unpopular beliefs

in contrast to things I believe that no one else believes, which are intended to be potentially-novel insights about the world --- things that most people haven't even thought about --- here are some beliefs that are not novel, but that current society probably disagrees with me on.

Also gesturing in this direction is pg's Things You Can't Say (https://paulgraham.com/say.html), though some of the beliefs I'd put here might be fine to discuss in most company but just unpopular.

Corporal punishment: I'm tentatively in favor of corporal punishment for adults. I think Singapore still does some version of this (caning is a punishment for certain crimes) but it's unpopular in most of the developed world. Compared to jail terms, it's a more visceral deterrent, but also much less wasteful both of the state's resources, and of the offender's precious human life. If committed of a crime I think I would rather have one extremely painful day than waste a year of my life in prison. Prison also disconnects the offender from society (family, work, etc) in a way that can be hard to recover from, while with corporal punishment you can be back at work the next day.

Caveats are that corporal punishment probably demands a higher standard of proof (caning an innocent person feels viscerally more wrong, harder to make reparation for in some nebulous way … though I'm not actually sure it's actually more disruptive than imprisoning them would be), you'd still need prison for many crimes (some people are not safe to have in society), and the calculus would/will change in a post-scarcity world where we could actually invest the resources in prisons to make them genuinely beneficial and reforming experiences (even people innocent of a crime might not mind being sentenced to a year of state-funded therapy, rehabilitation, and personal growth, if these were genuinely well-designed programs run with the full resources and wisdom of a post-scarcity society).