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.
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".
> they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.
OK, I look at two objects [1] and posit that object B is larger than object A. I see it with my very eyes, I directly experience this feeling of largeness and smallness. How dare any data, any calipers or rulers (must be oppressive rulers!) tell me that my perception is wrong, and the sizes are equal?
The whole thing is based on the idea that seeing with one's own eyes is somehow not interpretation, but unadulterated truth. This is, unfortunately, not exactly so. No matter who you ask, Buddhist practitioners or cognitive scientists, anyone who paid attention to the problem know that "direct experience" is not very direct.
Tools to rectify biases in perception exist, and statistics (when properly implemented) are one such tool. But accepting one's own bias is psychologically hard; it's much easier to think that all these other people have a bias, or several. (It's an important part of growing up though.)
Part of the problem is that a lot of people are legitimately delusional, and the correct answer for them in their lives is, in fact, "discount your personal observations (they're not real)".
Like, if Fox news tells some people that San Fran has a ton of crime, then they will start seeing that crime. They will observe it. But that doesn't mean that crime has actually went up. It means they were primed and that they are biased.
When your political opinion relies on some set of facts being true, then you will just believe those facts to be true, ala 1984. And then to you, they are true. Your eyes can most definitely deceive you.
I'm now in LA. There are illegal food stalls over over the place.
Some people like them but irrelevant, a crime is being committed, nothing is being done.
So every day I see these crimes. They weren’t here 10 years ago.
Hence, my experience is crime is up since I visibly see it every time I go out.
This is the first example provided. It is not new, and it is legal.
Don't mean to be curt, just, puzzled me to read to say the least. Googled it myself 2 months ago. [1]
In general, the problem is that the strong arguments in the essay are epistemically local - they say specific things about specific measurement gaps - but they're translated into a general license to privilege vibes over data. And that move is where the essay falls apart for me.
I think this is an important point lurking behind a lot of disagreements about these kinds of issues: basically, there are a fair number of things that are legal that people don't want to be legal, and there are a fair number of things that are not legal that people do want to be legal. The first category likely includes, for instance, all manner of tax trickery practiced by the wealthy; the latter category includes things like going 75 mph on the freeway.
There are also cases where it's not entirely clear what most people want, but where (I would say) the legality should be based on what most people want, but it is instead based on a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people. I would put the food stalls in this category. If more people want the food stalls in LA than do not, then they should be legal; if more people do not want them, then they should be illegal. But their legality should not depend on which advocacy group was able to muster a bigger war chest to fund their legal fees and win a court judgment one way or the other.
I believe this is a symptom of fundamental failures in our system of law and government that have caused it to be quite unresponsive to the actual desires of the citizenry. This causes us to waste a lot of time and energy fighting over things like "crime" without making much progress because we are working against the grain of the social/legal apparatus that some people put in place over a long period of time.
Don't read following as a caricature/driveby, really appreciated the thought and framing and it wins out over what I'm about to say, I'm just putting my thoughts after 2 minutes musing as concisely as possible:
There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.
i.e. "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things" - if it was popular to get rid of food stalls in LA*, should be pretty easy, people are pretty plugged in these days
There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.
* it wouldn't be, they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event. If someone said something like they did in real life, you'd ignore it because it's fringe, or, tell them to move to Newport Beach (ritzy suburb). Even just ~15 years ago, in Buffalo, it was perfectly polite to say "sounds like you should move to the suburbs."
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.
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.
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. Maybe they're wrong, but I trust the money more than the public stats.
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. Locking up items is a big decision, cause it not only costs money but also discourages customers.
Then you might be surprised to know that a lot of those numbers were exaggerated. If you're trusting people to tell you accurate things based on numbers that they won't share.... you're gonna have a bad time.
This also distorts the shoplifting statistics. If two stores have equal rates of shoplifting but one has boxes and the other doesn't, they are not at equal risk. The one with boxes is at more risk. Flat shoplifting rates while boxes proliferate mean things got worse. (You can argue that boxes do nothing, but you would need strong evidence, cf parachutes.)
The number of shoplifting incidents is also a weak metric. Most shoplifting is not of serious economic concern. The problem is with repeat offenders and those doing it for profit. The value of merchandise lost is a much better metric but stores may be reluctant to share this due to concerns about insurance rates and public perception.
Crime statistics are very hard. And state capacity is declining, sadly. We can't expect bloggers to pick up the slack.
> I want to forcibly confine the small number of criminals, street addicts, and lunatics responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of crime and disorder
I think for that alone the post should be flagged and removed. "Political" posts are commonly flagged for mentioning basic human and civil rights. Here is someone suggesting locking up everyone they call "lunatic" like in Victorian times because they don't want to see supermarket isles with locks and don't understand cafes may not take cash because it's simpler to install a payment terminal. They should read some texts on the prison complex first [1].
Sides aside (heh), arguing that personally experiencing something means that it is reasonable to claim a wider-than-you trend is utter insanity. And that's exactly what this post spends 5,680 words arguing for.
Misunderstanding of data is a big problem. That's not a problem with relying on data. That's a problem with widespread innumeracy. Pretending like you're some kind of universal subject to whom all things happen and all thoughts occur is really not the solution. Your eyes may not be lying, but you are still a very small fish in a very big pond, and your own personal experience is less than epsilon against the world at large.
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 extremely invalid form, which is the form that the post 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.'
The problem words there are "generalize", "likely", and "should".
It's a known cognitive bias, not something to lean into.
But if you want something shorter than a three word phrase, there's also a single word for it: egocentrism. It's bad. Let's please not uphold it as our guiding standard.
Graphs can be abused and statistics can be misleading, and some things are hard to quantify and measure. But the author never makes any convincing case why the statistics would be wrong or misleading in this case: "I’m not here to argue with Scott’s statistics. I think they’re about as accurate as we could hope to make them. I’m here to argue that you don’t require them to make sense of the world".
His main argument is that many people feel crime is increasing, and that in itself is a good argument to disregard any falling numbers as obviously incorrect without any further justification being necessary.
The obvious problem is that people almost always say that crime is increasing, and they have consistently been shown to misjudge the actual trend for decades on end: "In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period." If we bought into the author's argument we would never be able to reach any other conclusion than that that crime has always been increasing and will always continue to increase.
