Discussion

Adorable and Harmless

djoldman: The issue here is semantics and definitions of words."Crime" is far too broad a word for there to be an overwhelming consensus as to whether it's going up or down. That's the main issue.If Scott A. had said "actual murders, property crime (defined as ____ ), ... and NOT perceptions of these" then there would be a more fruitful conversation.All this stuff about greek is a red herring. "Crime" is a collection of discrete events that occur or don't occur. There are more or fewer of them per time period. Whether or not those events are recorded correctly or that people are more or less aware of them can be debated, but the actual numbers are the numbers.

traderj0e: Store owners in certain "low crime" areas are taking up the serious cost of locking merchandise because they think the problem is really that bad. I trust the money more than the stats.

d-us-vb: No, the issue, as outlined in the post, is real problematic behavior of real people on the internet who are inclined to tell anyone who is skeptical regarding the data (whatever it may be) that they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.The post is about the author, not crime. The critique of Scott. A's posts is an example of the kind of online content that led the author to become "apostate to the Church of Graphs".

bombcar: There's also tons of nuance that doesn't get caught in "feelings" - if the homeless outside your gated community are repeatedly murdering each other, you have a "high crime rate" that you may not care about at all.But if suddenly they stop murdering each other and only kill you (or someone like you) during the year, the crime rate has gone way, way down, but your perception of it has skyrocketed.

pron: My main problem with Scott Alexander is this: To draw correct conclusions from data, a necessary (though insufficient) condition is that you must be an expert in the field from which the data is drawn and/or to which the data applies. Otherwise, you might not know how accurate the sources of the data are and, more importantly, whether you're considering enough context (i.e. whether you have all the right data to draw your conclusion). For example, when I read Paul Krugman on international trade or central banks, at least I know that he's an expert in that subject matter so he knows what context may be more or less relevant.Scott Alexander is not an expert in almost anything he writes about. In relation to this post's subject, Alexander is not an expert in criminology, law enforcement, political perception, or sociology. Then again, neither is the author of this post (at least they don't say what their relevant credentials are).It seems to me that both Alexander and the author of this post are members of the same church - the church of those who believe that people can draw correct conclusions from a sampling of data without the necessary scholarship and expertise, and that you can understand something complicated without putting in all the effort that's required to understand it.

TimorousBestie: > I increasingly find myself in disagreement with Scott’s essays on social issues and public policy, despite broadly sharing his small-L liberal outlook.Well, there's your problem. Scott isn't a "small-L liberal." He does a decent job at masquerading as one, but ask a fan to recount his "greatest hits" and they're all boring old orthodox conservatism: race realism [1], IQ [2], anti-identity politics [3], etc.(No, I'm in the mood to debate his positions on any of this, it's all been done to death and further debate isn't going to change anyone's mind, let alone his. The citations are there to establish that he is aligned with these views, whether or not it's warranted.)One fringe benefit of belonging to "The Church of Graphs" that I don't think the author really touches on is that believers can do motivated reasoning _very_ easily. Scott is an expert at laundering his motivated reasoning through well-researched citations and data that supports his points, but he's not so great at giving the other side a fair hearing.[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-r...[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-le...[3] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-against-boomers

jnovek: Businesses do make irrational decisions with their money, that’s a big part of why enterprise sales works.

thaumasiotes: I have a different problem that I would also describe as a Church of Graphs.I keep reading essays in which the author makes some claim and supports it by displaying a graph. The graph is not explained other than as proof that the claim it supports is correct. The axes are unlabeled, or labeled with meaningless abbreviations.Apparently enough people find this persuasive that the practice has become widespread. But why?

hluska: I’m not familiar with this writer or the writer this is about so can someone help me out with something? This article is fawning over this Scott person, talks about how the audience is more intelligent than average and about how ‘impeccably sourced and credentialed’ this Scott person’s arguments are.Am I missing an in joke somewhere or do people actually write like this?

farfatched: https://www.astralcodexten.com/ is one of the most influential bloggers in tech spaces.I was a keen reader, but don't follow so much anymore.That said, I don't think his influence is that large, but who is?He's likely fawning over Scott because he wants the post to read by readers of Scott."A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down"

1attice: Author loses me when he starts pearl clutching about the harms of seeing boarded-up windows, and his wife having to walk past unhoused drug users. (Who, let us be clear, are the ones who are actually experiencing harm.)This guy isn't a liberal, he's a guy looking to justify his discomfort by dressing it up with a bit of rehydrated bible-school epistemology

farfatched: His wife and the unhoused drug users can both can be worthy of sympathy and consideration.

ronsor: There's a serious problem where people look at statistics and assume the constituent components are 100% evenly distributed.This is rarely the case.

traderj0e: People keep telling me I'd be safer if I chose a self-driving car, citing overall car crash stats. Those include people who DUI, text while drive, are way too old, or drive a Tesla or Altima, where I'm none of the above.

traderj0e: Even in those cases, they aren't wildly off the mark, at least the ones that survive. Maybe they spend a little extra on some overpriced enterprise solution, but it at least works. The locked up items are a big risk, cause it not only costs money but also discourages customers.

