7 ms·

You're only able to be lax about physical security because institutions take care of it for you. Your taxes go to police, FBI, military. You keep your money in

by adrusi 10y ago

You're only able to be lax about physical security because institutions take care of it for you. Your taxes go to police, FBI, military. You keep your money in a bank, and the bank spends money on security. If people stopped keeping their money in banks and started storing it in their homes, the incentive for burglary would go up in your area. I also assume you don't live in a dense city. Even in a utopia you couldn't have perfect safety without investing in security: some people are going to commit crimes and violate property just for fun, and when there's a lot of people in one area, that becomes a concern. There has never in history been a time when people can be secure without investing in security. To claim that investing in security is in indication of something "wrong" is therefore at best a sentiment far ahead of its time.

nitrogen 10y ago
some people are going to commit crimes and violate property Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots?
- Prefinem 10y ago
  He/She could believe that people are inherently bad.
- adrusi 10y ago
  Breaking the rules is fun. The thrill in taking such risks is exhilerating and if you get good at it — if you can repeatedly break the rules and get away with it — you feel powerful. Unless you're suggesting a transhuman approach, there's no way to get around that. You can eliminate any incentives for crime, and eliminate all sources of childhood strife, and still have people who commit crime because it's a great hobby.
  - eric_h 10y ago
    It certainly is. Personally, I've grown beyond purely breaking rules for the sake of it, without concern for the repercussions. I still break the rules, all the time, but only when I think the rules are wrong and no true harm will come from my breaking them. It's gotten much less fun in my old age, just seems rather boring and rational.
  - msh 10y ago
    Only if the chance of capture is low. If people got cought 9 times out of 10 I don't think they would have that hobby.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      And now we're back to spending billions on security.
  - Qwertious 10y ago
    I think that can be fixed at a cultural level, so it's no guarantor of crime.
    - clevernickname 10y ago
      Sexual desire was fixed at a cultural level until it wasn't. The narrative that people only steal because they're poor and desperate is just that, a narrative. Anyone can feel excitement at taking another's property. Your perfect society free of crime is begging for a "disruption."
      - majewsky 10y ago
        > Anyone can feel excitement at taking another's property. My upbringing has had this "golden rule of ethics" (don't do to others what you don't want done upon yourself) ingrained in me pretty well, so I would never feel excitement about this. (Hypothesis: This ridiculous objectivism has had people forget how much cooperation is ingrained into humans by nature.) That said, I am aware that such thoughts exist in my subconsciousness, because the subc is always exploring all possible paths, but I have never experienced that as an even remotely acceptable (in terms of my own moral) path of action.
        usrusr 10y ago
        > don't do to others what you don't want done upon yourself This only works for people who sufficiently appreciate their own possessions. Others might develop a very relaxed "stuff comes, stuff goes, who cares it's just materialistic crap anyways" attitude and and that equips them to have surprisingly little remorse in regards to theft. This is probably exemplified best in the extremely high rate of theft affecting near-zero-value bikes in many Dutch cities. That kind of thief might even rationalize by inverting guilt, "if he feels bad about the loss it's his own fault that he is not as cool about shitty old piles of rust as I am"
        clevernickname 10y ago
        Have you ever watched a heist film? If so, you can't claim not to understand how it could be exciting to break into someone's property, risk imprisonment or death, and take their stuff. Go watch one some time, the writers make sure to paint the victims as bad men and the thieves as anti-heroes so that you can enjoy the fantasy without guilt. You've missed my point for the opportunity to moralize and posture. Consider this: You know cheating is wrong, you probably consider yourself to be someone that would never do it, yet you can still acknowledge that it would most likely be enjoyable for at least a very short while, right? That's all I'm saying, not (lmao) some kind of faux-objectivist philosophy on the right to take other people's property or whatever it is you seem to be imagining.
- shshhdhs 10y ago
  Easy to say, but people are selfish. There will always be evil sinful people in this world
  - angry_octet 10y ago
    Only if you believe in the concept of evil and sin.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      There will always be people who will happily infringe upon your person to their benefit and your dismay. There, now the philosophical twaddle is excised without ruining the spirit of the point
      - hinkley 10y ago
        Exhibit B: A human expending energy to protect an idea from a self-important prat too busy playing word games and Tea with Philosophers to listen.
      - calgoo 10y ago
        Yea, I wish we could all live in Anarchy without rules or police or armies etc. But there is always an asshole who want more, or think he deserves more. I mean, we reward these people today with jobs on WallStreet etc, but these people would still exist in an anarchy, and would do their best to "solve" the world to their liking.
    - hinkley 10y ago
      Exhibit A. A human selfishly ignoring the thesis of a statement in order to sound wise and try to win the disagreement by subterfuge.
      - angry_octet 10y ago
        Since the discussion is about criminality, and it was suggested that this arises due to some religious notions rather than eg (a) people being defective or (b) social-economic disadvantage, it thought that out to be challenged. From an evolutionary perspective you could say that there must be an advantage in such behavior to the individual, even if the society suffers. Also, thanks for the unjustified rudeness, you've made a great contribution today.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots? You mean change human nature?
  - bobwaycott 10y ago
    I imagine it'd be more like changing human behaviors, and the societal conditions in which they are shaped.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      So, have any society ever changed those exact behaviors?
  - danharaj 10y ago
    Human nature is the least productive concept ever. It is only ever brought up to defend the status quo and declare it as inevitable. It is a mystical concept impervious to examination. Whether it's "God" or "human nature" it's just a term for an abstract master that keeps us all in bondage.
