Noticing I agree/resonate profoundly with everything in this thread, but also (based on everything I understand) I think this pithy statement that leads the thread is perhaps-confused, perhaps-misleading, perhaps-dangerous? (on its own)
Why punishing bad actors is hard to aim
11 tweets · April 2021 · 19 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
Which makes this yet a whole other different interesting move kind of like the one I pointed at a few hours ago. From my perspective, that is!
Part of what I find confusing about the whole thing is that the entire thread is indeed about the far-reaching consequences of bad actors, but way more the sort of thing I'd expect to read from someone who doesn't think more penalizing is really gonna help — which is my view.
Maybe this is (unconsciously) intentional? Designed to kinda pull people in who vibe with the initial statement, but then shift most of the emphasis onto a pretty different frame of the whole thing. Clever if so. Sry-not-sry if my thread blows ur cover🙃
Anyway, part of the whole issue about punishment is that many bad actors are very good at making sure the label "bad actor" gets applied to *other* people, not them.
which is a more general case of this:
Another issue with punishment is that it's really hard to steer! You can't aim it, all you can do is say "away from here!" But in high-dimensional spaces, that's almost everywhere. So it's not stable unless it has somewhere to arrive.
@visakanv *obviously* knows this thing about role-models I talked about with @Conaw. that's kind of his whole thing
re "reward is just the temporary relief of punishment" this is part of what's so important about developing self-respect if you have enough self-respect, others can't yank on you by promising respect in exchange for you doing something they want u don't
Anyway, it encourages me to see Visa also adding this important piece.
Which dovetails with the late James P. Carse's excellent articulation of the paradox of evil.