During the satanic panic the the 1980's the populace at large were convinced that large swaths of satanists were routinely sacrificing and abusing children. The police was convinced it was a real problem and had special "satanic experts" to combat the issue, a huge amount of parents were genuinely afraid of their childrens' safety, and there were thousands and thousands of cases of reported ritual abuse. In reality and in hindsight there were zero evidence of satanic cults abusing children. The author's argument could, completely unmodified, be used to argue that we should listen to the people's lived experience instead of the evidence and conclude that the satanic cults must actually have been a real societal danger back then. Or is he only against disregarding someone's lived experience in favor of evidence when it is his lived experience?
It doesn't even matter if he is right in this case. Maybe the all the statistics is flawed and his feeling of rising crime rates is justified. The problem is that he offers no actionable heuristic that allows us to separate his intuition from other people's intuition that has been obviously wrong in hindsight, like the satanic panic.
An interesting article. I wonder if there's a valid point in here buried somewhere underneath the endless obnoxious comparisons of his opponents to cultists.
My main problem with Scott Alexander is this: To draw correct conclusions from data, a necessary (though insufficient) condition is to 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). At the very best, you can consider the objections you've heard, but are these (all) the right objections? 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. When he's not an expert in some subfield of economics, at least he knows who the experts are and refers to them.
Scott Alexander is not an expert in almost anything he writes about. As far as I know, he's not done any scholarly work outside his area of practice, psychiatry. 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 neither of them even know who the experts are. I can understand why they find the question interesting, but they're ill-equipped to provide answers. Both personal perception and data can obviously be misleading, which is precisely why people who truly want to understand something spend years becoming experts.
It seems to me that both Alexander and the author of this post are, actually, members of the same church whose members are those who believe that people can draw correct conclusions from a smattering of data without the necessary scholarship and expertise, and that you can understand something complicated without putting in all the effort required to understand it: the Church of Dunning–Kruger Dilettantism.
Of course, anyone is free to write their thoughts on anything, and readers are free to form opinions on what they read. What this reader sees here is two people arguing over something that both know far too little about to offer the relevant insight. What is interesting to me is that someone who's not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of crime took the time to write a long rebuttal to another post about crime written by someone else who knows just as little. I can guess that's because that church is large.
> It seems to me that both Alexander and the author of this post are, actually, members of the same church - the church of those who believe that people can draw correct conclusions from a smattering of data without the necessary scholarship and expertise, and that you can understand something complicated without putting in all the effort required to understand it. It's the Church of Dunning–Kruger Dilettantism.
We are all like that, we have no other options, haven't we? I mean, either we try to understand the world around us, or we are not. We can't be experts in everything, so in most cases we are go by Danning-Kruger Dilettantism.
Scott made the dilettantism into a profession, he has its methods and he sharpens them. He debates things with other dilettantes, and it helps them to improve themselves. To me, personally, it is one of the main attractions of the blog. I'm dilettante in a lot of topics, but still I don't want to simply ignore them, because I'm not an expert.
> What is interesting to me is that someone who's not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of crime took the time to write a long rebuttal to another post about crime written by someone else who knows just as little.
It is not about crime really. The author we discussing talks about methodology, they are on a meta level of a discussion, the crime discussion is just one data point for a meta-discussion.
Your post is the part of the same meta-discussion about methodology, though your attack comes from the other direction.
> We can't be experts in everything, so in most cases we are go by Danning-Kruger Dilettantism.
Or care enough to find out what the experts say? Surely that's the best way to start understanding the world around us. And if the experts don't agree on an answer, the people who know less probably won't contribute much, but at least it raises the level of discussion.
> Scott made the dilettantism into a profession, he has its methods and he sharpens them. He debates things with other dilettantes, and it helps them to improve themselves.
I won't judge the methods people use to improve themselves, but I can say that this is not a good method of getting closer to the truth, just in case that is also something they're interested in beside self betterment. No amount of thought or debate can substitute scholarship.
> The author we discussing talks about methodology
Methodology of what? Self-improvement or getting to the bottom of why people think there's a rise in crime? Because if it's the latter, a better methodology than either would surely begin with studying the subject more seriously.
> Or care enough to find out what the experts say?
And what do expert way about crime? I don't care about crime levels, so I have no idea where to look really. It seems that no one knows where to look, as in comments on Scott's blog, so on HN. Could you find an expert take on this discrepancy between reported levels of crime and perceived levels of crime?
If you can't, and no one can, so maybe it is a good question to try our abilities to work with data and draw conclusions?
> this is not a good method of getting closer to the truth
I do not care about crime, but I know that I can't ask expert all the question I have. So I just have no other options.
> a better methodology than either would surely begin with studying the subject more seriously.
You can't be expert in all topics at once, so this is not an option. Probably you can create a think tank, inviting experts in different areas into it, which can answer all your questions. But where do you get the money for that?
There have been numerous studies on crime perception and fear of crime in the last 50 years. Here's just a small touch of what an internet search brought up in ten minutes:
For example, one of these sources, in the British Journal of Criminology begins with: For over 40 years, the fear of crime has been a stable of North American, British and European criminological research. Hundreds of publications have sought to illuminate the social and emotional risks associated with worry about crime (Ferraro 1995; Hale 1996; Visser et al. 2013).
> If you can't, and no one can, so maybe it is a good question to try our abilities to work with data and draw conclusions?
Not like that. You'll find that most questions for which there's good data (and even if there isn't) that more than one person is interested in already have experts thinking about. If there aren't, and you're qualified (i.e. have the requisite context) people will pay you to work on the problem through something called "research grants".
> You can't be expert in all topics at once, so this is not an option. Probably you can create a think tank, inviting experts in different areas into it, which can answer all your questions. But where do you get the money for that?
Well, in Europe we have these things only we call them universities, not a "think tanks", and while far from perfect, they're the actual best way humanity has come up with for trying to answer hard questions. They work like this: people spend some years getting the needed context in various fields, and then different people spend years studying different areas. These people publish their findings periodically, and so people who aren't experts in a particular field can read what the experts wrote. Because people make mistake, multiple people explore every question, and then they argue with each other, but when they do, they already know what they're talking about. This turns out to work better than people starting with a blank slate trying to ponder their way to an answer in the course of days or weeks.
