To an extent, doing low status community service (e.g. picking up trash) is somewhat like the old punishment of being put in the stocks - subject to some public humiliation. Is that worth the loss of potential value of having the offender do something more useful?
( FWIW, for minor initial offenses, I, personally, would put a much higher emphasis on increasing the _probability_ of punishment than the _severity_ of punishment. )
I will note that if I ran a retail store, I probably wouldn't want known shoplifters working there as community service, because I'd have to make sure they didn't shoplift more during their community service.
The colors in repeat offender shoplifting made me first think that 35% of commenters want death for shoplifting, which seemed *quite* unlike being a big softy...
I think that people's general idea of a shoplifter is a 13-year-old kid stealing a candy bar, and even adjusting it for 100$ worth of goods doesn't change it *that* much, which might affect the willingness to let go with a warning.
For what it’s worth — I don’t know how representative I am — although I didn’t pick the softest possible option, I was softer than not, and I did assume that the shoplifter was an adult.
Yeah I think we're talking about the general structure of a system more than the hypothetical of single judge's decision on a single case.
What made you choose death? Would you not expect someone like that to learn their lesson after 1 or 10 years in prison, or what factors into that for you? I'm definitely on the soft side of things, myself, so a death penalty is next-to-incomprehensible for me.
For me, after 10 previous arrests (and presumably 10 convictions with increasingly harsher punishments) they are clearly incorrigible, so that's why I chose death. I was disappointed to learn that I was wrong in thinking that 35.9% were in agreement with me.
10 previous arrests is but the floating of a dandelion seed on the soft summer zephyrs when it comes to the hardcore shoplifters, and drug addiction seems to be behind a good deal of it:
"A Dublin drug addict, with 342 previous convictions, who carried out three shoplifting incidents in Dundalk, has been given a suspended sentence after the local district court heard she is now on a methadone treatment programme."
Yes, that is the future I imagine is the most likely for someone with 10 arrests, that they will continue to victimize members of their community, dozens and hundreds and thousands of times, unless and until they are forcefully stopped from continuing down that path. To me it seems that we as a society (in most Western countries) have chosen that it is more important that we keep our collective hands clean by not punishing criminals too harshly than that we prevent those offences – though I would be happy to be convinced of some more charitable explanation for this strange behaviour on the part of our systems of justice.
I used to be more in favor of the death penalty. What persuaded me to change my mind was an increasing belief in the fallibility of the system on the margins. Life in prison is reversible. Also, carrying out the death penalty often doesn't save money due to the numerous appeals. But having it on the books likely does save money in terms of encouraging people to plea bargain.
I picked 10 years. My logic being that you give someone like a week or two for the first offense and then N-1 years in prison for the Nth offense. Or maybe something exponential rather than linear. But the point being that it ramps up such that after they get out of jail they are either terrified of an even harsher sentence the next time, or they just end up in jail permanently if they can't stop themselves.
People sometimes age out of the criminal lifestyle. It seems unnecessary to execute a 30 year old for being a career criminal when they might be a better person by the time they're 40 or 50. If shoplifting is the worst of their crimes, we can afford a couple of repeat offenses to offer second chances. If it was something harsher then I would agree with you (although ideally they'd be in jail too long to even reach 10 separate convictions in the first place).
Yeah, the age-out issue is why I also picked 10 years rather than life (I'm generally against imposing the death penalty other than as a "you've been sentenced to life without parole; do you want to be executed instead?" or as a "we don't have a prison that can hold him, so this is the only way to prevent reoffence").
One alternative that I find appealing would be to offer assisted suicide on demand to all incarcerated criminals. In many Western countries, the death penalty is politically impossible, while euthanasia is within the Overton window.
My stance for repeat offenders is based on the priors that: 1) The majority of repeat criminals cause far more harm to others both in and out of prison than they generate positive utility, and I’d probably say this is true in expectation for their whole lives; 2) Life is net-negative for the majority of repeat criminals themselves (due to substance abuse/mental health issues etc.) and would get worse in prison - therefore their death is a moral good regardless of whether it disincentivises crime; 3) not exactly sure how to compare gradations of the two, but prison is absurdly inefficient and costly. My sense is that efficient and humane prison has more costs to society than efficient and humane execution.
Keep in mind that the average cost to the Federal government (U.S.) of a death penalty sentence is estimated to be $1M more than the cost of imprisonment for life.
Only because the system is inefficient by design. A lot of those costs could be cut by making the trials shorter and reducing the opportunity for appeals.
But then, the prison system is inefficient by design as well. I'm pretty sure NKVD troikas and a bullet in the head were extremely cheap, but Gulag imprisonment cost was negative.
Yeah. In China it's more efficient - there are two expedited appeals, including one by the Supreme Court. The average time between sentencing and execution is two months.
I always find it interesting how getting a criminal case in front of a judge takes many months, but whenever Trump issues an executive order there's somehow a Federal judge somewhere ruling against it within hours. How does the case pipeline even work?
Although I don't doubt that some people on ACX have toxic, posturing attitudes to crime and punishment, I haven't really noticed any in this thread. People on both sides have responded thoughtfully and respectfully.
Are you respectful to other posters? Sure. Respectful to humanity? Nope. Your vitriolic policy prescriptions show a lack of regard for others is astonishing.
