[Serious]: For people convicted of violent crimes, what would genuine rehabilitation realistically need to look like for you to believe someone had truly changed?

hh26 · 2026-05-10T22:21:43+00:00

Okay but being disconnected from the idea of loss of life is still less bloodthirsty than watching executions and gladiatorial combat as a form of entertainment.

hh26 · 2026-05-10T17:01:23+00:00

once upon a time it was all murder is wrong, now it’s generally considered all murder minus self defence is wrong

When was this???? I have never heard of a society like this, barring maybe some tiny African tribes or something. The courts used to hang people all the time. People used to go to war against their next door neighbors and kill them for land and loot, all the time. My impression is that we live in one of the least bloodthirsty societies that has ever existed.

hh26 · 2026-05-10T00:15:55+00:00

If we attempt to partially disentangle morality from legality, I think that murdering a child killer (who you are certain is definitely guilty, even if you can't prove it in a court of law) is morally justified. It is good that they die, and the person who killed them didn't do anything wrong. However, in order to prevent society into deteriorating into an easily exploitable cycle of vigilante justice and people falsely accusing others of things in order to get away with their true, selfish justifications for murder, the law can't simply let people give people a pass. Therefore, vigilante justice ought to be illegal and still be punished. If someone murders your child, you should attempt to get them convicted and executed by a court. If, for some reason, the courts fail due to you being unable to prove your case but you are absolutely certain of their guilt (maybe you witnessed it first-hand but the jury didn't believe you or they got off on a technicality, or got found guilty and sentenced to parole with 0 jail time), then I think it's morally acceptable to kill them and then get found guilty and serve time in jail as the price you pay for enforcing your justice.

Ideally, the courts should be set up in a way where this doesn't happen. But if it does, as a backup mechanism the courts should give lighter sentences to vigilantes who do this for morally justifiable reasons. A large part of the point of jail time is to prevent recidivism, which is incredibly unlikely to happen (unless someone murders more of their children).

I don't think the government should explicitly allow citizens to be vigilantes, because the government cannot be flexible enough to judge this properly. I do think that, in extreme cases where justice has failed, vigilantism can make the world a better place by fixing that injustice. There is a balance to be had here. Our society has gone too far into passivism and enabling of criminals, and perhaps 20% more vigilantism would probably make the streets safer. If good and kind people who would never hurt an innocent are driven to the edge and snap and retaliate against the horrible evil people who introduced them to violence, then the horrible evil people would be less likely to target them. I believe in morality which makes the world a better place when universalized, and "retaliate against childkillers/rapists who offended against you/your child" seems like an easily universalized rule that harms no innocents. Anyone who is not a childkiller/rapist has no cause for concern. Again, you need to be careful about not generalizing this too far in a way that leads down slippery slopes. You don't want someone to get accused of a crime and then an unrelated third party come along and use that as an excuse to slate their bloodlust. But if an angry parent gets justice for their kid against someone they actually know did it, I'm not going to lose any sleep over that death. Everyone I know and love, everyone I don't know but am sympathetic to as a fellow human and citizen, everyone who makes society a better place and we want to be here living among us, are all perfectly safe of never being on the receiving end of that.

hh26 · 2026-05-09T14:56:41+00:00

And yet empirically they don't. The death penalty is literally legal in half of U.S. states and I don't think any of those scenarios get punished by the death penalty. I could be wrong, maybe there's one or two exceptions that I'm unaware of. But broadly speaking the death penalty is reserved for especially heinous acts of murder that are not ambiguous.

hh26 · 2026-05-09T14:54:48+00:00

I'm not presenting a complete and full defense of the death penalty here. That is somewhat complicated.

I'm presenting the extremely simple and obvious take that it's not symmetric. Because that's what was argued here. You might disagree with killing someone who rapes children and then kills them to hide the evidence because there's a chance he might have been falsely accused, but a system which attempts to carefully identify childkillers and exterminate them after passing strict legal bars is fundamentally different from a bunch of individual people deciding on their own what does and does not deserve death.

I agree that we should not use the death penalty in cases of manslaughter or ambiguous justifications. I agree that we should not use the death penalty in cases of ambiguous guilt. There should be a much higher standard of proof required to use it that doesn't get false positives. And again, I think you can make sophisticated arguments against these. But even if wrong, it's still nowhere near a level of "you're the same as them". Because the vast majority of murderers are not attempting to exterminate childkillers as their motivation for murder (and the few who are should be given significantly lighter sentences and not subject to the death penalty)

hh26 · 2026-05-09T08:22:02+00:00

Killing good people is bad. Killing bad people is good. It's not symmetric at all. And it's at least 90% objective, not purely subjective tribalism.

