11 ms·

The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)

44 points by tablespoon 5y ago

sombremesa 5y ago
If people were actually worried about inmate mental health we would do away with incarceration. Being held against your will doesn’t exactly do wonders for you - and the consequences don’t end when you’re released. Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary?
- Veen 5y ago
  > Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary? Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers, potential rape victims than convicted rapists, property owners than convicted thieves, and so on.
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    Makes sense - I’m well aware no one here cares about anyone else’s wellbeing (but some claims to the contrary sure are good for your image), and you can freely move that line around whenever you want to dunk on someone on Twitter or HN. That’s what life’s about. Or maybe that’s just Twitter, on HN it’s about saying things everyone agrees with and never bringing up something difficult to respond to, so you won’t get downvoted.
    - cybernautique 5y ago
      Which of these points leads you to declare that the parent doesn't "care about anyone else's well-being?" Genuinely interested. > Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. [1] Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers; [2] potential rape victims than convicted rapists; [3] property owners than convicted thieves; [4] and so on.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    > Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. I’d argue that our current system isn’t really interested in the well being of victims either. Or rather, it’s only interested with the victims when the victims express specific opinions. The actual relationship between crime, survivors, retribution, and forgiveness is an extremely complex matter. Consider the case of Sirhan Sirhan, and how public figures treated Kennedy family members who were pro-parole vs. anti-parole. Sometimes the same people who were saying “you must listen to the family” were openly attacking other family members for wanting parole! > Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers, potential rape victims than convicted rapists, property owners than convicted thieves, and so on. If that’s what motivates you, you should actively hope for a more merciful and restorative criminal justice system. Our current system has very high recidivism rates, which is very bad for those potential future victims.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
      When you say “our current system”, which country are you referring to?
      - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
        Contextually, I'm assuming the US, because they specifically mention Sirhan Sirhan, the Kennedy family, and high recidivism rates, all things applicable to the US justice system.
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        You are correct.
        yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
        That is of course exactly as I suspected since an Americentric view of the world is depressingly common. I think it’s not useful to form universal views of the world based on the status quo in the USA. The prison system is harsh in the USA, and recidivism is high. In some other countries however, the prisons are significantly more brutal, and yet recidivism is low. So it isn’t quite as simple as the the commenter was implying.
  - gaze 5y ago
    It's strange to put "property owners" in the same list of victims as murder victims and rape victims.
- thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
  This may be one of my spicier opinions but I think we should have caning for some crimes. Fines and incarceration both have collateral damage, if the person punished is responsible for anyone. Fines are regressive. Incarceration has a host of well known problems. But, unfortunately, a sufficiently dangerous person does need to be physically put away. Being held against your will may well do wonders for people you threaten.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    Isn't the problem that carrot only works if it is bigger than their criminal carrot and the stick only works if it is bigger than their own sticks? If you cane someone who was brought up with violence, it can reinforce the idea that only the strongest wins. On the other hand, trying to be nice to them won't work if they want the $100K they make from drug dealing. The sad fact is that nothing works perfectly, but at least we can strive to make it consistent, which is probably the biggest problem in most penal systems.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    It's not particularly spicy, but it has absolutely no evidence to support its effectiveness, either as a deterrent or as rehabiliitation. In fact plenty of historical evidence suggests it not only doesn't work, it makes reoffending more likely. There's no space for "Well, obviously..." in prison management. Effects are often not obvious at all. This is fine if you really want revenge porn, but not so much if you want a saner and less criminal culture.
    - scythe 5y ago
      >It's not particularly spicy, but it has absolutely no evidence to support its effectiveness, either as a deterrent or as rehabiliitation. A strong claim. A few minutes of searching found no strong evidence for or against its effectiveness, or that is superior or inferior to incarceration. Much more seems to have been written about the morality and public opinion of the practice (e.g. [1, 2]). It is known that corporal punishment of children causes developmental harms, but this does not extend naturally to adults. 1: https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC85246 https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC85246 2: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2722140 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2722140