And that's a major weakness in the current system. Most defendants have no idea what's the maximum or typical sentence that applies to their case, or even may delude themselves into thinking that 3-strikes laws will not apply, they'll get community service, etc.
Even if you leave out humanitarian considerations, the fact is that the death penalty removes an incentive gradient. There is this famous story from the Qin dynasty, who had decreed that being late to a job warranted the death penalty. So when two generals were delayed by bad weather, they had no incentive not to start a rebellion.
I think limiting the sentence for habitual shoplifting to a year or so is much better. Someone who makes a living from shoplifting will still be out of circulation mostly, but the incentive gradient still remains. The message is "shoplifting will not be tolerated and you will (eventually) go to prison for it, but turning to robbery will get us really mad at you, and don't even think about starting to murder witnesses".
This is one of the few good counter-arguments - I definitely agree that we need incentive gradients, so this kind of policy couldn't be done in isolation.
My ideal system would be a relatively steep gradient from 1) very short but certain prison/cell time; 2) increasingly severe corporal punishment; 3) death penalty. There should be lots of carrots to go with the sticks, such as rewards for good behaviour, psychological treatment, and educational/work opportunities.
Also, as you mentioned imperial China, they were the masters of incentive gradients compatible with the death penalty.
Perpetrators of lesser crimes were allowed to be executed through simple beheadings, while with more heinous crimes, you could be 腰斩 "decapitated at the waist", 五马分尸 pulled limb from limb by 5 horses, or 灭九族 all of your relatives within nine generations would be killed as well.
Someone convicted of 10 shoplifting offenses should definitely receive a painless execution.
Didn't want to bring in ling chi or, Wikipedia tells me, 凌遲?
Given the risk of rape in jail (and contracting HIV, which can't be cured even if there are drugs for it now), I wonder if the corporal punishment should come first.
I have a hard time with the death penalty for shoplifting, but maybe I haven't lived in San Francisco lately. I think quite a few San Franciscans would be OK with the death penalty for public defecation at this point.
Good catch, I'd forgotten about 凌迟！On the jail point, I agree entirely, my idea was more "a couple of nights alone in a holding cell" rather than prison with other criminals.
I did pick death penalty (assuming ~linear increasing punishment prior to the 10th offense); "10 strikes and you're out (for good)" seems more than fair. 10 charges establishes a pattern of behavior suggesting that the perpetrator is incapable of peacefully existing within the confines of modern society. The means of removal (death penalty, life imprisonment, exile to some uninhabited island where they can live as barbarously as they wish) are not super relevant, the key is identifying when someone belongs to this group ("irredeemably and openly contemptuous of civilization") and doing both them and us a favor by, well, removing them from civilization.
Some are doing it to survive, but when you're seeing "professional life-long thief" and "drug addict with string of convictions" and not "penniless mother needs to feed starving baby", that tilts the balance towards stern measures.
You and the rest of the tough on crime posturers seem totally unwilling or unable to grapple with the truth that addiction is literally a disease. Not just after a matter of speaking.
Even someone suffering a disease has some responsibility to society. If you are infectious with TB and you know it, you have little to no excuse for going out in public and coughing on people.
Professional shoplifters make their 'disease' impact on ordinary people and they are responsible for their actions.
Any sympathy for addicts I have is being rapidly burned through; there was a story in the media here about opening a safe injection site. Very nice, very heartwarming, included an addict talking about how great this was to restore her dignity and how she hated injecting in public in dirty alleyways because of the danger to her health and her safety.
So, if she hated that so much, was she trying to get clean? No, she was going to use the safe site to continue indulging in her addiction (and the heavy implication of "society owes this to me").
No, we don't owe it to you to make it easier to destroy yourself and (more pertinently) have a bad effect on the people and environment around you. She wants to get clean and heal up as much as is possible? She should definitely be supported in that. She wants to remain a junkie but now it is the duty of the state to babysit her while she shoots up, and if she feels she is not getting all her demands and not being treated with dignity, that is the fault of the state and she is owed more free stuff in compensation? I disagree.
If they're doing it to survive then the appropriate thing may be to place non-survival on the other side of the scales too, to persuade them to find a different survival method like the rest of us.
You overestimate the empathy of juries. Juries routinely convict innocents, rarely apply "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard hence why every jury is a crap shoot, and routinely find people guilty knowing full well the Draconian punishment they will receive. Jurors have no skin in the game hence their default is kill them all, let God sort it out.
Sure we get news stories sometimes of juries doing the right thing but that's it, it's news because it's rare. You look at a case like Daniel Penny and there are hundreds just like him with even more favorable circumstances rotting in jail, and even then nearly all the jurors found him guilty, he just got lucky he had two holdouts which is rare. That was a fluke, not a feature.
At least in some trial contexts, knowing about defendant's prior convictions is not allowed, as is talking about the penalties on the table for the current accusation.
I didn't respond to the survey, but I would have chosen community service for a first time shoplifter and the death penalty for the 10x repeat offender
Yeah, that was confusing. And having worked in retail and suffered from shoplifters, I went "okay, death does seem a reasonable choice here" 😀 I'm probably very much biased, though, by the experience of having my purse stolen in a shopping centre years back, leaving me more or less stranded with no money and no way home. So my view of "thieving is a victimless crime" is "boiling in oil is also victimless, I mean nobody ever complained afterwards".
