Another thing. The problem is addiction, so why not more directly target that? Much like with added sugar. We should not put people for years in jail then call them a permanent risk to kids no matter where they actually are after, simply for possessing sugar, but it should not be so cheap. So make the addictive stuff cost a lot of bank by heavy taxation (say 300%, of which 100% then goes to funding rehab and services), make mental health services very easily available by comparison, and if coercive interventions are to be added, make them in a form of actual restraint more than punishment, i.e. the intent is not to cause suffering so much as to physically keep the drug away (e.g. putting people around them and/or working with their surrounding community to literally keep the drugs away from them [incl. by snatching it from their hand if it comes to that] instead of putting them in a dungeon where they are fed food that is intentionally chosen to be dangerous or with rapists that could very well lead to a fatal outcome).
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mike4ty4
This is a good/interesting way to look at it ... add up the total misery level instead of pretending that in either case "the misery" has stopped because you deliberately exclude one or the other miseries from the accounting.
Punishment does deter things. Whether it is the only thing that can is a different matter. But I think a lot of those who want alternatives need to get out of the "punishment does not deter" narrative, which is about as silly as saying that oil and gas don't provide energy because they are bad for the environment.
So what if you remove the vat of cocaine water by just removing the vat instead of by permanently crippling the other "rats" with 40,000 life-long collateral penalties after a jail where they could easily have been killed inside of?
What if we make treatment basically consist of some sort of genetic or other biotechnological intervention that essentially tweaks the vulnerability? Can't be worse than a jail + thousands of never-terminating under any circumstance collateral penalties.
The trick is to not assume that "feeding" it will solve it but to create alternative actions, doing research to do so while enduring the destruction patiently for as long as that takes.
What if we make it not simple, but "simply" exclude just one solution - lifetime punishment (prison + 40,000 collateral consequences, life imprisonment, or a death penalty) - directed against the persons with the problem, from the mix, and leave everything else as wide open as ever for consideration?
Yep, exactly - get rid of the alternative methods and leave no method and then that's a problem.
However, even if there is, why does that mean the answer needs to be the _specific_ extraordinarily-severe-by-nature method of criminal punishment? It seems the article, again, was basically suggesting the problem was there is no sort of incentive AT ALL, when it should be that we should be looking for "neither-nor" solutions that are neither the old method nor "just sit back and do nothing".
This seems like a big part of the issue:
state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.
When it should be that addictive use should be seen as a health problem, to be taken care of with treatment, instead of either a "human right" OR something to be treated by intentionally inflicting MASSIVE suffering (jail + esp. the post-jail 'collateral penalties').
This is a big valid point here - absolutely none of us (myself included) have presented any real evidence. So it's all just circlejerking.
Spend more of your hard earned cash to do the upkeep. YOU suffer a little more for it and I'm all down for that happening to you because we gotta spread the burden around given it's going to be there, period.
If you say they are just self-destroying and "want to create suicide" and "don't want to help those who don't want help" then why not both not help AND not punish at the same time, and just let "nature" do it all? That is, you have elective suicide AND you say they have a free pass out of punishment (basically they can whinny out of public use without ANYTHING adverse), and because "life is misery" just you yourself endure the misery of living in a society where that dealing with the externalities of their highly public drug use as they die/don't "want to climb out" is just a part and parcel of YOUR life. Suffer a little by NOT punishing. You're already doing it, so just do more of it and screw your complaining.
Basically, that is, do everything you say while NOT punishing the public drug use and you just eating the social cost of that as part of life's natural consequences (or else, if you do criminalize it, make a criminal conviction for it both not affect the availability of rehab at all and make the conviction vanish entirely upon successful completion of the rehab and then eat and endure permanently the social consequences of THAT on the "life is misery by default" logic).
people seem to fall back to some sort of centralized system like a scientific committee or centralized AI.
Maybe we should try to figure out how to create an AI "idea generator" that can probe idea space more freely and see if it can break us out of our thinking rut. IOW use the AI not to govern or control or have power over anything, but use it to inspire us and break us out of our boxes.
Profit motives aren't inherently the problem; the problem is what is justified or not in pursuing them - in particular, how their pursuit comes to clash with morally-valued interests such as human and non-human suffering. E.g. in _my_ mind at least, there is 0 fundamentally wrong with, say, creating profit by solely using your own things and your own personal labor. The only thing that suggests otherwise is religious dogma. But when you start hiring others who must work or else starve, when you start to create enough waste above and beyond and so forth, that's where things start to become more complicated because you are adding the potential for harming someone or something else against its will into the mix.
Conservatives using Marx! The IRONY!
Ultimately what we need is not a "victory" over anyone, but rather something where 100% of everyone's need (food, water, shelter, and medical care) are met barring purely random accidents.
An important question that needs asking is what happens if we run into a situation where that "slowness" of democracy gets more people killed and only a well-paced solution with some cadence to it could do the job (not "super fast", but like say a major change with a 1 year debate period and 10 year implementation period sustained steady progress)? Not arguing for a dictatorship, but out-of-the-box innovative thinking to invent a much more novel/radical political system.
Does this mean you're saying you need _bigger_ muscles specifically to get bigger brains?
The real problem is we have mechanized so much. Granted, machines can let us do so many things that would be utterly impossible without them, but the problem is we've allowed them to _substitute_ our natural labor and not to just _extend_ it.
It seems you are interpreting what is said in black and white terms. He (she?) said that personality is _neither_ completely _fixed_ _nor_ completely _mutable_. Things are not either/XOR.
The same goes with IQ. I don't think any average person could ever train their intelligence to be, say, John von Neumann. Thus it is not _completely_ mutable. He was a genetically superior specimen by every account and evidenced such from a very young age. But a good 15-20 point boost, especially if we did not train ourselves to our fullest before? Maybe. I used to process more slowly, now I process faster, because I pushed to think quicker. Thus it is not completely _fixed_, either. Definitely we can eradicate racial IQ gaps, I believe (average Black-White IQ gap in the US is 15 points favoring Whites, by the way.), Rushton et. al. be damned. If I remember right, in some places it was actually done, thus proving its possibility. (Interesting tidbit the racists seem not to address: Bhutan's and China's people are both “Mongoloid Asian" race by racist theory – but Bhutan has IQ 85, China at 105, at least using racists' own data sets. I wonder also what the IQ for rural China vs. urban wealthy China looks like. I suspect the 105 number comes from having a large proportion of the latter in the sample.)
However here you're using a pathological condition (depression) to make a judgment about a normal one (introversion). That is not necessarily reasonable. Introversion doesn't have to imply asocial; but rather just that the person can't socialize or more generally _absorb external stimulation_, _for an extended enough period_. And the world does need introverted people too who prefer to sit around cooking up ideas in their head as much as it needs extroverted people to put together teams to realize those ideas.
Well if that's the case, then whether we will undergo a personality change is not necessarily entirely in our control, because we may not develop the passion for the labor of personality change. It just might not "strike".
The $6m question is, is willpower itself limited by genetics? What happens then, if the ability to exert the hard effort to change the personality is itself genetically limited?
Why should "introversion" be changed or punished, necessarily? Developing intellect is something to be encouraged, but I don't understand the anti-introversion bias in your post.
And I suspect that the genetics does also set a limit as to how far one can bend, too. This too, will vary between persons.