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I say this of any institution public or private. The answer to restoring trust is a simple but apparently too difficult to actually do — be trustworthy. It’s kind of a crazy question. When doctors lie and misrepresent the truth, when they openly try to manipulate the public into believing things that are not supported by research in order to get them to obey, or when they push unneeded drugs and treatments on people, it’s easy to lose trust. And I find the loss of trust in medical professionals and institutions to be actually dangerous because honestly most people are horrible at understanding health information without a doctor to help them.
More directly:
Being untrustworthy should come with fairly immediate consequences upon revelation.
And you should DEFINITELY be kicked from any position of trust and banned from future ones.
That sort of mentality would probably do a lot for police reform, too.
Yep. I think it was Yudkowsky who had a list of possible police reforms in the wake of the Death of George Floyd that included immediate and permanent removal of any police officer who is involved in the death of an unarmed person during an interaction. They just cannot work in law enforcement thereafter.
Drastic, but if there's an extremely low rate of deaths in police interactions (that's a claim the pro-police side usually makes) then it restores trust to know that no cop will ever be put back on the streets after killing someone without justification. And of course, prison time can still result if there wasn't justification. Minimal cost overall.
It would be really handy to remove the massive 'benefit of the doubt' that goes in favor of on-duty cops that allows the actual nasty/predatory ones to act with impunity for far longer than they would if they were held to the standard of a normal citizen. And it aligns incentives so that cops are really motivated to avoid doing anything life-threatening to unarmed persons.
At its core, that is what feels like is the major problem. Incentives aren't aligned in a way that points towards outcome everyone wants. We'd all like to be able to take scientific research seriously and NOT have to be immediately skeptical. Scientists would like to believe they're pushing boundaries of knowledge forward and have some prestige from that. We want policies to be informed by good, accurate, reliable information, while accounting for uncertainties.
But that requires screwups to be uncovered and corrected quickly and bad actors to be removed before they cause too much damage. It ain't what we have currently.
I remember seeing this from Yudkowsky and thinking it was ridiculous and yet another example of how unserious a person he is. Many ""unarmed"" people killed by the police attack a cop and try to take their gun. You cannot "unarmed" fight a cop. That's a fight with a gun involved.
Perhaps, but look at the exact context of the incident that led to this.
George Floyd died while he was in handcuffs, face to the floor, with a grown man kneeling on top of him. He was 'unarmed' by any fair definition of the word.
A lot of people believe the cop's actions killed him, a lot of people believe it didn't, and say it was probably the drugs. Indeed, the mainstream conservative position is turning into Derek Chauvin deserves a pardon.
The rule proposed by Yudkowsky cuts the knot and just removes any 'bad' cops from the job even if we don't know for sure they're bad cops, so as to restore trust to the police as a whole, where the people who believe ACAB at least see that there's a consequence for the death of 'innocent' (yeah, I know I know) people in police encounters, and the "law and order" people can see that its the simple application of a facially neutral rule that holds the police to a 'high' but not unfair standard.
George Floyd was murdered and his murderer is currently in prison. The system worked, to the degree it does for handling murderers after the fact.
I would rather point to Michael Brown of "hands up, don't shoot" fame. He severely beat a cop with his bare hands. Fractured skull while in a car wearing a seat belt level beating. But Mr. Brown failed to take the cop's gun despite trying. Many cops have retention holsters and merely grabbing the grip of their gun and pulling won't get it out. Michael Brown then briefly ran away, but stopped, turned and charged the cop. It was then this cop defensively and justifiably shot an unarmed man to death.
Despite attempted railroading by the Obama administration, this cop escaped criminal punishment for his entirely justified defensive shooting of an unarmed man. Good thing Yudkowsky doesn't have some special veto power to punish this cop regardless. There's a reason we don't just cut knots. We need unruined un-carved-apart basic government institutions.
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