site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Alec Baldwin, the Lab Leak, and punishing maximal negligence

Alec Baldwin has been charged with manslaughter. We don’t know the nitty gritty details yet, but let’s consider the following possibility. Baldwin, as someone who funded and produced the movie, was ultimately responsible for choices in hiring. He hired someone insufficiently skilled at risk management on set. In addition to hiring and retaining someone whom a reasonable producer would consider insufficiently skilled, he acted negligently on set through pressure, which led to the death of an employee.

Whatever the actual details, there’s a plausible avenue by which Baldwin has serious moral blame in regards to manslaughter. The details that come out later will obviously dictate whether this occurred, but we can imagine a case in which a producer possesses moral blame for the system of failsafes failing. Importantly, in cases where the risks are high (a gun misfiring), greater care is morally warranted. Our expected duty to exercise care is proportional to the potential of harm.

Following from this example, I assert that we should develop a legal principle to maximally punish anyone involved in catastrophic lab leaks (those resulting in millions to tens of millions of death). [paragraph edited for clarity] We should do this regardless of the material facts of individual responsibility of a lab leak. This is because the risk of leak is of such significance that it belongs to a new category of risk:care ratio concerns. It is the principle of reasonable care and deterrence but amplified to the amount of harm involved. The amount of harm that a Covid leak created (implying that the lab leak theory is true) is more than what inspired the Nuremberg Trials. Playing with genetically modified coronaviruses, specifically enhanced for virulence, constitutes such a threat against the human race that every single person involved should have been made to underwrite their life as a guarantee in case of leak. Not for a lifetime in jail, or capital punishment — the guarantee should have been that the State would use medieval punishment on you for the rest of your life. The scientists who worked and funded and stamped the research should have been so certain that a leak would never happen that they literally stake endless, limitless torture for the rest of their life if it leaked. Only this level of deterrent punishment would befit the level of care required to deal with the potential harm of COVID. I am suggesting a moral principle that would prevent future leaks, applied to future cases, to stave off the risk of leak catastrophe.

If Baldwin, in acting unreasonably in hiring or setting workplace culture, can be responsible for one death, how much more care should scientists who work with virulent viruses exercise? Viruses that will kill 200 million by the end of the century are inconceivably more risky than anything that can happen in normal everyday business life. The risk to care ratio must be maximal because only this level of deterrence is sufficient to encourage a reasonable level of care. The whole point of Law is that foreseeing punishment deters behavior. It’s not just that Baldwin ought to have practiced sufficient care; it’s that everyone in Baldwin’s place should foresee a punishment from failing to exercise sufficient care. Baldwin deserves a punishment in accordance to his level of negligence, and everyone in Baldwin’s position must foresee a similar punishment for similar negligence.

Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?

I should point out that these sort of restrictions often end up killing people by causing inaction, as well as saving lives by causing inaction.

Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?

They probably would not. People would also, however, be unwilling to build dams, invent novel chemicals, or do a whole host of other risky activities. Including writing certain computer programs. Your proposed principle is untenable; it's the precautionary principle in disguise, with a side of Pascal's Mugging.

You are wrong on these counts:

  • Covid is (potentially) infinitely more harmful than a dam collapse. The dam killed 200k, and Covid 6 million and counting.

  • Your go-to an example is one where no one appears to have been placed with responsibility.

  • There’s no evidence that dam-builders are cowards who would not sign off on “I stake limitless torture on my dam not killing 200k people.” This is actually a completely reasonable thing to make them sign and similar principles have been used throughout history. Men still captioned the Titanic despite the expectation they would go down with their ship, and this was a coveted profession. In Japan, men still competed to become officers despite mistakes resulting in ritual suicide. Men still defended their territory from the Persian Empire in the face of certain death. I don’t think good scientists are cowards — I think the best scientists would stake their life on not accidentally killing millions of people.

  • A dam has provable benefits that often result in massively increased productivity, whereas playing around with highly lethal coronaviruses has no sum total benefit. We now need to find a way to use an enhanced virus to save, by the end of the century, 100 million lives. Only this would cancel out the harm that the leak caused.

Sure, I understand imprisoning or even executing people for this kind of negligence. Even expecting people to literally fall on their sword. But the torture shit goes a bit too far. Why allow yourself to be taken alive? Why cooperate? How do you get people to cooperate?

Covid is (potentially) infinitely more harmful than a dam collapse. The dam killed 200k, and Covid 6 million and counting.

Yes, a dam collapse has finite potential, and infectious diseases infinite. But other things do pose existential risk to humans. Or just existential risk in general. And if you believe climatologists, plenty of human activities right now are posing an existential risk to humans.

Your go-to an example is one where no one appears to have been placed with responsibility.

So? We don't live under your principle, so we wouldn't expect that.

There’s no evidence that dam-builders are cowards who would not sign off on “I stake limitless torture on my dam not killing 200k people.”

Even assuming there are such dam-builders, your plan filters for exactly the wrong ones. You're looking for the careful safety-conscious ones, and instead you'll get the fools who don't understand the risk and the arrogant cowboys who believe it will never happen to them.

We now need to find a way to use an enhanced virus to save, by the end of the century, 100 million lives. Only this would cancel out the harm that the leak caused.

100 million? You said COVID killed 6 million. Anyway, your principle didn't consider benefits, only risk.

I wrote 100mil at the end of the century.

