[ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato)

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Sat Apr 19 19:43:39 UTC 2014


Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it> , 13/4/2014 11:43 PM:
Il 13/04/2014 21:47, Tara Maya ha scritto: 
 
> Even Foucault, postmodernist poster boy, noted quite frankly in his 
> book Discipline and Punish that the rise of the modern prison came 
> because ordinary people could no longer stand to watch public 
> torture. 
Another relevant though of his (?) is that all societies punish, but they motivate *why* very differently and can implement the punishments in very different ways. Punishment works to some extent for somewhat rational social beings that can be operant conditioned (hence the universality), but the means and ends can be amazingly odd. 

 His argument (it's quite possible I've 
> misunderstood, since he strove at all costs to avoid clarity of 
> argument) was that the modern system wanted to change your thinking 
> not just your behavior, so it was worse, even if you were 
> tortured. 
 
My opinion about jail is simply they substituted a fast and direct 
death sentence with a slow and indirect death sentence. 
 
The point of killing killers or highwaymen or other types of violent 
behavior like rape (real rape) was to make them disgenic. No need for 
the authorities to understand the real effect, just the effect must be 
there. 
No it wasn't. The motivations for killing severe criminals were clearly based on theories of retribution (certain crimes *deserve* certain punishments), deterrence (scare people into behaving), and occasionally incapacitation (make recurrence less likely). Insofar there was a real dysgenic pressure against murderers it was relatively weak, given the low resolution frequency of violent crimes in the past (if you are more likely of dying from being a murder victim than from being killed as a murderer, the selection pressure will largely make people less likely to be murder victims). 
No doubt some government actions and cultural norms do promote selection pressures. But that is rarely a proper explanation for why the policies came about: evolutionary psychology explanations tend to work when the pressures are unchanging for enough generations, but legal systems typically do not last that many human generations and then shift around. Yes, societies that deal with internal violence better will have somewhat higher fitness, but given that the major determinants of region-averaged fitness were agriculture and coordination ability, it seems likely that any broad selection pressure would be acting through them. Assuming there is even any relevant effects here: group selection is pretty weak.
Substituting a jail term to dead or torture (and making jail decent 
places), the authorities reduced the incentives to resist arrest and 
the reasons to help some of these individuals.
Nope. if you look at the use of prison historically you will see that their rise correlates very strongly with richer economies that can afford them. Running a prison requires significant amount of state resources, and poorer countries cannot afford as much prisons as richer ones (yes, there are other factors too, like general oppressiveness or crazy places like the US: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/02/the_best_prisons_money_can_buy.html )
Prisons no doubt lower fitness a bit. But if there is an allele correlated with criminality (say bad impulse control), the fact that the fraction of people who have it *and* are in jail have lower fitness may not outweigh fitness benefits in the fraction who has it and are not in jail. 
Imagine an allele which gives 200% higher risk of going to jail and 50% more children if you don't go to jail. Let the incarceration rate be a median 100 per 100,000. So the total fitness will be 0*(200/100,000)+1.5*(1-200/100,000)=1.49. So the gene will have an essentially unchanged fitness improvement. If we use a US 716 per 100,000 incarceration rate the fitness will be 1.47. In fact, in order to drive it down to 1 you need an incarceration rate of 17,000 per 100,000, which even North Korea would find a bit excessive. A weaker fitness advantage of 10% still needs a crazy level of 4,500. And this is assuming zero fitness in jail: in reality people in prison do have families outside. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University




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