12:31 AM
The issue is "Well, I just thoguht he was taking advantage of the Ferguson Rule to hide a weapon" is a valid statement, but if the Furgeson rule ways "any officer afowl of this rule is immediately ejected from his office in shame and embarassment," it is going to start leading to alternative solutions (such as a massive focus on riot gear and automatic rifles, which we have seen in response to other events)
The issue that I think I've seen is that, yes our intuition tells us "what the answer ought to be." However, the intuitions of individuals do not agree with eachother. There are those who argue both sides. Clearly we cannot achieve harmony through mere intuition
So we create rules which remove some of the intuition from the problem, so taht we can at least agree upon the wordings we think should be used
The most clear example is that 100% of people agree with the statement: "Officers should try to do the right thing in all situations." Intuitively it is gratifying. However, there are immense arguments about what is "right"
So we break it doesn into rules which are less intuitive
The path I have seen people take is one of "we should continually iteratively add rules until the behaviors we don't see stop happening"
That heuristic has been REALLY popular as I debate it
Unfortunately, the assumption is that the act of adding rules eventually convertes on the outcome they want
A perfect exaple is the original poster's question
Talk about whether we give criminals the benefit of the doubt, but we put down animals tells me he is framing a very specific target: determinig where we should draw the line between human and anmal so we can better understand which shoudl be put down and which should not.
I think you and I would rapidly agree upon an answer: you should not have a hard line, because that hard line is impossible to draw. The answer should be smoother, which allows for more room for use of intuition in the decision
However, I find so terribly many people think there "ought to be" a hard line
and Godel does a remarkably good job of showing that there exist a vast multitude of situations where it is provably impossible to draw enough hard lines to solve the problem. You MUST have a soft region somewhere
If the OP can accept that in many situations, hard lines are not the answer, he should be able to realize the better solution: stop trying to set up the punishment system to have a sudden jump from leniency to instant-death. Then you don't HAVE to draw such a hard line
I've simply gotten tierd of arguing the individual cases
I've had too many people argue 1=2. Then when I prove them wrong, they argue 2=3. Then 3=4. After N time, I get frustrated and tierd and prove that for-all X, X != X+1
Godel is the tool I use to make such proofs with respect to trying to define systems of rules, because it does such an unbelievably good job of telling people to stop looking for those kinds of answers, because someone already proved they cannot possibly ever exst.
Maybe then they can start looking for rules which involve intuition, like you recommend. I think that for a reasonable agreeable definition of what intuition is, you can demonstrate that intuition+rules can indeed find the best answer
but I find many people don't even start down that path until you first prove that rules on their own cannot
Just like many people don't start down that path until you also prove that intuition alone doesn't find the best answer. (However, science already does a VERY good job of proving this to people on a regular basis)
Discussion between Cort Ammon and Rex…
Discussion between Cort Ammon and Rex…