In order for GoF to be demonstrably beneficial, to have been a good idea in practice, you will need to make up the 100mil dead by 2100. While it’s not impossible that GoF finds some use with malaria, it will likely be an eternal net negative for developed countries. To justify its existence, you now need GoF benefits to make up for the 1 million American lives lost so far and 16 trillion dollars. Do you think that’s actually going to happen?

It doesn't matter, because your principle considers only risks, not benefits.

You could simply lessen the risk by siting the labs in desolate, remote locations no one ever goes to.

Researchers have to go into and out of labs, and they have to eat and buy clothing and their children have to go to school and so on, and whatever system you set up to try to isolate these activities will be more prone to leakage than the actual BSL prophylactics since they'll take place in a less controlled environment.

Then you just have them marry other researchers and live in seclusion.

What's the big deal ? They'd probably get on fairly well, living in an isolated community with people who are largely similar to you, working towards the same goal seems rather nicer than living a megacity.

In practice: they would make sure to have a supply of cyanide capsules or something in the lab: they wouldn't let themselves be taken alive. I suppose this is an interesting idea. Think you might get busted for a lab leak and tortured? Open up the locked cabinet in the lab, find a sword, and fall on it.

Or if you can't go through with it yourself, get someone to help.

"This is a good death. There's no shame in this, in a man's death. A man who has done fine works."

Yeah. I suppose that the risk of a shootout might be prevented through stringent security measures or something, but there is also the risk of deliberate sabotage by desperate and highly stressed workers. Overall doesn't seem like a great idea, best to leave it at life imprisonment. Maybe the firing squad or something, if the proof is strong enough.

I fully agree. If this work absolutely has to be done, do it somewhere very remote like St. Elba or some similar island. Slap a 3 month quarantine on anything that leaves. Harsh penalties for those who redefine their work so it escapes the broad definitions of what is not allowed. Especially harsh penalties for those who do the most dangerous kind of work - using humanized mice so that their novel viruses is more at home with our biology.

But this work doesn't have to be done. The risk is totally out of balance with the reward. We do not gain much from GoF work. If we create new viruses, do we then create new vaccines for them too? There's a nigh-infinite number of deadly viruses we could create. The root cause is really just bored scientists wanting to do interesting work. Growing and editing viruses is fun, it lets you churn out new papers and demonstrate originality in your research. There needs to be a powerful deterrent to prevent this, preferably a deterrent that encourages defection from within the scientific community. Nobody in Stalin's Russia would dare do 'interesting' political science or economics research, lest they get reported to the NKVD. There needs to be a similar method that lets scientists dob in their comrades to gain status or financial rewards. This would slow research considerably in this field, not at all a bad thing in my mind. Genetic engineering is very dangerous and should be treated with care.

We really are not going to have a pleasant century if we have no concept of institutionalized caution over dangers capable of exponential growth. Biotechnology is only going to get easier. AI is only going to get more powerful. If we don't take these dangers seriously, like we take nuclear weapons, then we will get the fate we deserve.

St. Elba

St. Helena. Elba was the one that wasn't remote enough to prevent a leak of Bonapartism.

Good catch! I get them mixed up.

You don't need wild hypotheticals about a lab leak that probably didn't happen to find negligence leading to the COVID-19 pandemic. China actively covered it up for weeks (months?); not sure that's really even "negligence" at that point. Although the US's CDC not catching on sooner due to removing the person whose job it was to keep them honest in July 2019 probably does count.

And the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is due to Chinese government negligence. After SARS they clamped down on live animal markets, but over time, while they remained illegal, the government didn't seriously enforce the laws against them. In other words, they knew what they had to do to stop a pandemic, tried, and failed (or gave up). That makes them look culpable and/or incompetent, so they don't want too high a confidence assigned to that theory.

It's hardly a wild hypothetical - we know the closest biological origin was a bat in Laos. We know Wuhan Lab was bringing sick bats from Laos back to Wuhan, where they were interested in putting furin cleavage sites inside bat coronaviruses. The key difference between COVID and its precursor was the introduction of a furin cleavage site. It was also unusually good at infecting humans, almost as though it was bred on humanized mice - another thing Wuhan lab was doing.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/

How does a sick bat from Laos travel 1000 miles to Wuhan market and infect a pangolin or some other animal there, before adeptly spreading to humans? Why not some city in Southern China or Laos itself? Of all the myriad wet markets in China, it has to be the one right next to the primary bat coronavirus-studying BSL-4 biolab? This is a bit too convenient of a theory.

I'm afraid I can't access any counterarguments from your video since it's nearly 2 hours long. Furthermore, there's a huge bias from the medical community against a lab leak. If it's a lab leak, they'll endure massive public hatred, crippling regulations and endless legal hearings about who knew what when. They have every incentive to suppress the lab-leak story, that's why Daszak from Ecohealth (at the center of it all) was organizing a letter in the Lancet denouncing it as a 'conspiracy theory'.

I'm afraid I can't access any counterarguments from your video since it's nearly 2 hours long.

BTW, the show notes point to the research papers discussed on the podcast if you would rather see the arguments in that format (providing quote from the internet archive because the TWiV website appears to be down for me at the moment):

The podcast is an interview with the lead author on the papers going over the arguments, although presumably in less detail than the papers themselves.

My understanding is that the first paper shows that the cases show a pattern that strongly suggests the first human cases occurred at the market and not at the lab. And the second paper shows there were multiple spillovers both at the market, which is also inconsistent with the source being the lab.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/

This link predates the publication of those papers by a few months. I acknowledge that the lab leak theory wasn't a total nonsense conspiracy theory, but the accumulated evidence points pretty strongly against it at the moment. And, more importantly, whether or not it's right, it's a distraction from actions we already know we should be taking (but aren't) to prevent future pandemics.

