Prayer has been disproven to work as per the Templeton study. The Templeton Foundation exists to fund research that demonstrates scientifically the validity of religious (particularly Christian, but they’re nominally nondenominational) belief.

The funny thing about a city like New York is that you actually have more privacy walking down a street with a half million other people than you have in a rural town.

No one in New York cares about you even enough to notice you. They walk past Naked Singing Cowboy without a sideward glance.

I do think that people who cannot be fixed (although I do think that’s a bit of a loaded word) should be removed from a context where they can do harm, and I’m including other people in correctional facilities in that.

That being said, I don’t think that prisons should be places of torture. American prisons are pretty bad, in large part because making them into places of suffering and violence feels right to people because the people subjected to those conditions deserve it due to their actions.

If teaching someone job skills while having them study ethics with Chidi in the evenings helps make someone less likely to reoffend, then I think that’s clearly the path we should take, because punishment for punishment’s sake isn’t ethical.

What do you think the overall cultural effect of that would be? Has capital punishment been broadly applied historically, and what was the environment like at the time?

The article says that that’s what the people being investigated claim. Taking it for themselves is a less serious charge than reselling it for a profit.

I think we are very much on the same page, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me about it.

I’m saying that if one of the purposes of system of justice is to reduce the impact of unjust behaviors (or crime) on society, then should we take the path with the highest payoff? Just theoretically, if we were to hand a stack of books by Rawls and Sandel and Parfitt to a rapist, and we were able to know with perfect knowledge that the person became a pure altruist and would never harm again, would they have “gotten away with it” (assuming no punishment occurred)?

If your position is that the raison d’etre of addressing an exhibited criminal activity is to prevent re-offense, then we’re in full agreement. If your major concern is that re-offense may still occur because of our imperfect knowledge, that’s where we can research which approaches are statistically more likely to result in reducing recidivism, and I can agree with that.

For any class of offenses, we should take the approach that most probably reduces both the rate of reoffence by the individual and reduces the incidence of that offense socially. I would agree to that.

We can dig through the efficacy of treatment programs, but just to get a feel for the kind of question we are trying to answer, how would you feel if we were to hand a book of moral philosophy to a rapist and were able to with perfect foresight tell that they would never rape again?

Would your first impression be that they got away with something, or that they were successfully reformed and do not require further punishment? I’m coming from a theory of justice angle here just for kicking things off.

Please expand on what you believe the approach to someone who has committed a rape should be, and why.

I am saying that scientifically reformative forms of justice result in reduced recidivism.

There’s basically three different motivations in criminal justice. The first is isolation - removing a dangerous member of society from an environment where they can do harm. That doesn’t mean the incarceration needs to be brutal, or even uncomfortable. You can encase them in carbonite or lock them in a room at the Ritz, because the goal of preventing additional harm is effected.

The second is restoration and reformation. Again, this runs the gamut from counseling to Clockwork Orange. This approach both prevents additional harm and restores an individual as a functioning member of society.

The third is punishment. Punishment itself has a few different motivations. The first is reformation, as in the above, but it does it’s job less efficiently than other, less ham-fisted methods. The second is disincentivizing other people from commuting a crime, either through fear of punishment or (in an economic sense) decreasing the net benefit of committing a crime such that a rational actor will decide not to do it. That one is a mixed bag in terms of effectiveness. The evidence does not support the proposal that harsher penalties reduce crime. The third is just balancing the karmic books - the idea that society must avenge itself violently against someone who caused crime, just because “they deserve it.” I’m pretty sure that last one lacks support from either a pragmatic or an ethical standpoint, but it does seem to be a major motivating factor in the American justice system.

If you could reduce the recidivism of rapists through counseling more than through jail, would you support counseling over jail?

That’s not how statistical analysis of correlation works. If chewing tobacco causes oral cancer rates to soar by a factor of ten, it doesn’t matter if only 35% of chewing tobacco users get oral cancer.

The xenophobia leading up to the vote is what makes it funny.

> Absolutely the second worst Adams we’ve ever had as President!

-Thomas Jefferson

I worked on AIX systems when I was first getting into computer work in the 1990s. The software was okay (honestly, Solaris was better imo) but we were running a token ring network and that was buggy as hell. They called them “broken ring networks” for a reason.

But man, I really did love that RISC architecture. It made assembly language feel simple and elegant rather than the cuneiform that was the iteration of the CISC chips at the time.

Are they weighting the more recent data more strongly to account for the distributions to change in a given direction over time?

Which is exactly what the jury should be allowed to do. It should be illegal to allow a jury to proceed under a misunderstanding of the law.

If I were a juror, I would advise my fellow jurors of anything and everything I could discover relative to the case, but it should be unlawful for a court to lie by omission like this.

German humor is no joking matter.

Americans will use any unit of measurement other than the metric system.

Which car company do you work for?

I’m just picturing her thinking to herself “Haha, got ‘em.”

In some cases the states distribute the money to affected individuals. In other cases such as the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, the money is used to offset the costs of medical care associated with smoking, as well as to fund public health anti-smoking campaigns. The MSA was a very broad-ranging agreement.

Some people think we should use the MSA as a blueprint for energy companies who used similar or identical strategies as the tobacco companies to block climate change information and legislation. It’s actually called the Tobacco Playbook, in which companies will use a range of strategies to sow seeds of doubt as well as pressure politicians to prevent reform.

Needless to say, that’s a fight we haven’t won yet.

The Dude : It's all a god damn fake, man. It's like Lenin said: you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh, you know...

Donny : I am the walrus.

He makes a solid point.