Of course, because many things that interest people are non linear systems, there are many things we can't really get definitive answers for, and it's a fun exercise to think about the (currently) unanswerable questions. But to do it well, you need to start from the current state of knowledge and at least survey what the experts have so far rather than start from scratch with some pieces of data you may not have the right context to analyse.
That's why Scott Alexander isn't taken seriously. He's playing a game based on the plot of the film Memento: He makes sure he has just the right pieces to make something interesting for him yet simple enough to think through in days or weeks and maybe reach a conclusion (and a conclusion perhaps could not be reached without erasing enough information to paint a simple-enough picture). Some people find it entertaining, and I can see why; it evokes natural philosophy, which has certainly produced a lot of entertaning prose. But ultimately it's a game of fantasy science.
> There have been numerous studies on crime perception and fear of crime in the last 50 years.
Nice, so there are relevant studies. Pity no one tried to troll Scott with these, it would be interesting to watch.
> Not like that. You'll find that most questions for which there's good data (and even if there isn't) that more than one person is interested in already have experts thinking about. If there aren't, and you're qualified (i.e. have the requisite context) people will pay you to work on the problem through something called "research grants".
The existence of experts is not a guarantee they will answer your questions, or that they will publish their answers in an accessible way.
Grants are not the answer: you need to become an expert in a topic, to get a grant, but you can be an expert in all topics and get all the grants.
> Well, in Europe we have these things only we call them universities, not a "think tanks"
You can call them as you like, but if it is not you who pays money for researchers, they will probably won't answer your questions.
> to do it well, you need to start from the current state of knowledge
One can't do it in most of the cases. It is possible for a selected small range of topics, but not for all questions I can want answers for.
> at least survey what the experts have so far rather than start from scratch with some pieces of data you may not have the right context to analyse.
Yeah, I agree with that.
> That's why Scott Alexander isn't taken seriously. He's playing a game based on the plot of the film Memento: He makes sure he has just the right pieces to make something interesting for him yet simple enough to think through in days or weeks and maybe reach a conclusion (and a conclusion perhaps could not be reached without erasing enough information to paint a simple-enough picture). Some people find it entertaining, and I can see why; it evokes natural philosophy, which has certainly produced a lot of entertaning prose.
Yeah, hard to argue with that.
> But ultimately it's a game of fantasy science.
I can't resist and not to ask "and what?"
Universities are not really good in most cases. It is a rare occasion to read a take of a PhD on something like Iran war (Brett Devereaux just couldn't resist it), mostly all you have are opinions of self-proclaimed experts, and if you are lucky, if will be an opinion of Scott Alexander. Alternatively you can try to churn data yourself. Well, maybe if I had money to bring down paywalls all around the Internet I could read PhDs talking about the world around us all day long, but it needs too much money.
And when it comes to using far from perfect sources to understand what is going on, the only strategy I know is to stick to some number of those "experts". You'll learn their strengths and weaknesses with time, you'll learn how to form your own opinion based on their thoughts. You can't just stick to real experts, because you'll need really a lot of them to cover wide enough knowledge, so you'd better find some non-experts, who covers a wide range of topics, for most of them they will not have a qualification. Know your sources and watch them argue with others. You'll know when they are right and when they are mistaken.
> Pity no one tried to troll Scott with these, it would be interesting to watch.
I would assume that's because people who generally try to learn things from sources that communicate acquired knowledge aren't Scott Alexander's audience in the first place.
> You can call them as you like, but if it is not you who pays money for researchers, they will probably won't answer your questions.
Seems like you're not familiar with academia. One of the biggest problems with academia these days is a glut, not a dearth, of questions being explored. And beside, even if Scott Alexander were to try and answer your questions, there's no reason to trust his answers because he just doesn't have the necessary tools to answer them. What you're saying sounds like, well, if science won't answer your question, ask a medium. Sure, a medium might be happy to answer your question, but why would you think that the answer is correct?
If no one who is qualified to answer your question can answer it or wants to answer it, then it remains unanswered. There are lots of open questions. People who insist on getting answers to everything are asking to become gullible and accept wrong answers. Such a demand produces a supply of hacks who will be happy to answer anything.
Personally, I find it interesting that there are so many unanswered questions, but even if you're not, the belief they can be answered by some cursory assembling of some data and a few days of thinking is just wrong. I mean, you'll get an answer, but it probably won't be the right answer.
> Universities are not really good in most cases.
I don't know what "good" is judged against, but what the experts produce is typically superior to what Scott Alexander produces (which is why he's not taken seriously).
> You can't just stick to real experts, because you'll need really a lot of them to cover wide enough knowledge
If anything, there are too many, not too few. This means that in some niche areas you end up with bad experts. But that's no worse than the hacks.
> so you'd better find some non-experts, who covers a wide range of topics, for most of them they will not have a qualification.
Yes, but the good ones cover what the relevant experts say. The kind of stuff you may find in, say, the Economist or Paul Krugman's blog.
Scott Alexander's writing read to me like something written by a bright middle-schooler who has lots of thoughts and ideas, but little relevant knowledge. And because the people who are interested in actual knowledge know they won't find it in his writings, what you end up with is an entire community where you can find a very lively debate among a bunch of people, none of whom know what they're talking about.
It becomes interesting. You sounds as an advent of Church of Science from the very beginning, but now it becomes unmistakable. Science has no monopoly on truth. I'm not familiar with academy, you are right, I don't know how much Science share your ideas, but if it is, then Science has defeated itself. I hope that it is not so, and I believe it is not so.
Below there is a list of reasons why we cannot grant Science a monopoly on truth. I'm not claiming it is a comprehensive list, it is just reasons from top of my mind. But before that I'll say two more things.
Science doesn't have a monopoly on truth and Science is not a perfect instrument. Therefore I'll seek wisdom in all places, and I'll use my own brains to think, even if I'm not an expert in a topic. I will not ask medium, but it is not because I believe it is absolutely useless, it is because I have a limited time and I need to prioritize sources with high expected value of their answers. But still I will not bind myself to highest value sources either, because the path to the truth is not linear, you'd better remember about Monte Carlo methods and add some randomness to your moves.
