That sentence leaped out as me as the crucial error that plunged the article into confusion. The words “prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.” are a massive failure of natural language where two very different ideas get referred to by a single ambiguous phrase.
Start by recalling Daniel Dennett’s warnings against thought experiments. We set them up by saying: imagine X. We make a vague and half-hearted effort to imagine X. Then we draw the conclusion that we believed in all along. We seldom put the effort into our thought experiments that would let the logic of the scenario drive us to an unexpected conclusion.
Let us try to take Dennett’s warning seriously. Fred goes into prison on Friday saying “Ofcourse I glassed the fucking bitch! That cunt deserved it.” He comes out on Sunday saying “Call me Frederick. Call me Frederick the Fabulous. I hereby renounce my past life. It was so hopelessly vulgar. I will never be able to live down the shame of it, but I will strive mightily, for as long as God keeps me on earth, to be a shining example of penitence and good taste.”
The psycho-surgery and neural implants had done their job and Fred really is rehabilitated over the weekend. Where is the old Fred, who seldom got through a rugby match without being sent off, who lost girlfriends through spending all his money on beer, and whose dangerous, manly allure won him new ones, quickly, if not for long? Is this new Federick even straight? Why is he playing chess on Friday nights. People are shocked, disturbed, creeped-out. The state psychiatrist is adamant that it is the same person and has old school records to prove it. Rough old Fred had been the strongest chess player in his school, aged 9. The friends who don’t recognise him now, didn’t know him then.
The folk understanding is that the elite are erasing prisoners completely, effectively stealing their bodies to provide homes for completely new people who subscribe to elite values. The elite understanding is that criminality comes from developmental wrong turns that are being rolled back and that rehabilitation involves rolling back the wrong turns and fasted forwarding the criminal to become the person be should have become all along.
Whoops! I’ve think I’ve over done taking the thought experiment seriously. In Crowe’s brave new world people are indeed upset if prisoners go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday, but for the opposite reason. In PhilGoetz’s version they are upset because there is no punishment. In Crowe’s version rehabilitation is a kind of death penalty, but with extra nastiness, and way too harsh.
OK, that is half my story. There is a plain, flat, literal meaning to “prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.” as vividly imagined above. The idea that people would be unhappy with the lack of punishment strikes me as implausible speculation.
The other half of my story concerns the cynical, ironic meaning of “prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.”. Politicians want to save money so they cut jail terms. They head off criticisms that crime will rise by denying that it is a cost saving measure. They are ring fencing the money they save on shorter jail terms and spending it on new, scientific rehabilitation. Twice the reform, in half the time. It is mostly lies. The new therapies don’t work. They are only rolled out in two showcase prisons, with hand picked prisoners who have already reformed. The savings are mostly spent bailing out the banking system. Meanwhile, other politicians are rather pleased that crime is rising. That means they can persuade the public that more money must be spent on police and criminal justice and law enforcement. And that means that those politicians have a free hand to pass laws against vice and eliminate civil liberties and generally become the stern paternalistic father to all their children, err, adult citizens.
Meanwhile, the ordinary bloke, trying to get by in a rough part of town, where his flat gets burgled and his car gets stolen, knows exactly what is going on because he has seen it all before. Fred goes into prison on Friday, emerges rehabilitated on Sunday, burgles a flat on Monday and steals a car on Tuesday.
Of course people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday, because the cynical and ironic meaning is the only meaning they have for those words.
Start by recalling Daniel Dennett’s warnings against thought experiments. We set them up by saying: imagine X. We make a vague and half-hearted effort to imagine X. Then we draw the conclusion that we believed in all along. We seldom put the effort into our thought experiments that would let the logic of the scenario drive us to an unexpected conclusion.
I wouldn’t call that a warning against thought experiments, but a warning to do take them seriously and do them well. After all, Dennett himself does thought experiments. And of course, your comment does a thought experiment.
This seems like an extremely unfair and disingenuous comparison, assuming that one believes the current system also rehabilitates people, since we don’t generally assume Fred has been ego-executed during the 10 year sentence he would have had otherwise.