And, more importantly, whether or not it's right, it's a distraction from actions we already know we should be taking (but aren't) to prevent future pandemics.

What does this mean? Nobody here is making policy based on our discussions, what actions should we be taking instead of talking about things we want to talk about? And if lab leak turned out to be true - which you acknowledge is not outside the realm of possibility - why would that not be an important thing to investigate, never mind so unimportant as to be a distraction?

Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone? If he weren’t producing, hiring, etc. I would expect him to face the exact same charge. Maybe the armorer would also have liability, but I doubt it would roll uphill to the producer.

Anyway,

medieval punishment

I find it sort of amusing that you’ve reinvented an anti-death-penalty thought experiment, but followed it in the complete opposite direction. By assigning the maximum possible punishment to this crime, you have defined every other crime as lesser. Now our hypothetical amoral scientists have zero incentives to avoid lesser crimes like rape and murder—or worse ones like knowingly releasing such viruses! This is analogous to replacing all manslaughter offenses with mass murder. How would the incentives to be more careful stack up against those for murderers to be less selective?

It’s also worth considering that people still get sentenced to death, our current endpoint of the punishment scale. Assuming rational actors, they must be valuing their crime as worth an arbitrarily large punishment. What makes you think that amoral scientists wouldn’t make the same judgment even in the face of your choice of punishments?

Allowing for irrational actors, now...At some point, the Big Numbers round off to “very bad thing.” This gets multiplied by the eternal optimism of “this will never happen to me,” yielding an end result of “eh, probably fine.” Maybe the Eliezer Yudkowskys and Sam Bankman-Frieds of the world shut up and multiply correctly. I wouldn’t count on their coming to your same conclusion!

It does appear likely that it is Baldwin's role as the producer that is the basis for the charge. The armorer has also been charged, and the state OSHA fined the production company for violating various firearms safety regulations. The OSHA chief was quoted as saying, "What we had, based on our investigators' findings, was a set of obvious hazards to employees regarding the use of firearms and management's failure to act upon those obvious hazards."

I think the opposite, in that otherwise other producers would have been similarly charged. Especially as Baldwins role as producer did not apparently involve hiring any of the people or overseeing them on set. Given that it would be weird to charge him specifically out of all the producers. Ryan Smith's production company was apparently the one that did that.

I think he was charged because he was the one with the gun in his hand.

Yes, it looks like you are right. The NY Times this am says:

The district attorney for Santa Fe County, Mary Carmack-Altwies, said in an interview that Mr. Baldwin had a duty to ensure the gun and the ammunition were properly checked and that he should never have pointed it at anyone. “You should not point a gun at someone that you’re not willing to shoot,” she said. “That goes to basic safety standards.”

and

“He has an absolute duty to know that what is in the gun that is being placed in his hand is safe.”

And I suppose they might also argue that his knowledge of previous issues on set re guns served to enhance his duty.

Of course, that the DA claims such a duty exists does not mean that the duty does, in fact, exist. The first claim (“You should not point a gun at someone that you’re not willing to shoot,”) is clearly wrong in the special case of a movie production. Movie productions substitute other safety rules for that one, like "No live ammunition should be available" (a rule obviously impractical in other circumstances involving firearms).

That "absolute duty" (the "absolute" would indicate failure was itself proof of negligence -- though still not necessarily criminal negligence) seems unlikely to be supported by NM case law.

They also substituted the safety rule of “say ‘cold gun’ to the talent when you hand over an unloaded weapon” for the well-known safety rule “every gun is always loaded, unless you yourself have checked.” Together, those two substituted rules allowed one bullet onto the set, into the gun, and ultimately through the victim.

The moment anyone on set heard about the accidental discharge two days before, the standard rules should have been reinstated.

Together, those two substituted rules allowed one bullet onto the set, into the gun, and ultimately through the victim.

No; the substituted rules were violated. One rule was "no live ammo on set" and another was "check the ammo before loading it into the gun". Both these were violated, but not by Baldwin. The source of the live ammo remains unclear, but it was the armorer's job to ensure it was not present and to check the ammo before loading it into the gun.

The moment anyone on set heard about the accidental discharge two days before, the standard rules should have been reinstated.

The standard rules for a movie production are the substituted ones. The earlier accidental discharges were of blanks. One was caused when someone slipped while lowering the hammer -- in that particular revolver one must lower the hammer by pulling the trigger and holding the hammer back. Another was apparently caused by dropping a rifle loaded with a blank. Both of these can happen without any rule violations at all, merely unavoidable human fallibility.

Of course not. But we are discussing the DA's rationale for bringing the charges,not whether Baldwin is guilty.

Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone?

No. An actor is hired by a production company to perform a role with the tools they are given by the production company. Since most movies do not involve the actual killing of real people with real guns with real ammo, an actor's assumption would be that any firearm they are given to use as a prop during filming is non-lethal, and there is an existing apparatus of firearms-specific prop handlers who are hired by production teams to make sure that when an actor is handed a prop gun it is non-lethal and safe for use in make-believe scenarios. Now, my gun-enthusiast buddies will say that anyone handling a firearm is responsible for what happens with that firearm while they are handling it, but this is the POV of people who live in gun culture and are expecting to be using lethal weapons with live ammo. This is not the case with actors, who are more likely to be gun-ignorant as well as have their head at least half in a state of make-believe. It is the job of the production team to educate the relevant actors on proper gun-handling procedures and ensure the safety of the gun.

