Y’know what occurred to me? There was a movie about an attempt to reduce recidivism and make sure people released from jail become law-abiding members of society.
What’s wrong with using movies or novels as starting points for the discussion? No one’s claiming that it’s true, after all. Where is the lie, where is the rationalist sin? Science fiction represents the author’s attempt to visualize the future; why not take advantage of the thinking that’s already been done on our behalf, instead of starting over?
Not every misstep in the precise dance of rationality consists of outright belief in a falsehood; there are subtler ways to go wrong.
That starting point of the discussion we are having is fiction: it is a proposal for a reform of the penitentiary system, the reform that does not exist and is unlikely to come to pass, at least in the near future.
And in this particular case the movie is but a finger pointing to something. Since it is non-obvious to at least some, I’ll spell it out: under the proposed reform jails have strong incentives to not let the released inmates re-offend. At the same time jails have a great deal of control over what happens to inmates in their custody. One easy way to prevent future criminal activity is to cripple people in some way.
Hey, wasn’t there a movie about a troublesome guy who got a lobotomy? :-P
This comment matches a pretty bad pattern. No doubt you’ve seen it too; e.g., “There were some people who tried to create an orderly society; they were called Nazis”.
That said, it’s definitely worth considering that prisons might find ways of reducing recidivism that we wouldn’t like.
Yes, it does, but why is the pattern bad? It’s a hint at the observation that the potential solution space includes not only rainbows and unicorns, but also some pretty ugly monsters.
In this particular case there is even no implication that the OP himself might belong to this class of ugly monsters, only that his proposed solution creates incentives to look around the solution space mentioned above...
In my mind, the prototypical instance of the pattern is essentially an attempt at the fallacious implication, “You want to create an orderly society; the Nazis wanted to create an orderly society; you’re a Nazi”.
How would you concisely express the idea of “wanting to create orderly societies can lead to bad consequences, we have historical examples, such as the Nazis” without that implication?
You might just have to go with the long form. People are accustomed to pretty bad debating behavior. It’d be great if they could be charitable enough to consider alternate possibilities in a venue like LW, but empirically they often do not.
To be fully clear, I didn’t intend an attack on you. I’ve upvoted your top post; it raises an important concern, and the way it’s expressed makes perfect sense if you don’t confuse it with similarly-phrased fallacious implications.
But even I downvoted it before I thought about it for five seconds, and I felt I had some insight to share into why that was such a common response.
If the Ludovico technique actually worked, it would certainly seem to be a less cruel option than prison. I would probably rather be Ludovico’d than spend, say, 10 years in prison.
Y’know what occurred to me? There was a movie about an attempt to reduce recidivism and make sure people released from jail become law-abiding members of society.
It was called Clockwork Orange.
“I try to avoid the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence.”
Yes, and..?
Did I assert something and said “This surely must be true, for that is how things happened in the Korova Milk Bar”?
That starting point of the discussion we are having is fiction: it is a proposal for a reform of the penitentiary system, the reform that does not exist and is unlikely to come to pass, at least in the near future.
And in this particular case the movie is but a finger pointing to something. Since it is non-obvious to at least some, I’ll spell it out: under the proposed reform jails have strong incentives to not let the released inmates re-offend. At the same time jails have a great deal of control over what happens to inmates in their custody. One easy way to prevent future criminal activity is to cripple people in some way.
Hey, wasn’t there a movie about a troublesome guy who got a lobotomy? :-P
This comment matches a pretty bad pattern. No doubt you’ve seen it too; e.g., “There were some people who tried to create an orderly society; they were called Nazis”.
That said, it’s definitely worth considering that prisons might find ways of reducing recidivism that we wouldn’t like.
Yes, it does, but why is the pattern bad? It’s a hint at the observation that the potential solution space includes not only rainbows and unicorns, but also some pretty ugly monsters.
In this particular case there is even no implication that the OP himself might belong to this class of ugly monsters, only that his proposed solution creates incentives to look around the solution space mentioned above...
In my mind, the prototypical instance of the pattern is essentially an attempt at the fallacious implication, “You want to create an orderly society; the Nazis wanted to create an orderly society; you’re a Nazi”.
How would you concisely express the idea of “wanting to create orderly societies can lead to bad consequences, we have historical examples, such as the Nazis” without that implication?
You might just have to go with the long form. People are accustomed to pretty bad debating behavior. It’d be great if they could be charitable enough to consider alternate possibilities in a venue like LW, but empirically they often do not.
To be fully clear, I didn’t intend an attack on you. I’ve upvoted your top post; it raises an important concern, and the way it’s expressed makes perfect sense if you don’t confuse it with similarly-phrased fallacious implications.
But even I downvoted it before I thought about it for five seconds, and I felt I had some insight to share into why that was such a common response.
That’s OK. I feel that a slight troll aroma tends to improve the complexity of the flavour :-D
If the Ludovico technique actually worked, it would certainly seem to be a less cruel option than prison. I would probably rather be Ludovico’d than spend, say, 10 years in prison.