Nachtfalter
3mo ago
Regarding the distinction you make between improving deliberate information recall and improving spontaneous/sublime association: John Crowley's fantasy novel Little, Big has a character who uses a memory palace (aka. the method of loci) not just to commit facts to memory, but also to do detective work in the sense of joining the dots together. The palace is a place for reflection and discovery. At one point her attention is drawn to a room of the palace by a cowbell ringing in it, so the palace formalizes and increases awareness of the process of recognizing the relevance of a memory. Another character uses his palace (by physically walking around the real analogue of the imagined place) to perfectly preserve emotionally significant experiential memories.
This is a fictional portrayal which verges on astral projection sometimes. I have no idea to what extent it's grounded in reality, or even to what extent the author thought it was, and I haven't tried to emulate it. I've read somewhere that the method of loci was developed by ancient rhetors to memorize speeches, which sounds more like what you were complaining about.
I agree with lagrangian that rote memorization doesn't preclude forming associations. Organizing information in preparation for rote memorization can require decisions about what associations to make: if you want to memorize the periodic table, do you memorize periods or groups at a time, or mappings between atomic numbers and elements, or mappings from a given element to its immediate neighbours? In making this decision you are effectively selecting triggers of relevance and the information that should float into your mind in response to them.
Everyone should have access to free legal counsel, regardless of political orientation or the nature of the crime. It is in the interest of justice that all individual defendants be defended by lawyers who are as capable as possible, because this decreases the gap in resourcefulness between the individual and the government-supported prosecution. If this isn't possible all the time, one can still be pleased when it is. Here, the harms of incentivization pale before the benefits to justice.
Providing bail funds is a different matter, as it provides a degree of immunity to punishment. This is still different to a presidential pardon insofar as bail circumvents part of a punishment whereas a pardon overrules the justice system. An organization providing bail must expend some of its resources to do so, and this provides a lower bound to the extent to which the organization is truly convinced that the punishment is unjust. Presidential pardons are issued without sacrifice, at least in the short term. Pardons overrule the justice system, sending a stronger message incentivizing the crime. They are issued with less sacrifice (so potentially less conviction and consideration) than bail, which merely circumvents punishment and therefore sends a weaker message of incentivization.
Aside: I think your comment is whataboutism, but I've never been convinced that whataboutism is a bad form of argument. Why shouldn't one side complain about being held to a different moral standard than the other?
More options
Context Copy link