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Marginal Utility, Occam's Razor and KP

Posted by Dante on Sunday, October 19 2014 at 02:01:41AM

Reading up recently on economics, I reencountered the notion of "marginal utility."

Pre-Austrian-school economics was dominated by questions of inherent value that dispensed with the idea that humans make choices.

These days, of course, we understand that if nobody is willing to pay the "inherent value" of a good, then it really isn't worth what the theorist claims. ( Note to observers: Marx's entire premise flows from the labor-theory of value. If you accept that a cr*ppy novel which took years to write isn't worth more than a good novel which took months, then the whole structure collapses. )

But one issue which inherent value theorists couldn't suss out was the Diamonds/Water Paradox. Why, if water is essential to life and diamonds aren't. do people value diamonds more.

According to "Marginal Utility," when something is plentiful, its value will be based on its least valuable use. The classic analogy is of a farmer with five bins of corn. He may keep two to feed his family, two to sell, and after setting aside next year's seed, one bin for chicken-feed. If one is stolen, does he let his family starve? Of course not. The he assigns it to the least valued purpose and doesn't pay more than "chicken feed" for it ( or determines that the chickens can make-do with cheaper grain when buying the replacement. ) Heck, the whole idea of making a profit lies in getting others to value the corn as essential sustenance which he has allocated as "disposable."

So the least value we put to most water is letting it run down the sink when we're to lazy to turn it off between lathering the hands and rinsing them. If diamonds were common enough to be used as ballast in ships, then THAT would be their value.

Now strange things start happening in economies when you remove human choice.

If ALL metals were valued at the same rate, say "gold," then folks wouldn't use the scarce gold to get the same purchasing power; they would use something both more common and cheaper to obtain.

KP laws aren't structured to acknowledge the difference between the materiel which is the "most" and that which is the "least."

Evaluations based on markets prior to criminalization demonstrate that rape pics ( and even pics of sex acts ) are rarer and less popular than erotic posing pics or simple nudity ( with rape pics being virtually unheard of in a market-based economy. )

Without the cops collecting ( and soliciting [ remember the Dreamboard case? ] ) the worst of the worst, we must assume, according to Occam's Razor, and the notion of Marginal Utility, that what they bring to trial is not the rarest and most infrequent, but is the most common and least expensive to obtain.

When trying to prove that they're productive, are they really going to face departmental cutbacks by recognizing what scholars already proved, that rape pics are driven out of paid markets and are unpopular? Or are they going to try to equate drawings to real children and simple nudity to sex acts?

We don't need to assume that all officers are villains. All it takes for the lies about evidence to become systemic are a few bad eggs, and a structural lack of accountability.

If you may recall, the SF PD was systemically planting drugs on suspects and did so for years despite defense attys pointing this out. They did so until they were caught on a hotel survillance tape.

And when asked why they falsified evidence, the answer was because they could.

Many jurors don't get "burden of proof," "presumption of innocence" and other basics of civics 101. There's still an assumption that a case would not make it to trial if it lacked merit. And that a cops testimony is more trustworthy than a "criminals."

This is further complicated when the accused is some demonized "other." In a murder case, the suspect might claim self-defense and ask the jury to imagine what it would be like to fear for your life.

But when society demonizes the Muslim, the "gang member" the Pedo; they are being asked to assume that the motives of such people are not worthy of any empathy. ( Of course identification with the defendant should be irrelevant to whether the prosecution has a case. )

But with KP cases, the jury is predisposed to assume the worst, and the penalties are based on the worst, so simple logic and economics should determine that the cops will go with the least valued item which can purchase the highest possible sentence.

Oh, I've no doubt that if there were a case involving those anecdotally observed rape pics ( perhaps the ones the cops solicited in their sting ) that they wouldn't fail to use such evidence. But they also wouldn't be so heedless of the incentives to refrain from equating lingerie models with rape victims when they can depend on zero oversight and accountability. And when they know ( as the SF PD did ) that they can get away with it.

The true agnostic should assume the least if they assume anything at all when faced with no evidence which is falsifiable by other independent researchers. But, of course, those with a crusader's zeal have never met an agnostic argument they couldn't damn for its failure to condemn sin on the basis of lack of proof.

Dante

Dante





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