Introduction to a Medianworld
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She takes the entire pile of tokens.

"Hey everyone", she begins. "I've got all these tokens, you can tell they're mine by the fact I'm holding them. I'm willing to pay a 100 to anyone who intends to wear a mask and say 'I might be a bank robber' near a guard. Masks can be bought across the street. Who’s interested?"

Her plan is to recruit everyone here as distractions, without her last-minute co-conspirators technically breaking the law.

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Tokens are fungible. It says so in the law. That means all tokens are the same. There can't be a law that says "You can't knowingly buy stolen tokens" because that would mean there were two kinds of tokens, knowingly-stolen and not-knowingly-stolen. There are not two kinds of tokens.

Even if there was a law that said that, you could just throw one normal token in the bag and mix it around, and now none of the tokens would be knowingly stolen anymore, would they?

The only attribute of a token is who owns it, and you're allowed to enter into contracts with anyone holding a token on the assumption they own it, because otherwise you'd never be able to enter into a contract with anyone ever.

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Obviously it's dumb to have a law that lets you assume things that aren't true. There's gotta be some way to turn that into a pump for infinite money or infinitely improbable beliefs or something.

Can't the law just say that you can only trade tokens if it's more likely than not that it's not stolen?

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He pulls a token out of his pocket.

"How likely is it that this token is stolen?"

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Objection withdrawn.

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The other children aren't as confident in their understanding of rather complex legal details as Tiger is. She's spent prep time diligently checking everything.

The adult customers, however, think only for a moment about the many complex interlocking rules that build up their society, and decide individually but with a unanimous symmetry that the offer is technically legal and profitable in expectation. They look at each other, and nod.

They take a 100 token each from her pile, and head across the street to buy a mask for much less than that. The teenagers and children, having it be confirmed as a good idea by the older ones who everyone says are so much smarter, eagerly copy them.

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How could that possibly be legal? They're helping criminals escape.

And why would they want to help a criminal escape, anyway? Sure they get some tokens out of it, but by choosing like that they're causing the bank robbery to happen in the first place, and any damages will be their problem in taxes or bank fees or something. They're only stealing from themselves.

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Maybe they have fond memories of their own childhood mischiefs? Maybe the cost is going to end up imposed on everyone equally, but the benefits only accrue to the people in the room at that moment, which they know includes them?

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I don't claim to understand how adults think but I've heard them talk about complicated stuff a lot and that definitely isn't how adults think.

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It's legal because every step is legal. Being paid to do legal things is legal. Wearing a mask is legal. Saying true things to a guard is legal.

You can't make "Helping criminals escape" illegal because everyone is doing that all the time. Just by standing around in the street you're creating a crowd that might help a criminal escape. Just by existing you’re making the haystack slightly bigger that the guard must search through to find bad guys. Criminal laws should be discrete choices, with as little vague unpredictable line-drawing as possible.

Eval wants it to be possible to know in advance if something is a criminal act. Acts with mere civil harms can be compensated fairly afterwards, but criminal law should be solvable with a computer, ideally. Eval doesn't quite have that, yet, but it's trying, and it's not going to make a criminal law that depends on distant contextual considerations if it can possibly avoid it.

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Hey wait a second, this is all the Harm Commission’s fault.

They're willing to participate in some harmless childhood shenanigans, but if she'd been using an actual gun and had actually murdered a bank teller, there's no way random adults would want to help her escape by making themselves into a distraction.

The non-harm-reduced version of her plan was doomed all along.

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Adults don't think that way?

If you see someone run into a bank and rob it with an actual gun, actually killing someone in the process, it should seem immediately obvious that you're almost certainly inside a counterfactual under consideration by the Harms Commission.

You should act to control how you'd want that counterfactual to go, including by how it'll affect the Harms Commission's decision, which is very likely the only thing it'll affect and therefore the only thing you need to consider.

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But then it's still the Harms Commission’s fault!

If they weren't going around making counterfactuals that make crime less bad in reality, adults wouldn't be so willing to choose to decide in ways that make it more easy to commit them.

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If the Harms Commission wasn't going around making counterfactuals that make crime less bad in reality, all of you would be dead by now, so it wouldn't matter.

I mentioned a while ago that a few cities have been counterfactually nuked. I never mentioned which ones.

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Abject Horror.

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The hardest part of any crime is getting away with it afterwards.

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Search didn't have enough information to infer a crime was being planned in advance, but she's not so dumb that she won't be able to figure out which of her friends talked her into doing this afterwards.

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Tiger, hauling her remaining bag of tokens, runs back across the street and shoots her dead on the spot.

People outside who weren’t around to witness the bank robbery itself will start running and/or screaming, according to their personal preferences.

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Search being nominally dead will not stop any of the new recruits from buying masks: there is a sign that says how much masks cost, and Search never retracted the offer, so the customers just put money on the table, take one, and leave.

A more opportunistic and less careful masked child, almost at their eleventh birthday and therefore lacking much disincentive, takes the undefended sales money off the table to run away with.

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This whole "all crimes forgiven at an arbitrary line" thing is creating terrible incentives. Couldn't there just be a rolling period of 1 year or something, so that there's always at least some consequences?

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No you fool don't say that if he can trick us into agreeing that's what the rules should be then it'll turn out that's what the rules already are.

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The Guards do not actually consider upset children on vacation to be higher priority than a bank's alarm, and quickly sprint back.

The number of children wearing masks and obviously being distractions has grown substantially since the last time they checked, and it's not immediately obvious what's going on enough to bet money that any child in particular is worth arresting.

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If you do run into anyone up to some mischief near that alarm, and we are in no way suggesting we think you will, we think you should respond to them with your paintball guns and not your real ones.

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Thanks. We'll make a note of that.

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