1attice: Yes, seeing someone unhoused is the REAL homelessness

fgfarben: Ah. You refer to Rationalism.

BrenBarn: This is an interesting article. I feel like the point the author thinks he's making isn't maybe the one he's actually making, or at least not the one he ought to be making.The problem is he sets this up as a contrast between, on the one side, quantification, evidence, "graphs", and the like; and, on the other side, "your eyes", "lived experience", and so on.But these are not necessarily in opposition. There is nothing unquantifiable about "lived experience" or people opinions about crime, nor is there any reason to dismiss such data as irrelevant to policy decisions.Even if the "church of graphs" showed crime on a clear upswing, it would be absurd to say, "Crime has gone up, therefore we must build a new prison." To justify that action requires more than just that bare fact; it requires some kind of causal analysis that explains why that action would play a causal role in producing some desirable effect (like reducing crime).On the flip side, it is not absurd to say "Surveys show that the perceived level of crime has gone up, so we should explore policies to address that." This is especially true if you swap "perceived level of crime has gone up" for "perceived quality of life has gone down", because perception is in some measure an irrefutable judgment on quality of life. (That is, if you think your quality of life has gone done, then to at least some degree it factually has, because part of what it means to have a good life is to know that your life is good and to be happy about that.) Such a swap is likely warranted, because many of the author's examples of "crime" in the article make more sense as examples of quality of life. Seeing things locked up in stores is not experiencing crime or even perceiving an increase in crime; it is experiencing a decline in quality of life which may plausibly be an effect of an increase in crime, but that's not the same thing.So just having data doesn't tell you what to do, and just having feelings and perceptions doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything. What's missing in both cases is the causal explanation of how the data and/or the perceptions arose.Whenever I see people talking about "lived experience" I get a bit leery, because often that seems to be a lead-in to an argument of the form "I personally experienced X, therefore large-scale change Y should be implemented." The fallacy there is not starting from perception or from gut feelings; it's starting from just your own perceptions and gut feelings. If you can get data that shows a lot of people share your perceptions and gut feelings, then we can have something to work with. What we do with that information can vary: sometimes there is a causal theory to be developed and action to be taken that can trickle down into a change in those perceptions; sometimes the answer is better education or messaging that makes clear to people that their perceptions were inaccurate. But the problem is not a "church of graphs".With regard to the issue of crime as discussed in this article, it seems likely to me that the data adduced in support of the "there is no crime problem" position is missing something important that has a genuine impact on people's quality of life. This doesn't mean the data we have is wrong or irrelevant; it just means it's not the whole story. If you have a bunch of data on temperatures in different places around the world and you use that to pick the best place to live, you may be disappointed if you get there and find it's raining all the time. That doesn't mean your data was bad (temperature surely is a major determinant of what makes us like a certain climate) but that it's incomplete (you need more than just temperature).The solution to this is not to give up on data, it's to bring more data into the fold. Data on people's perceptions is immensely useful as a starting point for policy. It's not an endpoint, but then neither is any other data.

When you generalize about “how people are likely to treat a stranger in need” or “how should one live to be happy” based on examples from your own life

BugsJustFindMe: Sides aside (heh), arguing that personally experiencing something means that it is reasonable to claim a wider-than-you trend is utter insanity.There is a positionally valid form of knowing from experience of a thing happening: "I have seen a thing happen therefore the thing happens sometimes."And there is an invalid form, which is the form that the post uses defends and holds dear When you generalize about “how people are likely to treat a stranger in need” or “how should one live to be happy” based on examples from your own life.There's a phrase for this ilk of anti-logic, pretending as though oneself is the universal subject to whom all thoughts occur and all things happen: the False Consensus Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effectIt's a known cognitive bias, not something to lean into.But if you want something shorter than a phrase, there's also a word for it. It's called egocentrism.