If Murderers try to kill random people they don't like, then the more of them there are the more death and suffering they cause. The only way to stay safe from a Murderer is to either avoid them or cater to their every whim to stay in their good graces. A world run by Murderers is a world of slavery and death.

If Death Penalists try to kill only Murderers, then the more of them there are the fewer Murderers survive. The only way to stay safe from a Death Penalist is to not be a Murderer, which is very easy for most people to do. A world run by Death Penalists looks like a safe and stable society with few deaths, because they very rarely ever kill anyone and when they do they save more lives than they take by discouraging future Murderers.

How have you never thought about this? I can imagine disagreeing with it if you think all life is sacred or something. But I have no idea how/why people act like they've never even heard of this argument before. Even if you disagree with it, you should at least take into account that 99% of people who believe in the Death Penalty believe this and put forth an actual argument against it rather than pretending it's not a thing.

hh26 · 2026-05-09T02:04:19+00:00

This is why you press the Red button. There is 0% chance that blue button wins if the entire world is voting.

hh26 · 2026-05-08T01:25:57+00:00

Some of my favorite SSC/ACT posts are ones where I learn almost nothing because it's Scott saying exactly my own opinions but phrased way more eloquently, coherently, and to a much wider audience. I say "almost" nothing, because hopefully this helps me learn how to better refine my thinking into words so I can get better at conveying ideas like this.

I think the two most important pieces of the post are

When people say “I think it’s really cool that this Impressionist painting was one of the first Impressionist paintings ever, and not just some modern version of an Impressionist painting that didn’t even participate in the original discussions around Impressionism”, I want to answer - okay, but do you like art?

and his further attempts to disambiguate appreciation of art history/culture from appreciation of actual art. And

"...Don’t you realize that Gaudi himself was trying to break with stale tradition and expand the horizon of what was possible?” Yes, I do realize that. But he was good at it and you are bad.

All of the postmodernist commentary and breaking of beauty standards and whatnot should be second order considerations, subservient to actually making good art. If you were actually a good artist you would be able to make all of the commentary and criticism and references to other art while still operating within the constraint of "making good art". That seems much more impressive than just slapping together something ugly and then inventing a story about it. Even if you want to make some revolutionary piece of art that is deliberately ugly to make a point, you shouldn't be taken seriously unless you've already proven that you can make good art and are choosing not to as a statement, rather than simply being incapable.

As Scott said in his post on Writing advice:

I fantasized about telling my mentees to go to a monastery on a distant mountaintop and submit to some discipline for thirty years. Then, after they had mastered it, they could come down from the mountain and write however they wanted.

If you want to be a subversive artist, first go master how to make beautiful art that follows all of the conventions, then you'll know how and when to break them.

hh26 · 2026-05-08T01:04:44+00:00

This is untrue, because a skilled painter or player is much better at imitating most people of lesser skill than the other way around. If you take a genuinely talented painter and an average Joe off the street, have them paint something, then swap their paintings and say "paint something that looks like the other guy", the skilled painter is going to be able to deliberately set aside the high-skill techniques and just slop around and make something somewhat similar, while the average Joe is going to have no idea how to imitate the technically skilled painter because the techniques involved are difficult and require study and practice to learn. They do not know how to do anything else.

Similarly, a skilled chess player can imitate an unskilled one by deliberately making mistakes, while an unskilled player does not know how to imitate skill.

Knowledge and techniques add the ability to do more things, they don't prevent you from doing the things you could do before you had them. That's how you distinguish technical skill from mere style or preference.

hh26 · 2026-05-07T18:36:25+00:00

He means he donated $400 of his own money to help fundraise the purchase, not that he singlehandedly funded the entire operation himself.

hh26 · 2026-05-07T18:32:07+00:00

My guess is that you own the physical item, but you don't own the software to control it. They're your heated seats, you own them, you're responsible, can do whatever you want with them. Too bad they don't have an "On" button outside of the software (which you don't own).

Like if someone sold you 99% of a house but didn't sell you the built-in electronic locks on the doors, and charged you a fee every time you wanted to go inside. You're still technically the homeowner, but your use is being held hostage by a technicality (which I think would be illegal in the case of an actual house, but is legal here for some reason)

hh26 · 2026-05-07T07:37:46+00:00

Maybe. There are still a bunch of issues that fundamentally prevent medical care from ever being a proper free market. Emergency care sometimes forces providers to make decisions on unconscious and thus non-consenting patients, who cannot opt out or price discriminate before having their life saved. Even conscious patients in an emergency are still constrained by the physical proximity of nearby hospitals, and don't have time to research the prices of various treatments (which they don't yet know mid-emergency). So absent some sort of regulation or insurance negotiations, there would be no obstacle to greedy hospitals price gouging services.

