Crimes that are harder to catch should be more harshly punished
Please, don’t do this.
Your reasoning amounts to “we need to increase the punishment to compensate for all the false negatives”.
If the only kind of error that existed was false negatives, you might have a point. But it isn’t. False positives exist too. And crimes that are harder to catch are probably going to have more false positives. Harsher punishments also create bigger incentives for either false positives, or for standards that make everyone guilty of serious crimes all the time, thus letting anyone be punished at the whim of the moderators while pretending that they are not.
Agree that you need to account for false positives (and the above math didn’t do that)!
Sometimes crimes are harder to catch, but you can still prove they happened without much risk of false positives. I do sure agree that the kind of misbehavior discussed in this post is at risk of false positives, so taking that into account is quite important for finding the right punishment threshold. Generally appreciate the reminder of that.
Sometimes what makes a crime “harder to catch” is the risk of false positives. If you don’t consider someone to have “been caught” unless your confidence that they did the crime is very high, then, so long as you’re calibrated, your false positive rate is very low. But holding off on punishment in cases where you do not have very high confidence might mean that, for most instances where someone commits the crime, they are not punished.
Please, don’t do this.
Your reasoning amounts to “we need to increase the punishment to compensate for all the false negatives”.
If the only kind of error that existed was false negatives, you might have a point. But it isn’t. False positives exist too. And crimes that are harder to catch are probably going to have more false positives. Harsher punishments also create bigger incentives for either false positives, or for standards that make everyone guilty of serious crimes all the time, thus letting anyone be punished at the whim of the moderators while pretending that they are not.
Agree that you need to account for false positives (and the above math didn’t do that)!
Sometimes crimes are harder to catch, but you can still prove they happened without much risk of false positives. I do sure agree that the kind of misbehavior discussed in this post is at risk of false positives, so taking that into account is quite important for finding the right punishment threshold. Generally appreciate the reminder of that.
Sometimes what makes a crime “harder to catch” is the risk of false positives. If you don’t consider someone to have “been caught” unless your confidence that they did the crime is very high, then, so long as you’re calibrated, your false positive rate is very low. But holding off on punishment in cases where you do not have very high confidence might mean that, for most instances where someone commits the crime, they are not punished.