Now, that Baldwin was also a producer of this movie puts him farther up the chain of responsibility and liability. As movies often have several producers with different levels of on-set responsibility, if Baldwin as a producer is charged with a crime (criminal negligence seems more apt than manslaughter, in this case), that same should apply to all producers with on-set responsibilities as well as to the property masters and firearms advisors who put a live gun in the hand of an actor (who likely to be the least capable person on the set).

It is the job of the production team to educate the relevant actors on proper gun-handling procedures and ensure the safety of the gun.

Of which, Baldwin, having worked on many movies where guns were used were well aware of.

A big issue in the Baldwin situation is that in the scene that was being shot, Baldwin was meant to be quickly drawing the gun. He was not meant to be firing it. If you look at the filming right before the incident happened, his finger is clearly inside the trigger guard and likely near or on the trigger itself. So the revolver should have never of been fired in the first place. It was his negligence by pulling the trigger. If he was in a scene wherein he was intended to "shoot" the gun, and that is when the negligent discharge happened I would have more empathy towards Baldwin's innocence. This is not the case, so the armorer failed by allowing live ammunition onto the set and Baldwin failed by negligently pulling the trigger of the revolver when the scene did not call for it. Both made critical errors, leading to the death of one and another injured, and both are justifiably going to be charged.

I mean, that's definitely an error, but realistically the armorer made the much bigger mistake. Most rules about gun safety, such as not pointing the gun at anyone, go out the window in movies and are replaced by "make sure the armorer knows what they're doing."

Honestly makes me wonder why they use real guns at all.

This is my question. What is the point? Build a replica without the ability to fire at all. You can with tech make a small fire at the end of the gun and then dub in the relevant sound effect later.

In a movie with a budget of 7 million about cowboys, the cost of special effects as against firing blanks et al may be cost prohibitive.

(criminal negligence seems more apt than manslaughter, in this case)

Criminal negligence resulting in the death of a human being is involuntary manslaughter. Criminal negligence in itself is not a crime; it's a mens rea.

I don't think Baldwin was criminally (or even ordinarily) negligent, given what's known now. The armorer seems to have at least been negligent and probably criminally negligent in not detecting the live round. Merely hiring someone who was negligent isn't negligence, unless Baldwin had some reason to know she would be negligent. This doesn't seem to be the case.

Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone? If he weren’t producing, hiring, etc. I would expect him to face the exact same charge. Maybe the armorer would also have liability, but I doubt it would roll uphill to the producer.

Negligent hiring can be a theory of liability, but looks at what the hirer knew or should have known about the candidate at the time of hiring. I'm not up on entertainment industry hiring structures, so don't know if producers are responsible for staffing. But assuming arguendo that they are, if the armorer was unqualified and incompetent, that could theoretically drag the producer into it.

Negligent hiring is a common basis for civil liability, but not for criminal liability. I suppose there might a case out there on criminal liability on that basis, but it would be an enormous stretch. Especially given that criminal negligence is a higher bar to prove than is the ordinary neglidence required to prevail civilly.

The usual objection to "jail people who fuckup" (I most usually see it applied to politicians who fail to avert war) is that if you did that, no-one would take the job at all. No competent scientist who had a chance of getting another job would go anywhere near the field of infectious disease research (not even gain of function stuff, but ANY infectious disease research).

Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?

You say this like it's a good thing that no-one would work on it, but it's not. Mad scientist research into crazy-dangerous viruses has a very positive net effect on the world. Without it, kiss goodbye to ever having a cure for ebola. Or influenza. Or the common cold. The only people that might work on such things under threat of torture are the incompetent bottom-of-the-class scientists with no chance of getting a different job, and when you have them working in your Biohazard Lv 4 facility, even with harsh deterrents for failure, they're MORE dangerous than competent scientists with no deterrent would have been, i.e. what we have now.

Sorry OP, but we already live in the best of all possible worlds in this regard. The occasional lab leak Megadeath is an inevitability even under optimal conditions. It turns out all right in the end, though; the expectation value of the research is still positive even when you factor in the megadeaths, because once you work out how to cure influenza, the billions of lives saved on the long time horizon exceed the millions of lives lost to lab accidents.

Same with Alec Baldwin movies. The lives of a few behind the scenes gophers are a small price to pay for cinematic entertainment enjoyed by millions. Hutches is the stochastic version of the child sacrifice of Omelas, and the price of her life is a bargain for the hedons generated.

Baldwin shot the deceased. You mention the details on his manslaughter charge are not yet known. You then speculate the charge could be related to his role as a producer on the film on which he shot someone who died. You willfully ignore the possibility that the manslaughter charge is related to Alec Baldwin shooting someone with a gun, but still want this charge to serve as a parallel to anyone who might have been remotely involved in gain-of-function research in Wuhan?

We’re using hypothetical extensions of real world events to test our moral intuitions and formulate principles, yes. This is common in Western philosophy and traces at least to the Socratic dialogues. Gdanning posted a good link on the legal implementation details if that’s of interest to you, but it’s of pretty much no interest to my argument which rests on moral intuitions regarding concepts like care and negligence.

Fine, but what does that say if the underlying example ultimately proves to be wrong? That Baldwin, the triggerman, is only the equivalent of the specific person who let the virus loose?