- alfl 5y ago
  No, it’s not arbitrary. It’s dialectical. “The line” is drawn by laws passed by well-constituted popular government and based on long-standing precedent.
  - zbentley 5y ago
    Like the laws that result in extreme racial bias in sentencing, or an outsize proportion of inmates locked away due to mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug crimes? The laws that don't take into account abuse by prison staff or other inmates, secondary effects on inmates like PTSD, or tertiary effects on society from things like grooming? The "long standing precedent" of drug criminalization that was willed into existence by public hysteria campaigns spearheaded by a highly agendaed political elite in a short span of time in the 1980s and 90s? The "well constituted popular government" whose judges and sentencing behavior vary so much between states that which side of a street you live/get arrested on can be the difference between months and life in prison? The government that turns a blind eye to prisons whose conditions are condemned by other governments (the UN) as torture? Once you depart from the minority of incarcerations that are reasonably unquestionable (e.g. demonstrably uncorrectable violent sociopaths), you will find abundant arbitrariness at every level: in the formulation of laws, their application by courts, their enforcement by police, and the conditions of their punishments. "Arbitrary" is the rule. "Dialectical" (which I interpret as "civically intended, publicly acknowledged proportional consequences") is the exception.
- toss1 5y ago
  >>If people were actually worried about inmate mental health we would do away with incarceration. No, it is simple prioritization — that sort of absolutism is a fallacy. We are worried about 'inmate mental health' AFTER we are worried about preventing said inmate from further damaging the health, wealth, or life of others. If someone is a threat to anyone in my family, friends, society, IDGAF about their mental health until that threat is neutralized. If you have a better way to neutralize the threat from people who decide it is ok to damage, steal, harm, rape, kill, or otherwise violate other people, let us know. Otherwise, cut the fallacies.
_fat_santa 5y ago
Archive link to the story the author is talking about https://web.archive.org/web/20160304065420/http://maneatingrobot.com/96/prison-reform-via-soylent-and-oculus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160304065420/http://maneatingr...
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Thanks for the link. After reading the article I understand the strong reaction to some of its naivete. Many elements the author recommends removing aren't replaceable with a VR system. It's a terrible article. That said, the underlying idea of using VR/video games in prisons to supplement treatment and increase opportunity for socialization while incarcerated is valid. Plenty of ostensibly healthy, free people opt to socialize this way. I know several psychologists working on these types of systems for non-incarcerated patients (kids with autism, etc). US prisons do not rehabilitate and this might be one way to safely and cheaply provide this type of outreach.
- g8oz 5y ago
  !! A masterclass in techno-utopian quasi-messianic nonsense.
  - simmerup 5y ago
    What the author of this article should realise is that Silicon Valley can go back to basics because it doesn’t matter at all when they fail. Real life problems aren’t like that.
- mtnygard 5y ago
  It's not satire? I thought the author was deliberately constructing The Matrix one element at a time.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I think the film "Cube" is superior in this context, is about exactly your point: [SPOILER ALERT] : : : : : Blind bureaucracy creating a city-cized torture device over the course of decades, everyone built a little piece of it, but no one knows what it is.
FeepingCreature 5y ago
I mean, I'm with Snow here. I think the response is a bit poor in that "well, we don't know that this is safe, so this proposal is obviously crazy and does no one any good." Maybe we could find out if it's safe? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it's a bad idea.
- simmerup 5y ago
  What happens when a rowdy prisoner breaks the VR headset and is suddenly trapped alone in a box for 10 years. What state do you think he’ll be in when he’s let out? Ridiculous idea
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    Maybe you could give them a replacement edit: and I mean, they could still use voicechat in the meanwhile, you can build that in the wall so it's pretty hard to break
    - simmerup 5y ago
      And when they break the replacement? Or they piss off the guards so the replacement somehow takes months to get to them? It’s cruel.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      >Maybe you could give them a replacement but isn't this supposed to be happening in America?
    - mcguire 5y ago
      What happens if VR goggles turn out not to be the most wonderful thing ever? Well, it's still cheaper and I'm sure eventually VR technology will get better...
