You can understand why eliminating a system which may cost some lives, but save more than it costs, may seem a poor ethical choice to some people though, I hope?

The same thinking impedes a lot of progress with welfare, and precipitates a lot of suffering. When we try to move forward with a new system that will reduce the suffering of millions and save as many lives from starvation on the street, we get isolated sob stories of one or two people (which would likely extend to thousands in real life) who the new system fails. We also move forward with efforts sometimes in reverse: we find a few instances of harm from a system, and so replace it with a new system that eliminates that form of harm and saves dozens of people at the expense of thousands or even millions of lives (this almost happened with the live polio vaccine).

There's a reason I'm wholly analytical: I hate making mistakes, and my only viable response is to correct them and refuse to react quickly to emotional and moral appeals. I don't want to look out on the world one day and tell myself I made all the just and good decisions, watching it burn as people die in the streets; I'd rather make the hard decisions and wait for the opportunity to save the child of Omelas without sacrificing everyone else in the process, even if that opportunity never comes.

Ever play Beneath a Steel Sky? There's an insurance salesman that tries to tell you that your robot is likely to attack you because 42% of survey respondents are worried that their robot may go rogue.

Peoples' perception of a thing may differ from the reality. People even fail to perceive when they're being manipulated, even when directly asked. So your survey is invalid.

Secondary opinion piece. Experts have been continuously wrong in many industries, for example about passwords needing funny hash symbols and spaces and ampersands and capital letters. We've spent 20 years beating people over the head with actual math to get them to understand password security, and they till think 8 characters with one capital letter and one numeral is more secure than 20 lower case characters, and that half hour lock-out times for 3 failed attempts in 15 minutes is required (i.e. 20 attempts in 60 seconds giving 60 seconds of lock-out would create an effective limit...).

Their understanding of empirical research can be wrong. For example: they can cite studies that were carried out poorly, or that are old. They can rely on a mass of old or improper studies and ignore a smaller set of newer and better-executed studies. These are all common mistakes in academia.

Remember that nutrition and experts also believe fat and salt are bad for you. That includes your doctor, researchers at NIH, and dieticians. They're all wrong.

Research showing fat is bad for you came from an old study that cherry-picked countries with a correlation while ignoring countries where high fat intake did not come with high heart disease risk; research on salt has been mainly short-term, relying on blood pressure effects after increasing sodium intake in your diet. These studies show grave procedural errors.

Modern research shows that saturated fat and cholesterol intake do not raise risk of heart disease or affect blood cholesterol levels except in a small subset of the population with a genetic defect. Modern understanding of the renal system has discovered, through longer-term studies, that sodium intake of up to 6000mg per day is safe. Blood pressure increases when sodium intake increases; then the kidneys trigger hormonal releases and begin eliminating sodium quickly. It takes three days to stabilize completely, but potassium deficiency makes the renal system less efficient at eliminating sodium.

I've read the empirical research on the death penalty. I've even re-examined the data in several studies and uncovered lurking variables and confounding factors that explain some of the conflicting results. I've even generalized some of these confounding factors to the justice system as a deterrent in general, and provided models for determining what punishments work best in what areas. I know a little bit more about this than most people--even most expert criminologists.

By the way: my cousin has a Ph.D. in criminology, a BA in social services, and a Master's in English. We've had a few good discussions.

It looks like you are trying to move the ball down court.
Would you like to dribble it?
make a pass?
take a 3 point shot?

tasty corn fattened bacon flavored apes.

every year seattlites eat all the blackberries they can pick. The only thing that cut that down was when people began spraying them. But you cold not possibly get more people eating them, and that didn't dent the population in 50 years. On the otherhand no thinks of them as invasive in the sense they were not natural to live there. the pacifc northwest is berry country. Just a thorny nuisance you have to keep cut back when it encroaches walkways not unlike choking vines on trees.

The risk of punishment serves to create deterrence. Risk is probability and severity, both. Remember what I said: if the dominant risk of criminal activity is occupational hazard (i.e. killed in gang fights), state penalties do fuck-all. You have a 99% chance of being shot by drug dealer, and 1% chance of being arrested at all? No state penalty means a damn to you; you have more important shit to worry about.

Numerous studies have shown that the death penalty has strong deterrent effect. I've even read studies that swapped back and forth while citing other studies, and then concluded that they have no idea what the hell's going on in the world.

And you didn't read the post at all, and display an obvious lack of understanding of anything.

Repeat: State penalties are a deterrent if and only if they are the dominant consequence of an action.

