Comment by delish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delish | Hacker News Reader

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> but it doesn't make them not-bad.

I disagree. I've never found a coherent absolute ethical framework. Not even "Don't kill people."

When anyone is arguing that something is bad, that person has to appeal an authority or belief. Often the reasoning leads to utilitarianism: "If we want society to continue, we should ban murder." But that's still an if/then statement. Beneath the if/then is an appeal that society is good or desired.

> And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police.

This viewpoint becomes popular with Hobbes in the 1600s. I disagree with the term "base instincts," which negatively connotes those things. I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others. Government and police try to reduce that kind of randomness. But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice. I'm speaking loosely of course.

I think of my American government as social contract, not as protective parent.

> I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others.

I think "randomness" is even worse, because it makes it sound like these actions could be expected from anyone at anytime. Statistically, a small portion of the population is responsible for most of the violence, through repeat offenses. Also, in many situations there are clear warning signs (e.g. mentally ill with clear homicidal ideation, member of a gang). Are you really arguing that a dice roll is a good fundamental model for human behavior?

Nondeterminism (assuming humans are truly nondeterministic) doesn't really matter here, except for the fact that we don't have a way of precisely predicting people's behavior (and may never have one). If it turns out that humans are just complicated, deterministic machines that we can not feasibly predict, the reasons for which we have developed societal structures do not disappear.

> But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice.

I think it's pretty easy to distinguish between the first two and violence. I agree that the third is a bit trickier. If what you mean is that the exercise of both these and the dispositions-formerly-known-as-base-instincts are a result of allowing for a significant measure of personal freedom, I'll agree with you. But writing human behavior off as having no more structure than a random number generator ignores a lot of predictive and explanative power that we do actually have.

Depending on what you mean by premeditation a large percentage of US murders are more or less random.

#Pollution #Cars

GP's point was that human's thoughts and intents are a lot different from randomness. It isn't likely that most people intend on running into pedestrians whenever they get in their car.

When someone drives a car into a farmers market there not exactly choosing there victims. In extreme cases you have things like people flying airplanes into someone's home.

Sure, they did not intend to crash, but choosing to risk others lives is considered a reasonable thing to do. Assuming your not overly blatant about it.

> it makes it sound like these actions could be expected from anyone at anytime

They can. A neurotypical person's brain could spontaneously generate a violent psychotic episode due to a stroke or adrenergic tumor or somesuch. Just like any area of the sky could spontaneously throw a lightning strike at you at any time. It's low probability, certainly, but murder is a low-probability event to begin with.

The important point is that a model with "non-deterministic" people in it has more predictive power, epidemiologically, than a model where it's impossible to become a murderer without "warning signs." It's not at all "writing human behavior off"; the fact that the model includes randomness can actually help you prevent murders more effectively, by leading you toward strategies to cope with unpredictable murders—e.g. building education toward methods of "de-escalation" for psychotic episodes, crimes of passion, etc. into your society—rather than simply trying to reinforce policing and social work.

> They can. A neurotypical person's brain could spontaneously generate a violent psychotic episode due to a stroke or adrenergic tumor or somesuch. Just like any area of the sky could spontaneously throw a lightning strike at you at any time. It's low probability, certainly, but murder is a low-probability event to begin with.

I think if we eliminated all murders except these, we would be in excellent shape. My point is these are not the ones worth focusing on, because we don't have good tools to deal with "random, history free, psychotic break."

> The important point is that a model with "non-deterministic" people in it has more predictive power, epidemiologically, than a model where it's impossible to become a murderer without "warning signs."

Well, if your probabilistic model has no "warning signs", then how does it provide any information at all? If you don't have a method of using information to differentiate the probabilities when given a person/group of people/location etc. then you have no predictive power at all, except for the average murder per capita.

> building education toward methods of "de-escalation" for psychotic episodes, crimes of passion, etc.

De-escalation of psychotic episodes is an impossibly hard thing to teach without protracted work with a mental health professional. In addition, I seriously doubt that there would be any effectiveness when taught to people who have not experienced psychosis. Teaching this to everybody would be inhibited not only by cost, but by the fact that there is not likely enough people in a society that would be good enough therapists to do this on a large scale.

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