This is the kind of implicit lying that seems pervasive today and I am so tired of it.
This alone is sufficient evidence of their malicious intent and should be enough to punish the people responsible for trying to ruin an innocent person's life.
But it's not gonna happen because the law is not written to punish people using it maliciously against others and most people simply won't care anyway.
I believe this behaviour is normalized in prosecution. Accusing someone or a crime? Raid their kitchen and bag every knife as a weapon and every household chemical as explosive precursors to get the jury on your side.
Think of organizations as a kind of AI. A prosecutorial organization can take on a so-called "paperclip maximizing" dysfunction just like a standard AI. Converts the whole world to paperclips.
The solution actually is to gate the specialist AI's through a generalist process. That's what court is supposed to be, but court is less effective in the modern world.
I really like this framing. It also reinforces my opinion that the thing most like the proverbial AI that turns the entire world into paperclips by far humans. It's a bit fascinating if you look at it from a psychological / mythopoeic point of view: are villains _always_ the evil part of ourselves, even when they're not human?
A do believe causing harm without justification should automatically result in punishment that causes the same harm to the abuser multiplied by a multiplicative constant but 10x is probably too much. Usually, I'd suggest something between 1.5 and 2.
He was facing 10 years IIRC, giving them 15 seems reasonable.
This constant should increase with repeated abuse so people who are habitual offenders get effectively removed from society.
Some countries already have something similar, like the 3 strikes law, but that has issues with discontinuity (the 3rd offense is sometimes punished too severely if minor). I'd prefer a continuous system, ideally one that is based on actual harm.
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We also need mechanisms where civil servants (or anybody else, really) can challenge any law on the basis of being stupid. If the law is written so that it prohibits any amount (or an amount so small that it is harmless, even if he imported dozens of these samples), it is stupid and should be removed.
if a psycho run to stab someone, but a car blinks in his face as the knife is just about to hit his victim, causing him to miss and hit only the arm, why should he get a discount?
> This is the kind of implicit lying that seems pervasive today and I am so tired of it.
I am so tired of it, too. Toying with the legal boundary of lying in communication is pathological, maybe even sociopathic.
Everyone knows when someone is doing it, too. We just don’t have the means to punish it, even in the courts.
The whole “I won’t get punished so I’m doing all the immoral things” habit is foul to begin with. I don’t know how, but I hope our society can get over it. As things stand, there is no way to outlaw being an asshole.
There are glimmers of hope - like Wales trying to ban lying in politics. But of course, the punishment has to be proportional to the offense, not just a slap on the wrist.
If I wanted to take things to an extreme, I'd ask why laws even need to be so specific about which offenses lead to which punishments and which offenses are even punishable in the first place (the "what is not forbidden is allowed" principle).
In theory, you could cover them more generally by saying that any time someone intentionally causes harm to others (without a valid reason), he will be caused proportional harm in return. Then all you need is a conversion table to prison time, fines, etc.
With lying, all you would need to prove is that the person lied intentionally and quantify the expected harm which would have been caused if the lie was successful (regardless if it actually was or not - intent is what matters).
As a bonus, it would force everyone to acknowledge the full amount of harm caused. For example, rape usually leads to lifelong consequences for the victim but not the attacker. In this system, such inconsistency, some would call it injustice, would be obvious and it would be much easier for anyone to call for rectification.
"without a valid reason" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Not only would this idea be impractical and highly subjective, determining what a valid reason is, is the same problem as defining the Law in the first place.
Can you insult someone? Can you say something wrong that you thought was right ("the lion cage is locked") that someone is injured from? What is their duties in checking the info they get is correct? Is there a min wage or not? What value is it? Does it change on city or state? Can under-age people sign contracts? Can they vote?
I never said we didn't need rules, just that when they are too specific, people tend to follow the letter but break the spirit of the rule.
(Sidenote, one deeply ingrained idea is that the law is somehow special compared to other rules. The only real difference is that the law is enforced by violence while other rules are not.)
I was also talking about criminal law so the questions about minimum wage, contracts and voting are irrelevant regardless if you want specific or general rules about punishments.
You don't have to lie to tell a lie. The media have honed well this skill over decades.
"Coffee study found that it TRIPLES, your chance of developing a terrifying form of colon cancer! A 300% increase!"
In reality the study had a sample size of 10 and the odds were for an extremely rare form of lung cancer you have a 0.0003% chance of developing anyway. But now most readers go tell their co-workers "they did a study and found that coffee actually gives you colon cancer".
What I've noticed is that for a lot of people, if you do something wrong through a sufficient number of steps, they feel like the severity is lower.
The opposite is in fact true - causing harm through multiple steps shows intent and the severity is in fact higher.
If a journalist doesn't understand statistical significance, he is either incompetent or malicious. Either way he needs to be removed from his little position of power and if the incompetence is sufficient or the malice proven, he needs to be punished.