Fine, but what does that say if the underlying example ultimately proves to be wrong?

I don't think this automatically means anything. A hypothetical extension of real events is basically a hypothetical situation with increased salience.

Did you have something particular in mind?

FWIW, see this discussion of the relevant NM law,

Should we really punish people for everything that goes wrong? Can we make a movie if the producer is charged with murder if someone dies? If the principal of a school is responsible for all injuries on the playground, the result is going to be obese kids who aren't allowed to play fun games. Developing new a new medication costs well over a billion, and much of this cost is due to an extreme fear of someone having an adverse side effect. Meanwhile, lots of good ideas for medications get scrapped due to the cost of developing them into products. Humanity has invested far more in coal power than nuclear power in the past 30 years because of the extreme fear of another Chernobyl and the impossibility of insuring nuclear power. Because of that, thousands of people die every day due to coal pollution, which is causing far worse damage than Chernobyl ever did. If anything we are being too cautious and not accepting enough of risk.

If I keep a lion caged on my property but a freak lightning strike causes the cage to open and results in my lion killing someone, I should go to jail. Owning a lion is an ultrahazardous activity, and to reduce the social risk we should make lion owners strictly liable for all the harm their lion causes even if, given that the person had a lion, he behaved with proper caution. Aiming a gun at a person and pulling the trigger is also an ultrahazardous activity.

Legally-speaking, "ultrahazardous activities" to which strict liability attaches are those activities where harm frequently results even if due caution is taken. The prototypical example is blasting or other explosives work - even if you do everything right, you don't know where all the debris is going, or what effects other properties of the explosion could cause (e.g., there's a famous case where the shockwave from dynamiting-open an irrigation canal caused a bunch of minks on a nearby fur farm to freak out and eat their own young; the blaster was held responsible for the lost profits from the devoured baby minks, even though the blast wave wasn't itself harmful to anything, and the mink freakout was unforeseeable, because blasting is just that dangerous.).

We don't impose strict liability to incentivize due caution; we impose it because someone has to swallow the inevitable losses caused by ultrahazardous activities, and society has decided that the person/entity engaging in the activity is the best option.

If lion-keeping had a small chance of gestating a cure for cancer, would this change your calculus?

Your lion is high risk for your neighbours, but also high reward.

Alec Baldwin wasn't hanging around with loaded guns for shits and giggles: he was trying to make ART. Fairly prolefeed-tier art, true, but do you want to live in a safetyist world where no-one dares pick up a paintbrush for fear the chemicals in their paint might flick into someone's mouth and cause freak allergy anaphylactic shock?

He violated onset safety rules. Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it. And armorers normally check every gun before every scene. Both of these normal safety precautions were skipped here, to my knowledge, so manslaughter/negligent homicide/depraved heart murder/whatever the case may be charges make a lot of sense.

That society is a safetyist mess does not mean that safety should be completely disregarded.

Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies

Well, yes it is... stochastically. For every time a man is close to a gun, some proportion of the time he will point it at another person, just as a probabilistic fact. You can decrease the amount of times this happens by detering said behaviour through punishment. But you may rapidly see that the side-effects of the deterrents become more pathological than the things they were meant to deter: namely, fewer movies will get made because movie sets need more safety commissars, which are both expensive and obstructive.

How many N movies are you willing to sacrifice to decrease "actor really does point gun at someone else" by M%?

For me the number is negative, because I prefer "watching movies" to "infinitesimal increases in teamster safety".

That society is a safetyist mess does not mean that safety should be completely disregarded.

Less strawmanning, please. I'm not saying COMPLETELY disregard, merely disregard much much more. And if you think society is a safetyist mess, you apparently agree with me, making it doubly odd that you would strawman me.

Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it.

This is simply not true.

And armorers normally check every gun before every scene.

Indeed, and this was supposed to have been done, and was claimed to have been done (but clearly was not, or not correctly)

Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it.

I can scarcely believe this to be true. I have seen probably hundreds of scenes where a gun was literally touching against someone’s head.

Fake guns and special effects go a long way. Even firing a blank in that position will kill someone.

Are you sure they were actually filmed using a gun and not a prop designed to look like one?

No, but if that is possible (not saying it isn't, it certainly sounds like a good idea) why are real guns ever used? Why would anyone expect a real gun to be used?

It literally doesn’t matter; that’s the whole point here. Baldwin was also sure that the item he is using is a perfectly safe prop. How is he more culpable than the other actors who held the prop guns to other people’s heads?

If the principal of a school is responsible for all injuries on the playground, the result is going to be obese kids who aren't allowed to play fun games.

Side note, but I've long thought it would be a pro-social act for someone to sue a school over their child's obesity/ADHD, and charge that policies mandating physical inactivity for most of a child's waking hours are the direct, proximate cause.

Just establishing this legal risk would provide cover with insurance etc to allow more short-term risk (eg running at playtime)

It's possible both are true. We accept too much risk in some areas (gain of function research) and too little in others (nuclear power)

No reasonable scientist would do this so only unreasonable scientists would.

I’m still not sure the usefulness of the field of study here. I think we’d just be better off if government banned the activity.

If it has to be performed, then it should be performed in Antarctic or something.

I think GoF to engineer virus to kill mosquitoes could be useful.

Yeah that couldn’t possibly have unforeseen consequences

It is effectively banned (in the US and Canada and most of Europe at least) which is why institutions that wish to engage in Gain of Function Research have to pay labs in China and India to do it for them, instead of using their own labs.

