I have had personal discussions and heard many media types that included data like this to support the idea of systemic racism:
African Americans have 2.3 times the infant mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites.
African American infants are 3.8 times as likely to die from complications related to low birthweight as compared to non-Hispanic white infants.
African Americans had over twice the sudden infant death syndrome mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites, in 2017.
In 2017, African American mothers were 2.3 times more likely than non-Hispanic white mothers to receive late or no prenatal care.
Those who use these numbers seem to care more about the value of the debate points than they do about a sincere discussion about solving the inequities. Many of these people are sociologists or historians who care deeply that others acknowledge systems racism. Our national discussion now is rooted in these acknowledgments and looking through lenses. Where are the problem solvers? Historians don't solve problems. Sociologists seem to rarely solve problems. Acknowledgements are not solutions. Bezos could donate $50M to a university to get this issue evaluated by public health professionals, social psychologists, and economists. Why not do that? I am becoming more and more cynical. That social justice movement doesn't want to solve problems...they want to gain power. If one could snap their fingers and end all of these inequities tomorrow...Sociologists and DEIA consultants across American would collectively yell....NO!
My guess is there are disparities in access to health care. Universal healthcare would close much of these gaps. There are other health related disparities that would also be mitigated by universal healthcare. Why does BLM not put its weight behind universal healthcare? Why do all these socially woke companies not support universal healthcare? If the woke movement got behind this collectively...it may have a shot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, BLM or any of these companies have done come close to the impact universal healthcare would have. Not close...canceling Rachel Nichols doesn't get a 19 year old black women the healthcare she needs to deliver a healthy baby. The social justice movement is great at stiring up shit but terrible at getting real things done. As a project manager it makes me very skeptical that they really want to get this project done. If only every time Ezra Klein apologized for his white privilege a high risk black baby was saved....well they would all be saved. But it doesn't work that way. There is a lot of capital....how does it get spent?
I think you're setting up a false choice here. Activists who support BLM and activists who support universal health care are the same people, by and large.
People make fun of the Sunrise Movement for having racial justice in its platform but it goes both ways. The racial justice orgs have environmental and economic justice in their platforms. These are very ideological people so of course they are going to be uniformly left.
It is not about support or not support...it's about magnitude and framing. If all of the energy that was largely misplaced under the banner of "defund the police" was used for universal healthcare and it as framed as a significant help to resolving inequities then that would make a difference. How you support something is just as important as what you support.
imo, framing universal healthcare as a racial justice issue would make it less likely to pass, not more. But it's not going to pass any time soon no matter what the frame is, I guess.
If you think it hard to determine how many murders have taken place, you should try to determine how much securities fraud there has been and whether it is going up or down.
Today's new word: lacunae. I like it. Yglesias is taking on Wesley Yang in the contest of who can use the most obscure words their readers/followers have to look up. The challenge is to try and use it in a spoken sentence by 11:59 PM this evening.
Like Matt has said that to many people inflation means “the price of gas and maybe milk”, to many ordinary people the crime rate means, “the rate of murder, robbery, and unfortunate public interactions, possibly weighted in that order”. (AKA “how safe do I feel?”)
I see this in the controversy in San Francisco—no matter how much progressive politicians and activists tell the public that crime overall is down, people don’t care because the crime they care about is up.
And progressives often have really bad messaging about this—one assistant to the DA locked her Twitter after she compared a citizen complaining about not feeling safe in public to the KKK. I think this is because it’s become normalized on the progressive left that everyone who disagrees with you is a racist arguing in bad faith, which is a bad way to treat constituents even when true. Telling people that their fears make them bad people is a losing strategy.
People seem to be getting in their own opinions about the examples instead of thinking about the challenges in the issues that Matt raised.
1) We should recognize that some things are much more easily countable than others. I think that Matt has, in the past, pointed to homicide as a very countable phenomenon, whereas many other crimes are more subjective in their classification.
2) We should recognize that some things are already counted, to a large degree. In those cases, it's about collecting all those counts, rather than counting from scratch. That's no mean feat, but it does radically simplify things.
