[FRIAM] On the: RLY!? side

[uǝlƃ ☤>$]

I addressed the stupid people vs stupid acts. Dave makes that conflation. I don't.

But re: punishment - I also never claimed stupidity should be punished. I claimed stupidity should be painful. As a person who inflicts pain on myself daily, on purpose, it would be silly to identify pain with punishment. Futher, many of us are affected by chronic pain, often of unknown mechanism/origin. Sophistry about the problem of Evil notwithstanding, chronic pain is not the universe punishing you. The story of Job is a stupid story.

We *could* talk about pain as a mechanism for aversive learning, though. The chronic pain I suffer from has taught me how to (and that I must) moderately meter out my pain in order to avoid greater amounts of pain. Pain has taught me a great deal. It's not a punishment in the slightest sense of that word.

On 8/26/21 9:44 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> It would be good to make a distinction between "punishment" and "self-preservation".  There is something incoherent about asserting that stupid people need to be punished, because one of the salient features of stupidity is an inability to learn from experience.   
> 
> Also, don't we need to distinguish between stupid people and stupid acts?
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☤>$ uǝlƃ