Do you really want bad things to not happen or just really really want to torture those you deem to be evil? Proposing severe punishment as a disincentive is hardly the newest idea out there, if anything it's literally 'medieval torture'.

This point of view is aesthetically repulsive for me for a myriad of reasons, failing the veil of ignorance test, giving the state just about infinite power, the naked bloodthirst being just a few of them.

However, I'll give you a modern counter-example. The Mexican drug cartels are no strangers to torture. They flay, burn and dismember their own members for things as trivial as stealing 13$ worth of drugs (Source: Sinaloa chainsaw execution), failing to scout properly, or leaving the cartel. And rival cartel members, even lackeys such as drug runners are dealt with extreme prejudice. And people still keep on fucking with the cartels and joining them.

I suggest you watch 'Funkytown gore' (a famous video of said torture) to acquaint yourself with what your proposal actually looks like. If you can watch the video without flinching. And be okay with innocents sometimes being subjected to that as a cost of doing business. And be okay with a potential family member being subjected to that because the n-th order effects of his actions are death, finally if you are okay with yourself being subjected to that for working on the retroactive wrong science. I can take you seriously. Else you are just a RETVRN larper who sounds like a clown to anyone who knows anything about History and how bad things used to be.

If the cartel's coming after me, my choices are presumably between dying a slow and miserable death at the hands of the cartel...or dying a swifter death in a shootout with said cartel, hopefully after taking some of the bastards to Hell with me.

In a modern environment with firearms available to most and effective poison and high explosives available to those with the technical knowledge or connections, this just results in a bunch of people blowing themselves up or shooting it out with whoever is trying to catch them.

Do you really want bad things to not happen or just really really want to torture those you deem to be evil?

These are actually the same thing. The first is just the logical explanation, and the second is the internalized, evolved taste for justice that certain human populations naturally develop. The first is the deterrent theory and the second is the retributive theory of justice, but they are not mutually exclusive. I believe they are the same thing! “Did you really kill Hitler to prevent evil, or to feel good about killing Hitler?” Yes!

Proposing severe punishment as a disincentive is hardly the newest idea out there

Yes, it’s the basis of every civilization’s deterrence to extreme defection of standards. Let’s apply it to a novel use case!

This point of view is aesthetically repulsive for me […] sounds like a clown to anyone who knows anything about History and how bad things used to be.

To me this sounds just a little naive. We are already implementing terror and torturous death on nations that affect our geopolitical dominance. We are fine with starving Yemenis and dead Syrian children. We are okay with pregnant women in Afghanistan being foreseeably-accidentally killed so that we destabilize these areas. It is the very basis of American foreign policy in the Middle East, and before that Cambodia and Vietnam. We commit more torture today (all of its moral residue, st least) than a medieval kingdom. We shouldn’t ignore the widespread use of it just because a video on liveleak made us feel icky. The barbarity of torture and torturous death is a fact of life in geopolitics and must be accepted.

So what about those who feel a very strong internalized distaste for law-and-order types who fantasise about extreme punishments, especially when the extreme punishments happen to always be for members of their outgroup? Many of them probably think that your viewpoint is pretty evil, and would at least be willing to go as far as locking you up in solitary if that were the only way to stop you from actualising it. Do you figure their feelings on the matter are also an evolved taste that certain human populations naturally develop which reflects a logical viewpoint, or do only your feelings align with the truth?

Perhaps some might even like the idea of torturing the would-be torturer. Would you prefer to fight to the death against those people (who, if they don't have a numerical advantage over you, certainly don't seem to have that much of a disadvantage) over who gets to get tortured in the end, or do you think you could come to a compromise where neither of you tortures and you could resolve your differences in a different way?

I would definitely prefer to live in a country with the reasonable amount of Risk-Care assessment that (per the view in my post) encourages saving millions of lives from a torturous death. If someone disagrees I am completely unbothered — what can I do but express my argument? This discussion is not about the most efficient practical form of procuring the legal remedy in the courts, it’s higher order than that. To me, wanting to do maximal evil to a person that wants to effectively minimize maximal harm (and torturous death) does sound like a perverse and antisocial worldview. But maybe you can get a society up and running on such principles. I would listen to someone argue that this leads to the best results, despite my doubt.

The laziest nontrivial argument to do whatever it takes to stay torture-free is that we are in a society that at least tries its darndest to maintain a pretense of shunning deliberate torture even if it is for the greater good, and all the most recent ones that did not maintain this pretense seem pretty terrible to live in.

I do concede that wanting to have all those who advocate living by the sword die by the sword and only then abolish swords is somewhat gratuitously brutal, and I'd personally be quite contented with merely locking up anyone who was involved in introducing torture. (Note that this is not to say I want to lock anyone up for arguing for it, as long as it is not implemented. That would run up against other principles.)

So what about those who feel a very strong internalized distaste for law-and-order types who fantasise about extreme punishments, especially when the extreme punishments happen to always be for members of their outgroup?

This argument proves too much. It can apply to any type of punishment for anything. If you want to lock people up for bank robbery, someone could equally well say "what if someone thinks that viewpoint is pretty evil and is willing to lock you up for expressing it"?