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    Lobotomy was used for this purpose for many years to make unruly prisoners docile. The practice is still legal (and doesn't use an ice pick any longer), however it is rarely used today. There are however an array of medications that could be administrated to force compliance and do not cause a permanent state like a lobotomy would. But yes, the entire idea is dehumanizing in my opinion.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fhackernewz 5y ago
why wouldn't write a comment worth reading? Because these motherfucking moderators will just downvote you and shadow ban your fingerprints
cousin_it 5y ago
I keep thinking about Dostoevsky's account of late 19th century Russian prison in "The House of the Dead". It's in a remote town, but it's pretty open, civilians walk in and out and do business with inmates. Why are modern prisons so cut off from society in comparison?
- ModernMech 5y ago
  The modern prison is not modeled after a town, school, or hospital as a place of community, growth, and rehabilitation. The modern prison is modeled after a dairy farm, where prisoners are livestock to be housed and milked for profit. I’m a big believer in the idea that economic incentives determine behavior, so until we take the profit motive out of the prison system, I believe it will continue to be a place of exploitation. I shudder to think of how much worse it could get with Facebook involved.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cousin_it 5y ago
    That can't be the answer to my question, as prisons have become more isolated also in countries where they aren't privatized.
    - projektfu 5y ago
      A prison doesn't have to be private to have a profit motive. Many prisons are built to provide jobs (corrections officers, admin, services) in their localities. Many prisoners are housed far from their homes. It can't be beyond notice to elected representatives that closing the prisons would affect their constituents.
nathias 5y ago
it would be a large improvement over what you're doing to people now
JasonFruit 5y ago
I was just having a conversation elsewhere, and I complained that technocrats want to put everyone in identical boxes and mediate their entire experience of the outside world. I had no idea my figurative expression had ever been proposed seriously.
throwaway91321 5y ago
The original blog post is pretty silly for a number of reasons, but I think this reply post is also pretty bad. For instance, the author makes it sounds like cheaper and better prisons would be a bad thing: > In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s working on the wrong problem...If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism. He later goes on to dismiss worries about violence in prison, and chalks up the fear to people like Shane imagining the people in prison as being "so other." Prison violence is a very real problem, and it's hard to feel like someone actually cares about the prisoners when they're casually dismissing it like this and acting as if it's misguided to try to make prisons safer. The other issues he talks about are important, but they don't negate the importance of improving prisons. It's like arguing that the worries about the Boeing 737 Max are unimportant because we should be riding high speed trains instead of flying. Furthermore, there seems to be a severe lack of imagination. For instance, he writes: > Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners. He's not wrong that switching prisoners who are used to human interaction into isolation with VR seems like it would end up badly. But a mere two paragraphs before this, he writes about how there are already supermax prisons (among others) where the prisoners are isolated. We wouldn't need to do Nazi-esque experiments to see if VR has potential, we could offer it to prisoners who are already isolated. I can't see how it wouldn't be an improvement for most of those who are already isolated. Again, I don't disagree that the original article was extremely goofy. But this response doesn't seem to be much better, especially for someone who teaches courses on social change.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Once upon a time, Greg Bear wrote a novel called Strength of Stones, where the inhabitants of a planet built artificially intelligent, self-maintaining cities with the ability to exile criminals to protect the rest of the inhabitants. Then, potential criminals. Eventually everyone. I don't remember the rest of the book; it wasn't very good.) Anyway, have you realized that cheaper prisons are a bad thing? (No one really cares about the safety of prisoners. Honestly, do you?) Cost is the primary limit on incarceration in the US; making incarceration cheaper simply means more people are kept in prisons. The US imprisons about 1% of the population (2020: 2,120,000 prisoners, 330,000,000 population); what proportion is about right, do you think? More or less? A comment: "Ethan, I’m glad you’ve mentioned Morozov’s writing in this post. His essay on “The Taming of Tech Criticism” http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism strikes me as examining the key issues here, particularly his line: “Disconnected from actual political struggles and social criticism, technology criticism is just an elaborate but affirmative footnote to the status quo.”"
xwdv 5y ago