I want also to say about "unanswered questions". It is really good, that you feel yourself comfortable despite uncertainty. Most of people are not, they can't sleep if they have unanswered questions and they could pick a random answer just to make the question answered. But it is possible to do better, than just stuff a question in a pile of unanswered questions. If you accept the idea of an answer as a probability distribution over all possible answers, then you can have an answer for any question and move all the uncertainty into the distribution of the answer. You can deal with the uncertainty in a more conscious way, and sometimes using more intricate methods. You can seek answer, find no definitive "yes" or "no", but still update your distribution. The unanswered questions stop being unanswered, they become questions with high entropy answers. Entropy is a continuous function, so question can become more unanswered or less unanswered.
And now the list of reasons to reject Science claim for a monopoly on truth.
1. There are phenomena Science can't deal with due to its methods. The most glaring class of such phenomena are single irreproducible events. Did Christ rise from death? Science can't answer this question and probably it never won't be able to answer it, because it can't do multiple observations. Scott Alexander recently wrote again on topic of a collective vision of Virgin Mary[1], and science can't tackle the question. I think you should read it through. Because you'll notice that it seems that now science can meaningfully join the discussion, because there are similar events, but before these events we found, all the science could do about the vision, is to keep its proud silence on the topic.
2. We cannot trust Scott Alexander, but we cannot trust Science either. Science can be mistaken, and sometimes it may be mistaken for no good reason at all. Did you read Judea Pearl "The Book of Why"? Pearl tells the history of statistics in his book, and particularly the roles of Pearson and Fisher, who doesn't look as people prioritizing truth over everything else, they where fighting the truth due to... well, I'd say because they were humans with all our failings. Science can be led astray in its search for truth behind Alzheimer disease because of a junk-paper published 30 years ago. Or Science could spend enormous efforts to build String Theory and then... just chuck it away.
We should hope that Science will correct itself eventually in all such cases, but should we just wait for it, or maybe we are allowed to stray from Science and use our brains instead? Maybe Science is close to truth than anything/anyone else, but still it is not the Truth. Which means than you need to use your own brains, and to accept any statement with a grain of salt. We have to part with boolean logic and embrace the probabilistic nature of truth even when we talk about scientific truths.
3. Science develops the scientific method and employs the state of art methods to seek truth, but it is a scientific propaganda. xD I mentioned The Book of Why of Judea Pearl, which shows examples of Science rejecting better methods, and the causality proposed by Judea Pearl and his students is not a method science really wield. Bayesianism is the previous idea of Judea Pearl, it is older than causality by 10 years, and Science still relies on debunked p-values[2]. There are better methods, but Science still clings to old ones, rejecting the prospect of learning new tricks.
4. Science is a part of a bigger system and it can't avoid pressure from it. SJW pressured Science to a point, when its answers on questions including words "black", "white", "male", "female" are just plainly unreliable. Scientists can't publish a paper stating that black people are somehow "worse" than white. It doesn't matter if the paper contains truth or not, scientist just not allowed to publish it. So now any study talking about correlation of skin color or sex or gender with anything is just don't worth time needed to read it. I don't know other examples of this, but you need to be careful when seeking scientific answers, and keep in mind that some answers cannot be uttered. Or science is not allowed to diagnose politicians based on observations of their behavior. Science is restricted by society, culture, moral and ethical considerations. We should keep it in mind when we are seeking scientific answers.
5. There is knowledge Science never bothered itself to incorporate, or it just can't incorporate it. If my granny shows me how to use a specific herb to treat a wound, should I reject her knowledge as unscientific? Lets suppose I can't find a scientific answers about the herb, so what should I do? But knowledge can be just beyond Science. Science works with knowledge that can be written on a paper. If it can't then Science is out of luck. There is intuition for example, it cannot be written down. I use it to write English, I don't know grammar rules, I rely on intuition. I can't formalize my intuition, I can just use it. Well... English maybe not the best example for me, because English is my second language, and I'm not enough proficient with it to compete with professional linguists, but I am proficient in Russian to use it in ways that no linguist could explain. No grammar would accept my ways, but other Russians will understand what I'm doing. You see? I'm more proficient in Russian than Science with all its linguistic studies and thousands of linguists.
6. There are questions that are beyond Science. Like what does it mean to be conscious? When scientists try to answer this question, they are not better than laymans. For example, Anil Seth says that "consciousness is biological"[3] and kinda stops there. What a shame. Or Steven Hawking proclaiming that philosophy is dead. You can't just ask Science what is conscious and get an answer, because Science doesn't understand the question: it is a philosophical question right now. It can become a scientific question, but for now it is not.
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?
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.
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?
> Members of The Church of Graphs live by one primary commandment: thou shalt not believe your lying eyes.
Ah, how familiar this is from some colleagues in tech.
Demands of evidence are asymmetric: make a bold claim that's aligned with the group, and it slips by; make a hint of a misaligned claim, and you get chided for not being a researcher in the field and spreading misinformation.
> 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.
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
The intro paragraph threw me for a while, too. The author says he stopped liking Scott Alexander's posts because of the tenor of Scott's politics. Usually in the past couple decades when someone's said that it's meant "Scott's too Republican-coded for me on things like race and feminism"; but this post's author is actually arguing that Scott is too Democratic-coded for him on social issues like crime (and, by extension, immigration and race: TFA's author doesn't approve of the number of "obviously illegal" food trucks he sees on the street, for example).
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.
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".
> they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.
OK, I look at two objects [1] and posit that object B is larger than object A. I see it with my very eyes, I directly experience this feeling of largeness and smallness. How dare any data, any calipers or rulers (must be oppressive rulers!) tell me that my perception is wrong, and the sizes are equal?
The whole thing is based on the idea that seeing with one's own eyes is somehow not interpretation, but unadulterated truth. This is, unfortunately, not exactly so. No matter who you ask, Buddhist practitioners or cognitive scientists, anyone who paid attention to the problem know that "direct experience" is not very direct.
