Macronectes giganteus

Be embarrassed by that.

It's just too difficult

Get smarter.

I find it boring

It's because you're stupid. Develop the taste

They're all white

I don't care. Also, shut up- it's not like you're reading classic African literature either, which you could easily Google and get access to btw.

I have a disability/ I'm poor/ I have trauma/ I dont have time

In an ideally good and just society, they would be sequestered from the wider population, with as little harm to their life and freedom as is reasonable, with the intent of offering to them a means by which they can rehabilitate themselves.

The truth of the matter is that such an action is burdensome, difficult, and the results of that effort are rarely impressive, and often offensive to the families and friends of those sequestered.

It is still the kindest thing we can do for them.

I did the math, by the way, if you took the 4% of the population responsible for the majority of violent crime (those who offend 3 or more times) and marched them into the sea; not including any chilling effect of the action in question, you'd see a minimum 50% reduction in all violent crime, including homicide.

Because at the end of the day, dead cirminals don't reoffend.

That being said, I don't trust the government; any government, to do this correctly, so I'd rather we had the means to...disincentivze and physically/permanently arbitrate this issue as individuals. Because while the math does hold out, the problem is that the government and the masses will not stop at that 4%, they will keep going to justify their existence and to avoid feeling bad for the blood on their hands.

I may have become more strident in my beleif on this as time has gone on, but the basic nucleus has been the same since I was much, MUCH younger.

BUT—

OP is overstating their case when they starts getting into how wanting to know the psychological roots of crime is “freakish” and “eugenic.”

Skipping over the fact that physiognomy is literally real and has provable predictive power… True Crime people only really ask questions about “the Criminal Mind” when it comes to incredibly depraved and abhorrent crimes that cry out for an Abnormal Psych explanation.

No no, they want a surveillance system that isn't dependent on buildings full of analysts, who even with advanced tools have a limit to the number of targets they can keep tabs on.

They want something which can make connections between all the disparate datasets they've been building for decades, against the population at large--foreign and domestic. and do it in a way that is accessible to an imbecile (read: upper management).

People see this stuff happening in other countries and think that it will never happen in their country, but this shit always comes home.

There’s already a vast network of flock cameras, tracking your every move, there’s already going to be built-in surveillance systems in cars, and they can already figure out who your friends and family are just by studying whose phones your phone is near every day. They can map out your whole routine, they have absolute shit loads of data on everyone - the problem has always been that there is just so much data to get through that it is virtually useless.

They are already integrating companies like flock and Palantir into the government, now they are gonna start buying up even more controlling interest in AI companies

All of it will be militarized, against you. 

These are the people who are incapable of managing their own resources and therefore must live off the resources of others because they can only consume -- which loops right back into the OP: NPCs would be incapable of saying "if I got stolen from, I would feel bad, therefore I should not steal from others" because they would answer "but I'm not the one being stolen from" and carry on with their thievery.

Casual reminder that genetics exists and is sociologically relevant.

There's a long history of eugenics and, more generally "Obviously we have to control you because you're naturally predisposed to be inferior and dangerous" and going, "Right but you should assume we won't do that again" annoys me for like…

No one has asked you to assume there won't be control! On the contrary — all policies involve some degree of control over someone or something. And if a conclusion of "we will not make any policies informed, even indirectly, by any of this" was foregone, if we could know in advance that all information from studying a topic will be useless and impractical, yeah in that case there would not be much point to discussing it. Pretty tall order though & I don't think you mean to advance a fully general proposal "we cannot talk about research if it might inform a policy and end up with someone controlling someone else".

What drives my annoyance is rather that "control" has vast range to it, starting from the very, very soft control of "we will remind that X is impolite" or "we will recommend Y as the best practice", or the very, very restricted control of "we will order bureaucrats B to maintain paperwork about topic Z and not involve anyone else". Seems disingenious to forget the possible width of policy-space only once the discussion has anything at all to do with human genetics.

(Even that doesn't seem to be the boundary actually; most people have no problem, you presumably don't, with it being a widely known fact that people committing violent crime are disproportionally men.)

