At 7:28 PM 7/25/96, janke@unixg.ubc.ca wrote:
Hello, Tim,
I found your essay interesting, but would like to describe a hypothetical situation and my ideas of how your notion of Schelling points applies to you to see if I am correctly following your ideas:
Suppose that I live in a rural area and I know that my neighbour beats his children because I have seen them with bruises before and too many times just to be from household accidents. Since I am far enough away from him, the beating does not make enough noise to distrub me from any of my activities. I am also planning on moving in three years, so there is little danger that I will be a victim if the children develop into violent criminals due, in part, to their abuse. In this case, the "least action" reasoning seems to tell me to do nothing.
I mentioned "beatings" as a specific example of where the community may decide the costs of intervention are justified. In my view, concentrating on such "extreme" cases (beatings, Christian Scientist parents, etc.) is rarely useful, especially when most "interventions" are for so much less extreme cases.
On the other hand, the state might do some sort of calculation like the following:
(probability the children will become violent criminals) x (cost of dealing with violent criminals) -(cost of taking the children from the parent)
Well, I don't believe any calculus of "probability the children will become violent criminals" is useful. We don't know if watching the Power Rangers will make an 8-year-old "turn into" a criminal at age 18. And so forth.
Am I following your ideas ok? :)
Check out the Friedman URL I gave for more details. The Schelling point view is more "energy conservation common sense" than utilitarian models usually have it. Thus, all of your talk about estimating the chances that someone will become a criminal in the distant future is not something an "energy conserver" (a lazy person, basically) will worry about too much. Especially, but not solely, because there is basically no way to predict the future. I might think that my neighbor, a Christian Fundamentalist, is raising warped kids. But this is his business, so long as I have don't have to pay for them or their ideas directly. They may turn out to be Dahmerian cannibals in 10 years, but they probably won't. And, in any case, I won't lift a finger to change their home environment. (Nor would my neighbor tolerate it--and he's got a Benelli Super-90 Tactical Shotgun, a lot more firepower than I have!) This last paragraph is pretty important. A lot of people realize they can't personally intervene with their neighbors, and so they seek the power of a mob or herd to enforce some law they themselves cannot or will not. "There ought to be a law!" is the most disgusting phrase in the English language. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."