If the linked excerpt is supposed to be the epitome of outrage, I don’t get it. The idea is a bit odd but seems worth exploring and is better than the current alternatives.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  What are the current alternatives? That’s what is so irksome about this post to people in this field. It’s coming from the right place, but instead of even acknowledging the alternative solutions out there, it brushes them aside and jumps right to the most technical one imaginable - basically hook prisoners up to the Matrix. A thoughtful proposal would hold this idea up against other proposed solutions and weigh the pros and cons of each. I think even the most cursory analysis would have made the original piece much better.
- mcguire 5y ago
  So what to you would be the epitome of outrage, if solitary confinement, hypothetical technology, and optimizing for the cheapest manner of keeping a human alive is not it?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > If the linked excerpt is supposed to be the epitome of outrage, I don’t get it. The idea is a bit odd but seems worth exploring and is better than the current alternatives. The original blog post was an unholy combination of profound ignorance, arrogance, and the belief that problems can be solved exclusively through an almost mindless application of tech fads and buzzwords. A lot of tech people display that same unholy combination, and the Ethan Zuckerman article has a lot of good advice for overcoming it.
mcguire 5y ago
An initial thought: Is Soylent still a thing?
- mcguire 5y ago
  It is! Wow. Anybody here still living on it?
jrm4 5y ago
Honestly, as a black person I'm all too familiar with this kind of obliviousness. For me, it usually comes in the form of dumb commentary like.. "We can fix this in a way like the following; if I were a kid from the rough part of town, I would go to the library instead of joining a gang. We need to work on why this doesn't happen more." In a way, these are even worse because they're simultaneously technically correct and royally stupid and completely unhelpful because it's very obvious the writer is absolutely ignorant and clueless about the big picture and efforts that already exist. It's like running up in a hospital and yelling at doctors to wash their hands because infections ARE STILL KILLING PEOPLE.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I know most of you hate this word, but this is a great example of what privilege looks like: thinking you can solve a problem you have zero experience with, and not including people who do. Another example: I was at a hackathon and met this kid who wanted to build a wristband for domestic violence victims so they could push a button and call for help when they were being abused. Great idea, he wants to use his tech knowledge to help abused spouses! That's fantastic! Nothing wrong with that and it should be supported. But since he has never experienced being an abuse victim, nor did he consult any, he didn't realize what a useless idea this is. (As soon as the abuser knows what the device is, you think they will allow it in the house, let alone take heavy retribution for buying it? Even if it was a subtle/hidden device, being caught with it would mean even more abuse.) Heart is in the right place, but intellectual arrogance needs some dialing in.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Harsh words. If they can persuade even a single person to gather enough domain knowledge to validate their efforts, I suppose they could do some good. That said, whenever I see someone doing the Dunning Kruger Maneuver, I try to approach with compassion and communicate the constraints they are missing without mocking them, humiliating them, and forcing them into a corner where they publicly lose face. Misplaced confidence is a universal and human problem, not limited to technologists, and it's an excellent place to apply the golden rule. Caveman Science Fiction illustrates it happening in reverse: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science_fiction_you_are_play_gods/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science... For a real world reverse example, consider Jurassic Park. It convinced a generation of casual moviegoers that they understood the risks of genetic engineering to be severe and untamable, even though the movie was the furthest thing from a risk analysis: the dinosaurs were guaranteed to get out, otherwise nobody would pay to see the movie, including myself. In any case, the moment anyone brings out accusations of arrogance, privilege, naiveté, etc is the moment that battle lines are drawn and all hope of civil discourse goes out the window. That's often a waste, because most of these situations can be course-corrected without verbal bloodshed.
  - mcguire 5y ago
rendall 5y ago
Speaking as an American who emigrated to a Nordic country, when I go back to visit I feel like I'm leaving a more civilized land for a less civilized land. The feeling largely comes from how harshly the US government treats its citizens, and how that harshness is an expression of public will. As but one example, in any forum discussing any infamous man on trial, and there is inevitably a significant number of people talking about how excited they are for him to be anally raped. Prison as a concept is an opportunity for average American to indulge their inner sadist. Related, no matter how well a company is paid to deliver services to the public, those services are inevitably sub-par, and expected to be so. Whether prisons, schools, public utilities, welfare, public transportation, medical care: if it's paid for by taxes, it's gotta be shitty. I don't like the response article, either. It's written in that grating, self-righteous tone of the smug moral scold. This is a person who is not actually helping, but helping himself build a reputation for helping, by moral screeching and bullying. At least the original essay was honest.

