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The past is not true

sive.rs

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Re: The past is not true

#331

Post by pcthrowaway »

brightlancer wrote: post #259
bittercynic wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make a mistake like this, where you owe a debt that can never be repaid, I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure. This probably should follow you around forever, but maybe it shouldn't dominate every moment of the rest of your life.

> I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure. It's called prison. > This probably should follow you around forever, but maybe it shouldn't dominate every moment of the rest of your life. Prison (and convictions generally) shouldn't follow folks forever because it disincentivizes rehabilitation, it incentivizes recidivism, it labels someone based upo…

> > I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure.

> It's called prison.

No.

Prison (and the threat of it) accomplishes a few things:

It's punitive, which allows people who enjoy retribution to feel some satisfaction at their idea of justice being carried out.

The threat of prison theoretically prevents some people from inflicting some societal harms on others.

And it keeps dangerous people away from the general public.

It also has the consequence of lining the pockets of the people running for-profit prisons (this is actually really really bad for society though), and also costs taxpayers a ton of money.

And another nice benefit of adversely affecting minorities, poor people, and otherwise marginalized people disproportionately.

It largely is not successful at rehabilitating people. Maybe some people, sometimes, but in the U.S. at least, there are more people who come out of prison more broken than they were going in, and also have fewer options for living an ethical life coming out. They fall in with gangs for protection, and those networks extend back out of the prison. The money spent imprisoning people (especially for things like nonviolent, victimless crimes) could likely do much more good to society if it was used differently.

If someone theoretically did something bad, and was remorseful for their actions, and we could say with a degree of certainty that they were no more likely to commit the same act again than any random person on the street, I think it would be better to not imprison them, and spend that money on, say, social services instead.

If you're looking for models of actually allowing people to atone and work towards improvements in their future behaviour, we'd do better with a restorative justice model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice

Re: The past is not true

#333

Post by omgmajk »

For us with anxiety problems the past is very often a lie. Imagining the worst possible outcome for everything tends to make things stick in the brain that are fundamentally not true.

Re: The past is not true

#334

Post by avgcorrection »

keepamovin wrote: post #316
mrguyorama wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point? That this person is saying "I believed I did a bad thing and it turned out to be wrong so I exclaim that there is no objective reality and you shouldn't beat yourself up over bad things you think you did because maybe they weren't really that bad"? Come on, this fails even basic logic. One event being misremembered is not valid proof that all or even many events are misremembered to your advantage.

Thanks for sharing what you found there! I don't know, I get if you take that from it, but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too.

> , but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too.

This is why I didn’t elaborate in a follow-up reply. I knew I was going to get a reiteration of the first reply (“wider view”, who the hell knows what that means).

Re: The past is not true

#335

Post by DoctorOetker »

benkitzelman wrote: post #298
miiiiiike wrote: post #134

He did the right thing by seeking her out to apologize. The rest doesn’t hold water. “There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.” The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true. They’ll stab people in the back or work to damage people’s careers and when you c…

Yeah... but also from the other perspective (the victim / target) - bitterness about the past is poison and for your own good, forgive. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/evolution-the-self/2...

I think millions of years of natural selection are a better advisor than a stranger on the internet, or teachings of the status quo.

We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc.

If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.

Re: The past is not true

#336

Post by bandie91 »

norir wrote: post #213
mrguyorama wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accept that sometimes when you do a bad thing that permanently harms someone else you don't deserve forgiveness (not everyone is christian FFS) and it's not wrong for that to follow you around forever. If that makes you uncomfortable, too fucking bad, don't irreversibly blind someone.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

important to note that it is not an absolute command. it's qualified as it follows: "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

Re: The past is not true

#337

Post by zimpenfish »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #323
metacritic12 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think misanthropes aren't being enabled by articles like the above. Many of them honestly don't care deep down about the damage they do. Others like Mark Wahlberg just "forgive themselves" for blinding a neighbor as a teen, even if their actual victim doesn't forgive them, so they can feel better about themselves mentally. https://time.com/3623630/mark-wahlberg-pardon/

Mark Wahlberg didn't blind that guy -- he lost his eye in Vietnam. Also he forgave Wahlberg. But Wahlberg believed he had blinded him, so it's basically the same story as the OP article. https://jezebel.com/mark-wahlberg-beating-victim-says-actor-...

> Mark Wahlberg didn't blind that guy -- he lost his eye in Vietnam.

Call me an old cynic but I'd love to see the old fella's bank account around 2014 given he seems to have waited 26 years to clear that up and it happened to coincide with Wahlberg asking for a pardon.

Re: The past is not true

#338

Post by NoRelToEmber »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #335
benkitzelman wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... but also from the other perspective (the victim / target) - bitterness about the past is poison and for your own good, forgive. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/evolution-the-self/2...

I think millions of years of natural selection are a better advisor than a stranger on the internet, or teachings of the status quo. We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc. If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.

> If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function

Deterrence being one obvious function.

Re: The past is not true

#339

Post by nathan_compton »

hef19898 wrote: post #240
nathan_compton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of quantum mechanics this is a genuinely open philosophical question. The equations which time evolve the wave function are time-symmetric, which means that even if you know the current state of the universe's wave function somehow, you still only get a probabilistic projection for the state in the past. I think this leaves open the genuine physical possibility that the past does not exist in the same way tha…

We are not living in a Star Trek / MCU multi-verse so.

This has nothing to do with fiction. Roughly speaking, if you are some kind of wave function realist, then the implication that the past has a similar kind of uncertainty as the future is a simple consequence of the time reversibility of quantum mechanics (without the measurement postulate). Read a book.

Re: The past is not true

#340

Post by hef19898 »

nathan_compton wrote: post #339
hef19898 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not living in a Star Trek / MCU multi-verse so.

This has nothing to do with fiction. Roughly speaking, if you are some kind of wave function realist, then the implication that the past has a similar kind of uncertainty as the future is a simple consequence of the time reversibility of quantum mechanics (without the measurement postulate). Read a book.

I do read, history books for example. Using quantum physics to argue some meta-physic view on life is, well, it is I guess... I think it is loughable.
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