Apathetic voters who'll still vote for a terrible party just because they hate the same people the politicians say they do?
MIB put it so succinctly, large groups of humans are exceedingly dumb. It's almost like our individual intelligence drops, perhaps we evolved those effects from tribalism so that organising larger groups was more effective. And perhaps that effect is broken now that we organise in much larger groups than we ever evolved for.
"A bad plan now is better than a good plan later."
People have evolved to unify behind a strong (and aggressive) leader because historically the biggest threat to one's tribe (and therefore genes) were other tribes. You might not be in the right but it doesn't matter to evolution, what matters is that you kill the people trying to kill you, regardless of who started is.
This primitive drive is why every time the going gets tough, people elect charismatic and abusive leaders - because their lizard brain wants to fight an external enemy and abusers are good at giving people that enemy (Jews for Hitler, immigrants and gays and anybody who is slightly different for Trump, ...).
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The issue is that for most of our evolution, such a leader could units hundreds, maybe thousands of people and if a tribe behaved aggressively and unjustly towards its neighbors, those neighbors would units against it and "keep it in check" (which is a euphemism for fighting and killing them).
But these days you have 3 superpowers, 2 of which are dictatorships and the 3rd is on track to become one. There is nobody to keep them in check.
> There are glimmers of hope - like Wales trying to ban lying in politics
Lol. Give me a break. This is like all the "combat disinformation" bullshit. You claim something is a lie or disinformation because your government appointed expert said so and jail someone. When years later it's undeniable that you were the one lying you said "we did the best with what we had at the Time".
Naive solutions only give more power to those in power and are abused routinely.
Obviously all available tools will by used by bad people. What we need is:
1) Good people to also use those tools - a lot of self-proclaimed good people think some tools are bad and therefore they won't use them. But tools are just tools, what makes it good or bad is who you use it against / for what reason.
A simple example is killing. Many people will have a knee-jerk reaction and say it's always bad. And they you start asking them questions and they begrudgingly admit that it's OK in self defense. And then you ask more questions and you come up a bunch of examples where logically it's the right tool to use but it's outside of the Overton window for them to admit it.
A good way to reveal people's true morality is movies. People will cheer for the good guys taking revenge, killing a rapist, overthrowing a corrupt government, etc. Because they naturally understand those things to be right, they've just been conditioned to not say it.
2) When bad people hurt someone using a tool, we need the tool to backfire when caught.
Obviously, to jail someone, the lying needs to be proven "beyond reasonable doubt" - i.e. Blackstone's ratio. Oh and no government appointed experts who get to dictate the truth. If the truth is not known with sufficient certainty, then neither side can be punished.
This threshold should be sufficient so that if it later turns out the person was not in fact lying, the trial is reevaluated and it will show that the prosecution manipulated evidence to manipulate the judge into believing the evidence was sufficient.
Alternatively, since incentives dictate how people play the game, we can decide that 10:1 is an acceptable error ratio and automatically punish prosecutors who have an error rate higher than that and jail them for the excess time.
So yes, if A jails B and it later turns out this was done through either sufficient incompetence or malice, then A should face the same punishment.
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I am sure given more time, we can come up with less "naive" and more reliable systems. What we know for sure is that the current system is not working - polarization is rising, anti-social disorders are more common, inequality is rising, censorship in the west increased massively in the last few years, etc.
So either we come up with ways to reverse the trend or it will keep getting worse until it reaches some threshold above which society will rapidly and violently change (either more countries fall into authoritarianism or civil war erupts, neither of which is desirable).
Just because something doesn't work doesn't mean anything you propose will be better. That's how we get security theater or worse, the war on drugs.
> So either we come up with ways to reverse the trend or it will keep getting worse until it reaches some threshold above which society will rapidly and violently change (either more countries fall into authoritarianism or civil war erupts, neither of which is desirable
Bullshit. That's your thesis. But hey, if you want to start that violent revolution to overthrow the government do post about it here. I'm sure you'll be successful in this day and age.
You first act as if the current situation is the best we can do by pretending that no alternative can be better by implying that any alternative is naive.
I attempt to be reasonable and explain in good faith.
Yet then you admit the current situation doesn't work while at the same time continue acting as if a solution is impossible by pretending any attempt at a solution is worse without actually giving any specific criticisms.
On top, you:
1) (Probably intentionally) misrepresent what I said - I never said I wanted a violent revolution, I warn about it.
2) Mock me.
EDIT: Oh and I just noticed you attacked another commenter for absolutely no reason[0]. I would very much like to understand your goals because without further explanation, just going by your behavior here, they seem diametrically opposed to a better society for no valid reason.
This alone is sufficient evidence of their malicious intent and should be enough to punish the people responsible for trying to ruin an innocent person's life.
But it's not gonna happen because the law is not written to punish people using it maliciously against others and most people simply won't care anyway.