Hmm... If we _did_ want someone to serve as a long term reminder to others, as gibbets once did, are there technologies that could help? "Picowaving" (irradiation via gammas or e-beam) could render a shrink-wrapped condemned felon shelf-stable in the process of dispatching them...
A shoplifter is threatening violence. If you confront him, you might get hurt by him. The state can also hurt a guard who is considered too aggressive (both financially and physically), acting on behalf of the criminal. As you know, many stores now have a policy of never confronting robbers at all.
"A shoplifter is threatening violence." My goodness, this is incredible torturing at the English language. A person is not actually threatening violence until they are, you know, threatening violence.
YOU are not freewheeling. So yes, if you were truly talking about a handbag, that would be pretty good evidence of your gender.
You being British explains a lot. Your country is awash with violent crime; last I checked, the violent crime rate was 42 percent higher in London than in New York City. I imagine living in such an environment might traumatize a person and make them unable to really address this subject objectively. I feel the same way about Americans that had to live through the lead addled, crime heavy 70s as adults.
By the gods, sirrah, those are fighting words! Naught but blood can wipe out the stain of such a foul imputation, and so prepare to betake yourself to the field of honour! Pistols for two, breakfast for one!
I think you and Banana should meet up, at least on here; you both seem to have very certain opinions in my regard 😁
For what it's worth I felt like the gaps between the options were very large, especially at the relevant level- one month is not enough, a full year seems like too much.
Not sure I thought "adult", but information I missed was: a) how often in the last year (was it 2 thefts per years of less value than one night in prison will cost ...) b) how high the risk of conviction per theft in the location. If you can assume only three shopliftings before you get caught AND "convicted" - that is different from ten or 40 thefts per one conviction.
Finally, it depends - that's why we have judges. I know a mentally disturbed elder bag-lady who does something foolish every few months - and gets caught almost every time. Last time she took tools from the library, worth 150$. Fine: Library shut her out for the next 8 months. Lady kept the tools, too. What the point of putting her into any expensive prison?! - "Death penalty for asocial elements" we did that in Germany 1933-45. Somehow derailed.
I was one of the death pickers but I was equally coaching it in an actual just system, i.e. where the person is actually guilty of it having both genuine rens mea and genuine actus reus as opposed to some judge or jury just felt so. Would I support it in the current US system, no, I wouldn't make it a crime at all beyond a private tort.
I feel there is no crime more heinous than intentional physical theft, kill them all.
Based on my wife's experiences working retail, the standard concern is teenagers lifting cosmetics and costume jewelry rather than candy bars but I think your description of our snap perception is broadly correct.
I like the idea of community service as the penalty for petty offenses. There's a poetic justice to it, providing value and partially mending the "social fabric" damage around the offender because their community sees them making good (willingly or not). Broadly it seems like a more pro-social punishment for petty crime than prison or state violence.
My vague impression is that our current justice system doesn't escalate punishment very smoothly for pretty crime. I have a similarly fuzzy idea that there is a community service element to being in prison but broadly it's just intensely bored prisoners knocking around a small area, under constant stress from rival gangs, and buddying up with more hardened guys. I agree with the conventional wisdom that this send more like a strategy for criminal hardening than rehabilitation.
Given that, my intuition is to fill out the punishment curve; insert more forced community labor + smaller reductions in freedoms e.g. house arrest into the escalation stack for pretty crime before getting to jail time. I'd also offer labor sentences as an alternative to fines for people who can't afford them. Maybe the community service programs could hire out work teams and the funds of those teams go into a pool for reimbursing victims of petty crimes.
Major violent crimes should still probably get the stick. Forced community service seems unlikely to deter e.g. gang violence.
The "age" and "state" responses are poorly displayed in google forms (understandable as a limit of the form, but maybe there's a way to get it to show it in... graph form? Or at least a %?)
I was one of those who entered yea to having shoplifted and guessed 25%. My thinking is that probably most ever-have-shoplifters are like me - I was a 10 year old who saw something shiny and put it in my pocket (a cool-looking glass paperweight) and have never done anything illegal since, except maybe privately partaking of some substances - and that the majority aren't pathological thieves or particularly harmful to society. "One in four people steals something at any point in time, most learn their lesson, and a much smaller number of them keep doing it and need the justice system to step in and punish them in lieu of their parents" just generally... jives with my understanding of the world.
I wonder how much overlap there actually is between sexual orientation and relationship style preference (i.e. I doubt it's true that actually every bi person is the same as every poly person, it's just funny the numbers work out that way.)
The 22 people who said they want 8 children: I hope you find each other.
The self-rating physical attractiveness sure looks like people here might be more deluded than we'd like to think. Not me, though, obviously I'm perfectly objective about myself in every way /s.
Some of the write-in responses to Religious Denomination are a bit worrisome. Same with the responses to "what is your height in centimeters". I mean, what unit are the people saying 20-30 even using?
"Madokaist (I swear this is serious and not a joke)" - I just wanted to say to whomever wrote that in... watching that entire show while on LSD is the closest I have ever come to feeling religious epiphany, so I relate.
The even steps up in "school choice" results make me wonder about the reasoning for people for picking what they did. I don't remember exactly how the question was phrased but it's rare to see a response graph like that, isn't it?