Tools to rectify biases in perception exist, and statistics (when properly implemented) are one such tool. But accepting one's own bias is psychologically hard; it's much easier to think that all these other people have a bias, or several. (It's an important part of growing up though.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebbinghaus_illusion
Part of the problem is that a lot of people are legitimately delusional, and the correct answer for them in their lives is, in fact, "discount your personal observations (they're not real)".
Like, if Fox news tells some people that San Fran has a ton of crime, then they will start seeing that crime. They will observe it. But that doesn't mean that crime has actually went up. It means they were primed and that they are biased.
When your political opinion relies on some set of facts being true, then you will just believe those facts to be true, ala 1984. And then to you, they are true. Your eyes can most definitely deceive you.
Don't mean to be curt, just, puzzled me to read to say the least. Googled it myself 2 months ago. [1]
In general, the problem is that the strong arguments in the essay are epistemically local - they say specific things about specific measurement gaps - but they're translated into a general license to privilege vibes over data. And that move is where the essay falls apart for me.
[1] https://la.streetsblog.org/2024/07/22/l-a-street-vendors-cel... (note: this just removed the last barriers, temporary events (i.e. sports), farmers markets, schools)
> It is not new, and it is legal.
I think this is an important point lurking behind a lot of disagreements about these kinds of issues: basically, there are a fair number of things that are legal that people don't want to be legal, and there are a fair number of things that are not legal that people do want to be legal. The first category likely includes, for instance, all manner of tax trickery practiced by the wealthy; the latter category includes things like going 75 mph on the freeway.
There are also cases where it's not entirely clear what most people want, but where (I would say) the legality should be based on what most people want, but it is instead based on a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people. I would put the food stalls in this category. If more people want the food stalls in LA than do not, then they should be legal; if more people do not want them, then they should be illegal. But their legality should not depend on which advocacy group was able to muster a bigger war chest to fund their legal fees and win a court judgment one way or the other.
I believe this is a symptom of fundamental failures in our system of law and government that have caused it to be quite unresponsive to the actual desires of the citizenry. This causes us to waste a lot of time and energy fighting over things like "crime" without making much progress because we are working against the grain of the social/legal apparatus that some people put in place over a long period of time.
This is very fair and I generally agree.
Don't read following as a caricature/driveby, really appreciated the thought and framing and it wins out over what I'm about to say, I'm just putting my thoughts after 2 minutes musing as concisely as possible:
There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.
i.e. "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things" - if it was popular to get rid of food stalls in LA*, should be pretty easy, people are pretty plugged in these days
There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.
* it wouldn't be, they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event. If someone said something like they did in real life, you'd ignore it because it's fringe, or, tell them to move to Newport Beach (ritzy suburb). Even just ~15 years ago, in Buffalo, it was perfectly polite to say "sounds like you should move to the suburbs."
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.
There's a serious problem where people look at statistics and assume the constituent components are 100% evenly distributed.
This is rarely the case.
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.
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. Maybe they're wrong, but I trust the money more than the public stats.
Businesses do make irrational decisions with their money, that’s a big part of why enterprise sales works.
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. Locking up items is a big decision, cause it not only costs money but also discourages customers.
Then you might be surprised to know that a lot of those numbers were exaggerated. If you're trusting people to tell you accurate things based on numbers that they won't share.... you're gonna have a bad time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
This also distorts the shoplifting statistics. If two stores have equal rates of shoplifting but one has boxes and the other doesn't, they are not at equal risk. The one with boxes is at more risk. Flat shoplifting rates while boxes proliferate mean things got worse. (You can argue that boxes do nothing, but you would need strong evidence, cf parachutes.)
The number of shoplifting incidents is also a weak metric. Most shoplifting is not of serious economic concern. The problem is with repeat offenders and those doing it for profit. The value of merchandise lost is a much better metric but stores may be reluctant to share this due to concerns about insurance rates and public perception.
Crime statistics are very hard. And state capacity is declining, sadly. We can't expect bloggers to pick up the slack.
> I want to forcibly confine the small number of criminals, street addicts, and lunatics responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of crime and disorder
I think for that alone the post should be flagged and removed. "Political" posts are commonly flagged for mentioning basic human and civil rights. Here is someone suggesting locking up everyone they call "lunatic" like in Victorian times because they don't want to see supermarket isles with locks and don't understand cafes may not take cash because it's simpler to install a payment terminal. They should read some texts on the prison complex first [1].
[1]: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-gulag/paper
EDIT: Added reference
Sides aside (heh), arguing that personally experiencing something means that it is reasonable to claim a wider-than-you trend is utter insanity. And that's exactly what this post spends 5,680 words arguing for.
Misunderstanding of data is a big problem. That's not a problem with relying on data. That's a problem with widespread innumeracy. Pretending like you're some kind of universal subject to whom all things happen and all thoughts occur is really not the solution. Your eyes may not be lying, but you are still a very small fish in a very big pond, and your own personal experience is less than epsilon against the world at large.
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 extremely invalid form, which is the form that the post 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.'
The problem words there are "generalize", "likely", and "should".
There's a phrase for this ilk of anti-logic: the False Consensus Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
It's a known cognitive bias, not something to lean into.
But if you want something shorter than a three word phrase, there's also a single word for it: egocentrism. It's bad. Let's please not uphold it as our guiding standard.
Graphs can be abused and statistics can be misleading, and some things are hard to quantify and measure. But the author never makes any convincing case why the statistics would be wrong or misleading in this case: "I’m not here to argue with Scott’s statistics. I think they’re about as accurate as we could hope to make them. I’m here to argue that you don’t require them to make sense of the world".
His main argument is that many people feel crime is increasing, and that in itself is a good argument to disregard any falling numbers as obviously incorrect without any further justification being necessary.
The obvious problem is that people almost always say that crime is increasing, and they have consistently been shown to misjudge the actual trend for decades on end: "In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period." If we bought into the author's argument we would never be able to reach any other conclusion than that that crime has always been increasing and will always continue to increase.