If the outcome is the same then why would it be creepy for this to happen over the course of a weekend instead of 10 years? After all, either way, Fred is “a shining example of penitence and good taste” and has a sudden interest in chess...
I’ve often encouraged people to give someone a more charitable interpretation. But I haven’t had to ask someone not to deliberately search out the least-charitable interpretation… until now.
The idea that people would be unhappy with the lack of punishment strikes me as implausible speculation.
If you’d said, “most people”, I wouldn’t agree, but I could imagine you were thinking it through carefully. But it’s “implausible” that people want revenge on criminals? No. I find that implausible.
That sentence leaped out as me as the crucial error that plunged the article into confusion.
So when I say P, it’s speculation; but when you say not(P), it’s definite?
I suspect that we are talking past each other because of a cross-cultural confusion. There are hidden assumptions here that we do not share. I’m going to try and step back a bit and to bring my subconscious assumptions to the surface.
I accept Robin Hanson’s notion of Homo Hypocritus: Man the sly rule bender. Indeed I push on a little further.
Mr. A takes advantage of Mr. B with a little sly rule bending. Later Mr. B gets his own back with a little sly rule bending of his own. Later still Mr. A tries it on again, but Mr. B knows how the trick is done and resists, becoming Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener. I see Man The Sly Rule Bender and and Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener as two sides of the same coin, action and reaction.
To see how this plays out in real life consider the case of Abdelbaset_al-Megrahi. His imprisonment, after being convicted of the Lockerbie Bombing, was causing political difficulties with Libya. It would be expedient to release him, but how could it be justified? Since he had protstate cancer it was possible to declare that he only had 3 months to live and to release him on compassionate grounds according to existing rules.
He is still alive eighteen months later, so round one to the Man The Sly Rule Breaker. How can Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener push back? He could try insisting on accountability, with some kind of sanction being taken against doctors who turn out to be excessively pessimistic about the prognosis of candidates for compassionate release.
Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener loses round two; there is no accountability for these kinds of decisions. Why does Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener usually lose? A glib answer is that when we have power we turn into Man The Sly Rule Breaker because we are in a position to abuse discretion. When we lose power we turn into Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener because we object to those who have displaced us abusing the power of discretion that they have won from us. Perhaps, but I would rather say that I just don’t know and leave that as a thread to pull on another time.
Finally, Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener falls back on opposing release on compassionate grounds altogether. He loses round one when doesn’t believe that the prisoner is close to death. He loses round two when the prisoner lives on and no-one is called to account. So he falls back to fight a rear-guard on the grounds that compassionate release is immoral because it undermines the sanctity of punishment or something, blah blah. It is not about compassion, it is about rule bending.
I see “rehabilitation” as a tool for rule bending. The white kid with the rich father gets rehabilitated and the black kid with no father doesn’t. “Rehabilitation” is about connections and prejudice. The question of whether the offender will commit more crimes in the future doesn’t come in to it.
It is entirely natural that “Most people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.” because they hate the idea of the white kid with the rich father having immunity, being sent to prison on Friday, declared “rehabilitated” on Sunday, and back to stealing on Monday. They would love to be able to say: we don’t believe in this so called rehabilitation. However Man The Sly Rule Bender usually wins this fight. The losers turn into Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener. They cannot get honesty before the event about whether the rehabilitation is genuine, they cannot get accountability after the event when it turns out that the rehabilitation was not genuine, so they find themselves backed into a corner where they must fight on the grounds punishment is necessary to uphold the moral order beyond mere future conduct, blah, blah.
The big weakness I can see in my position is that I need to claim that the battle between Man The Sly Rule Bender and Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener is a subconscious battle. On the conscious level no-one is admitting that the rehabilitation doesn’t work. The rehabilitator is in denial because his job depends on rehabilitation actually working. Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener is in denial because he has already lost two political battles and is making his last stand. I’m skating on thin ice here.
I hope I have managed at this attempt to explain why I find
Most people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.
so problematic. I read it and think that I am reading a subtle piece of two-level psychology. On the subconscious level Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener is recognising that he has lost the political fight for honesty about the fact that rehabilitation does not work. So the conscious mind is being briefed to just accept that it does work and fight on, on high-faluting moral ground that a cruel punishment lets the criminal treat it a penance and thus regain his personnel dignity or something like that, the usual tosh.