    - refurb 10y ago
      Do you think animals have a "nature"? If so, why are humans any different? Sure, we can reflect on our behavior and try and change it, but it's undeniable there are innate drivers that can be hard to overcome.
      - danharaj 10y ago
        I take issue with the way "human nature" is used, not the idea that we have a nature. It is almost always unproductive. Even so, most who make an argument from human nature always convince me that they know nothing about other human beings within a sentence or two.
        refurb 10y ago
- ori_b 10y ago
  How do you plan on preventing people from wanting things?
  - bobwaycott 10y ago
    Idealistically and for the fun of philosophically considering the matter, by creating a world composed of societies in which the inhabitants are free from want.
    - woodman 10y ago
      > ... inhabitants are free from want. Do you mean chemical lobotomies or a post scarcity economy? Because there are some wants that are impossible to fulfill, for example: there are a bunch of murderers in Syria motivated by the desire to fly a winged horse to a sky mansion where 72 infinity virgins await. I don't see that happening, even post scarcity.
- ori_b 10y ago
  How do you plan on preventing people from wanting things?
- flukus 10y ago
  Because those roots are hard wired into us by a billion years of evolution.
  - bobwaycott 10y ago
    And yet we evolved a rather handy set of features for altering and shaping our behaviors.
    - flukus 10y ago
      And they'll continue to evolve and improve, but that takes thousands of generations.
      - bobwaycott 10y ago
        Naturally.
      - majewsky 10y ago
        You're radically underestimating mankind's potential of disruptive innovation.
  - hinkley 10y ago
    Now I have to apologize for playing both sides of this conversation, but we've been working on this tribalism for a few hundred years, maybe if you were a better student of human history than I am you could make a case for a few thousand. We have a way to go, but we have made at least some progress. Maybe in another few hundred years humans won't be so 'Us and Them'. Maybe materialism will be the next thing we work on. Who knows, maybe by the time we reach the next galaxy we'll have it sorted out.
    - clevernickname 10y ago
      It's human nature to crave sex, maybe not with every single person you meet, but certainly with more than a single partner in your entire life, right? For thousands of years, Christianity attempted to "work on this" aspect of human nature and make non-monogamous sexuality taboo. It was fairly successful at it. Yet (depending on your perspective) it only took somewhere between a few years and a few decades post-sexual revolution for it all to come crashing down spectacularly. If the most powerful institution in the western world couldn't "fix" this aspect of human nature over millennia, it is sheer arrogance to think we can do better today.
- gnaritas 10y ago
  Because "we're" being realistic. Changing that is unrealistic.
- woodman 10y ago
  > ... instead of trying to change it at its roots? Because eugenics went out of fashion a long time ago. The "roots" is free will, so you can't really change that without horrific consequences. Using birth control (voluntary and involuntary) to bias the population was a popular idea in the 1920s. China's latest gamifaction of "social credit" is another biasing attempt. I'm not aware of any "roots" solution that doesn't require total surveillance or head measurements...
banach2 10y ago
More than just for fun. In a global society so encapsulated by money people are always going to tend toward the path of least resistance to maximise that goal. In many cases, despite the moral factors, risk, etc; this is going to be crime. It seems to simply be human/animal nature and something which society itself won't easily be able to change.
kalleboo 10y ago
I live in Japan, where there seems to be a much stronger respect for other people's property. It's a common story for people who forget their wallet on a park bench or something to come back hours later and it's either still there or at the local police box. There's also a lot less vandalism - I don't usually see things like trashed bus stops that were a daily sight back home. Most people seem to lock their bikes with a simple lock between the frame and back tyre - those would have all been hauled away by a truck and disappeared by the next morning back where I used to live. (edit: another anecdote - I was very surprised when my wife thought nothing of leaving a brand new MacBook Pro visible in the back seat of the car when going into a restaurant for lunch) And yes, people here (mainly the elderly) do keep vast sums of cash at home http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2027129/Honest-Japanese-return-78million-cash-earthquake-rubble.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2027129/Honest-Japan... Japan also has some of the densest cities on earth. Of course, it's far from perfect (there's plenty of crime, people still lock their doors, and sexual violence seems to be off the charts), but it shows that paranoia doesn't have to be the default state. If they made it this far, how much further is possible within human nature?
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  I moved to Rome, Italy last year and was quite surprised how little respect they seem to have for other people's property. All the apartments have thick security doors[1], lower windows of buildings have iron bars and all gardens have tall fences. If you leave anything that looks even remotely valuable in your car, someone will break a window and grab it. There is tonnes of vandalism, and even if you leave a motorbike locked with a secure lock it's somewhat likely it won't be there the next day. It sounds the complete opposite of Japan! [1] A few weeks after I arrived I was at a friends house and there was a disturbance of some sort in the apartment next door. The police couldn't get in, so called the fire service who had to work for 20 minutes to break the door down. They considered going in through the outside, but it was the third floor and all the windows had metal shutters.
- david-given 10y ago
  I live in Zürich. The joke here is that if you left a pile of money on the pavement in the city centre, it would stay there for a week and then you'd be fined for littering. People here are basically honest. There aren't any turnstiles on the transit system --- they just assume you'll have bought a ticket. Children roam the streets on their own and think nothing of talking to random adults. Of course, they back up this trust with enforcement; there are occasional spot checks on the transit system with big fines; and if you don't pay a driving ticket the police will come to your house and remove your license plates...