3) We should recognize that some counts/reporting can have more-or-less direct impacts on financial matters. Chicken futures. Tax revenue. The business world wants to know what's going on in X. Financial markets want to know what's going on in Y. That powerful sector pushes for things to be counted and reported. But counting in other areas does not lead to greater profits for anyone.
4) We should recognize the contexts where there is "loose coupling" between policy and practice. Enacted curriculum is definitely one of those places. Matt has tweeted about a history teacher or often deviated from the textbook. These situations are MUCH MUCH harder to count, because they require direct observation of virtually every instance. I mean, imagine that I gave you a budget of $10,000,000 year for a study of what is actually taught in history class/lessons across this country's 130,000 schools. $10 million is MASSIVE sum of money for an education study. And let's say that I promised to fund at that level every years for 10 years. Think that you could get an accurate count? Design that study for me.
(Yeah, yeah. Sampling, not census. But how would you sample schools? How would you sample teachers? How would you sample days? How often would you observe? How would you design your reporting categories? Who would observe? How would you calibrate? I can't figure out how to do this study for ANY amount of money, and I advise on study design all the time.)
*********************
Look, economic data is reported all the time. Business data is reported all the time. But I think that the availability of that has warped Matt's conception of what is reasonable to expect. He has said that he wants "broadly accept authoritative data," without recognizing that even GDP is contested.
He says that there should be descriptive work, but that's not actually what he means. He doesn't want rich thick descriptive data. He want rolled up summary quantitive data that people can easily wrap their mind arounds. Sure, we can get that for homicide. Fine.
But what does he think the reporting of what we teach about history would look like? Let's just skip what the study would look like. What does he think that report would look like?
It appears to be like he want a resource to exist that allows him to find easy answers to unanticipated questions at an unanticipated level of granularity on unanticipated issues.
Like, let's stick to history. High school history. Should teachers tie lessons into current events? To what degree should they stick to the old curriculum, and to what degree should they meet the needs of their students who live in the world? When would BLM or new questions about the history of American immigration policy have been added to his data collection instrument so that the data could be in the report that he imagines being available?
Some data is easy to collect. Some is hard. We would do well to recognize which are which and not treat it all the same.
(And there's absolutely no question that education scholars would do quite well developing the kinds of descriptive reports that Matt would love to have. That's a groups of fields that welcome such things. But that's also a group of fields that is VERY short on research funding. See above.)
"In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology."
I don't understand why this is considered okay.
Freddie DeBoer had two articles recently that really struck a nerve with me about how there is no accountability for "social justice" dictates outside of them being essentially pointless. Its okay to force people to sit through "weird DEI trainings, [where they] roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal" because they have no real impact other than making everyone hate DEI initiatives for being pointless. But it feels like so much of the energy and passion of progressives around social justice get's caught up in the culture war and symbolic posturing instead of actual action taken to help people.
I also wonder how many employers are requiring these weird trainings? I'm in the Milwaukee area and I haven't heard of any of my friends that, like me, work in the business sector having to go through one of these. It seems mainly like a non-profit and education thing. Let me stress again though this is just what I have heard in my admittedly small corner of the world.
The chicken example isn't that random--those stats exist because people trade agricultural and livestock ETFs, futures, etc.
Financial markets are really good at information discovery and dissemination. Conversely, there is no market for "how much critical race theory will be taught in the US in any given year?" and as a consequence, there is no reliable information on it.
All true, but Matt's point is more, if the public good of it is so great, why not do what financial markets do and figure it out? It's a good point and I back more information gathering. I would love to know through satellite data how many people use certain parks so cities would know what people actually want. I would love if we could know where garbage generation that pollutes x water supply or y forest is coming from. These are important things to aggregate and know and we just... don't. So we are forced to hold bad opinions or do nothing.
You have to bear in mind that at this point, we have significant political factions that benefit from ignorance.
A classic example would be the NRA opposing public health research on the impacts of gun policies, full stop. They don't want to have an argument about trade-offs, or about what might be the set of minimally-restrictive rules that preserve the right to self-defense while saving lives. They just want to prevent the public from even hearing the idea that policy could save lives.
Similarly, a lot of Republicans don't want to argue with climate research, they just want to pretend it doesn't exist, and ideally de-fund it, and perhaps ban public university researchers from researching it.
By the same token, you can bet that reactionary police union types don't want to see high-quality crime statistics made available to the public. They already know what policies they want to implement. Why would they want to be bothered with "facts" or "evidence" about whether those policies are effective?
I heartily endorse Matt's plea here and wish we could make doing data better a priority.
Building a high quality, sustainable database is challenging. You have to coordinate all the actors, both providers and recipients of data. You need to organize and systematize the data so it's internally consistent as well as consistent over time. Most important of all is that you have to keep it going year after year, even in times when the issue loses salience, people's interest wanes, and few people are using the data.
Twenty-plus years ago, I was involved in building an open-ended archive of all maintenance actions on critical Army weapon systems. Keeping it going was a bear, in part because the Army wasn't culturally equipped to know what to do with that wealth of information (e.g., what are the most critical repair parts brigades should deploy to war with? why has that tank broken down for the same reason four times in the past two years?) I can imagine the challenges in setting up and maintaining the chicken data. I can only imagine how hard it would be to do the same for crime data.
Matt can break done the calculus of social justice, DEIA, and increasing murder rates but Republicans are just going to do the arithmetic. Sure their method is bot as accurate as taking the derivative but it will be much easier to understand. Teachers are making your white children feel bad. Democratic politicians are advocating to defund the police and now murder rates are going up. You probably had MANDATORY DEIA training you didn’t want to do…that’s because of the Democrats. Republicans are going to take the House and the Senate and we could see that jackass Trump back in a few years.
It's like Steve Bannon said on his podcast a few weeks back: the path to save the nation is through school boards. The more you make people upset about things like CRT invading their classrooms, the more they'll turn out and vote GOP in 2022. It's quite the strategy.
"What’s more, there’s what’s on paper and then there’s what’s happening in classrooms.
In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology. And by the same token, it’s very normal for history teachers to go off-book if there’s something in the textbook they don’t think is spun the right way. "
Thank you for saying this! There is powerful disincentive for school systems to be open about what is taught in social studies and history: what ever you say has a very real chance of sending someone to the local news outlet, of sending outraged and deaf parents to school board meetings, and contributing to the certainty that all education everywhere is some lethal combination of incompetence and indoctrination.
This is not to say there is not lethal incompetence in education and in the classroom. Rather that it doesn't look as people expect. What history is taught, what books are read are nothing compared to the commitment to teach students how to write coherent paragraphs and essays. Not what to think, but how to structure a coherent argument.
There are over a hundred school systems in my state, which means thousands of individual schools under thousands of individual principals. When this is multiplied out across the whole nation, the idea the "education" is some monolithic thing, everywhere the same, should become obviously nonsensical. Even more outlandish is the idea one could get that many Americans to even come close to marching in lockstep about anything.
> how is it that all the tech bros in San Francisco are convinced there’s been a surge in shoplifting and petty crime when the data says the opposite?
I think this gets to something important about crime stats- they represent the number of crimes reported to and accepted by the police department.
If the police department refuses to accept reports, or systematically minimises crimes, the data will be bad. If people believe that reporting crime won't do anything, they won't report it.
Walgreens closed ten stores because of theft in SF, I am not sure why people get skeptical about this. Drug stores have been pretty essential and open all pandemic. This is a strange and local thing.
More epistemic humility! Preface all national crime statistics with a catechism about how they are collected in diverse ways with diverse standards and come with the warning that they should not be used to make comparisons!
I just read an article that was criticizing the reporting on shoplifting in San Fran which claimed that shoplifting is down—but the article admitted that small-value shoplifting is down but high-value shoplifting is up. I didn’t think the article reckoned with the fact that it is entirely rational to care 10x as much about a theft of $400 as a theft of $40, and that it doesn’t take much of an increase in major shoplifting to completely negate the effects of a decline in minor shoplifting.
Similarly, if people feel their chances of being murdered are up, it doesn’t matter how low the chances are for minor crimes.
About low value shoplifting- because of a recent law, Prop 47, anything under $950 is a ticket, and you aren't supposed to get arrested. Police departments and retailers are occasionally grumpy about this and claim it is at the root of theft increases. I don't have any proof that that is true, but it seems like something that might factor into reporting rates of low dollar value theft.
I live near SF and have to go there the various shops have changed a lot over the last year or so. Putting more things behind glass cases more security etc.
FWIW, I saw a video by an independent journalist on YouTube (who seemed pretty centrist) interview a security guard at a pharmacy in SF, and he said that their standing order at the time was to let the shoplifters go, and not to bother reporting to the police, and that policy was well known to the shoplifters, so of course some people weren't shy about not paying.
Those statements by Walgreens and its peer chains should be treated with at least a touch of skepticism, as they are motivated arguments being put forward by PR flacks. The suggestion that there is a causal link b/t store closing over a 2 year period and theft levels is possibly, even probably, true. But they're also completely unsupported by anything except statements made by their PR people with the goal of influencing public policy. They don't really have any incentive to be honest about the strength of the causal connection.
Sure, but there is plenty of corroborating evidence- those stores often look windswept, a wild amount of stuff is locked behind glass, everyone local complains about crime, occasionally videos of people hauling garbage bags of sundries out go viral locally. East coast skepticism seems crazy in the local context.
I have had personal discussions and heard many media types that included data like this to support the idea of systemic racism:
African Americans have 2.3 times the infant mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites.
African American infants are 3.8 times as likely to die from complications related to low birthweight as compared to non-Hispanic white infants.
African Americans had over twice the sudden infant death syndrome mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites, in 2017.
In 2017, African American mothers were 2.3 times more likely than non-Hispanic white mothers to receive late or no prenatal care.
Those who use these numbers seem to care more about the value of the debate points than they do about a sincere discussion about solving the inequities. Many of these people are sociologists or historians who care deeply that others acknowledge systems racism. Our national discussion now is rooted in these acknowledgments and looking through lenses. Where are the problem solvers? Historians don't solve problems. Sociologists seem to rarely solve problems. Acknowledgements are not solutions. Bezos could donate $50M to a university to get this issue evaluated by public health professionals, social psychologists, and economists. Why not do that? I am becoming more and more cynical. That social justice movement doesn't want to solve problems...they want to gain power. If one could snap their fingers and end all of these inequities tomorrow...Sociologists and DEIA consultants across American would collectively yell....NO!
My guess is there are disparities in access to health care. Universal healthcare would close much of these gaps. There are other health related disparities that would also be mitigated by universal healthcare. Why does BLM not put its weight behind universal healthcare? Why do all these socially woke companies not support universal healthcare? If the woke movement got behind this collectively...it may have a shot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, BLM or any of these companies have done come close to the impact universal healthcare would have. Not close...canceling Rachel Nichols doesn't get a 19 year old black women the healthcare she needs to deliver a healthy baby. The social justice movement is great at stiring up shit but terrible at getting real things done. As a project manager it makes me very skeptical that they really want to get this project done. If only every time Ezra Klein apologized for his white privilege a high risk black baby was saved....well they would all be saved. But it doesn't work that way. There is a lot of capital....how does it get spent?
I think you're setting up a false choice here. Activists who support BLM and activists who support universal health care are the same people, by and large.
I don't know about that.
Here's M4BL, one of the main BLM orgs policy platform which includes normal left redistribution stuff in addition to Black-specific stuff: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/invest-divest/
https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/economic-justice/
Here's the org BLM's petition for Medicare for All: https://blacklivesmatter.com/sign-the-petition-pass-medicare-for-all/
People make fun of the Sunrise Movement for having racial justice in its platform but it goes both ways. The racial justice orgs have environmental and economic justice in their platforms. These are very ideological people so of course they are going to be uniformly left.
It is not about support or not support...it's about magnitude and framing. If all of the energy that was largely misplaced under the banner of "defund the police" was used for universal healthcare and it as framed as a significant help to resolving inequities then that would make a difference. How you support something is just as important as what you support.
imo, framing universal healthcare as a racial justice issue would make it less likely to pass, not more. But it's not going to pass any time soon no matter what the frame is, I guess.
A fair assessment - I disagree.
If you think it hard to determine how many murders have taken place, you should try to determine how much securities fraud there has been and whether it is going up or down.
Today's new word: lacunae. I like it. Yglesias is taking on Wesley Yang in the contest of who can use the most obscure words their readers/followers have to look up. The challenge is to try and use it in a spoken sentence by 11:59 PM this evening.
Remember when The Weeds learned about "inter alia" and Dara Lind crammed that into every paragraph for like six months? I remember.
You all would know that word if you'd watched "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
Like Matt has said that to many people inflation means “the price of gas and maybe milk”, to many ordinary people the crime rate means, “the rate of murder, robbery, and unfortunate public interactions, possibly weighted in that order”. (AKA “how safe do I feel?”)
I see this in the controversy in San Francisco—no matter how much progressive politicians and activists tell the public that crime overall is down, people don’t care because the crime they care about is up.
And progressives often have really bad messaging about this—one assistant to the DA locked her Twitter after she compared a citizen complaining about not feeling safe in public to the KKK. I think this is because it’s become normalized on the progressive left that everyone who disagrees with you is a racist arguing in bad faith, which is a bad way to treat constituents even when true. Telling people that their fears make them bad people is a losing strategy.
great stuff!
People seem to be getting in their own opinions about the examples instead of thinking about the challenges in the issues that Matt raised.
1) We should recognize that some things are much more easily countable than others. I think that Matt has, in the past, pointed to homicide as a very countable phenomenon, whereas many other crimes are more subjective in their classification.
2) We should recognize that some things are already counted, to a large degree. In those cases, it's about collecting all those counts, rather than counting from scratch. That's no mean feat, but it does radically simplify things.
3) We should recognize that some counts/reporting can have more-or-less direct impacts on financial matters. Chicken futures. Tax revenue. The business world wants to know what's going on in X. Financial markets want to know what's going on in Y. That powerful sector pushes for things to be counted and reported. But counting in other areas does not lead to greater profits for anyone.
4) We should recognize the contexts where there is "loose coupling" between policy and practice. Enacted curriculum is definitely one of those places. Matt has tweeted about a history teacher or often deviated from the textbook. These situations are MUCH MUCH harder to count, because they require direct observation of virtually every instance. I mean, imagine that I gave you a budget of $10,000,000 year for a study of what is actually taught in history class/lessons across this country's 130,000 schools. $10 million is MASSIVE sum of money for an education study. And let's say that I promised to fund at that level every years for 10 years. Think that you could get an accurate count? Design that study for me.
(Yeah, yeah. Sampling, not census. But how would you sample schools? How would you sample teachers? How would you sample days? How often would you observe? How would you design your reporting categories? Who would observe? How would you calibrate? I can't figure out how to do this study for ANY amount of money, and I advise on study design all the time.)
*********************
Look, economic data is reported all the time. Business data is reported all the time. But I think that the availability of that has warped Matt's conception of what is reasonable to expect. He has said that he wants "broadly accept authoritative data," without recognizing that even GDP is contested.
He says that there should be descriptive work, but that's not actually what he means. He doesn't want rich thick descriptive data. He want rolled up summary quantitive data that people can easily wrap their mind arounds. Sure, we can get that for homicide. Fine.
But what does he think the reporting of what we teach about history would look like? Let's just skip what the study would look like. What does he think that report would look like?
It appears to be like he want a resource to exist that allows him to find easy answers to unanticipated questions at an unanticipated level of granularity on unanticipated issues.
Like, let's stick to history. High school history. Should teachers tie lessons into current events? To what degree should they stick to the old curriculum, and to what degree should they meet the needs of their students who live in the world? When would BLM or new questions about the history of American immigration policy have been added to his data collection instrument so that the data could be in the report that he imagines being available?
Some data is easy to collect. Some is hard. We would do well to recognize which are which and not treat it all the same.
(And there's absolutely no question that education scholars would do quite well developing the kinds of descriptive reports that Matt would love to have. That's a groups of fields that welcome such things. But that's also a group of fields that is VERY short on research funding. See above.)
"In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology."
I don't understand why this is considered okay.
Freddie DeBoer had two articles recently that really struck a nerve with me about how there is no accountability for "social justice" dictates outside of them being essentially pointless. Its okay to force people to sit through "weird DEI trainings, [where they] roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal" because they have no real impact other than making everyone hate DEI initiatives for being pointless. But it feels like so much of the energy and passion of progressives around social justice get's caught up in the culture war and symbolic posturing instead of actual action taken to help people.
I also wonder how many employers are requiring these weird trainings? I'm in the Milwaukee area and I haven't heard of any of my friends that, like me, work in the business sector having to go through one of these. It seems mainly like a non-profit and education thing. Let me stress again though this is just what I have heard in my admittedly small corner of the world.
The chicken example isn't that random--those stats exist because people trade agricultural and livestock ETFs, futures, etc.
Financial markets are really good at information discovery and dissemination. Conversely, there is no market for "how much critical race theory will be taught in the US in any given year?" and as a consequence, there is no reliable information on it.
On a non-market side, how much food will exist in the immediate future is a very important thing for government to keep track of.
All true, but Matt's point is more, if the public good of it is so great, why not do what financial markets do and figure it out? It's a good point and I back more information gathering. I would love to know through satellite data how many people use certain parks so cities would know what people actually want. I would love if we could know where garbage generation that pollutes x water supply or y forest is coming from. These are important things to aggregate and know and we just... don't. So we are forced to hold bad opinions or do nothing.
You have to bear in mind that at this point, we have significant political factions that benefit from ignorance.
A classic example would be the NRA opposing public health research on the impacts of gun policies, full stop. They don't want to have an argument about trade-offs, or about what might be the set of minimally-restrictive rules that preserve the right to self-defense while saving lives. They just want to prevent the public from even hearing the idea that policy could save lives.
Similarly, a lot of Republicans don't want to argue with climate research, they just want to pretend it doesn't exist, and ideally de-fund it, and perhaps ban public university researchers from researching it.
By the same token, you can bet that reactionary police union types don't want to see high-quality crime statistics made available to the public. They already know what policies they want to implement. Why would they want to be bothered with "facts" or "evidence" about whether those policies are effective?
Off topic (for today), but on one of Matt's issues: Raleigh, NC approves "gentle density" https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article252617598.html
Headline should have been, "Yes, you can count chickens before they're hatched,..., but not other important stuff". LOL
I heartily endorse Matt's plea here and wish we could make doing data better a priority.
Building a high quality, sustainable database is challenging. You have to coordinate all the actors, both providers and recipients of data. You need to organize and systematize the data so it's internally consistent as well as consistent over time. Most important of all is that you have to keep it going year after year, even in times when the issue loses salience, people's interest wanes, and few people are using the data.
Twenty-plus years ago, I was involved in building an open-ended archive of all maintenance actions on critical Army weapon systems. Keeping it going was a bear, in part because the Army wasn't culturally equipped to know what to do with that wealth of information (e.g., what are the most critical repair parts brigades should deploy to war with? why has that tank broken down for the same reason four times in the past two years?) I can imagine the challenges in setting up and maintaining the chicken data. I can only imagine how hard it would be to do the same for crime data.
Matt can break done the calculus of social justice, DEIA, and increasing murder rates but Republicans are just going to do the arithmetic. Sure their method is bot as accurate as taking the derivative but it will be much easier to understand. Teachers are making your white children feel bad. Democratic politicians are advocating to defund the police and now murder rates are going up. You probably had MANDATORY DEIA training you didn’t want to do…that’s because of the Democrats. Republicans are going to take the House and the Senate and we could see that jackass Trump back in a few years.
It's like Steve Bannon said on his podcast a few weeks back: the path to save the nation is through school boards. The more you make people upset about things like CRT invading their classrooms, the more they'll turn out and vote GOP in 2022. It's quite the strategy.
"What’s more, there’s what’s on paper and then there’s what’s happening in classrooms.
In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology. And by the same token, it’s very normal for history teachers to go off-book if there’s something in the textbook they don’t think is spun the right way. "
Thank you for saying this! There is powerful disincentive for school systems to be open about what is taught in social studies and history: what ever you say has a very real chance of sending someone to the local news outlet, of sending outraged and deaf parents to school board meetings, and contributing to the certainty that all education everywhere is some lethal combination of incompetence and indoctrination.
This is not to say there is not lethal incompetence in education and in the classroom. Rather that it doesn't look as people expect. What history is taught, what books are read are nothing compared to the commitment to teach students how to write coherent paragraphs and essays. Not what to think, but how to structure a coherent argument.
There are over a hundred school systems in my state, which means thousands of individual schools under thousands of individual principals. When this is multiplied out across the whole nation, the idea the "education" is some monolithic thing, everywhere the same, should become obviously nonsensical. Even more outlandish is the idea one could get that many Americans to even come close to marching in lockstep about anything.
> how is it that all the tech bros in San Francisco are convinced there’s been a surge in shoplifting and petty crime when the data says the opposite?
I think this gets to something important about crime stats- they represent the number of crimes reported to and accepted by the police department.
If the police department refuses to accept reports, or systematically minimises crimes, the data will be bad. If people believe that reporting crime won't do anything, they won't report it.
Walgreens closed ten stores because of theft in SF, I am not sure why people get skeptical about this. Drug stores have been pretty essential and open all pandemic. This is a strange and local thing.
More epistemic humility! Preface all national crime statistics with a catechism about how they are collected in diverse ways with diverse standards and come with the warning that they should not be used to make comparisons!
I just read an article that was criticizing the reporting on shoplifting in San Fran which claimed that shoplifting is down—but the article admitted that small-value shoplifting is down but high-value shoplifting is up. I didn’t think the article reckoned with the fact that it is entirely rational to care 10x as much about a theft of $400 as a theft of $40, and that it doesn’t take much of an increase in major shoplifting to completely negate the effects of a decline in minor shoplifting.
Similarly, if people feel their chances of being murdered are up, it doesn’t matter how low the chances are for minor crimes.
Here is the article by the way:
http://www.cjcj.org/mobile/news/13165
About low value shoplifting- because of a recent law, Prop 47, anything under $950 is a ticket, and you aren't supposed to get arrested. Police departments and retailers are occasionally grumpy about this and claim it is at the root of theft increases. I don't have any proof that that is true, but it seems like something that might factor into reporting rates of low dollar value theft.
I live near SF and have to go there the various shops have changed a lot over the last year or so. Putting more things behind glass cases more security etc.
FWIW, I saw a video by an independent journalist on YouTube (who seemed pretty centrist) interview a security guard at a pharmacy in SF, and he said that their standing order at the time was to let the shoplifters go, and not to bother reporting to the police, and that policy was well known to the shoplifters, so of course some people weren't shy about not paying.
It really reminds me of the meanest, most critiquey parts of Seeing Like A State. The sacred reported number blinding the state to reality.
The AI skeptics are always scared of paperclip maximizers, but we do it all by ourselves.
Those statements by Walgreens and its peer chains should be treated with at least a touch of skepticism, as they are motivated arguments being put forward by PR flacks. The suggestion that there is a causal link b/t store closing over a 2 year period and theft levels is possibly, even probably, true. But they're also completely unsupported by anything except statements made by their PR people with the goal of influencing public policy. They don't really have any incentive to be honest about the strength of the causal connection.
Sure, but there is plenty of corroborating evidence- those stores often look windswept, a wild amount of stuff is locked behind glass, everyone local complains about crime, occasionally videos of people hauling garbage bags of sundries out go viral locally. East coast skepticism seems crazy in the local context.
I for one applaud Matt's strong stance against schools spirit murdering black children: https://www.slowboring.com/p/pedagogy
I thought spirit murder was the point of school?
Depends on who you ask