In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty. > Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed? This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.
  - WhitneyLand 9y ago
- evgen 9y ago
  In the minds of many people the purpose of the system is not entirely to deter crime; some criminals will not be deterred and the secondary purpose of the system is to segregate such people from society by placing them into little boxes until the system decides they are no longer a danger to the rest of us.
  - splitrocket 9y ago
    So are you saying that the solution is to lock up these people for life? Because I hope that’s not what you are saying.
    - dsacco 9y ago
      You hope that’s not what the commenter is saying, but what is your proposal instead? We can put significant effort into understanding criminals, for the purposes of both preemptive treatment and reactive rehabilitation, but this is not likely to eradicate crime. What do you suppose we should do with criminals who continue to commit violent or disruptive crimes in perpetuity? To clarify, I think the system could improve: extremely long sentences may not need to be issued for first time offenders, even if they are very serious. But I don’t think the system can remove permanent sentences if criminals exhibit a clear predilection that is resistent to all known forms of treatment.
      - splitrocket 9y ago
        http://www.swiftcertainfair.com http://www.swiftcertainfair.com Been studied, replicated, and thoroughly tested. It’s just one option as well. There are many many more.
        dsacco 9y ago
        Do you mind summarizing what that is a bit? I’d like to read about it, but either the link isn’t working for me (I’m on mobile) or it doesn’t contain much information aside from the homepage.
coleifer 9y ago
Prison is a deterrent, certainly, but it also exists to keep violent folks away from the rest of society so they can't do more harm.
- splitrocket 9y ago
  This study indicates that incarceration, at least as it is currently implemented, is emphatically not a deterrent for repeat violent offenders. As for the public safety element, yes, but these people mostly weren’t locked up for life. What this shows, at least, in my opinion, is that much more intensive psychological and therapeutic interventions are needed, because if anything, incarceration as it currently exists would seem to exacerbate the problem.
  - zarkov99 9y ago
    Or, more simply, you could incarcerate repeat offenders for longer periods of time.
    - mapgrep 9y ago
      What is the concrete benefit of simplicity in this context, and how do you quantify whatever that benefit is? Becaue the cost is both clear and intensive: Depriving a human being of liberty for additional years or decades. This should be done only when absolutely neccessary, should it not? We disapprove of imprisonable offenses intensely, but these are still human beings, with rights. It seems to me a humane system does not inflict thousands of cumulative additional incarceration years merely to keep the implementation of justice “simple.”
      - zarkov99 9y ago
        Simple in the sense that if you can identify this 1%, keeping them locked up or otherwise away from the rest of society longer will very effectively reduce crime. There is no way that therapy is going to be as effective. We are talking about repeated violent offenders here, really dangerous individuals. Of course they are still people but their happiness is secondary to keeping them from repeatedly inflicting harm on innocents.
WhitneyLand 9y ago
>we encode our own motivations and desires as the impetus I don’t see how that’s true. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, the system was encoded based on what the designers knew about motivation and desires at the time? The fact that what they knew was based on their own motivations seems incidental. I doubt if they had the perfect formula evidenced and understandable to them at the time, that they would have intentionally ignored it to still encode it in their own image. So we can really boil it down to, people didn’t understand human nature as well when these systems were created. Then, even as better understanding evolved and continues to improve, the problem of inertia and entrenched thinking works against change. From that we can conclude one of the biggest problems with the criminal justice system is, simply that it’s impeded in the exact same way so many other systems are. edit after comment: Point is the description of the problem seems to imply pretentious motivations, when the simplest explanation is they just didn’t know how things worked at the time.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > The fact that what they knew was based on their own motivations seems incidental. I doubt if they had the perfect formula evidenced and understandable to them at the time, that they would have intentionally ignored it to still encode it in their own image. My understanding of the comment you’re responding to is that the nature of human experience precludes that ideal understanding, not that people would purposely ignore it. The point appears to be that humans encounter intrinsic difficulty in understanding the myriad idiosyncratic motivations of others in the species, not that they deliberately don’t want to understand it. In other words: I don’t think you and the parent commenter are disagreeing.
  - WhitneyLand 9y ago
    I certainly disagree the nature of human experience precludes ideal understanding. My point is the comment suggests almost an egocentric process, i.e. modeling a system in our own image, when actually it’s explained by simple ignorance.
    - dsacco 9y ago
ComputerGuru 9y ago
From a purely scientific point of view (since that is what you are espousing), you can't make the comment you just did without proving that without the threat of jail time this subset of the population would not be committing even more crimes even more often. Additionally, speaking as someone that agrees with the scientific premise of your argument, any alternative would be a trade-off, i.e. the percentage of the population that are not committing crimes at all would need to remain sufficiently deterred, which may change when the deterrent does.