The symmetry with bank robbery doesn't hold, because "jailing bank robbers is unjust" is a minority position, and opposition to any jailing at all is even more so. On the other hand, opposition to torture in general is (mercifully, in my eyes) still mainstream, as is the belief that extreme punishment for negligence is unjust. Argue for jailing bank robbers and most people will nod along and no norms will be changed. Argue for torturing scientists who oversaw major accidents, and you will only leave us with additional torture, because abstract principles like "no torture" are always softer than tribalism like "if we torture, it better be the outgroup". This will neither be torture that you want (because you and your people are in a minority (as weighted by power) disagreed with ~ despised by the majority) nor torture that I want (because I don't want there to be torture).

The symmetry with bank robbery doesn't hold, because "jailing bank robbers is unjust" is a minority position,

If many people think like you this is circular reasoning; if nobody supports it because it's a minority position, that makes it a minority position even if it wasn't already.

I'm also skeptical that you'd stop objecting to torture if it proved to be popular.

abstract principles like "no torture" are always softer than tribalism like "if we torture, it better be the outgroup".

This argument could be made for other things too. It has not, for instance resulted in the death penalty, or even long sentences, being applied tribally.

I'm also skeptical that you'd stop objecting to torture if it proved to be popular.

I wouldn't, but I never claimed that I would. However, I'd stop being able to use this particular argument towards my interlocutor. If torture were popular, I would consider his position merely immoral, and I don't think that this is the forum for trying to shift someone's value function. Given that it is as unpopular as it is, though, I believe his position is not only immoral but also instrumentally bad for his own ends, and I am trying to use that as an argument to get him to drop it. Is there a problem with having ulterior motives (which I think I'm being pretty upfront about) in trying to stop someone from making a mistake?

edit:

This argument could be made for other things too. It has not, for instance resulted in the death penalty, or even long sentences, being applied tribally.

Interesting point. I don't think those two quite satisfy the criteria to be a perfect model of torture, because the death penalty seems to only be applied to people who are too low-class to matter to either tribe in every country where I'm equipped to judge its tribalism and there was never an established principle against long sentences (and there are examples where they were applied tribally, e.g., famously, interbellum Germany), but you are probably right that my expectation that it will inevitably become so needed more careful thought. I still think that the circumstance that the proposed motivating use will be interpreted as blatantly tribal makes it highly likely.

To be clear, OP seems to want to establish this prospectively.

This does not seem to be the case from the OP. They write:

Following from this example, I assert that we should have craft a law to maximally punish everyone who was involved in COVID leaking from a lab (implying this dominant theory is indeed true).

The actions being punished are explicitly referenced in the past tense, as things that have already happened. Similarly the Nuremberg trials, which are referenced, involved retroactive illegality.

OP also wrote

I am of course suggesting implementing a future legal / constitutional framework for this, in an ideal political environment. (They should be legally punished, by new laws. Nothing more.)

In totality I think they are talking about going forward there should be a way to punish things like covid leak.

Following from this example, I assert that we should have craft a law to maximally punish everyone who was involved in COVID leaking from a lab (implying this dominant theory is indeed true).

Since when is this the dominant theory? It has just recently shifted from "totally fake news right-wing conspiracy" to "possibly plausible" in mainstream discussion.

"Possibly plausible" seems like a regretful compromise with public opinion by the media. A strong majority of the US public believes covid leaked from a lab.

So is that the only thing that you want to punish with medieval torture, or is there anything else? I'm thinking of tobacco executives as an immediate candidate for someone who under any principled law you are proposing should go right after the lab leak overseers into the torture pit. Considering the tribal valence of it, how are you planning to argue against the other tribe enacting medieval torture on you or your champions, once they are in power?

More pragmatically, you probably aren't going to be successful at capturing scientists who oversaw a lab leak wherever they were in the world. If your country is the one that passes the law you want, all scientists who could imagine themselves committing an accident of this magnitude - which may be everyone who is good in this field - will move to Russia, China, or whatever other pick of adversary does not share in your bloodthirst and will not extradite, and then you can act surprised when COVID 2.0 turns out to have a mysterious affinity for people from your country. (I'm not a biochemist, but I don't know if, were I one, I would feel particular moral trepidations about doing horrible things to people who approve of subjecting me to a lifetime of medieval torture for an honest mistake, however dire the consequences.)

Why do you see tobacco as anything halfways comparable? Tobacco use is known to be harmful and the harm is something that people willingly exchange in return for a pleasant experience. In the case of a tobacco executive in the 60’s lying about the dangers of smoking, this is mitigated by the expectation that corporations lie in America. If a regulatory body were tasked with doing research on tobacco, and it knowingly declared tobacco free from danger in the face of overwhelming evidence, and this ruling was in effect for thousands of years, then yes I would see it as similar. But a reasonable person can find the studies and dispute the government consideration, whereas no one can opt out of getting COVID. So this is an essentially dissimilar metaphor in regards to risk and culpability.

If you’re saying that we should let mad scientists do mad research because otherwise they will do it in Russia, I disagree because of the risks of mad research, and would hope an international body is developed to oversee mad research.

You can't exactly opt out of passive smoking (certainly not in the '80s, unless you stayed home, which probably also would protect you against COVID), but fair enough about it being too dissimilar to work as a comparison. There's another analogy that has even more culture war juice in it, though, and which seems like an actual candidate for a way in which eroding the "no cruel and unusual punishment" norm would come around to bite the red tribe coalition. Global warming is something which a large majority of people actually believes has already or will cause millions of deaths, and a narrative has long taken root (the whole "Exxon internal memos produced accurate climate projections decades ago" thing) where its causation was not merely negligent but actively malicious. If "cause megadeaths by negligence or worse => lifelong torture" becomes the new norm, then I don't think that oil execs will make it for long, and a particularly triumphalist progressive coalition might be tempted to go for their Republican party enablers too.