I was fairly disappointed by this one. There were zero actually hot people of either gender, and it basically just clusters in the middle, with a positive bias for both genders, and men "reaching" a little more in self evaluation over their outside-rated hotness.
I took the female-rating-male survey when Aella posted it. There were some "extremely hot" examples in the original dataset, but they were AI-generated images. Even the ones who were exactly my type were in the uncanny AI valley, so I rated them worse than if they had been real.
Also, the real images were pictures that Aella solicited from her twitter followers. This was explicitly framed as "hey, are you self-conscious about your looks? Let's find out if your feelings are well-founded!" No guy who is genuinely hot probably wanted to participate.
Could be. My visual estimation of myself as a 3 from looking at Aella's pics roughly corresponded with the number I got when you were briefly able to get your actual rating out of OKCupid about 10 years ago.
(They had a 'search by looks' feature, and you could see the extra code appended to the web search in the search bar...there was a variable that went from 0 to 10000. So if you put a weird language in as one of your languages and then created a second account, you could search for that language as well as the code that only searched people of given attractiveness levels...then move the attractiveness levels up and down until you figured out where you showed up. They're a lot more sophisticated now.)
I think the physical attractiveness thing doesn't necessarily imply any self-deception.
1) ACX survey takers are fairly young, slim, wealthy and intelligent, which are associated with physical attractiveness. I wouldn't assume that the median ACX survey respondent is near the societal median, just as I wouldn’t assume this for income or intelligence.
2) Even if 1) doesn't cover it, the question doesn't necessarily imply a normal distribution. People could interpret "very attractive" and "very unattractive" as unevenly distributed in society generally. Someone at the societal median could correctly class themselves as 6-7, (using something like the 4chan attractiveness chart), because the lower-end has more variation.
When my daughter was around age 4 or 5, she stole something shiny from a store. My wife took her back to the store and made her apologize and pay for it (like $2 or something). I think this had a good effect on my daughter, and was quite harmless to the store. The clerk at the store didn't want to take the money, said it was okay. We obviously disagreed, and felt that it was more important for our daughter to do what was right than learn that you can occasionally steal stuff and nobody cares.
I think children imbibe this pretty quickly. I used to work in a library, and a number of times when parents who had not been library users as adults (which was most people) got a card for the first time, their little children were often quite astonished and concerned that they could take things away "without paying".
The survey shoplifting question perplexed me. I answered yes, because I am pretty sure I shoplifted on one occasion only, when about nine or ten, alongside a friend, when I didn't yet know the term. We used to ride our bikes up to the drugstore, whose one cash register was at the back, to buy candy. It's hard for me to imagine that we discussed this in advance, as I think even our feeble little brains would have balked at baldly countenancing theft. And it wasn't that we didn't have enough money in our pockets for bubble gum. Instead, the scenario must have wordlessly presented itself to us as a little thrilling game - getting out of the store undetected, with the gum in hand, because the proprietor was at the back.
I'm sure he or she was quite aware of the possibility that this was being entertained.
In any case, the thrill, once accomplished, was not so great that I ever tried it again; and I expect that I probably suppressed the thought of it, because of course on reflection even I could perceive that it was stealing, which was one of the commandments.
But yet I find or want to find this distinct from "shoplifting" as generally practiced.
I'm pretty sure that the people answering 20-30 for "what is your height in centimeters" are Americans who accidentally divided their height in inches by 2.54, instead of correctly multiplying it by 2.54. So to get useful data from those, you gotta multiply their number by 2.54^2 = 6.45
I wonder if the big softie vs maximum punishment is mostly a bravery debate over what people think is the current state - you read the results as softie, I actually read them as pro-more punishment, which makes me suspect we have different views on what the current level of punishment is (with the pro-maximal punishment people mostly just going "turn the punishment dial up without worrying about it going too far").
>I think a lot of liberals have been told that weed smokers and shoplifters get slammed in federal prison for years or something, and seriously believe it.
I don't think that many people think shoplifters are in prison (liberals/leftys do have incorrect views about the number of drug users in prison, also some subset of the left hates big business and actively supports shoplifting) but instead think that the cost benefit of enforcing shoplifting is wrong because in any given instance enforcing the rules doesn't outweigh the cost. The problem is once it becomes public knowledge that shoplifting is not punished norms change and the cost to society is much larger.
Hm, so I think the dynamic is that a small group of people who actually are maximally harsh (the tail in the pie chart) speak out, and then a lot of the more moderate people express directional support (because they think we should go in that direction even if not all the way), so it comes off like a consensus for maximum punishment
Imagine if people <i>actually got</i> 20 hours of community service for first-time shoplifting! So harsh. It might even dissuade enough shoplifters that stores could stop banning backpacks, and people who don't own cars could get groceries more easily.
I've never had a store in NYC give me trouble for coming in with a backpack (maybe because most people there don't have cars? Or because despite stereotypes it's relatively low crime for an American city?)
Maybe this is more of a problem outside of larger cities. Both stores I've seen with this policy are in towns of about 10,000. In which case, yeah, most people do have a car and I happen to be an oddball for shopping without one.
If you're PKU I'll say that in hayward (and now you know who I am) I have been basically told every time I enter a store that I can't bring my backpack, so I end up putting it in like a cubby and then pick it up at the end to store my groceries.