splitrocket 9y ago

Let me put it this way: the current “standard” criminal justice system is exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime, but those folks are not the population that in fact commit crimes.

saas_co_de 9y ago
> exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal and only criminalize the activity of people not like them.
- weberc2 9y ago
  > More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal This is true by definition. Anyway, what sort of violent crime do you propose to legalize?
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    Here is one that is fraught where I live - disciplining children with a smack. Many people think hitting children in a disciplinary context should be legal.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Hitting or smacking? Smacks are a very limited subset of hits.
    - bradknowles 9y ago
      How do you define a “smack” versus a “hit”?
      - stordoff 9y ago
        You probably also need to consider things like how often is physical discipline being used, and is it actual discipline or just an excuse for abuse.
        ygaf 9y ago
        What is more wrong - a parent physically abusing their child when they feel like it (bear in mind the parent is also taking care of said child)? a parent bound by society reduced to moaning at their child (think kids under 10) hoping to control them? I know which is more perverse.
      - DanBC 9y ago
        You don't. All forms of hitting children are abusive.
        dane-pgp 9y ago
        Shouting at, or ignoring, children is also (emotionally) abusive. Should we lock up parents who ever act in one of those ways towards their children? Also, what about when children hit their siblings, or their parents, or their class mates? I don't think that locking these children up is conducive to their welfare either.
weberc2 9y ago
To play devil's advocate, maybe the system is very, very good as evidenced by all of the people who aren't running around committing crimes. In other words, survivorship bias.
- olavk 9y ago
  To verify if this is the case, you should compare incarceration rate and crime rate with otherwise similar countries.
singlow 9y ago
Tautology - People who are effectively deterred from committing crimes do not commit crimes. The system may be very effective at deterring many would-be criminals. Any system will be ineffective against some subset and so this statement would still apply. Under any system, most crime will be committed by those whom that system does not effectively deter.
- splitrocket 9y ago
  Yes, true. So, in order to improve the system and reduce crime, you need to understand those who are currently not effectively deterred. More of the same is not going to work if you hope to improve outcomes.
  - Anon1096 9y ago
    But you don't want people who currently aren't committing crimes to begin doing so. Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      That seems to start from the assumption that everyone would commit crime if they could.
      - oddlyaromatic 9y ago
        They specifically referred to the "deterred subset" ... which is much smaller then "everyone". In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty. > Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed? This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.
- WhitneyLand 9y ago
evgen 9y ago
In the minds of many people the purpose of the system is not entirely to deter crime; some criminals will not be deterred and the secondary purpose of the system is to segregate such people from society by placing them into little boxes until the system decides they are no longer a danger to the rest of us.
- splitrocket 9y ago
  So are you saying that the solution is to lock up these people for life? Because I hope that’s not what you are saying.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    You hope that’s not what the commenter is saying, but what is your proposal instead? We can put significant effort into understanding criminals, for the purposes of both preemptive treatment and reactive rehabilitation, but this is not likely to eradicate crime. What do you suppose we should do with criminals who continue to commit violent or disruptive crimes in perpetuity? To clarify, I think the system could improve: extremely long sentences may not need to be issued for first time offenders, even if they are very serious. But I don’t think the system can remove permanent sentences if criminals exhibit a clear predilection that is resistent to all known forms of treatment.
    - splitrocket 9y ago
      http://www.swiftcertainfair.com http://www.swiftcertainfair.com Been studied, replicated, and thoroughly tested. It’s just one option as well. There are many many more.
      - dsacco 9y ago
        Do you mind summarizing what that is a bit? I’d like to read about it, but either the link isn’t working for me (I’m on mobile) or it doesn’t contain much information aside from the homepage.

