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Comment by mcfunk | Hacker News Reader

It's almost as if evidence continues to mount that addiction is a health issue and should be treated as such, rather than as a matter of criminality.

For anyone interested in further reading on the topic I highly recommend information available from the Institute For Addiction Study (https://www.theinstituteforaddictionstudy.org/).

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Certain aspects? Sure. All aspects? No. I don’t mind the buying the use and the minor incidentsl things. But if the addiction causes harm, be it physical, material or other major impacts on others, then it becomes both a health issue and a criminsl issue (stealing, hit and runs, deception, and obviously more). But yes, let’s try and treat it first rather than seek punishment first.

Punishment runs counter to all forms of sustainable learning, according to the science of learning how to learn.

Let's lovingly apply science to criminalization of people being human, rather than criminalizing human behavior. Let's not seek to punish. Let's start exploring other solutions spaces.

Let’s say you havd someone in the Army of some country, any country, and that soldier does heinous things contrary than that allowed by internstional convention on clearly a civilian population, let’s say, do we still say, “oh, hey, they were high, it’s an illness, let’s treat them and after done, let’s get them back in the army”.

Yes, obviously, if that can be proven to be the cause? Proper criminal rehabilitation and reintegration is very important.

It is. But there are psychopaths out there who simply don't do violence out of fear from counterviolence. Remove the threat with social works and they laugh about it.

So in general I agree, that there are better methods than punishment, but for some it works.

We should take incidence rate of such characteristics into account before proscribing general approaches

I believe it will be hard to get those numbers. I take history as evidence that there are plenty of people or groups out there, who do violence to gain benefit. It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.

Humanism is a relativly new concept. One worth pursuing, but maybe not blinded by idealism.

> I believe it will be hard to get those numbers.

I believe it is worth the effort

> It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Different reasons have different most effective solutions. If we choose as our general solution something that has narrow scope of significant positive effect and wide scope of moderate negative effect, I'd say we've chosen poorly as that will harm society as a whole rather than help it. Which is why the hard task of getting those numbers is worth it.

We know so little about psychopaths and/or the brain. I've heard they can't change. I hypothesize believing psychopaths can't/won't choose to heal or contribute to life hinders the ability to conceive of ways they might.

I prefer to mix sciences of dynamics with love and mindful design. I've had a nuff* of the narratives of static sciences. What happens when we allow for resident psychopaths to shamelessly and fearlessly be themselves? Is that something we even have examples of happening, particularly where the dominant culture was a peaceful one of equanimity, autonomy, and interdependence? If we (humanity) haven't conducted that natural experiment, I'd love to give it a shot & work with them to answer the question of how can a community change to include them.

* I propose the unit of "nuff" as a subjective metric of satisfaction. What I say is a nuff is a nuff for me and what you say is a nuff is a nuff for you.

Major caveat:

As I understand common animal training wisdom and the literature, punishment (+P/-R, in conditioning circles) does work. It just needs to be applied only when necessary, and in the right way. Punishment to avert a behavior is supposed to be short-duration and immediately after the behavior is observed. Judicial punishment fails on both counts. It also is supposed to be done only when the (natural) consequences of the misbehavior are potentially dire, or when the animal already knows what they're supposed to do, and is misbehaving due to some other drive.

But the judicial system of punishment is great for creating predators (prisons are great for reinforcing predatory behavior, on both sides of the bars), and it's also great for mis-training people to try to avoid getting caught, or to fight to the death in court, instead of training them to avoid criminal behavior in the first place.

Although you're open to other perspectives, I think you're addicted to punishment.

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