by adrusi 10y ago

nitrogen 10y ago

some people are going to commit crimes and violate property Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots?

Prefinem 10y ago
He/She could believe that people are inherently bad.
adrusi 10y ago
Breaking the rules is fun. The thrill in taking such risks is exhilerating and if you get good at it — if you can repeatedly break the rules and get away with it — you feel powerful. Unless you're suggesting a transhuman approach, there's no way to get around that. You can eliminate any incentives for crime, and eliminate all sources of childhood strife, and still have people who commit crime because it's a great hobby.
- eric_h 10y ago
  It certainly is. Personally, I've grown beyond purely breaking rules for the sake of it, without concern for the repercussions. I still break the rules, all the time, but only when I think the rules are wrong and no true harm will come from my breaking them. It's gotten much less fun in my old age, just seems rather boring and rational.
- msh 10y ago
  Only if the chance of capture is low. If people got cought 9 times out of 10 I don't think they would have that hobby.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    And now we're back to spending billions on security.
- Qwertious 10y ago
  I think that can be fixed at a cultural level, so it's no guarantor of crime.
  - clevernickname 10y ago
    Sexual desire was fixed at a cultural level until it wasn't. The narrative that people only steal because they're poor and desperate is just that, a narrative. Anyone can feel excitement at taking another's property. Your perfect society free of crime is begging for a "disruption."
    - majewsky 10y ago
      > Anyone can feel excitement at taking another's property. My upbringing has had this "golden rule of ethics" (don't do to others what you don't want done upon yourself) ingrained in me pretty well, so I would never feel excitement about this. (Hypothesis: This ridiculous objectivism has had people forget how much cooperation is ingrained into humans by nature.) That said, I am aware that such thoughts exist in my subconsciousness, because the subc is always exploring all possible paths, but I have never experienced that as an even remotely acceptable (in terms of my own moral) path of action.
      - usrusr 10y ago
        > don't do to others what you don't want done upon yourself This only works for people who sufficiently appreciate their own possessions. Others might develop a very relaxed "stuff comes, stuff goes, who cares it's just materialistic crap anyways" attitude and and that equips them to have surprisingly little remorse in regards to theft. This is probably exemplified best in the extremely high rate of theft affecting near-zero-value bikes in many Dutch cities. That kind of thief might even rationalize by inverting guilt, "if he feels bad about the loss it's his own fault that he is not as cool about shitty old piles of rust as I am"
      - clevernickname 10y ago
        Have you ever watched a heist film? If so, you can't claim not to understand how it could be exciting to break into someone's property, risk imprisonment or death, and take their stuff. Go watch one some time, the writers make sure to paint the victims as bad men and the thieves as anti-heroes so that you can enjoy the fantasy without guilt. You've missed my point for the opportunity to moralize and posture. Consider this: You know cheating is wrong, you probably consider yourself to be someone that would never do it, yet you can still acknowledge that it would most likely be enjoyable for at least a very short while, right? That's all I'm saying, not (lmao) some kind of faux-objectivist philosophy on the right to take other people's property or whatever it is you seem to be imagining.
shshhdhs 10y ago
Easy to say, but people are selfish. There will always be evil sinful people in this world
- angry_octet 10y ago
  Only if you believe in the concept of evil and sin.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    There will always be people who will happily infringe upon your person to their benefit and your dismay. There, now the philosophical twaddle is excised without ruining the spirit of the point
    - hinkley 10y ago
      Exhibit B: A human expending energy to protect an idea from a self-important prat too busy playing word games and Tea with Philosophers to listen.
    - calgoo 10y ago
      Yea, I wish we could all live in Anarchy without rules or police or armies etc. But there is always an asshole who want more, or think he deserves more. I mean, we reward these people today with jobs on WallStreet etc, but these people would still exist in an anarchy, and would do their best to "solve" the world to their liking.
  - hinkley 10y ago