44 points by tablespoon 5y ago

If people were actually worried about inmate mental health we would do away with incarceration. Being held against your will doesn’t exactly do wonders for you - and the consequences don’t end when you’re released. Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary?

Veen 5y ago
> Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary? Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers, potential rape victims than convicted rapists, property owners than convicted thieves, and so on.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  Makes sense - I’m well aware no one here cares about anyone else’s wellbeing (but some claims to the contrary sure are good for your image), and you can freely move that line around whenever you want to dunk on someone on Twitter or HN. That’s what life’s about. Or maybe that’s just Twitter, on HN it’s about saying things everyone agrees with and never bringing up something difficult to respond to, so you won’t get downvoted.
  - cybernautique 5y ago
    Which of these points leads you to declare that the parent doesn't "care about anyone else's well-being?" Genuinely interested. > Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. [1] Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers; [2] potential rape victims than convicted rapists; [3] property owners than convicted thieves; [4] and so on.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  > Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. I’d argue that our current system isn’t really interested in the well being of victims either. Or rather, it’s only interested with the victims when the victims express specific opinions. The actual relationship between crime, survivors, retribution, and forgiveness is an extremely complex matter. Consider the case of Sirhan Sirhan, and how public figures treated Kennedy family members who were pro-parole vs. anti-parole. Sometimes the same people who were saying “you must listen to the family” were openly attacking other family members for wanting parole! > Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers, potential rape victims than convicted rapists, property owners than convicted thieves, and so on. If that’s what motivates you, you should actively hope for a more merciful and restorative criminal justice system. Our current system has very high recidivism rates, which is very bad for those potential future victims.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    When you say “our current system”, which country are you referring to?
    - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
      Contextually, I'm assuming the US, because they specifically mention Sirhan Sirhan, the Kennedy family, and high recidivism rates, all things applicable to the US justice system.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        You are correct.
      - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
        That is of course exactly as I suspected since an Americentric view of the world is depressingly common. I think it’s not useful to form universal views of the world based on the status quo in the USA. The prison system is harsh in the USA, and recidivism is high. In some other countries however, the prisons are significantly more brutal, and yet recidivism is low. So it isn’t quite as simple as the the commenter was implying.
- gaze 5y ago
  It's strange to put "property owners" in the same list of victims as murder victims and rape victims.
thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
This may be one of my spicier opinions but I think we should have caning for some crimes. Fines and incarceration both have collateral damage, if the person punished is responsible for anyone. Fines are regressive. Incarceration has a host of well known problems. But, unfortunately, a sufficiently dangerous person does need to be physically put away. Being held against your will may well do wonders for people you threaten.
- lbriner 5y ago
  Isn't the problem that carrot only works if it is bigger than their criminal carrot and the stick only works if it is bigger than their own sticks? If you cane someone who was brought up with violence, it can reinforce the idea that only the strongest wins. On the other hand, trying to be nice to them won't work if they want the $100K they make from drug dealing. The sad fact is that nothing works perfectly, but at least we can strive to make it consistent, which is probably the biggest problem in most penal systems.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  It's not particularly spicy, but it has absolutely no evidence to support its effectiveness, either as a deterrent or as rehabiliitation. In fact plenty of historical evidence suggests it not only doesn't work, it makes reoffending more likely. There's no space for "Well, obviously..." in prison management. Effects are often not obvious at all. This is fine if you really want revenge porn, but not so much if you want a saner and less criminal culture.
  - scythe 5y ago
    >It's not particularly spicy, but it has absolutely no evidence to support its effectiveness, either as a deterrent or as rehabiliitation. A strong claim. A few minutes of searching found no strong evidence for or against its effectiveness, or that is superior or inferior to incarceration. Much more seems to have been written about the morality and public opinion of the practice (e.g. [1, 2]). It is known that corporal punishment of children causes developmental harms, but this does not extend naturally to adults. 1: https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC85246 https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC85246 2: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2722140 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2722140
alfl 5y ago
No, it’s not arbitrary. It’s dialectical. “The line” is drawn by laws passed by well-constituted popular government and based on long-standing precedent.
- zbentley 5y ago
  Like the laws that result in extreme racial bias in sentencing, or an outsize proportion of inmates locked away due to mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug crimes? The laws that don't take into account abuse by prison staff or other inmates, secondary effects on inmates like PTSD, or tertiary effects on society from things like grooming? The "long standing precedent" of drug criminalization that was willed into existence by public hysteria campaigns spearheaded by a highly agendaed political elite in a short span of time in the 1980s and 90s? The "well constituted popular government" whose judges and sentencing behavior vary so much between states that which side of a street you live/get arrested on can be the difference between months and life in prison? The government that turns a blind eye to prisons whose conditions are condemned by other governments (the UN) as torture? Once you depart from the minority of incarcerations that are reasonably unquestionable (e.g. demonstrably uncorrectable violent sociopaths), you will find abundant arbitrariness at every level: in the formulation of laws, their application by courts, their enforcement by police, and the conditions of their punishments. "Arbitrary" is the rule. "Dialectical" (which I interpret as "civically intended, publicly acknowledged proportional consequences") is the exception.
toss1 5y ago
>>If people were actually worried about inmate mental health we would do away with incarceration. No, it is simple prioritization — that sort of absolutism is a fallacy. We are worried about 'inmate mental health' AFTER we are worried about preventing said inmate from further damaging the health, wealth, or life of others. If someone is a threat to anyone in my family, friends, society, IDGAF about their mental health until that threat is neutralized. If you have a better way to neutralize the threat from people who decide it is ok to damage, steal, harm, rape, kill, or otherwise violate other people, let us know. Otherwise, cut the fallacies.

_fat_santa 5y ago

Archive link to the story the author is talking about https://web.archive.org/web/20160304065420/http://maneatingrobot.com/96/prison-reform-via-soylent-and-oculus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160304065420/http://maneatingr...

throwaway09223 5y ago
Thanks for the link. After reading the article I understand the strong reaction to some of its naivete. Many elements the author recommends removing aren't replaceable with a VR system. It's a terrible article. That said, the underlying idea of using VR/video games in prisons to supplement treatment and increase opportunity for socialization while incarcerated is valid. Plenty of ostensibly healthy, free people opt to socialize this way. I know several psychologists working on these types of systems for non-incarcerated patients (kids with autism, etc). US prisons do not rehabilitate and this might be one way to safely and cheaply provide this type of outreach.
g8oz 5y ago
!! A masterclass in techno-utopian quasi-messianic nonsense.
- simmerup 5y ago
  What the author of this article should realise is that Silicon Valley can go back to basics because it doesn’t matter at all when they fail. Real life problems aren’t like that.
mtnygard 5y ago
It's not satire? I thought the author was deliberately constructing The Matrix one element at a time.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I think the film "Cube" is superior in this context, is about exactly your point: [SPOILER ALERT] : : : : : Blind bureaucracy creating a city-cized torture device over the course of decades, everyone built a little piece of it, but no one knows what it is.

FeepingCreature 5y ago

I mean, I'm with Snow here. I think the response is a bit poor in that "well, we don't know that this is safe, so this proposal is obviously crazy and does no one any good." Maybe we could find out if it's safe? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it's a bad idea.

simmerup 5y ago
What happens when a rowdy prisoner breaks the VR headset and is suddenly trapped alone in a box for 10 years. What state do you think he’ll be in when he’s let out? Ridiculous idea
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  Maybe you could give them a replacement edit: and I mean, they could still use voicechat in the meanwhile, you can build that in the wall so it's pretty hard to break
  - simmerup 5y ago
    And when they break the replacement? Or they piss off the guards so the replacement somehow takes months to get to them? It’s cruel.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >Maybe you could give them a replacement but isn't this supposed to be happening in America?
  - mcguire 5y ago
    What happens if VR goggles turn out not to be the most wonderful thing ever? Well, it's still cheaper and I'm sure eventually VR technology will get better...
- nemo44x 5y ago
  Lobotomy was used for this purpose for many years to make unruly prisoners docile. The practice is still legal (and doesn't use an ice pick any longer), however it is rarely used today. There are however an array of medications that could be administrated to force compliance and do not cause a permanent state like a lobotomy would. But yes, the entire idea is dehumanizing in my opinion.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fhackernewz 5y ago

why wouldn't write a comment worth reading? Because these motherfucking moderators will just downvote you and shadow ban your fingerprints

cousin_it 5y ago

I keep thinking about Dostoevsky's account of late 19th century Russian prison in "The House of the Dead". It's in a remote town, but it's pretty open, civilians walk in and out and do business with inmates. Why are modern prisons so cut off from society in comparison?

ModernMech 5y ago
The modern prison is not modeled after a town, school, or hospital as a place of community, growth, and rehabilitation. The modern prison is modeled after a dairy farm, where prisoners are livestock to be housed and milked for profit. I’m a big believer in the idea that economic incentives determine behavior, so until we take the profit motive out of the prison system, I believe it will continue to be a place of exploitation. I shudder to think of how much worse it could get with Facebook involved.
- deleted 5y ago
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- cousin_it 5y ago
  That can't be the answer to my question, as prisons have become more isolated also in countries where they aren't privatized.
  - projektfu 5y ago
    A prison doesn't have to be private to have a profit motive. Many prisons are built to provide jobs (corrections officers, admin, services) in their localities. Many prisoners are housed far from their homes. It can't be beyond notice to elected representatives that closing the prisons would affect their constituents.

nathias 5y ago

it would be a large improvement over what you're doing to people now

JasonFruit 5y ago

I was just having a conversation elsewhere, and I complained that technocrats want to put everyone in identical boxes and mediate their entire experience of the outside world. I had no idea my figurative expression had ever been proposed seriously.

throwaway91321 5y ago

The original blog post is pretty silly for a number of reasons, but I think this reply post is also pretty bad. For instance, the author makes it sounds like cheaper and better prisons would be a bad thing: > In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s working on the wrong problem...If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism. He later goes on to dismiss worries about violence in prison, and chalks up the fear to people like Shane imagining the people in prison as being "so other." Prison violence is a very real problem, and it's hard to feel like someone actually cares about the prisoners when they're casually dismissing it like this and acting as if it's misguided to try to make prisons safer. The other issues he talks about are important, but they don't negate the importance of improving prisons. It's like arguing that the worries about the Boeing 737 Max are unimportant because we should be riding high speed trains instead of flying. Furthermore, there seems to be a severe lack of imagination. For instance, he writes: > Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners. He's not wrong that switching prisoners who are used to human interaction into isolation with VR seems like it would end up badly. But a mere two paragraphs before this, he writes about how there are already supermax prisons (among others) where the prisoners are isolated. We wouldn't need to do Nazi-esque experiments to see if VR has potential, we could offer it to prisoners who are already isolated. I can't see how it wouldn't be an improvement for most of those who are already isolated. Again, I don't disagree that the original article was extremely goofy. But this response doesn't seem to be much better, especially for someone who teaches courses on social change.

mcguire 5y ago
Once upon a time, Greg Bear wrote a novel called Strength of Stones, where the inhabitants of a planet built artificially intelligent, self-maintaining cities with the ability to exile criminals to protect the rest of the inhabitants. Then, potential criminals. Eventually everyone. I don't remember the rest of the book; it wasn't very good.) Anyway, have you realized that cheaper prisons are a bad thing? (No one really cares about the safety of prisoners. Honestly, do you?) Cost is the primary limit on incarceration in the US; making incarceration cheaper simply means more people are kept in prisons. The US imprisons about 1% of the population (2020: 2,120,000 prisoners, 330,000,000 population); what proportion is about right, do you think? More or less? A comment: "Ethan, I’m glad you’ve mentioned Morozov’s writing in this post. His essay on “The Taming of Tech Criticism” http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism strikes me as examining the key issues here, particularly his line: “Disconnected from actual political struggles and social criticism, technology criticism is just an elaborate but affirmative footnote to the status quo.”"

xwdv 5y ago

If the linked excerpt is supposed to be the epitome of outrage, I don’t get it. The idea is a bit odd but seems worth exploring and is better than the current alternatives.

ModernMech 5y ago
What are the current alternatives? That’s what is so irksome about this post to people in this field. It’s coming from the right place, but instead of even acknowledging the alternative solutions out there, it brushes them aside and jumps right to the most technical one imaginable - basically hook prisoners up to the Matrix. A thoughtful proposal would hold this idea up against other proposed solutions and weigh the pros and cons of each. I think even the most cursory analysis would have made the original piece much better.
mcguire 5y ago
So what to you would be the epitome of outrage, if solitary confinement, hypothetical technology, and optimizing for the cheapest manner of keeping a human alive is not it?
tablespoon 5y ago
> If the linked excerpt is supposed to be the epitome of outrage, I don’t get it. The idea is a bit odd but seems worth exploring and is better than the current alternatives. The original blog post was an unholy combination of profound ignorance, arrogance, and the belief that problems can be solved exclusively through an almost mindless application of tech fads and buzzwords. A lot of tech people display that same unholy combination, and the Ethan Zuckerman article has a lot of good advice for overcoming it.

mcguire 5y ago

An initial thought: Is Soylent still a thing?

mcguire 5y ago
It is! Wow. Anybody here still living on it?

jrm4 5y ago

Honestly, as a black person I'm all too familiar with this kind of obliviousness. For me, it usually comes in the form of dumb commentary like.. "We can fix this in a way like the following; if I were a kid from the rough part of town, I would go to the library instead of joining a gang. We need to work on why this doesn't happen more." In a way, these are even worse because they're simultaneously technically correct and royally stupid and completely unhelpful because it's very obvious the writer is absolutely ignorant and clueless about the big picture and efforts that already exist. It's like running up in a hospital and yelling at doctors to wash their hands because infections ARE STILL KILLING PEOPLE.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I know most of you hate this word, but this is a great example of what privilege looks like: thinking you can solve a problem you have zero experience with, and not including people who do. Another example: I was at a hackathon and met this kid who wanted to build a wristband for domestic violence victims so they could push a button and call for help when they were being abused. Great idea, he wants to use his tech knowledge to help abused spouses! That's fantastic! Nothing wrong with that and it should be supported. But since he has never experienced being an abuse victim, nor did he consult any, he didn't realize what a useless idea this is. (As soon as the abuser knows what the device is, you think they will allow it in the house, let alone take heavy retribution for buying it? Even if it was a subtle/hidden device, being caught with it would mean even more abuse.) Heart is in the right place, but intellectual arrogance needs some dialing in.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Harsh words. If they can persuade even a single person to gather enough domain knowledge to validate their efforts, I suppose they could do some good. That said, whenever I see someone doing the Dunning Kruger Maneuver, I try to approach with compassion and communicate the constraints they are missing without mocking them, humiliating them, and forcing them into a corner where they publicly lose face. Misplaced confidence is a universal and human problem, not limited to technologists, and it's an excellent place to apply the golden rule. Caveman Science Fiction illustrates it happening in reverse: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science_fiction_you_are_play_gods/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science... For a real world reverse example, consider Jurassic Park. It convinced a generation of casual moviegoers that they understood the risks of genetic engineering to be severe and untamable, even though the movie was the furthest thing from a risk analysis: the dinosaurs were guaranteed to get out, otherwise nobody would pay to see the movie, including myself. In any case, the moment anyone brings out accusations of arrogance, privilege, naiveté, etc is the moment that battle lines are drawn and all hope of civil discourse goes out the window. That's often a waste, because most of these situations can be course-corrected without verbal bloodshed.
- mcguire 5y ago

rendall 5y ago

Speaking as an American who emigrated to a Nordic country, when I go back to visit I feel like I'm leaving a more civilized land for a less civilized land. The feeling largely comes from how harshly the US government treats its citizens, and how that harshness is an expression of public will. As but one example, in any forum discussing any infamous man on trial, and there is inevitably a significant number of people talking about how excited they are for him to be anally raped. Prison as a concept is an opportunity for average American to indulge their inner sadist. Related, no matter how well a company is paid to deliver services to the public, those services are inevitably sub-par, and expected to be so. Whether prisons, schools, public utilities, welfare, public transportation, medical care: if it's paid for by taxes, it's gotta be shitty. I don't like the response article, either. It's written in that grating, self-righteous tone of the smug moral scold. This is a person who is not actually helping, but helping himself build a reputation for helping, by moral screeching and bullying. At least the original essay was honest.