Probabilistic, Reformative Justice
The article discusses the complexities of justice systems, particularly the binary distinction between guilt and innocence. It argues for a probabilistic approach to justice that considers reformative measures rather than purely punitive ones. This perspective challenges traditional views and suggests a more nuanced understanding of criminal cases.
- ▪The article presents a hypothetical scenario involving two indistinguishable individuals, one guilty and one innocent.
- ▪It categorizes justice systems along two axes: punitive vs. reformative and binary vs. probabilistic.
- ▪The author advocates for a probabilistic approach to justice, which may offer better outcomes than strict binary judgments.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Lesswrong |
| Canonical URL | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dqbhcm6g7CMWvhoid/probabilistic-reformative-justice |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 14:50:42 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T14:59:38.696Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T14:59:38.696Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TMqoJZg94FaF |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
IntroductionImagine you are an all-powerful judge, presented with two indistinguishable copies of the same person — one evil and one good. You know that one of them has committed multiple murders, whilst the other one is completely innocent. However, it is impossible for you to figure which is which. Letting both walk free feels wrong, and convicting both feels worse. Intuitively, some form of compromise would be best. The hypothetical is contrived, but it illustrates the point I’d like to argue: the outcome of criminal cases largely follow a binary distinction, one that makes sense if the innocence/guilt of the subject is of crucial importance, but otherwise doesn’t.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lesswrong.
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