During the satanic panic the the 1980's the populace at large were convinced that large swaths of satanists were routinely sacrificing and abusing children. The police was convinced it was a real problem and had special "satanic experts" to combat the issue, a huge amount of parents were genuinely afraid of their childrens' safety, and there were thousands and thousands of cases of reported ritual abuse. In reality and in hindsight there were zero evidence of satanic cults abusing children. The author's argument could, completely unmodified, be used to argue that we should listen to the people's lived experience instead of the evidence and conclude that the satanic cults must actually have been a real societal danger back then. Or is he only against disregarding someone's lived experience in favor of evidence when it is his lived experience?
It doesn't even matter if he is right in this case. Maybe the all the statistics is flawed and his feeling of rising crime rates is justified. The problem is that he offers no actionable heuristic that allows us to separate his intuition from other people's intuition that has been obviously wrong in hindsight, like the satanic panic.
An interesting article. I wonder if there's a valid point in here buried somewhere underneath the endless obnoxious comparisons of his opponents to cultists.
My main problem with Scott Alexander is this: To draw correct conclusions from data, a necessary (though insufficient) condition is to 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). At the very best, you can consider the objections you've heard, but are these (all) the right objections? 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. When he's not an expert in some subfield of economics, at least he knows who the experts are and refers to them.
Scott Alexander is not an expert in almost anything he writes about. As far as I know, he's not done any scholarly work outside his area of practice, psychiatry. 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 neither of them even know who the experts are. I can understand why they find the question interesting, but they're ill-equipped to provide answers. Both personal perception and data can obviously be misleading, which is precisely why people who truly want to understand something spend years becoming experts.
It seems to me that both Alexander and the author of this post are, actually, members of the same church whose members are those who believe that people can draw correct conclusions from a smattering of data without the necessary scholarship and expertise, and that you can understand something complicated without putting in all the effort required to understand it: the Church of Dunning–Kruger Dilettantism.
Of course, anyone is free to write their thoughts on anything, and readers are free to form opinions on what they read. What this reader sees here is two people arguing over something that both know far too little about to offer the relevant insight. What is interesting to me is that someone who's not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of crime took the time to write a long rebuttal to another post about crime written by someone else who knows just as little. I can guess that's because that church is large.
> It seems to me that both Alexander and the author of this post are, actually, members of the same church - the church of those who believe that people can draw correct conclusions from a smattering of data without the necessary scholarship and expertise, and that you can understand something complicated without putting in all the effort required to understand it. It's the Church of Dunning–Kruger Dilettantism.
We are all like that, we have no other options, haven't we? I mean, either we try to understand the world around us, or we are not. We can't be experts in everything, so in most cases we are go by Danning-Kruger Dilettantism.
Scott made the dilettantism into a profession, he has its methods and he sharpens them. He debates things with other dilettantes, and it helps them to improve themselves. To me, personally, it is one of the main attractions of the blog. I'm dilettante in a lot of topics, but still I don't want to simply ignore them, because I'm not an expert.
> What is interesting to me is that someone who's not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of crime took the time to write a long rebuttal to another post about crime written by someone else who knows just as little.
It is not about crime really. The author we discussing talks about methodology, they are on a meta level of a discussion, the crime discussion is just one data point for a meta-discussion.
Your post is the part of the same meta-discussion about methodology, though your attack comes from the other direction.
> We can't be experts in everything, so in most cases we are go by Danning-Kruger Dilettantism.
Or care enough to find out what the experts say? Surely that's the best way to start understanding the world around us. And if the experts don't agree on an answer, the people who know less probably won't contribute much, but at least it raises the level of discussion.
> Scott made the dilettantism into a profession, he has its methods and he sharpens them. He debates things with other dilettantes, and it helps them to improve themselves.
I won't judge the methods people use to improve themselves, but I can say that this is not a good method of getting closer to the truth, just in case that is also something they're interested in beside self betterment. No amount of thought or debate can substitute scholarship.
> The author we discussing talks about methodology
Methodology of what? Self-improvement or getting to the bottom of why people think there's a rise in crime? Because if it's the latter, a better methodology than either would surely begin with studying the subject more seriously.
> Or care enough to find out what the experts say?
And what do expert way about crime? I don't care about crime levels, so I have no idea where to look really. It seems that no one knows where to look, as in comments on Scott's blog, so on HN. Could you find an expert take on this discrepancy between reported levels of crime and perceived levels of crime?
If you can't, and no one can, so maybe it is a good question to try our abilities to work with data and draw conclusions?
> this is not a good method of getting closer to the truth
I do not care about crime, but I know that I can't ask expert all the question I have. So I just have no other options.
> a better methodology than either would surely begin with studying the subject more seriously.
You can't be expert in all topics at once, so this is not an option. Probably you can create a think tank, inviting experts in different areas into it, which can answer all your questions. But where do you get the money for that?
> And what do expert way about crime?
There have been numerous studies on crime perception and fear of crime in the last 50 years. Here's just a small touch of what an internet search brought up in ten minutes:
* https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/SUBJECTIVE-PROBABILITY...
* https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/59/2/435/5067283
* https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-ma...
* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
* https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/law/news/article/1953/crime-has-fal...
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0094-8
For example, one of these sources, in the British Journal of Criminology begins with: For over 40 years, the fear of crime has been a stable of North American, British and European criminological research. Hundreds of publications have sought to illuminate the social and emotional risks associated with worry about crime (Ferraro 1995; Hale 1996; Visser et al. 2013).
> If you can't, and no one can, so maybe it is a good question to try our abilities to work with data and draw conclusions?
Not like that. You'll find that most questions for which there's good data (and even if there isn't) that more than one person is interested in already have experts thinking about. If there aren't, and you're qualified (i.e. have the requisite context) people will pay you to work on the problem through something called "research grants".
> You can't be expert in all topics at once, so this is not an option. Probably you can create a think tank, inviting experts in different areas into it, which can answer all your questions. But where do you get the money for that?
Well, in Europe we have these things only we call them universities, not a "think tanks", and while far from perfect, they're the actual best way humanity has come up with for trying to answer hard questions. They work like this: people spend some years getting the needed context in various fields, and then different people spend years studying different areas. These people publish their findings periodically, and so people who aren't experts in a particular field can read what the experts wrote. Because people make mistake, multiple people explore every question, and then they argue with each other, but when they do, they already know what they're talking about. This turns out to work better than people starting with a blank slate trying to ponder their way to an answer in the course of days or weeks.