If walking into someone's house is about 95% likely to get you shot, state penalties--arrest, fines, jail, execution--are approximately zero deterrent. If murder is unlikely to end in any negative way aside from whatever the state sets down, then the state penalty is the dominant factor.

High-gang-crime regions expose criminals to occupational hazard more than anything: they're less likely to be arrested (not executed) than killed by other criminals. Whatever the police are going to do to these people has zero impact.

Low-crime regions expose criminals mainly to state penalty: the major concern for a murderer is state execution. It hangs in the basal ganglia, automatically factoring into all decisions--especially high emotional decisions, where the underlying threat of execution has its biggest impact.

These are completely different situations isolated by regional culture and individual lifestyle. Career criminals in peaceful criminal venture--burglars in suburbs exposed to almost zero non-violent crime--will be extremely hesitant to commit acts of violence almost entirely due to state penalty. Violent career criminals will tend to ignore those penalties; but criminals will shy away from violent crime, and thus less often become violent career criminals, when doing so appears to minimize their exposure to severe consequences.

That is to say: death penalty has likely minimal impact in Baltimore and Detroit; has likely strong impact in some of the more suburb-y New England states where there's not a lot of crime. It's not one homogenous concept in an isolated little box.

It's an acceptable error rate when it's greater than the consequences of not doing it and not otherwise avoidable.

Obviously, we must constantly improve the justice system to minimize conviction of the innocent. We must cease the death penalty where it is not a deterrent greater than innocents lost to it, but keep it where it is.

Because people have unscientifically figured out that threat of death is a damn good deterrent, so we presume we're saving more innocent lives than losing. If true, then the blood of the innocent is on our hands if we don't carry out executions--that is, if we save 5 innocents a year from execution while causing an increase in crime claiming 15 innocents, we are responsible for 10 more deaths.

From a more scientific standpoint, deterrence is complicated. I keep saying this: in drug-gang-riddled cities, 99% of the perceived threat is death by other criminals. The criminals don't think the man will kill them, even if they know the man will kill them if he catches them. They think they'll either die in the hood or eventually make it out rich; or they don't think about where they're getting, but are still mainly concerned with not dying in a bad drug deal or gang war. State executions don't factor in here.

In a more peaceful situation, the most important consideration is state executions. People don't have guns, they don't shoot you if you break into their house to murder them, so that's not a worry. You're not a career criminal, and you live in a quiet neighborhood. When the impulse to go murder some son-of-a-bitch comes into your mind, something will hold you back... first personal morals, then an ingrained fear of consequences. The only consequence here is state execution, hence, unlike above, it's a deterrent.

Now, all that's meaningful, but I'll repeat: we as a society haven't figured this out. We've figured out people fear death, and that fear is a deterrent. We don't realize it's in vain here, and extremely effective there. Instead, we pick a side: death penalty for fear of increased murder, or no death penalty because it doesn't seem to help.

Not to mention imprisonment is almost as bad as execution. I like to use the strategic scenario of 10 years imprisonment between 25 and 35, both with and without an existing relationship, career, or both. In any scenario, your life is destroyed; this compounds with psychological impacts of imprisonment--you become a broken man, more prone to crime--and so prison is both torture and a risk to society (an innocent man could come out a murderer).

The real solution is to stop convicting the innocent. Use of the death penalty is fine, but should scale with venue: use it less (up to and including not at all) in areas where it's simply not a deterrent. However, I reject this lethal injection bullshit: a slow, killing numbness looks peaceful, and absolves us of our actions; quarter that motherfucker, with a bolt smashing the back of the skull just before the body is ripped apart. Let the execution horrify us so that we regret what we do; maybe we'll take better care to not condemn a man to death unless we're really fucking sure he did something to warrant it. Make the prosecutor and the jury watch, too. In person.

Ohio just uses its new head-ripping-off machine.

Yes, of course. I don't use shampoo, but I do use soap. I also use a comb to clean my hair, and I scrub the scalp. Sebum production diminishes when I do this, but I have to be thorough: miss cleaning behind your ears and you'll have a rotting, putrid landfill smell coming off your head. If you do get everywhere, your hair smells like ... hair ... the way it would if you used raw detergent to clean it, but with the feeling of soft puppy fur.

Soap makes it much easier, and is essential for skin. Then again, I use a boar bristle scrub brush on my body; modern practice uses soap and water alone. I do use soap, but I need exfoliation such as by bath rag, pumice or apricot grains, or a stiff brush. Sometimes I'll soap up, wash down, and find large sheaths of white, dead skin flaking off during abrasion by bath towel.

Modern prudence factors in as well: who wants hot, sweaty sex with the unwashed?