coleifer 9y ago

Prison is a deterrent, certainly, but it also exists to keep violent folks away from the rest of society so they can't do more harm.

splitrocket 9y ago
This study indicates that incarceration, at least as it is currently implemented, is emphatically not a deterrent for repeat violent offenders. As for the public safety element, yes, but these people mostly weren’t locked up for life. What this shows, at least, in my opinion, is that much more intensive psychological and therapeutic interventions are needed, because if anything, incarceration as it currently exists would seem to exacerbate the problem.
- zarkov99 9y ago
  Or, more simply, you could incarcerate repeat offenders for longer periods of time.
  - mapgrep 9y ago
    What is the concrete benefit of simplicity in this context, and how do you quantify whatever that benefit is? Becaue the cost is both clear and intensive: Depriving a human being of liberty for additional years or decades. This should be done only when absolutely neccessary, should it not? We disapprove of imprisonable offenses intensely, but these are still human beings, with rights. It seems to me a humane system does not inflict thousands of cumulative additional incarceration years merely to keep the implementation of justice “simple.”
    - zarkov99 9y ago
      Simple in the sense that if you can identify this 1%, keeping them locked up or otherwise away from the rest of society longer will very effectively reduce crime. There is no way that therapy is going to be as effective. We are talking about repeated violent offenders here, really dangerous individuals. Of course they are still people but their happiness is secondary to keeping them from repeatedly inflicting harm on innocents.

WhitneyLand 9y ago

>we encode our own motivations and desires as the impetus I don’t see how that’s true. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, the system was encoded based on what the designers knew about motivation and desires at the time? The fact that what they knew was based on their own motivations seems incidental. I doubt if they had the perfect formula evidenced and understandable to them at the time, that they would have intentionally ignored it to still encode it in their own image. So we can really boil it down to, people didn’t understand human nature as well when these systems were created. Then, even as better understanding evolved and continues to improve, the problem of inertia and entrenched thinking works against change. From that we can conclude one of the biggest problems with the criminal justice system is, simply that it’s impeded in the exact same way so many other systems are. edit after comment: Point is the description of the problem seems to imply pretentious motivations, when the simplest explanation is they just didn’t know how things worked at the time.

dsacco 9y ago
> The fact that what they knew was based on their own motivations seems incidental. I doubt if they had the perfect formula evidenced and understandable to them at the time, that they would have intentionally ignored it to still encode it in their own image. My understanding of the comment you’re responding to is that the nature of human experience precludes that ideal understanding, not that people would purposely ignore it. The point appears to be that humans encounter intrinsic difficulty in understanding the myriad idiosyncratic motivations of others in the species, not that they deliberately don’t want to understand it. In other words: I don’t think you and the parent commenter are disagreeing.
- WhitneyLand 9y ago
  I certainly disagree the nature of human experience precludes ideal understanding. My point is the comment suggests almost an egocentric process, i.e. modeling a system in our own image, when actually it’s explained by simple ignorance.
  - dsacco 9y ago

ComputerGuru 9y ago

From a purely scientific point of view (since that is what you are espousing), you can't make the comment you just did without proving that without the threat of jail time this subset of the population would not be committing even more crimes even more often. Additionally, speaking as someone that agrees with the scientific premise of your argument, any alternative would be a trade-off, i.e. the percentage of the population that are not committing crimes at all would need to remain sufficiently deterred, which may change when the deterrent does.