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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

This is heartbreaking to read. I don't know how people who's communities are going through this pain deal with it. I can barely read this article without getting emotional.

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A community is a collection of individuals, each of whom may or may not feel pain in response to something that happens to less than 0.002% of Americans, and generally as a result of the deceased individual's own behavior. Collections of individuals do not experience pain as a collective. Many, if made aware, would still not care, because they manage to keep themselves out of jail, and barring that, manage to refrain from assaulting the correctional officers charged with maintaining order within the correctional system. Call them callous, but theirs is a way of being in the world that is no less valid than one that holds every individual's life worthy of special protection from the consequences of their unforced errors, and where these might be attributable to mental illness, there is a rational argument for putting the space and resources consumed by the mentally ill to better use. One wouldn't fill a spaceship full of mentally ill occupants where every individual's actions contribute to or harm the survival of the others, and it is not a huge leap to see the earth as a ship and the survival of it's occupants as far from guaranteed. It is straight forward to infer that that which increases net prosocial behavior within the species need not be resisted.

> Call them callous, but theirs is a way of being in the world that is no less valid than one that holds every individual's life worthy of special protection from the consequences of their unforced errors, and where these might be attributable to mental illness, there is a rational argument for putting the space and resources consumed by the mentally ill to better use.

You've asserted that this eugenicist viewpoint is valid and is defensible but you don't present such a defense. Would you like to post a defense this position which is by no means obvious?

That's not eugenics. It's one of those short-sighted "utilitarian" views that you'd usually see on LessWrong or something.

It's not eugenics though.

It is eugenics once you start digging into it and having a conversation about the etiology of the social problems being discussed. As a former LWer, I regret to inform you that a great deal of utilitarianism on LessWrong is eugenics without explicitly mentioning the belief in an essential origin of human qualities that one wishes to promote or demote. There are many naive members of the community who don't or refuse to see it, and a large contingent of manipulative people who know exactly what they're saying.

Calling my position eugenicist is a straw-man. I am not advocating for artificially selective evolutionary pressure, but rather am pointing out that allowing natural selection to take its course is a rational position to hold, even moreso in the face of the accumulating consequences of Malthusian crisis. Humanity's battle is not with Darwin, it's with Fermi.

In what way is jailing and murdering people (innocent, guilty, mentally ill, or otherwise) "allowing natural selection to take its course"?

Weird how the Malthusian crisis' victims always end up being disadvantaged unprivileged serfs

Trying to be hyper rational doesn't exuse acting unethically.

Many, me included, believe that for example one innocent execution is too many. But it's such a small percentage! But the existence of capital of punishment increases prosocial behavior! (it doesn't but besides the point)

Nah, ethics still matter.

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