But I still maintain that no one should be punished for bad ideas.
People should be punished for mendacity. And there are situations where you cannot reliably distinguish mendacity from bad ideas without the assistance of a telepath.
If you never punish bad ideas, the majority of these edge cases will be mendacity, because the proportion of bad luck is constant while the amount of mendacity increases in proportion to the probability that the response will be permissive. Conversely, if you always punish mendacity, then the majority of your edge cases will be bad luck, because you can voluntarily refrain from mendacity, but you can't voluntarily refrain from bad luck.
This means that there is a point somewhere on the scale where the loss to unpunished mendacity begins to exceed the gain from not punishing good-faith mistakes.
Yes, if you assume that you can always perfectly discern whether people are acting in good faith or not, then you can construct a system that never has to accept punishing bad luck as necessary collateral damage in rooting out mendacity. And if pigs could fly, reinforced umbrellas would be a growth industry.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
If you never punish bad ideas, the majority of these edge cases will be mendacity, because the proportion of bad luck is constant while the amount of mendacity increases in proportion to the probability that the response will be permissive.
Not necessarily. Mendacity for the sake of it is pointless - or at least evidence of a mental disorder, or an interest in an unusual form of performance art.
The real issue is self-serving mendacity. The self-serving part not being limited to mendacity, but other actions too.
I'd suggest anti-social self-interest is rather easier to discover - e.g. totally open transaction records would be a practical requirement. (For whatever form of records were being kept.)
The issue then becomes symmetrical oversight with feedback loops that encourage open participation and prevent authoritarian and/or narcissistic damage to the common good.
And punishment doesn't apply - revenge is pointless, unless you want to be a biblical patriarch with a bad temper.
Restraint would be enough.
Totally open transaction records does not help you determine whether an investment that generates a positive operating surplus but negative profit was made because the investor expected it to be a profitable investment or because he expected to be able to hold society hostage to the sunk cost.
You want to propose one of those?
And punishment doesn't apply - revenge is pointless,
On the contrary, in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, for example, revenge is absolutely required to create a credible disincentive to self-serving mendacity.
There are insane results in game theory, but that's not one of them.
The real issue is self-serving mendacity.
(simple) mythomania vs agenda-based mythomania... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