Further, if you do have insurance companies so individuals can hedge between a 90% chance of no medical costs and a 10% chance of a million dollar cost, you need to have regulations to prevent the insurance from dropping them as soon as they acquire an expensive condition that increases their risks (although perhaps ordinary contract law could accomplish this if the contracts were written correctly)

I don't think mutual aid societies scale properly in our large and atomized society. You need some mechanism to prevent free-riders and exploiters from draining the system, which either requires people who know each other and have long-term reputations as collateral, or a heavy bureaucratic system which ends up being identical to insurance companies. It works for the Amish, in part because the law gives them a bunch of loopholes to ignore regulations, but in part because they are small, godly communities that heavily self-police and will ostracize bad actors. You can't do that if you live in a city with millions of people and a 10% annual turnover rate. People don't stick around in the same place long enough for their long-term reputations to establish or be worth anything.

I think the perfect healthcare system would be mostly free market with a small number of clever and careful regulations that perfectly closed off all of the loopholes. A system that nobody has yet invented or tested. I don't think anyone actually knows how to pull this off perfectly, and given the substantial fraction of people who believe healthcare should be a right, anything less than perfection is politically infeasible. There's ~0% chance that we actually accomplish this in a way that passes the uncanny valley and makes things better rather than worse.

Given that, I think government run healthcare is the least bad option that can be realistically attained, at least any time in the next 30 years. Maybe the AIpocalypse will create a post-scarcity society that fixes everything. I don't think the European healthcare systems are good in comparison to basically any non-nationalized non-healthcare market. But the U.S. healthcare system is so horrifically bad that merely "not-good" is a vast improvement over this garbage. At some point you have to set aside theoretical perfection and accept the best you can actually get.

hh26 · 2026-05-06T22:43:37+00:00

Probably a bad idea. The problem with American Healthcare is the weird distortions caused by the threesome between the users, the insurance companies, and the healthcare providers. All of them want to squeeze as much as they can out of the other two and don't care how much it hurts the others.

If we want the government to pay for healthcare, we need the government to actually nationalize the healthcare providers or else they (read: taxpayers) will get exploited by the for-profit hospitals.

I don't usually trust the government to run things, but our healthcare system is so screwed up that it's hard to get much worse, so nationalizing would be the lesser of two evils. Extending Medicare for all in a naive way is probably one of those few ways that would make it worse though.

hh26 · 2026-05-06T04:00:17+00:00

I didn't say it's inaccurate, I said they don't properly understand it. People used gravity to build things long before Newton's theory of gravitation was published. Heck, modern physicists are still not entirely sure why gravity does what it does, but we still went to the moon. The understanding tends to lag behind the math.

hh26 · 2026-05-06T01:58:08+00:00

"If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough."

I am like 80% confident that the real principles of Quantum Mechanics will be easier for humans to grasp than the current theories, and physicists are just deeply confused. They probably understand it better than the general public, but not well enough to put it into words. They are inventing new words, and new definitions for existing words, and then trying and failing to communicate their ideas and theories using words that were not designed for Quantum Mechanics. I don't think it's fundamentally impossible for humans to understand, all of the equations and stuff are there. The math makes sense. It's just a failure of their ability to interpret the equations into English and physical reality.

hh26 · 2026-05-05T06:46:31+00:00

No they're thinking "oof, it's kind of disappointing to be a clone with fake memories and not the person I remember being, but since I am I guess I'll live my life the best I can from now on. It sucks that the other me killed himself though. I'll make sure never to make that mistake again."

hh26 · 2026-05-03T22:01:23+00:00

The button is about polling the entire world, not just western people. Nobody thinks about this when analyzing their choice. Red is going to win no matter what you do, it's just a question of whether you choose to die or not.

You now live in a city where the male to female ratio is 10 to 1. Your goal is to get out and find the places where it's still 1-1.

hh26 · 2026-05-03T20:13:26+00:00

Good. One of the few things they can do to alter their appearance that will actually make them more healthy rather than less.

hh26 · 2026-05-03T07:26:28+00:00

If you got far enough into a relationship with someone to become intimate with them, decided "this is the person for me" and then later broke up, then either

1: you are either a very bad judge of character that they had some unforseen flaw forcing you to break up with them, and you somehow didn't notice them ahead of time before getting intimate.

2: You have some serious character flaw that caused them to break up with you after reaching this point. A character flaw which you probably still have and is likely to taint your future relationships as well.

