[nkozyra]

> We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.

This is why I asked why 22 was right and 32 is wrong. "Because the judge said so" is no more useful than my asking "why heads?" and you answering "because that's where it landed when I flipped it."

There might not be a "right answer," and I'm ok with that. But it's odd to decide it's right simply because an authority decided it was.

> You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).

I'm not ignoring them, I'm simply responding to the reasoning you gave. By your metrics, 22 gives 12 more years of societal safety than does 10. This is what you responded to me, and I'm trying to point out that I believe it's flawed. If there are more factors included, it doesn't make this reasoning less flawed, it's just a smaller slice of the judgment's pie.

> You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.

Perhaps inadvertently, I think you hit the nail on the head. We don't have metrics that validate or invalidate any of this. We rely on a set of arbitrary guidelines mediated by emotions and feelings. In a great many cases, I don't think we're accomplishing anything but pushing a problem away and pretending we fixed it.

[sangnoir]

Forgive me for going meta: Your "Socratic method" falls short when you ignore obvious context. You assumed the liat of reasons I stated was exhaustive, I clarified in my reply that it wasn't and then after another back-and-forth you suggested I may have "inadvertently" stumbled upon the the real reason of your concerns: complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.

You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors - especially in written discussion forums like HN... Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives. This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.

[nkozyra]

> You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors

This isn't what happened - my end of the conversation was a reaction to your replies and only your replies.

> This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.

You did in the prior reply - at least explictly - only. Forgive me for not making assumptions of things you didn't say.

But again, my point was that if "protection of society" is a factor in this complex system, there's not much argument against maximizing that.

All that said ...

> complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.

This wasn't my conclusion, it was simply a reaction to getting more information in that reply than you had previously offered.

> Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives.

:(

Getting a reductive comment like this doesn't help.