My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth.
The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.
For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust even if 99% of the population are good people.
> You hit the point where your agent is churning for hours and running more and more tests and inadvertently breaking more things trying to make the change in all those places
I've had this experience with vibe-coded applications written by Claude itself. For some reason, Claude doesn't seem to use any good practices unless I tell it to, and seems to require me to walk it through a decent design up front.
If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.
It's hard enough to be unemotional when the livelihood of yourself (and others you care about) is on the line, but it's doubly hard when you think justice has been violated.
I think people often make this mistake, where they think they've killed their ego, and then fail to notice when their ego returns.
I think people generally underestimate how hard it is to permanently kill their ego. What ends up happening, then, is that a lot of people genuinely believe that they have humility when in actuality they don't.
The US allowing Iran to levy a toll on Hormuz would completely discredit the US and set the precedent for other countries to levy their own shipping tolls . It's a non-starter.
I am so tired of people talking philosophy without knowing any philosophy. So here is some Aquinas for those who want some actual substance.
What is the ultimate good for humans? Specifically what does the good for us, and thus our well-being or happiness, ultimately consist?
It cannot be wealth,
because wealth exists only for the sake of something else which we might acquire with it (ST I-II.2.1).
It cannot be honor, because honor accrues to someone only as a consequence of realizing some good, and thus cannot itself be an ultimate good
(ST I-II.2.2).
For similar reasons, it cannot be fame or glory either, which are in any case often achieved for things that are not really good in the first place (ST I-II.2.3).
Nor can it be power, for power is a means rather than an end and might be used to bring about evil rather than genuine good (ST I-II.2.4).
It cannot be pleasure, because pleasure is also a consequence of realizing a good rather than the realization of a good itself; even less likely is it to be bodily pleasure specifically, since the body exists for the sake of the soul, which is immaterial (ST I-II.2.6).
Aquinas identifies three general categories of goods inherent in our nature.
First are those we share in common with all living things, such as the preservation of our existence,
Second are those common to animals specifically, such as sexual intercourse and the child-rearing activities that naturally follow upon it.
Third are those peculiar to us as rational animals, such as "to know the truth about God, and to live in society," "to shun ignorance," and
"to avoid offending those among whom one has to live" (ST I-II.94.2).
These goods are ordered in a hierarchy corresponding to the hierarchy of living things (i.e. those with vege-tative, sensory, and rational souls respectively).
The higher goods presuppose the lower ones; for example, one cannot pursue truth if one is not able to conserve oneself in existence. But the lower goods are subordinate to the higher ones in the sense that they exist for the sake of the higher ones.
I had a chemistry teacher who insisted that the fissile isotope of Uranium was U-238 not U-235. I challenged him on this multiple times and he refused to budge on this. I get that it's a simple mistake to make (it seems like U-238 is bigger so intuitively ought to be less stable) but he could have just looked it up and he didn't, I guess he was just so confident about it that he thought there was no way he could have been wrong about it.