So I read on and find myself a stranger in a strange land.
Upvoted for this sentence alone.
That sentence leaped out as me as the crucial error that plunged the article into confusion. The words “prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.” are a massive failure of natural language where two very different ideas get referred to by a single ambiguous phrase.
Start by recalling Daniel Dennett’s warnings against thought experiments. We set them up by saying: imagine X. We make a vague and half-hearted effort to imagine X. Then we draw the conclusion that we believed in all along. We seldom put the effort into our thought experiments that would let the logic of the scenario drive us to an unexpected conclusion.
Let us try to take Dennett’s warning seriously. Fred goes into prison on Friday saying “Ofcourse I glassed the fucking bitch! That cunt deserved it.” He comes out on Sunday saying “Call me Frederick. Call me Frederick the Fabulous. I hereby renounce my past life. It was so hopelessly vulgar. I will never be able to live down the shame of it, but I will strive mightily, for as long as God keeps me on earth, to be a shining example of penitence and good taste.”
The psycho-surgery and neural implants had done their job and Fred really is rehabilitated over the weekend. Where is the old Fred, who seldom got through a rugby match without being sent off, who lost girlfriends through spending all his money on beer, and whose dangerous, manly allure won him new ones, quickly, if not for long? Is this new Federick even straight? Why is he playing chess on Friday nights. People are shocked, disturbed, creeped-out. The state psychiatrist is adamant that it is the same person and has old school records to prove it. Rough old Fred had been the strongest chess player in his school, aged 9. The friends who don’t recognise him now, didn’t know him then.
The folk understanding is that the elite are erasing prisoners completely, effectively stealing their bodies to provide homes for completely new people who subscribe to elite values. The elite understanding is that criminality comes from developmental wrong turns that are being rolled back and that rehabilitation involves rolling back the wrong turns and fasted forwarding the criminal to become the person be should have become all along.
Whoops! I’ve think I’ve over done taking the thought experiment seriously. In Crowe’s brave new world people are indeed upset if prisoners go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday, but for the opposite reason. In PhilGoetz’s version they are upset because there is no punishment. In Crowe’s version rehabilitation is a kind of death penalty, but with extra nastiness, and way too harsh.
OK, that is half my story. There is a plain, flat, literal meaning to “prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.” as vividly imagined above. The idea that people would be unhappy with the lack of punishment strikes me as implausible speculation.
The other half of my story concerns the cynical, ironic meaning of “prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.”. Politicians want to save money so they cut jail terms. They head off criticisms that crime will rise by denying that it is a cost saving measure. They are ring fencing the money they save on shorter jail terms and spending it on new, scientific rehabilitation. Twice the reform, in half the time. It is mostly lies. The new therapies don’t work. They are only rolled out in two showcase prisons, with hand picked prisoners who have already reformed. The savings are mostly spent bailing out the banking system. Meanwhile, other politicians are rather pleased that crime is rising. That means they can persuade the public that more money must be spent on police and criminal justice and law enforcement. And that means that those politicians have a free hand to pass laws against vice and eliminate civil liberties and generally become the stern paternalistic father to all their children, err, adult citizens.
Meanwhile, the ordinary bloke, trying to get by in a rough part of town, where his flat gets burgled and his car gets stolen, knows exactly what is going on because he has seen it all before. Fred goes into prison on Friday, emerges rehabilitated on Sunday, burgles a flat on Monday and steals a car on Tuesday.
Of course people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday, because the cynical and ironic meaning is the only meaning they have for those words.
I wouldn’t call that a warning against thought experiments, but a warning to do take them seriously and do them well. After all, Dennett himself does thought experiments. And of course, your comment does a thought experiment.
True, but it was a warning against the particular thought experiment in the comment that he had responded to.
This seems like an extremely unfair and disingenuous comparison, assuming that one believes the current system also rehabilitates people, since we don’t generally assume Fred has been ego-executed during the 10 year sentence he would have had otherwise.
If the outcome is the same then why would it be creepy for this to happen over the course of a weekend instead of 10 years? After all, either way, Fred is “a shining example of penitence and good taste” and has a sudden interest in chess...