Of course, because many things that interest people are non linear systems, there are many things we can't really get definitive answers for, and it's a fun exercise to think about the (currently) unanswerable questions. But to do it well, you need to start from the current state of knowledge and at least survey what the experts have so far rather than start from scratch with some pieces of data you may not have the right context to analyse.
That's why Scott Alexander isn't taken seriously. He's playing a game based on the plot of the film Memento: He makes sure he has just the right pieces to make something interesting for him yet simple enough to think through in days or weeks and maybe reach a conclusion (and a conclusion perhaps could not be reached without erasing enough information to paint a simple-enough picture). Some people find it entertaining, and I can see why; it evokes natural philosophy, which has certainly produced a lot of entertaning prose. But ultimately it's a game of fantasy science.
> There have been numerous studies on crime perception and fear of crime in the last 50 years.
Nice, so there are relevant studies. Pity no one tried to troll Scott with these, it would be interesting to watch.
> Not like that. You'll find that most questions for which there's good data (and even if there isn't) that more than one person is interested in already have experts thinking about. If there aren't, and you're qualified (i.e. have the requisite context) people will pay you to work on the problem through something called "research grants".
The existence of experts is not a guarantee they will answer your questions, or that they will publish their answers in an accessible way.
Grants are not the answer: you need to become an expert in a topic, to get a grant, but you can be an expert in all topics and get all the grants.
> Well, in Europe we have these things only we call them universities, not a "think tanks"
You can call them as you like, but if it is not you who pays money for researchers, they will probably won't answer your questions.
> to do it well, you need to start from the current state of knowledge
One can't do it in most of the cases. It is possible for a selected small range of topics, but not for all questions I can want answers for.
> at least survey what the experts have so far rather than start from scratch with some pieces of data you may not have the right context to analyse.
Yeah, I agree with that.
> That's why Scott Alexander isn't taken seriously. He's playing a game based on the plot of the film Memento: He makes sure he has just the right pieces to make something interesting for him yet simple enough to think through in days or weeks and maybe reach a conclusion (and a conclusion perhaps could not be reached without erasing enough information to paint a simple-enough picture). Some people find it entertaining, and I can see why; it evokes natural philosophy, which has certainly produced a lot of entertaning prose.
Yeah, hard to argue with that.
> But ultimately it's a game of fantasy science.
I can't resist and not to ask "and what?"
Universities are not really good in most cases. It is a rare occasion to read a take of a PhD on something like Iran war (Brett Devereaux just couldn't resist it), mostly all you have are opinions of self-proclaimed experts, and if you are lucky, if will be an opinion of Scott Alexander. Alternatively you can try to churn data yourself. Well, maybe if I had money to bring down paywalls all around the Internet I could read PhDs talking about the world around us all day long, but it needs too much money.
And when it comes to using far from perfect sources to understand what is going on, the only strategy I know is to stick to some number of those "experts". You'll learn their strengths and weaknesses with time, you'll learn how to form your own opinion based on their thoughts. You can't just stick to real experts, because you'll need really a lot of them to cover wide enough knowledge, so you'd better find some non-experts, who covers a wide range of topics, for most of them they will not have a qualification. Know your sources and watch them argue with others. You'll know when they are right and when they are mistaken.
> Pity no one tried to troll Scott with these, it would be interesting to watch.
I would assume that's because people who generally try to learn things from sources that communicate acquired knowledge aren't Scott Alexander's audience in the first place.
> You can call them as you like, but if it is not you who pays money for researchers, they will probably won't answer your questions.
Seems like you're not familiar with academia. One of the biggest problems with academia these days is a glut, not a dearth, of questions being explored. And beside, even if Scott Alexander were to try and answer your questions, there's no reason to trust his answers because he just doesn't have the necessary tools to answer them. What you're saying sounds like, well, if science won't answer your question, ask a medium. Sure, a medium might be happy to answer your question, but why would you think that the answer is correct?
If no one who is qualified to answer your question can answer it or wants to answer it, then it remains unanswered. There are lots of open questions. People who insist on getting answers to everything are asking to become gullible and accept wrong answers. Such a demand produces a supply of hacks who will be happy to answer anything.
Personally, I find it interesting that there are so many unanswered questions, but even if you're not, the belief they can be answered by some cursory assembling of some data and a few days of thinking is just wrong. I mean, you'll get an answer, but it probably won't be the right answer.
> Universities are not really good in most cases.
I don't know what "good" is judged against, but what the experts produce is typically superior to what Scott Alexander produces (which is why he's not taken seriously).
> You can't just stick to real experts, because you'll need really a lot of them to cover wide enough knowledge
If anything, there are too many, not too few. This means that in some niche areas you end up with bad experts. But that's no worse than the hacks.
> so you'd better find some non-experts, who covers a wide range of topics, for most of them they will not have a qualification.
Yes, but the good ones cover what the relevant experts say. The kind of stuff you may find in, say, the Economist or Paul Krugman's blog.
Scott Alexander's writing read to me like something written by a bright middle-schooler who has lots of thoughts and ideas, but little relevant knowledge. And because the people who are interested in actual knowledge know they won't find it in his writings, what you end up with is an entire community where you can find a very lively debate among a bunch of people, none of whom know what they're talking about.
It becomes interesting. You sounds as an advent of Church of Science from the very beginning, but now it becomes unmistakable. Science has no monopoly on truth. I'm not familiar with academy, you are right, I don't know how much Science share your ideas, but if it is, then Science has defeated itself. I hope that it is not so, and I believe it is not so.
Below there is a list of reasons why we cannot grant Science a monopoly on truth. I'm not claiming it is a comprehensive list, it is just reasons from top of my mind. But before that I'll say two more things.
Science doesn't have a monopoly on truth and Science is not a perfect instrument. Therefore I'll seek wisdom in all places, and I'll use my own brains to think, even if I'm not an expert in a topic. I will not ask medium, but it is not because I believe it is absolutely useless, it is because I have a limited time and I need to prioritize sources with high expected value of their answers. But still I will not bind myself to highest value sources either, because the path to the truth is not linear, you'd better remember about Monte Carlo methods and add some randomness to your moves.