I have been called a shoplifter 3 times (even though I've shoplifted 0 times) because I was wearing a backpack out the store.
It would be interesting to explore the stark difference between the average ACX commenter and the average ACX survey respondent.
Could it be that people who are more extreme in the punishments they want to see doled out are way more likely to share that stance? Maybe because they feel angry at the world for being so lenient? Or because they know they're in the minority, and thus want to increase their ranks among the masses?
Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post? Then, their anonymized answer to the survey does not involve the same incentive so they revert back to a more "middle ground" approach?
I was surprised to see the 25% shoplifting figure, both real and expected by respondents. I'd be interested in seeing a country/continent breakdown here, because as a European I feel like we might have a different view on both the probability and the severity of the punishment.
I expect the survey to be much more representative than the comments section. People filling out the survey don't need a particularly strong motivation to input their position, while people in the comments probably do. The other factors you mention probably move the needle, too, though I wouldn't put too much weight in the middle-ground-reversion idea.
What is your take on the shoplifting stuff that surprised you? I'm German, but I don't feel too surprised by the results (though hindsight and all that). In particular, 25% for ever-shoplifting seems quite expected to me, if we include kids. Would you have expected a higher or a lower rate?
I guess I answered the shoplifting question from the point of view of adults or teenagers doing it. If I had thought about kids too, I probably would have gone to 25-35% myself. I have lived in a few large European cities over the past ten years and I've talked to people from all walks of life, and I just get a feeling that shoplifting is exceedingly rare nowadays from a teenagers-and-adult perspective. I've never been to the US so I was wondering if there's a different moral (perception on shoplifting) and actual (shoplifting rates) framework at play.
Based on this alone, it doesn't look like there's a major difference in the amount of shoplifting between the UK and the US. I'm fairly happy generalizing this to the rest of Europe - my gut feeling was wrong!
I see. I mean we don't really know whether people tended to include kids or not in their model (@Scott something to better clarify in the form in the future). Thanks for clarifying
The fact that generalising the UK with Europe (different cultures, different languages), and not with the US (same language, same cultural origin) is seen as such a natural thing to do is a symbol of so many things wrong with the current world.
I would guess that people who have emotions about a topic are very strongly overrepresented, and those people hold more extreme views. Not just on ACX, but on any social media, and to slightly less extent also in traditional news. You get the same effect if you compare any representative survey with any online survey. On most questions, the average opinion in representative surveys is quite moderate and boring. It happens rarely to me that I find the majority opinion of such a survey outrageous or even remarkable. Whereas I find the majority opinions in online surveys or social media often crazy.
By the way, this already drove me crazy in Scott's post: IN WHICH DIRECTION were you surprised? Sorry for screaming, but I honestly don't know, and it's itching me.
This probably applies across most topics. I mentioned this in a thread one time already I think, but the pro/anti Trump comments before the election seemed pretty close to 50/50, which is way out of step with the political demographics from the surveys.
I think this is kind of everything everywhere though, which is why Twitter is so horrible.
>Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post?
Wrong way around. Normally, the motivation for making a comment is that you disagree strongly with something; people with unpopular views disagree strongly more often.
As one of the softies — though not the softest of the softies — I just don’t have any interest in arguing about it in the comments section of a well-trafficked blog.
Perhaps the same thing that makes someone inclined to be very tough on crime makes them more likely to talk about it -- extremists of every stripe are louder than moderates, yeah?
Sounds reasonable. Where are the extremists on the other extreme of the spectrum? Or are there really none/so few they don't get much attention? Could be.
I mean, there are certainly extremists who talk about abolishing police etc. They may not be in this blog post but they do exist and they are loud. Those would read as the opposite side to me. I want to say... "zizians"?
I would like to abolish policing in its current form as it exists in certain polities. People think of it as an eternal and necessary, but it was only invented 200 years ago. There's no intrinsic reason that the institution responsible for investigating murders should also be the institution who control riots. The penetentiary model of prison-as-punishment is also about the same age and should also be abolished.
It's next to impossible to have a productive conversation about this in a blog comment section, however.
The idea that the riot police be different from the detective police is interesting but that is the case within police forces already.
I find the whole “we’ve only been locking people up for 200” years a bit disingenuous. It’s true that prisons arise with the enlightenment, more or less, but punishment doesn’t start then. It was harsher beforehand, Prior to prisons, there were multiple punishments like corporal punishment, flogging, whipping, branding, mutilation, stockades, pillories, ducking stools, capital punishment (beheading, hanging, crucifixion, burning at the stake), breaking on the wheel, banishment, exile, outlawry, transportation to colonies , restitution, wergild, debt slavery, public fines, forced labor, galley slavery, workhouses, penal colonies, indentured servitude, public shaming, dunking, cucking stools, the brank, tarring and feathering and for religious punishments, ordeals, trial by fire, trial by water, trial by combat, penance, pilgrimage, excommunication and death.
Part of being tough on crime is making everyone know that we're going to be tough on crime. If 4% of shoplifters were randomly and quietly disappeared, it would only reduce shoplifting by 4%.
...But we already know that harsher punishments don't have a noticable effect on disincentivizing crime. The point is to increase the percentage of shoplifters that disappear.
It’s a lot easier to get excited about, “we can make society meaningfully better with this one weird trick: Actually locking up criminals,” than it is to get excited about commonly-held default opinion #2596.
