hugh_'s comments

What's the point of giving a four-year-old a bike anyway? It's not like you're going to let 'em ride it anywhere interesting, or unsupervised.

Now, either they're committing more crimes because sentencing has got less harsh, or they're committing more crimes because of other social factors (eg the growth of gang culture, drug culture, et cetera). Either way it's not clear to me that making sentencing even less harsh than it already is will solve anything.

I'd say it's more like asking "What cars do park rangers drive?" or "What foods do wrestlers eat?" because we're talking about groups of people with quite specific requirements. The question, while overly broad, isn't silly, because there's a lot of people who have no idea and have never heard of things like Maple, Magma. Heck, now I coem to think of it I've never heard of Maxima, so your answer taught me something new. And if you learn something new from the answer, it's probably not a silly question!

Better K-6 education could probably decrease crime, if we can turn the illiterate, shiftless dullards who make up the lower rungs of society into literate and hardworking (if still dull) citizens. But this requires more a new educational strategy rather than just more money, and I don't know if anyone has thought of a good one yet.

This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.

Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.

(I suppose if you really wanted to be paranoid you could suppose that your _own_ actions in flipping the lightswitch might be subconsciously being controlled by someone else, but this is a whole different level of skepticism)

Actually, making that reduction in practice is pretty much what I do for a living.

What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws?

Perhaps one set of natural laws that applies around here, and a slightly different set that applies in Andromeda, but only on Tuesdays? But surely the two sets, plus the Andromeda/Tuesdays restriction, put together form one slightly more complicated set of physical laws?

Perhaps an infinite set of subtly different natural laws which apply at different points in space and time? But that's still just one very large set of laws, right?

In situations where we can't freely vary any of the parameters we're always going to have a lot more difficulty. Given a pile of correlations between, say, happiness and the countless other variables in the mere two hundred or so countries which exist (eg "average bovine thigh circumference"), it'd be impossible, in the absence of any good theories about what should make people happy, to determine what does make people happy.

Luckily we have pretty good ideas from our own observations and from those of others about what actually does make people happy: health, wealth, nice weather, absence of civil war, et cetera. But we'll never be able to get anything other than the vaguest confirmation of what we already believed out of statistical methods alone.

If I understand this correctly, this means that the vertical axis goes from "similarity in large-scale structure" at the top to "similarity at the momentary scale" at the bottom, so the triangle is a sensible way to look at it.

1. Become a specialist

2. Become a generalist

This has two advantages. Firstly, you'll be useful and employable in your youth, since a specialist with a few years' experience is a valuable asset, but a half-baked generalist is pretty useless. Secondly, and more importantly, you'll know what it's like to really understand a subject, which should help you in your quest to partially understand all the others.

And people are complaining that the crash was caused by under-regulation? How about first removing all the laws which force banks to lend money to folks who are unworthy of credit?

There's good reason to believe that lie detectors might work much better in the laboratory, on test subjects telling inconsequential lies to experimenters and knowing they'll go home, than on real suspected criminals telling vitally important lies (or truths) for life-or-death stakes.

If I were a bank and I found out a borrower had walked away from a previous loan leaving their creditors holding the bag, there's no way in hell I'd lend them a single cent, ever.

On the other hand, if we were to execute a thousand prisoners per year then it would start to get a whole lot cheaper. For instance, I'd be in favour of executing the scrote that stole my bike.