    Exhibit A. A human selfishly ignoring the thesis of a statement in order to sound wise and try to win the disagreement by subterfuge.
    - angry_octet 10y ago
      Since the discussion is about criminality, and it was suggested that this arises due to some religious notions rather than eg (a) people being defective or (b) social-economic disadvantage, it thought that out to be challenged. From an evolutionary perspective you could say that there must be an advantage in such behavior to the individual, even if the society suffers. Also, thanks for the unjustified rudeness, you've made a great contribution today.
coldtea 10y ago
>Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots? You mean change human nature?
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  I imagine it'd be more like changing human behaviors, and the societal conditions in which they are shaped.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    So, have any society ever changed those exact behaviors?
- danharaj 10y ago
  Human nature is the least productive concept ever. It is only ever brought up to defend the status quo and declare it as inevitable. It is a mystical concept impervious to examination. Whether it's "God" or "human nature" it's just a term for an abstract master that keeps us all in bondage.
  - refurb 10y ago
    Do you think animals have a "nature"? If so, why are humans any different? Sure, we can reflect on our behavior and try and change it, but it's undeniable there are innate drivers that can be hard to overcome.
    - danharaj 10y ago
      I take issue with the way "human nature" is used, not the idea that we have a nature. It is almost always unproductive. Even so, most who make an argument from human nature always convince me that they know nothing about other human beings within a sentence or two.
      - refurb 10y ago
ori_b 10y ago
How do you plan on preventing people from wanting things?
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  Idealistically and for the fun of philosophically considering the matter, by creating a world composed of societies in which the inhabitants are free from want.
  - woodman 10y ago
    > ... inhabitants are free from want. Do you mean chemical lobotomies or a post scarcity economy? Because there are some wants that are impossible to fulfill, for example: there are a bunch of murderers in Syria motivated by the desire to fly a winged horse to a sky mansion where 72 infinity virgins await. I don't see that happening, even post scarcity.
ori_b 10y ago
How do you plan on preventing people from wanting things?
flukus 10y ago
Because those roots are hard wired into us by a billion years of evolution.
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  And yet we evolved a rather handy set of features for altering and shaping our behaviors.
  - flukus 10y ago
    And they'll continue to evolve and improve, but that takes thousands of generations.
    - bobwaycott 10y ago
      Naturally.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      You're radically underestimating mankind's potential of disruptive innovation.
- hinkley 10y ago
  Now I have to apologize for playing both sides of this conversation, but we've been working on this tribalism for a few hundred years, maybe if you were a better student of human history than I am you could make a case for a few thousand. We have a way to go, but we have made at least some progress. Maybe in another few hundred years humans won't be so 'Us and Them'. Maybe materialism will be the next thing we work on. Who knows, maybe by the time we reach the next galaxy we'll have it sorted out.
  - clevernickname 10y ago
    It's human nature to crave sex, maybe not with every single person you meet, but certainly with more than a single partner in your entire life, right? For thousands of years, Christianity attempted to "work on this" aspect of human nature and make non-monogamous sexuality taboo. It was fairly successful at it. Yet (depending on your perspective) it only took somewhere between a few years and a few decades post-sexual revolution for it all to come crashing down spectacularly. If the most powerful institution in the western world couldn't "fix" this aspect of human nature over millennia, it is sheer arrogance to think we can do better today.
gnaritas 10y ago
Because "we're" being realistic. Changing that is unrealistic.
woodman 10y ago
> ... instead of trying to change it at its roots? Because eugenics went out of fashion a long time ago. The "roots" is free will, so you can't really change that without horrific consequences. Using birth control (voluntary and involuntary) to bias the population was a popular idea in the 1920s. China's latest gamifaction of "social credit" is another biasing attempt. I'm not aware of any "roots" solution that doesn't require total surveillance or head measurements...

