Anti-social Punishment — LessWrong

Why do some societies exhibit more antisocial punishment than others? Martin explores both some literature on the subject, and his own experience liv…

ICE, CBP Officers Prefer To Sexually Assault Children When Committing Crimes

The “worst of the worst” are coming for the “worst of the worst.” Of course, this administration has completely given up on this pretense, despite sending out lots of noisy …

Refusing to Be the Victim – How to Adopt a “Player” Mindset at Work

You can’t expect others to fix your problems. When you take responsibility for making the best of any situation, you have the power to make things better.

Wikipedia:Long-term abuse

This page summarises a limited number of long term abusers, to assist members of the community who believe they may have cause to report another incident. Note that this page is not a noticeboard. Names should only be added for the most egregious and well-attested cases. Most users here will have been banned, some on multiple occasions.

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried is finally facing punishment. Let’s also put his ruinous philosophy on trial.

Why Elite White-Collar Criminals Are Rarely Punished

White-collar criminals benefit from institutionalized non-enforcement practices, regulatory policies, and legal representation not available to street criminals.

Punished by Victor M Rios | East Bay Booksellers

Honorable Mention, 2014 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social Problems2012 Best Book Award, Latino/a Sociology Section, presented by the American Sociological Association2012 Finalist, C.

Giving Altruism a Bad Name

Effective Altruism’s metrics-driven model of philanthropy is elitist, condescending and — most damning of all — extremely ineffective.

Welcome To One Of The Most Humane Prisons In The World

"Treat people like dirt, and they will be dirt. Treat them like human beings, and they will act like human beings."

Epistemic assholes

In this paper, I develop and defend the concept epistemic assholes. An epistemic asshole is someone who exhibits a distinctive form of epistemic badness characterized not by gross irrationality or hostility to truth, but by a stable, entitled disregard for one’s epistemic relations with others. Drawing on Aaron James’s (2012) account of moral assholes, I examine how people can systematically exploit epistemic cooperation by allowing themselves special advantages—such as “freedom from inquiry”, “doxastic comfort”, and “freedom to criticize”—while remaining insulated from criticism by an entrenched sense of entitlement. The resulting view, the Relational Approach to Epistemic Assholes (REA), explains why epistemic assholes are not epistemically the worst, yet are nonetheless deeply galling. After motivating the need for this concept, I show how REA captures both “impure” cases (involving both epistemic and moral assholery) and “pure” epistemic assholes, whose objectionable conduct is driven by epistemic aims themselves. I further explore connections between epistemic assholes and epistemic vice, and the causal role that epistemic assholery can play in active ignorance and epistemic exploitation. Through this latter connection, I argue that epistemic assholes play an insidious causal role in sustaining objectionable social power dynamics. The concept of epistemic assholes provides a valuable lens for understanding important but often-hidden hazards in our social epistemic environment.

Worst of the Worst - 152 Criminal ICE and Border Agents — Ohio Immigrant Alliance

Video recording, final report, data, and other content from the release of OIA’s new report, “The Worst of the Worst: 152 Sexually and Physically Abusive ICE and Border Agents; Implications for U.S. Communities and Actions Needed from Congress.”

What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity

Many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. Hating your job is one thing  –  but what happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. While identifying closely with your career isn’t necessarily bad, it makes you vulnerable to a painful identity crisis if you burn out, get laid off, or retire. Individuals in these situations frequently suffer anxiety, depression, and despair. By claiming back some time for yourself and diversifying your activities and relationships, you can build a more balanced and robust identity in line with your values.

What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model

Authorities, from parents of toddlers to leaders of formal institutions, use punishment to communicate disapproval and enforce social norms. Ideally, from whether and how severely a transgression is punished, targets and observers infer shared social norms. Yet in light of every punitive choice, observers also evaluate the motives and legitimacy of the authority. Here, we show that the effects of punishment can only be understood by considering these inferences simultaneously. We measured human observers’ joint inferences empirically in three preregistered experiments ( N = 1 , 254 ) and developed a rational Bayesian model using an inverse planning framework that captures and explains these inferences and their interactions quantitatively and parsimoniously. When people have different priors about norms or authorities, the model predicted and we experimentally confirmed that observing punishment by the authority can sustain polarization. This work reveals the rational logic behind how people learn from punishment and a key constraint on the function of punishment in establishing shared social norms.