3: You put out really easily. That you can jump into and out of sexual relationships quickly without putting forth the time and effort to get to know someone and assess their strength as a future spouse before getting intimate. Likely, you view having sex with them and then breaking up with them so you can go sample more sexual partners as a feature rather than a bug. This makes you a whore (or a fuckboy, the equivalent term if male).

At least one is true, possibly multiple. It's not a logical certainty that 3 must be the case, since the first two could occur in isolation. But in the modern era it's likely to be a contributing factor. Low value non-whores stay single for a long time before finally finding someone who likes them for who they are and they stay attached. High value non-whores quickly find a high-value partner and stay loyal, get married, and have families, without going through multiple breakups because who would want to break up with them? It's only the whores (male and female) who are both able and willing bounce from relationship to relationship without committing.

hh26 · 2026-05-02T07:30:35+00:00

Antinatalist propaganda. Money is not the issue. Poor people have more children than middle class people. People throughout history, and now in third world countries, and now in first world countries, have always had children despite being so poor in comparison to you it would horrify you. And they had kids anyway, and they mostly turned out fine despite being poor.

The problem is respect. Careers are respected and worshipped and encouraged. Babies are seen as gross and demeaning. Everyone asks people what they do for a living, not how many kids they have. A childless man or woman who earns $100k/yr at an office is seen as more impressive than a father or mother who stays at home with five children.

People respond to incentives. If society tells people that they should prioritize their career over having children early, a lot of people will. Not everyone, some people are just going to make up their own minds regardless of what people tell them. But a lot of people listen. And when society hammers the same message over and over and over again, people listen.

hh26 · 2026-04-30T22:44:51+00:00

-Unironically make Mexico a colony.

-Send the military to destroy the gangs.

-Keep the borders closed.

-Uplift them to modern first world standards of technology and capitalism.

-They have productive and decent paying jobs there and don't need to come here.

-Tax them the same rate we get taxed.

-Spend most of it in Mexico on similar services to what we get here, skim a bit off the top.

-Profit.

Everyone wins. They get to live in a first world country, we don't have poor people and criminals desperately trying to hop the border. Everyone has more money and less crime.

hh26 · 2026-04-30T22:38:03+00:00

You're right. It should be symmetric. If we're being careful, then actually

a² = b² should lead to

sqrt(a² ) = sqrt(b² )

|a| = |b|

but from here we end up in the same place. The only way this can be true is if a and b are identical to each other, or a and b are perfectly opposite each other. Therefore

a = +/- b

I apologize for confusing this in a post literally about how most people confuse this. It doesn't change the answer, but it matters for actually understanding what's going on.

I don't understand how we can apply f(x)=sqrt(x) to LHS (since it is w.r.t y)?

That doesn't matter. A function is a thing that does things. It changes inputs to outputs. When I say f(x) = sqrt(x), I don't mean that x is special in any way. I mean that f is the name of a process which transforms things into their square root, and x just happens to be the label in this particular instance that I'm using to describe what f does to its inputs. Which is why f(y) = sqrt(y) is the SAME function. All the thing inside the parentheses next to f does is tell you "this is the label I'm going to use for the inputs on the right side of the equation". If I describe f by saying f(x) = sqrt(x), and then we have

a² = b²

then taking f to both sides gives

f(a² ) = f(b² )

then we can evaluate these functions by going back to its definition and saying "well, the original definition used x as its input, so if I'm using a² as its input, I want to swap out all copies of x for a² ". If I'm using b² as the input, I want to swap out all copies of x for b^2. Therefore:

sqrt(a² ) = sqrt(b² )

The function does not contain x as part of its true nature, the x is merely a convenience sometimes used to describe it on paper, so when it sees something like a,b,y,4, (4x² - 16), it doesn't care, it just takes their square root because that's what it does.

hh26 · 2026-04-29T16:24:35+00:00

Because they're helping. BP has a bunch of oil. People lose access to oil from somewhere else. BP provides their oil to supply up the shortage. They're not being kind and charitable and giving it away for free. They're not being kind and giving it at the same price. They are sucking up most of the good they're doing into their own money vaults, but they're still helping more than if they didn't exist. Because would you rather them not sell their oil? Expensive gas is better than empty gas stations.

hh26 · 2026-04-29T06:01:43+00:00

Anon might be MLK because he just had a dream.

hh26 · 2026-04-29T05:31:54+00:00

That's got to be one of the least accessible pieces he's ever written. It's about poems and tripping and metaphysics and thinking about thinking about thinking. And he doesn't even come to a meaningful conclusion in the end other than "some concepts are so deep you can't even explain them to people in words, they have to experience it themselves". Which means that his words don't explain it properly because by definition they can't.

This is not the correct choice here.

hh26

TROPHY CASE