Many who espouse the more extreme positions (on most topics) tend to be incapable of nuance (possibly just unwilling). It often makes for a rather unrewarding discussion.
My honest guess is that they have less natural empathy and that makes it easier for them to argue all day about how human beings should be executed without feeling burned out at the prospect.
Im generally tough on crime because of empathy. Not that I support the death penalty, but largely the system as it is (here in the U.K.) - with some leeway for petty crimes and drug use.
Obviously the US is different.
My empathy is for the victims, who are invariably poor and powerless. Not caring about crime is, consciously or unconsciously, a vicarious display of wealth.
Normal urges for those who partake in this sort of blog + Internet Tough Guy Syndrome.
It's like those dudes who start slicing the pie every time they hear a bird land on their roof; going online and talking about how good it would be to just exterminate all the brutes give you a little thrill right in the amygdala without you actually having to go out and maybe get your ass beat.
Possibly because it gives a modest but addictive adrenaline rush to say something incredibly transgressive online? And since your moderation weeds out many types of extreme transgression, like blatant insults, the tough on crimers and "foreign human life has no inherent value" types are the only extreme transgressors left.
Do you ever worry that reading thousands upon thousands of words from these homicidal types might cause you psychic damage?
I would understand that. As boop says below, toughies are going to feel better about talking about it.
I kind of am, but I don't really have a logical argument for being a softy other than "well, if they can do it to shoplifters, they can do it to me for something else they define at a later date." I don't really trust the government. Of course, I don't trust business, the right, the left, or women either, and if I were a practicing rather than a theoretical bisexual I'd probably distrust men too!
I don’t mind having my beliefs challenged, but so many first hand accounts of people’s new beliefs either don’t make any sense, are obviously bullshit (are you sure the ayahuasca is what cured your autoimmune disease?) or are based on woo (your left and right hemispheres are in “proper order” now?) So I think the main fear is not that it will affect my beliefs, but rather that it will fuck up my brain to the point that I believe things that are dumb. Essentially, I would be interested to try a psychedelic if it seemed likely to make me see reality more clearly rather than less, but “less clearly” seems to generally be the more likely outcome as far as I can tell.
a drug changing your belief and a drug making your beliefs dumber are almost synonymous. Except if you have some mental illness, I guess taking some substance that does something to your brain will mostly make your thoughts worse. Just as banging your head against the wall will probably make your beliefs worse not better.
My suspicion on the autoimmune disease one is that they hadn't actually been diagnosed with a clear cut autoimmune disease, but had nonspecific symptoms and a spurious high ANA and the nonspecific symptoms resolved.
> Essentially, I would be interested to try a psychedelic if it seemed likely to make me see reality more clearly rather than less
They do neither. Psychedelics provide you, as someone says further down the comments, with first-hand evidence that direct realism is false. They do this by replacing your normal interpretive framework with a radically different one. Some people unfortunately don't get the message, and conclude it replaces false perceptions with true ones.
I have some advice. One is that the effect-vs-dose curve for psychedelics is convex, not linear. Doubling the dose more than doubles the effects and I have a personal suspicion that a good chunk of ayahuasca's reputation comes from the traditional use being at a really high dose relative to other psychedelics. You'll be much better off with psychedelics if you just travel to the lowlands of notably altered thinking and pretty visual effects and stop there rather than climbing up the mountain of "might rewrite my soul". If you're especially cautious, microdosing is recommended, as in terms of the magnitude of mental effects, it's the psychedelic equivalent of having one beer.
As for the clearness of seeing reality... I'd say that psychedelics push your cognition into a very different mode with both strengths and weaknesses relative to sober thought. It's common to have novel realizations where sober-you goes "yeah, this checks out and is important". But just because there are true insights doesn't mean that everything that feels insightful at the time is a true insight. This is another reason to stay with lower doses, they leave your metacognition somewhat intact and you have the ability to go "this feels really profound but it's probably just bullshit". This is analogous to a person on a moderate dose of alcohol going "this seems awesome but sober-me would say it's a bad idea, I won't do it". Low-to-moderate doses give you a saving throw, pretty much.
There's lots of possible good effects from psychedelics. I've had very connecting conversations on XTC with friends who normally have difficulty with intimacy. The double helix of DNA is famously conjured on LSD. This podcast on re-opening critical developmental periods is also very enlightning.
"No fear of death" seems underspecified. it seems healthy to be at peace with one's inevitable mortality, but dysfunctional to actually lack any inhibitions against endangering oneself. My impression is that most spiritual and psychedelic experiences that sound like this quote refer to the healthy, peaceful kind of "no fear of death". (And I say this as a donor to life-extension research. Saving and extending lives is good, but realistically, I expect most or all people alive today to be mortal, and we may as well live with it.)
By contrast there are a lot of accounts of ketamine use that suggest that the sense of self-preservation can be lost, especially when they coincide with stories of fatal accidents or suicides. My guess is that ayahuasca (which is primarily serotonergic like other psychedelics, rather than NMDA-inhibiting like the dissociatives) does not cause higher-than-usual rates of self-harm or reckless accidents, but that's the thing to watch for.
Not instructions, but having a strong epistemology, emotional attachment to truth, and a strong understanding that direct realism is false go a long way. Understanding indirect realism allows you to understand that the reality bending experience you just had was not an insight into the external world, but one into your mind and your perception of the world.
I'd love to know more about this person, my hunch when I hear conversion stories like this is that the convert didn't have a gears level understanding of why the religion is false (maybe they were raised in a non religious setting, so they just don't know anything about the religion or why they don't believe), got converted via weak evidence and emotional appeals, and then exaggerate how staunch of an atheist they were to make the story more exciting. I see this a lot in christian conversion stories, where they hype up how they used to be an atheist but found god, but when you hear their story they kinda believed in god the whole time but never cared about the religion till they "converted", or they didn't have any understanding of the religion and weren't a committed and knowledgeable atheist before converting.
To make a analogy, peek-a-boo works on a baby because they don't understand object permanence, and an intense psychedelic trip converts people to religions or makes them believe in aliens or think that they saw external other dimensions because they don't understand indirect realism, what you see/feel/hear does not always equal objective external reality, even when it's "realness" feels "more real" than normal
>this can also be applied to religious insights. If there are supernatural entities, and they do communicate with us during altered states like ayahuasca trips, how the hell can we know that they're benevolent and not trying to manipulate us with pretty imagery and feelings?
Evangelicals and Fundamentalists would wholeheartedly agree with you. From my own experience if you explain DMT and the "machine elves" to one who's never heard of them before they will 100% of the time conclude that people are talking to demons.
Yeah, this thing keep bugging me in the context of psychodelics.
It seems obvious that if you take some substance that alters your brain chemistry according to material rules, this can't be evidence in favor of idealism. No matter how wonderful the experience is, the methodology is completely off.
And yet people keep becoming more religious/less confident in materialism due to psychodelics. The standard explanation is that such people are simply gullible doofuses who suck at epistemology. But I have troubles accepting it, especially when we are talking about people in rationality adjacent spheres.
A more sinister explanation is that psychodelics irreversibly break something in the brains, making people more gullible and less capable of reasoning correctly. And if so, they are really really bad and should be restricted much harder.
The sinister explanation seems like the obviously correct explanation. Only other possible explanation would be that there is some sort of being that would choose to impart wisdom mostly through drugs, and that seems like an odd choice
There is one other possible explanation: that the human mind is capable of perceiving the spiritual, and that these drugs facilitate that perception. Imagine if someone was born blind, and a doctor came up with a drug that would allow them to see for a few minutes. After the drugs wore off would it be surprising that many of those who took them now believe colors are real?
But a seeing person can easily prove to others that he's no longer blind, even to other blind ones, for example by distinguishing something from a distance, which can then be confirmed by touch. The problem with spiritualism of all sorts is that objective evidence of it has always been close to non-existent.
You can easily demonstrate color-discerning superpower as well, by telling a milk-filled bottle from a water-filled one, say. I'll grant that describing what colors _are_ is a much more difficult proposition.
It's conceivable, of course, that spirits exist but aren't particularly entangled with the ordinary stuff, but their proponents usually claim that they are impactful in the real world, and not only in the afterlife or whatever.
What seems to happen on psychedelics is a loosening of priors and people's perceptions not matching up with "direct" realism.
I agree that experiences on drugs or on meditation don't give you insight into the true nature of things. However, neither do experiences when you are completely sober. In the end it's all groundless/incomplete/uncomputable. Any (metaphysical) position is as justifiable as any other. Ofc. this also comes from a certain perspective. I am using language and concepts ...
From a bayesian perspective it would about finding some kind of universal prior which is arbitrary.
In some way it also reminds me of people switching from the radical left to the radical right or the other way around.
Be smart and an analytical high-decoupler. I took shrooms for the first time a couple years ago (in my 40's) and was completely underwhelmed by the experience. You'd have to be pretty dim and/or pretty emotionally/philosophically immature to be impressed by it. Maybe I just had an atypical experience, but I can't imagine any drug experience altering my worldview. No matter what I thought I saw I would immediately write it off as "well that's what happens when you screw with your brain". I don't think I would ever be tempted to interpret it as a glimpse into universal truth. I suspect that those who do have deep personal problems.
I always wondered how much continuity there is of brain function across different domains. What you say makes sense--yeah, if you're skeptical you *shouldn't* be as susceptible to spiritual surprises from shrooms. But is that actually the case? If we give 100 engineers and 100 artists shrooms, we'd *expect* the artists to trip balls more often, but has anyone actually tried? (After all, you have weird counterexamples like Jack Parsons of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who got into Thelema and did an occult ritual with L. Ron Hubbard.)
Interesting idea. I suspect there's not a big difference: look at the composition of Burning Man. Lotsa techies. And I knew plenty of STEM guys in college who were deeply into psychedelics.
Maybe I'm wired atypically - Ecstasy didn't do anything for me either - but my model is that I'm an unusually unemotional and abstract thinker so shrooms took me to a place that I already live in. I do like stimulants so maybe I'm just a dopamine guy? One of these days I'm gonna give DMT a try. Maybe that'll shake something loose. If nothing else I'll be able to set that pretentious bat straight.
Who knows? I'm just wondering how well sensitivity to these things actually correlates with personality type. It could be that it does, or it could be it's superficially plausible but it's actually some other aspect of brain architecture that doesn't at all, like the way painting your house watery blue won't protect it against fire. But I don't think we're going to see the research anytime soon.
