homesafe on Nostr: Okay, this gets fucking technical if I'm gonna explain it properly, but this is not ...

Okay, this gets fucking technical if I'm gonna explain it properly, but this is not just an excuse and bullshit

If you're going to describe everything that is imposed on someone which they don't prefer as "punishment" -

- then I want another word that differentiates between "stuff imposed on people which is purely to prevent them from continuing to run around in situations where they've been violating norms and harming others"

- and the *different* thing where "norm violators get put in situations that are supposed to use suffering to teach them to behave & so people know that norm violation will result in them suffering"

This is related to the decision-theory of threats

Agent 1 knows that Agent 2 disprefers Action X - so to get Agent 2 to do something that Agent 1 prefers, Agent 1 communicates to Agent 2 that they will do the thing Agent 2 disprefers unless Agent 2 behaves a certain way"

This is the basic shape of a threat

What *isn't* a threat is something like "Agent 3 communicates to Agent 2 a policy about their Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement - which wasn't decided on based on how Agent 2 will change their behavior given this information - just communicated in order to be helpful for Agent 2 in understanding which situations lead to Agent 3 taking certain actions *because of Agent 3's own best interests*"

If you're imagining stuff that would make someone "regret their actions," and then communicating to them that you're pre-committing to doing those things if they behave a certain way - you're threatening them.

You're committing to going out of your way to do things they wouldn't prefer in order to alter their behavior - andthe correct response to this is to *ignore the threat* because they're *only making the threat because they think you won't ignore it.*

It is different when you're saying "we will send you into exile for the sake of protecting the rest of our society from people who go around committing murder - but we aren't telling you not to murder because we say so and because we anti-incentivize it. Murder if you want, just know that 'The Public' is a safe-space that people have agreed ought to be kept free of murderers, so murdering will get you removed from 'The Public' since not murdering people is one of the conditions everyone agrees to in that space in order to be able to live better lives."

People who kill people in the public are still benefitting from others maintaining the agreement not to murder people - their lives in 'The Public' are nicer than alternative worlds where everyone ran around killing people. If people want to keep those nice things, they has to be a filter that seperates out people who have demonstrated they will violate the "social-contract."

Someone who kills is "flipping the table" when the "table" would not have been there if everyone went around flipping tables all the time.

So removing them from that place where they violated the agreements allowing that place to exist in the state that everyone prefers (being able to go out to a beach without worrying about being gunned down) is not a *threat.*

That policy of conditional reactions doesn't depend on believing that people will fear the consequences of breaking their agreement - you'd still behave the same way if you knew everyone *didn't make their decisions while considering how you'd react to their decisions.*