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There's a lot of room in the justice system for discretion at various levels. The law isn't absolute like that in practice.

I'm more complaining about people - allegedly human - making black and white distinctions. Actually, what I'm more upset about is people working from this self-serving system of "logic":

  [general problem] -> [label]+ -> [general action]
For example, saying that casual sharing of media is copyright violation, which is theft, theft is bad and should be punished harshly, thus casual sharing of media should be punished harshly.

It bottle-necks the ambiguity of the real world through a single specific label - ideally one stuck at one end of the spectrum - and thereafter applying a consequence from that label. It's a corrupt mode of thought to my mind.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...



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