I want also to say about "unanswered questions". It is really good, that you feel yourself comfortable despite uncertainty. Most of people are not, they can't sleep if they have unanswered questions and they could pick a random answer just to make the question answered. But it is possible to do better, than just stuff a question in a pile of unanswered questions. If you accept the idea of an answer as a probability distribution over all possible answers, then you can have an answer for any question and move all the uncertainty into the distribution of the answer. You can deal with the uncertainty in a more conscious way, and sometimes using more intricate methods. You can seek answer, find no definitive "yes" or "no", but still update your distribution. The unanswered questions stop being unanswered, they become questions with high entropy answers. Entropy is a continuous function, so question can become more unanswered or less unanswered.
And now the list of reasons to reject Science claim for a monopoly on truth.
1. There are phenomena Science can't deal with due to its methods. The most glaring class of such phenomena are single irreproducible events. Did Christ rise from death? Science can't answer this question and probably it never won't be able to answer it, because it can't do multiple observations. Scott Alexander recently wrote again on topic of a collective vision of Virgin Mary[1], and science can't tackle the question. I think you should read it through. Because you'll notice that it seems that now science can meaningfully join the discussion, because there are similar events, but before these events we found, all the science could do about the vision, is to keep its proud silence on the topic.
2. We cannot trust Scott Alexander, but we cannot trust Science either. Science can be mistaken, and sometimes it may be mistaken for no good reason at all. Did you read Judea Pearl "The Book of Why"? Pearl tells the history of statistics in his book, and particularly the roles of Pearson and Fisher, who doesn't look as people prioritizing truth over everything else, they where fighting the truth due to... well, I'd say because they were humans with all our failings. Science can be led astray in its search for truth behind Alzheimer disease because of a junk-paper published 30 years ago. Or Science could spend enormous efforts to build String Theory and then... just chuck it away.
We should hope that Science will correct itself eventually in all such cases, but should we just wait for it, or maybe we are allowed to stray from Science and use our brains instead? Maybe Science is close to truth than anything/anyone else, but still it is not the Truth. Which means than you need to use your own brains, and to accept any statement with a grain of salt. We have to part with boolean logic and embrace the probabilistic nature of truth even when we talk about scientific truths.
3. Science develops the scientific method and employs the state of art methods to seek truth, but it is a scientific propaganda. xD I mentioned The Book of Why of Judea Pearl, which shows examples of Science rejecting better methods, and the causality proposed by Judea Pearl and his students is not a method science really wield. Bayesianism is the previous idea of Judea Pearl, it is older than causality by 10 years, and Science still relies on debunked p-values[2]. There are better methods, but Science still clings to old ones, rejecting the prospect of learning new tricks.
4. Science is a part of a bigger system and it can't avoid pressure from it. SJW pressured Science to a point, when its answers on questions including words "black", "white", "male", "female" are just plainly unreliable. Scientists can't publish a paper stating that black people are somehow "worse" than white. It doesn't matter if the paper contains truth or not, scientist just not allowed to publish it. So now any study talking about correlation of skin color or sex or gender with anything is just don't worth time needed to read it. I don't know other examples of this, but you need to be careful when seeking scientific answers, and keep in mind that some answers cannot be uttered. Or science is not allowed to diagnose politicians based on observations of their behavior. Science is restricted by society, culture, moral and ethical considerations. We should keep it in mind when we are seeking scientific answers.
5. There is knowledge Science never bothered itself to incorporate, or it just can't incorporate it. If my granny shows me how to use a specific herb to treat a wound, should I reject her knowledge as unscientific? Lets suppose I can't find a scientific answers about the herb, so what should I do? But knowledge can be just beyond Science. Science works with knowledge that can be written on a paper. If it can't then Science is out of luck. There is intuition for example, it cannot be written down. I use it to write English, I don't know grammar rules, I rely on intuition. I can't formalize my intuition, I can just use it. Well... English maybe not the best example for me, because English is my second language, and I'm not enough proficient with it to compete with professional linguists, but I am proficient in Russian to use it in ways that no linguist could explain. No grammar would accept my ways, but other Russians will understand what I'm doing. You see? I'm more proficient in Russian than Science with all its linguistic studies and thousands of linguists.
6. There are questions that are beyond Science. Like what does it mean to be conscious? When scientists try to answer this question, they are not better than laymans. For example, Anil Seth says that "consciousness is biological"[3] and kinda stops there. What a shame. Or Steven Hawking proclaiming that philosophy is dead. You can't just ask Science what is conscious and get an answer, because Science doesn't understand the question: it is a philosophical question right now. It can become a scientific question, but for now it is not.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-buddhist-sun-miracle [2] https://figshare.le.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Agai... [3] https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/
Ah. You refer to Rationalism.
Thank you for this, I was struggling to put my finger on it.
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?
Here I was, baited by the idea that it was a rejection of knowledge graphs and the semantic web...
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.
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?
Scott Alexander, 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 blogging influence is that large, but whose 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"
Idk, the whole article is super weird, even though I agree with the point
> Members of The Church of Graphs live by one primary commandment: thou shalt not believe your lying eyes.
Ah, how familiar this is from some colleagues in tech.
Demands of evidence are asymmetric: make a bold claim that's aligned with the group, and it slips by; make a hint of a misaligned claim, and you get chided for not being a researcher in the field and spreading misinformation.
Ironically, it is a Scott Alexander post that articulates this phenomenon best: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
> 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
*not in the mood
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
> This guy isn't a liberal
The intro paragraph threw me for a while, too. The author says he stopped liking Scott Alexander's posts because of the tenor of Scott's politics. Usually in the past couple decades when someone's said that it's meant "Scott's too Republican-coded for me on things like race and feminism"; but this post's author is actually arguing that Scott is too Democratic-coded for him on social issues like crime (and, by extension, immigration and race: TFA's author doesn't approve of the number of "obviously illegal" food trucks he sees on the street, for example).
His wife and the unhoused drug users can both can be worthy of sympathy and consideration.
Yes, seeing someone unhoused is the REAL homelessness