The Power to Punish

Content note: this is written as part of a challenge to publish a daily essay.Once upon a time, people in quarrels could challenge one another to a duel, and the loser would die. This was certainly an escalation. Nowadays we have a society which has set that option down, which reduces the risk and potential downside in so many interactions.This is a common pattern in society. The United States of America has benefited from lots of people starting risky business ventures. The point of an LLC—a "Limited Liability Company"—is that your capacity for debt is limited. The company can go bankrupt, but the people owning it can move on without the debt following them (providing it was not due to a handful of criminalized exceptions like fraud or tax issues). While some companies grow to produce trillions of dollars of value for the economy, many stutter and die, but they don't put their owners in lifelong poverty.The heuristic can be stated thus:If you want people to take more risks, then try to reduce or limit the magnitude of failure.Allowing people to become vicious enemies, without allowing either side to resort to personal violence, means that people can do more ambitious things while risking others hating them for it. Now that I write it out, I'm not quite sure why this is good? If you do things that are worthy of people hating you and wanting to kill you, perhaps you should in fact not do them?I guess the counterargument is that there are a lot of people, and a lot of people have pretty inaccurate beliefs, and if you do anything big or ambitious in the world, people will come to viciously hate you. Kennedy, a friend of mine, once said to me something to the effect of "I don't want to be subject to the poor epistemics of the populace"; the idea being that people have a wide distribution of beliefs, and by random chance if enough people are aware of you someone may estimate your effects on the world as extremely negative, and grow to hate you.[1] So allowing anyone to c