(no subject)

When it comes to investing, the vast majority of the public now uses index funds. In other words, when it matters financially people don't rely on private information in their decision making.

On the other hand, we see an explosion of conspiracy theories on social media, propagated and exploited even at the level of the President of the US. In an interview a couple of years ago, Rep. Nunes said that the ratio of conspiracy theory letters to issue letters flipped completely to something like 5:1. Furthermore, Facebook and Youtube make it now possible to target susceptible people with specific political ads. In other words, in politics people's decision making is highly influenced by the perception of having access to relevant private information.

Why is this divergence?

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/justice-dept-winds-down-clinton-related-inquiry-once-championed-by-trump-it-found-nothing-of-consequence/ar-BBYObjg?li=BBU4PL8

A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.

(no subject)

Reflecting on this episode, no one could fail to conclude that men’s souls are even more liable than their bodies to suffer from lesions and malignant tumours, that spread in them and grow in malignancy until they become utterly incurable. In the case of ulcers, even treatment may sometimes inflame them and make them spread more rapidly, while the effect of leaving them untreated, to do what they naturally do, is that they go on eating away at the surrounding flesh until nothing substantial remains.

Something similar happens in men’s souls too, where livid and putrid growths often make people more baleful and cruel than any beast. Kind and merciful treatment is taken by such people to amount to fraudulent scheming, and they become increasingly suspicious of and hostile towards their benefactors. But vengeful retaliation arouses in them such a rabid desire to win that there is nothing, however taboo or terrible, that they do not tolerate, and think the better of themselves for behaving with such boldness. In the end, they become so malignant and cruel that they might as well not be human.

--- Polybius, The Histories.

(no subject)

From a purely logical POV, killing (or imprisoning) an evil person can make a situation worse if they are replaced by an even more evil person. This goes back to Kant's analysis of hypothetical statements ( The Critique of Pure Reason, "If perfect justice exists"). Framing the killing as an act of justice implicitly hypothesizes that evil is unique, rather than a systematic result of the underlying condition.