It's a good opportunity to invoke that evergreen movie quote (the "law" in the US context, I guess, would be the 8th Amendment):

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

It's easy to prove that covid caused millions of deaths. Go ahead and prove that climate change has done the same. Plus all the oil scientists, coal workers, car owners etc are in the billions themselves. They have massively diluted responsibility, at worse they may each deserve a speck in the eye for the equivalent of decades of medieval torture of covid guy.

It's easy to prove that covid caused millions of deaths

IS it? There are many causes of so-called Covid deaths; very few people die of Covid alone. You need pulmonary co-morbidities like smoking; like decreased immune function; like the social pathology of Western medical praxis at keeping Grandma around, medicated up to the gills, long past her sell-by date already. Africa hardly had any Covid deaths, because they don't do the last one.

Saying "Covid is responsible for millions of deaths" is like packing someone's port authority warehouse with ammonium nitrate for years and then putting all responsibility for the inevitable explosion on "The unseasonable heat that day was responsible for 7000 deaths".

The spark doesn't cause the inferno; the kindling does. A novel bat virus is only a spark.

African countries are piss-poor at tracking COVID deaths. Their death rates from disease are an order of magnitude higher than ours, so excess mortality statistics are going to be very noisy. Yes, a lot of the deaths were in people that were already vulnerable as hell from old age or diabetes or smoking or something. Let's call that 90 percent of 'em. We still have 10 percent of the dead that would have lived for at least a decade or so in the absence of COVID.

Go ahead and prove that climate change has done the same.

People very concerned about climate change will easily assert enormous costs due to climate change. I'm sure they could cook up scary death tolls if they needed to in order to justify punishing their enemies.

It's easy to prove that COVID-19 caused megadeaths, but it isn't easy to prove that it started from a lab leak. My out-of-posterior probability on "The COVID-19 pandemic began with a leak from the WIV" is 60%. People who I trust not to be enstupidated by the culture war and who have understood the evidence on both sides and updated on it use words consistent with posterior probabilities in the 10-49% range. "The COVID-19 pandemic began with a leak from the WIV of a pathogen deliberately engineered as part of a gain of function programme for which identifiable US persons can be blamed" is obviously even less likely because of conjunction.

Even if COVID-19 wasn't a lab leak, it could have been. That is sufficient to make gain-of-function research into pathogenic viruses a universal jurisdiction capital offence going forward, but it isn't enough to punish the people who did it when it was legal.

The call to start punishing people for the COVID-19 lab leak without confirming that it actually happened is a call to punish people based on any conspiracy or cock-up theory which is at least as plausible as the lab leak theory and ends with megadeaths. FWIW, my out-of-posterior probability on "Climate change will kill more than a million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2050" is 80% - we know that some non-zero amount of climate change is real, that Sub-Saharan Africa was too hot already, and that it doesn't take that much to cause a million deaths in the third world. My out-of-posterior probability on "Cigarette marketing during the period where tobacco company executives knew that smoking caused cancer but publically denied this caused increased cigarette consumption leading to over a million worldwide cancer deaths" is 95%.

Given the politics of all this, it will be the tobacco executives who are first against the wall if we adopt this policy. I suspect that at least one wholly innocent group (vaccine manufacturers, Monsanto employees, water flouridators etc.) will be targetted before the mob gets round to the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

More seriously, part of the purpose of trials and such-like is that they affect the deterrent message that the following punishment sends. If the De Santis administration gets the Supreme Court to ignore the Bills of Attainder clause and terror-tortures Fauci for funding gain of function research in Wuhan, the actual lesson learned is "Don't do anything which might upset a noisy minority of partisan voters enough that they call for your head" which cashes out as "Don't do anything at all" because partisan rage-machines are fairly unpredictable. Even if you do prove that Fauci-funded research engineered the virus which escaped from WIV, if he is the only person you terror-torture with e.g. tobacco industry executives skating then you are sending the same message.

To send the message "Don't do stuff that has an obvious risk of a megadeath cock-up", you need to make the risk of being terror-tortured depend more on the severity of the cock-up than the political valence of it.

Well, that doesn’t work because oil actually has a lot of utility as well. Maybe we’ve killed millions as a result of oil but also saved billions. Who knows.

To date, has GoF produced any real utility?

To date, has GoF produced any real utility?

Providing cushy high-status jobs for overproduced elites staves off nuclear civil war, is that good enough?

Gain of function experiments with Ebola (the virus BSL-4 was invented for) were instrumental in developing the Ebola vaccine.

I don't think the parent poster was proposing weighing the utility of it against COVID deaths, but even so, you're up against people who are much more numerous and better at creating narratives than you are. I'm sure they'll find some way to argue that GoF research produced utility, whereas oil executives just conspired to keep demand higher and externality pricing lower than it needed to be. When you are fighting against someone who controls the narrative, laws and principles, that is, elements of the narrative that the narrative-writer can not change except at a great cost, are your only protection. Why would you propose to abolish them, unless you are working off of a mental model of reality in which you have more power than you actually do? Are temporarily embarrassed NYT editors the new temporarily embarrassed billionaires?

(And, personally, I think removing the Schelling fence around torture causes sufficient harm in itself that the first people I would want to see tortured for a lifetime if that's how we start doing things are those who proposed doing that. Think of that story of the Greek tyrant with the Brazen Bull.)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats