5 ms·

> remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people

by lisper 4y ago

> remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another. Yes, but did you ever follow up to see if all of these people you knew as kids were still evil as adults? I did a lot of crazy shit when I was younger that I would never do today. People do change as they grow older. And even if there are exceptions, that is not a valid reason to imprison any particular individual with no hope of redemption.

dazc 4y ago
> I did a lot of crazy shit when I was younger that I would never do today. Did you torture a hamster because it was funny, like throwing it hard against a wall to see if it would bounce? Did you beat the shit out of a 5 year old girl because there was no one around to stop you? No? There is crazy shit and there is just evil. And yes, those people did end up doing much worse things because society just kept giving them that chance to turn into a saint.
- texaslonghorn5 4y ago
  what can you tell us about how they were parented?
  - bequanna 4y ago
    I really don’t like this line of thinking. This is the kind of bullshit trick that many terrible, violent criminals like the Menendez bros try to pull when they get caught: “It isn’t my fault I murdered/raped/etc, my upbringing was poor.”
    - texaslonghorn5 4y ago
      whoa there, you made a big jump. I didn't remove culpability from them. I'm just curious if there were any recognizable patterns between the parenting and the future bad behaviors.
      - bequanna 4y ago
        I hear you, and I simply stated that I don’t like where that line of reasoning can go. I’ve spent plenty of time around people who have been incarcerated for serious crimes and many of them are life-long con artists who take no responsibility for their actions. Their profession seems to be manipulation and manufacturing endless excuses. The trouble is that there are far too many naive people in the world that believe their bullshit stories and end up feeling sorry for them. The most charismatic of them are usually the most dangerous. The saying “give them an inch and they will take a mile” applies perfectly to this type of criminal sociopath.
    - rafaelero 4y ago
      I believe I read a study showing how this relationship is not causal. It's actually the shared genetic code that makes both the son be violent and the parents neglectful and abusive, not the abusive parents changing the son's behavior.
  - Viliam1234 4y ago
    Such information makes best sense in context. For example, if we learn that 40% of criminals were abused in childhood, we will interpret it certain way. But if we afterwards learn that 40% of non-criminals were also abused in childhood, now the previous interpretation does not make sense anymore. So we should start from the point "how many kids you know who were abused in childhood" and then ask "and how many of them later became criminals".
- lisper 4y ago
  I really don't want to get into the details, but yes, I did things that horrify me today, including causing pain and injury to animals and other humans. This is why I don't want to get into details. These are exceptionally painful memories. I had some pretty serious anger management issues. Note BTW that what matters here is not whether I was actually evil (I don't think I was) but whether my behavior could lead someone to think that I was and treat me accordingly. And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. I got very, very lucky that the people around me were not inclined to seriously entertain that hypothesis.
sy7ar 4y ago
And then there’re people who commit robbery and serve time. Then not long after release they commit worse crime like murder, which could’ve been prevented if they’re still in jail. It’s not that simple man. Sure people can become better, or they stay the same, or they get even worse.
- lisper 4y ago
  You need to watch "Minority Report". This is a form of argument that I call "Proof by horror story". It is a logical fallacy, a specific instance of a broader category of logical fallacies called faulty generalization [1]. To debunk it we only need to observe that just about any behavior can be predictive of committing a serious crime if you are willing to ignore false positives. But I'm not willing to ignore them. I think it's worse to incarcerate an innocent person than to let a guilty one go free. If you're willing to imprison a thief for life because there is a chance they might go on to commit murder, why not imprison their family as well? After all, they might have the same bad genes as the thief. For that matter, why not keep everyone in solitary confinement? That guarantees that no one will be free to commit murder. People's behaviors are unpredictable. Having some people occasionally go rogue is just the price we sometimes have to pay to live in a free society. If you don't like it you might want to consider emigrating to North Korea. Very few guilty people go free there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
  - bombcar 4y ago
    An individual's behavior is unpredictable, but in groups it's pretty predictable. Recidivism is a major issue and there are ways to address it, but they have to actually be worked on (and they will admittedly fail at times, people have to accept that). Many (most?) of the jail-to-good-citizen pathways have been closed down or restricted over the years.
    - lisper 4y ago
      Maybe the right answer is to reopen them rather than throwing more people in prison.

by lisper 4y ago

dazc 4y ago

> I did a lot of crazy shit when I was younger that I would never do today. Did you torture a hamster because it was funny, like throwing it hard against a wall to see if it would bounce? Did you beat the shit out of a 5 year old girl because there was no one around to stop you? No? There is crazy shit and there is just evil. And yes, those people did end up doing much worse things because society just kept giving them that chance to turn into a saint.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago
what can you tell us about how they were parented?
- bequanna 4y ago
  I really don’t like this line of thinking. This is the kind of bullshit trick that many terrible, violent criminals like the Menendez bros try to pull when they get caught: “It isn’t my fault I murdered/raped/etc, my upbringing was poor.”
  - texaslonghorn5 4y ago
    whoa there, you made a big jump. I didn't remove culpability from them. I'm just curious if there were any recognizable patterns between the parenting and the future bad behaviors.
    - bequanna 4y ago
      I hear you, and I simply stated that I don’t like where that line of reasoning can go. I’ve spent plenty of time around people who have been incarcerated for serious crimes and many of them are life-long con artists who take no responsibility for their actions. Their profession seems to be manipulation and manufacturing endless excuses. The trouble is that there are far too many naive people in the world that believe their bullshit stories and end up feeling sorry for them. The most charismatic of them are usually the most dangerous. The saying “give them an inch and they will take a mile” applies perfectly to this type of criminal sociopath.
  - rafaelero 4y ago
    I believe I read a study showing how this relationship is not causal. It's actually the shared genetic code that makes both the son be violent and the parents neglectful and abusive, not the abusive parents changing the son's behavior.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  Such information makes best sense in context. For example, if we learn that 40% of criminals were abused in childhood, we will interpret it certain way. But if we afterwards learn that 40% of non-criminals were also abused in childhood, now the previous interpretation does not make sense anymore. So we should start from the point "how many kids you know who were abused in childhood" and then ask "and how many of them later became criminals".
lisper 4y ago
I really don't want to get into the details, but yes, I did things that horrify me today, including causing pain and injury to animals and other humans. This is why I don't want to get into details. These are exceptionally painful memories. I had some pretty serious anger management issues. Note BTW that what matters here is not whether I was actually evil (I don't think I was) but whether my behavior could lead someone to think that I was and treat me accordingly. And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. I got very, very lucky that the people around me were not inclined to seriously entertain that hypothesis.

sy7ar 4y ago

And then there’re people who commit robbery and serve time. Then not long after release they commit worse crime like murder, which could’ve been prevented if they’re still in jail. It’s not that simple man. Sure people can become better, or they stay the same, or they get even worse.

lisper 4y ago
You need to watch "Minority Report". This is a form of argument that I call "Proof by horror story". It is a logical fallacy, a specific instance of a broader category of logical fallacies called faulty generalization [1]. To debunk it we only need to observe that just about any behavior can be predictive of committing a serious crime if you are willing to ignore false positives. But I'm not willing to ignore them. I think it's worse to incarcerate an innocent person than to let a guilty one go free. If you're willing to imprison a thief for life because there is a chance they might go on to commit murder, why not imprison their family as well? After all, they might have the same bad genes as the thief. For that matter, why not keep everyone in solitary confinement? That guarantees that no one will be free to commit murder. People's behaviors are unpredictable. Having some people occasionally go rogue is just the price we sometimes have to pay to live in a free society. If you don't like it you might want to consider emigrating to North Korea. Very few guilty people go free there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
- bombcar 4y ago
  An individual's behavior is unpredictable, but in groups it's pretty predictable. Recidivism is a major issue and there are ways to address it, but they have to actually be worked on (and they will admittedly fail at times, people have to accept that). Many (most?) of the jail-to-good-citizen pathways have been closed down or restricted over the years.
  - lisper 4y ago
    Maybe the right answer is to reopen them rather than throwing more people in prison.