And who is "we"? In a democratic society, you too are among the people who have the power and right to contribute to discussion on crime, criminalogy, criminal law… and if you do, the discussion will end up containing slightly more opinions to your liking. Really you are already a part of this discussion, & have asked questions (fairly few, but more than zero). Are you therefore one of "those" people who are "asking questions"? Or is there perhaps some other, more specific issues you are leaving unnamed? I could make vague guesses but a part of the problem is after all that this shroud of "let's not go there" is vague, lacking any stated boundaries of where you don't want discussion to go.

And I would like it to be also understood that discussion itself is not a brainworm, if anything it's the opposite, a necessary part of 1. figuring out what's actually true and 2. what should be done with the information.

Down in California, they're making it easier to imprison the mentally ill.

Look, if you start a sentence with "We need to be more willing to talk about the generic aspect of criminality..." that sentence doesn't end with "...so we can give people who are genetically predisposed to crime free cake and ice cream."

Even you talk about false positives, which proves the point; if the policy is to, say, fast track welfare and free preschool for people who are genetically at risk for crime, false positives are less of a worry than false negatives.

But we both know that part of the assumptions here are that by talking about the genetic aspect of criminality some bureaucratic (presumably government) organization would be getting some kind of permission to do something to the genetically impure that they probably won't like, or at least that won't particularly benefit them.

This sort of po-faced "Why there's all kinds of things we can do with this information" thing bugs me. Because in the country I live in, the government is constantly tempted to do bad things with that information.

...I mean, I'm sure there are some people out there who are eager to create the Division of Race-Driven Precrime Enforcement, as soon as they can get the political/social cover to do so. But that seems like it's going to be quite rare. Even the most-explicitly-race-conscious conservatives tend not to be advocating for anything like that, outside the fringiest of fringe corners.

Rather, the stance is something like: Science tells us that Minority Groups X and Y and Z are genetically crime-prone. So -- if our prisons are full of people from those groups, if kids from those groups receive disciplinary measures in school at disproportionate-seeming rates, if our culture has a general vague vibe that people from those groups are kinda shady, that is not evidence of an Evil Racist System in need of reform. That is society working as intended, and processing the true underlying facts of the world. The chattering class should stop using those outcomes as a cudgel in order to force through ever more anti-institutional and pro-minority-group reform; and, more important still, the chattering class should stop yelling at me about them.

And, of course, you can respond to that stance in all sorts of ways. You can certainly, with some justice, maintain that the government might easily come to use "genetic criminality information" in evil/oppressive ways.

A reason to believe these people were guided by genetics and not social factors is RIGHT THERE IN THE OP. Puzzleleafs responds to evidence by saying there's no evidence. Puzzleleafs is acting so astoundingly bone-headed and obscurantist, he tempts me to Bulverist speculation about his real motives.

I screenshotted him because he's close at hand and commented on this specific item; but my experience from listening to more officially-credentialed people on other items is that some sort of Nontheistic Creationism ideology runs right to the top in America. People who don't believe in God, but do believe that some implicit godlike power is restraining evolution from doing certain things to human genetic traits and phenotypes and distributions thereof. Apparently that would be "complicated". What is this, the progressive remake of Irreducible Complexity?

Protip: The breeder's equation describes selection on a phenotype without regard for complexity.

Animal breeders have been selecting for complex traits in animals since before the discovery of genes. Complexity is no obstacle to a bit of fucking around and finding out approximate solutions. Engineering is prior to physics.

I am half upset, half laughing here because seeing Nontheistic Creationists like Puzzleleafs makes me immediately sympathetic to Young-Earth Creationists. Many of the YECs believe that "evolution" isn't a real science of life, it's a dishonest excuse to deny Christianity and a stick to beat the Church with, and Puzzleleafs is living down to their expectations.

If you understand evolution - no, let's taboo that loaded word, and be more precise here. If you understand the Darwinian-Mendelian model of cumulative change in organisms over generations by mutation, replication, and selection on variation, then obviously it has to apply to humans too! Humans have discrete genes! Humans replicate imperfectly! Humans have reproductive fitness variation! Et cetera.

And obviously there will be genetic variations in human capability for violence, propensity to violence, impulsiveness, intelligence, foresight, empathy, and other factors that go into "criminal convictions". It would be very odd for things to not be this way. Understanding the Darwinian-Mendelian model should tell you that genetics is sociologically relevant before you even see OP's paper, the paper is for making it obvious to people who don't understand evolution or genetics.