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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Eh, I could see this argument making some amount of sense for generic bankmen (who both value their own time highly and are likely to be cut off from reoffending opportunities by even moderate prison terms and non-prison punishments such as professional bans). If you are a Shkreli, spending your best 10 years behind bars may not be a prospect that is worth any number of billions in your account. In the case of this particular Bankman, who by all accounts was really an idealist with an agenda beyond lining his pockets, the logic of deterrence, which says keep the expected value of the crime negative, requires greater punishment. If he really thinks he is saving the world if he succeeds, and his value function looks a lot more like his understanding of saving the world than like hedonism-maxxing for himself as a bag of meat and bones, the natural cap of hedonic saturation is blown off and he presumably needs to be threatened with a lot more personal suffering to bring the expected payoff of would-be imitators below zero (at least as long as we can't punish criminal effective altruists by mass incineration of mosquito nets or farming more shrimp).