I’ve often encouraged people to give someone a more charitable interpretation. But I haven’t had to ask someone not to deliberately search out the least-charitable interpretation… until now.
If you’d said, “most people”, I wouldn’t agree, but I could imagine you were thinking it through carefully. But it’s “implausible” that people want revenge on criminals? No. I find that implausible.
So when I say P, it’s speculation; but when you say not(P), it’s definite?
I suspect that we are talking past each other because of a cross-cultural confusion. There are hidden assumptions here that we do not share. I’m going to try and step back a bit and to bring my subconscious assumptions to the surface.
I accept Robin Hanson’s notion of Homo Hypocritus: Man the sly rule bender. Indeed I push on a little further.
Mr. A takes advantage of Mr. B with a little sly rule bending. Later Mr. B gets his own back with a little sly rule bending of his own. Later still Mr. A tries it on again, but Mr. B knows how the trick is done and resists, becoming Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener. I see Man The Sly Rule Bender and and Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener as two sides of the same coin, action and reaction.
To see how this plays out in real life consider the case of Abdelbaset_al-Megrahi. His imprisonment, after being convicted of the Lockerbie Bombing, was causing political difficulties with Libya. It would be expedient to release him, but how could it be justified? Since he had protstate cancer it was possible to declare that he only had 3 months to live and to release him on compassionate grounds according to existing rules.
He is still alive eighteen months later, so round one to the Man The Sly Rule Breaker. How can Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener push back? He could try insisting on accountability, with some kind of sanction being taken against doctors who turn out to be excessively pessimistic about the prognosis of candidates for compassionate release.
Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener loses round two; there is no accountability for these kinds of decisions. Why does Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener usually lose? A glib answer is that when we have power we turn into Man The Sly Rule Breaker because we are in a position to abuse discretion. When we lose power we turn into Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener because we object to those who have displaced us abusing the power of discretion that they have won from us. Perhaps, but I would rather say that I just don’t know and leave that as a thread to pull on another time.
Finally, Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener falls back on opposing release on compassionate grounds altogether. He loses round one when doesn’t believe that the prisoner is close to death. He loses round two when the prisoner lives on and no-one is called to account. So he falls back to fight a rear-guard on the grounds that compassionate release is immoral because it undermines the sanctity of punishment or something, blah blah. It is not about compassion, it is about rule bending.
I see “rehabilitation” as a tool for rule bending. The white kid with the rich father gets rehabilitated and the black kid with no father doesn’t. “Rehabilitation” is about connections and prejudice. The question of whether the offender will commit more crimes in the future doesn’t come in to it.
It is entirely natural that “Most people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday.” because they hate the idea of the white kid with the rich father having immunity, being sent to prison on Friday, declared “rehabilitated” on Sunday, and back to stealing on Monday. They would love to be able to say: we don’t believe in this so called rehabilitation. However Man The Sly Rule Bender usually wins this fight. The losers turn into Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener. They cannot get honesty before the event about whether the rehabilitation is genuine, they cannot get accountability after the event when it turns out that the rehabilitation was not genuine, so they find themselves backed into a corner where they must fight on the grounds punishment is necessary to uphold the moral order beyond mere future conduct, blah, blah.
The big weakness I can see in my position is that I need to claim that the battle between Man The Sly Rule Bender and Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener is a subconscious battle. On the conscious level no-one is admitting that the rehabilitation doesn’t work. The rehabilitator is in denial because his job depends on rehabilitation actually working. Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener is in denial because he has already lost two political battles and is making his last stand. I’m skating on thin ice here.
I hope I have managed at this attempt to explain why I find
so problematic. I read it and think that I am reading a subtle piece of two-level psychology. On the subconscious level Man The Stubborn Rule Stiffener is recognising that he has lost the political fight for honesty about the fact that rehabilitation does not work. So the conscious mind is being briefed to just accept that it does work and fight on, on high-faluting moral ground that a cruel punishment lets the criminal treat it a penance and thus regain his personnel dignity or something like that, the usual tosh.
So I read on and find myself a stranger in a strange land.
I think someone else on LW said it first.