banach2 10y ago

More than just for fun. In a global society so encapsulated by money people are always going to tend toward the path of least resistance to maximise that goal. In many cases, despite the moral factors, risk, etc; this is going to be crime. It seems to simply be human/animal nature and something which society itself won't easily be able to change.

kalleboo 10y ago

I live in Japan, where there seems to be a much stronger respect for other people's property. It's a common story for people who forget their wallet on a park bench or something to come back hours later and it's either still there or at the local police box. There's also a lot less vandalism - I don't usually see things like trashed bus stops that were a daily sight back home. Most people seem to lock their bikes with a simple lock between the frame and back tyre - those would have all been hauled away by a truck and disappeared by the next morning back where I used to live. (edit: another anecdote - I was very surprised when my wife thought nothing of leaving a brand new MacBook Pro visible in the back seat of the car when going into a restaurant for lunch) And yes, people here (mainly the elderly) do keep vast sums of cash at home http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2027129/Honest-Japanese-return-78million-cash-earthquake-rubble.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2027129/Honest-Japan... Japan also has some of the densest cities on earth. Of course, it's far from perfect (there's plenty of crime, people still lock their doors, and sexual violence seems to be off the charts), but it shows that paranoia doesn't have to be the default state. If they made it this far, how much further is possible within human nature?

lucaspiller 10y ago
I moved to Rome, Italy last year and was quite surprised how little respect they seem to have for other people's property. All the apartments have thick security doors[1], lower windows of buildings have iron bars and all gardens have tall fences. If you leave anything that looks even remotely valuable in your car, someone will break a window and grab it. There is tonnes of vandalism, and even if you leave a motorbike locked with a secure lock it's somewhat likely it won't be there the next day. It sounds the complete opposite of Japan! [1] A few weeks after I arrived I was at a friends house and there was a disturbance of some sort in the apartment next door. The police couldn't get in, so called the fire service who had to work for 20 minutes to break the door down. They considered going in through the outside, but it was the third floor and all the windows had metal shutters.
david-given 10y ago
I live in Zürich. The joke here is that if you left a pile of money on the pavement in the city centre, it would stay there for a week and then you'd be fined for littering. People here are basically honest. There aren't any turnstiles on the transit system --- they just assume you'll have bought a ticket. Children roam the streets on their own and think nothing of talking to random adults. Of course, they back up this trust with enforcement; there are occasional spot checks on the transit system with big fines; and if you don't pay a driving ticket the police will come to your house and remove your license plates...