I'm going to refrain from giving advice, though. I've never even done pot and I wouldn't know what I'm talking about. :)
> yeah, if you're skeptical you *shouldn't* be as susceptible to spiritual surprises from shrooms
Related anecdata: Took LSD, kept expecting _something_ to happen to my belief set or sense of self, but under scrutiny it turned out to be really solid and so my tautological take-away from the trip was "huh, I guess I've got a pretty solid model of myself and the world? Neat." I wouldn't bank on that being the right insight, either.
It did very fun things to my ability to navigate, though. Do not try out new routes through a park you like if you're on LSD. I would describe the effect as "it took my map of the park, and shattered it into a million pieces, so that I could tell at any one point that I had been in a particular place before (or not), but not how it related to the other pieces."
It did, however, get rid of my anxiety! That was fairly useful. I wouldn't have described myself as high-anxiety before, but on reflection, yeah... yeah, I was. I just had a lot of copes.
Wow, that's interesting! People keep talking about being one with the universe and that's a more pleasant way of describing shutting off your sense of spatial relations (or more likely, an actual experience of the thing being more pleasant).
We're at n=2 now, so it really is anecdata rather than just an anecdote.
I've heard about the anxiety thing too. I'm a little chicken to try because there's no reason at all I couldn't be in the 1 percent that has a bad reaction and has their life fall apart. But it's good to share experiences for the most adventurous.
It makes sense shamans and so on used to use this stuff, though. Probably it does act as a useful psychiatric medication for some people. I feel like Timothy Leary and Co. kind of set us back a long way by tying it to the counterculture, but who knows? Maybe it was never going to happen any other way.
I'm Atheist; but I do hold a bit of an open mind for the consciousness is fundamental world view. It's not falsifiable, but it is verifiable. Who knows what you discover in these "higher forms of consciousness". Probably its just creating a false but more beautiful narrative to existence. Ah well, what to say, fine by me.
Man, using almost the same shade of green for "Death" and "A Month in Prison" made me think ACX was wildly mad about shoplifting. Good thing you had the text underneath to clear that one up!
"the justice system doesn’t have the capacity to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which homeless people are harassers/mentally ill and which ones aren’t"
If an encampment is a known trouble spot, couldn't the city station a couple of police officers there and/or install cameras? Then there would be clear evidence of harassment (and also probably a reduction in harassment, which is good in itself).
I agree determining whether a harasser is mentally ill is hard, but they can be arrested and removed from the scene either way. Mental health status could come into play later, to determine whether repeat offenders should be jailed or institutionalised.
I don't think determining whether someone is harassing people is hard or beyond the capacity of the system.
What % of shoplifters get caught, should we multiply the punishment by the inverse of that?
How much does it cost to process and adjudicate a shoplifter, relative to the direct financial harm of them shoplifting? Should we multiply the cost by that ratio?
What do we expect to be the deterrence value?
Waving away most of that, let's say you have a 20% chance of getting punished, and shoplifting yields you $1000. Then the punishment needs to be substantially in excess of $5k utility to you.
Yeah for sure, normal/rational economists can make those arguments, and sane people need to acknowledge that's part of the ledger.
But surveys can't accurately capture 'what society you want to live in, how will it be enforced, etc.'
If you say 'the punishment should be 1 year' that might also be bundled with a bunch of other beliefs like 'we want to live in singapore, where repeat offenders are deported or serious offences are punishable by death, and also there is a very strong culture of crime for any reason is not acceptable; or at least 10% closer in that direction than we are now'
For a single offense - horrible idea. For 10+ repeat offenses (10 that we know about, chances are much much higher in reality) that may be worth the cost just to keep the person from lowering trust in society.
The worst repeat offenders don't seem to care about lesser punishments, sometimes don't care about punishments at all.
It is incredibly easy to not shoplift ten times in your life. If someone has gotten caught and arrested for shoplifting ten times and still isn’t getting the message, I don’t see any value whatsoever in allowing them to continue to exist in society. No well-meaning citizen would ever find themselves in that situation. You have to retaliate against willful defection with escalating punishment. This is just basic game theory.
Maybe it’s my own lack of imagination, but I can’t even imagine the possible mental state of someone who has gotten arrested ten times for shoplifting, but also doesn’t deserve to spend at the very least multiple years in jail.
"No well-meaning citizen would ever find themselves in that situation. You have to retaliate against willful defection with escalating punishment. This is just basic game theory. "
While I think "game theory" is a potentially useful lens here, extreme care must be taken in making judgements like this because many people fundamentally *haven't been playing the same game you have.*
My mental model of repeat offenders does include SOME people who are the human equivalent of DefectBot: that is, arrogant, low empathy people who think everyone who trusts others and follows the rules is a sucker just waiting to be taken advantage of. But it also includes quite a lot of people whose experience of "society" is being *constantly and egregiously defected against.*
If somebody has been repeatedly screwed over by authority figures all their life, the idea that just following the rules will lead to better outcomes--the idea that cooperate-cooperate is a state that can *ever* happen--is probably pretty alien. In such a mindset, shoplifting is just trying to get by in an unfair world. Getting caught and punished is just one more example of the unjust system screwing them over *again.* To the extent that it merits a change in behavior, that behavior is "try harder not to get caught," not "spontaneously start displaying the respect for authority that authority has never, ever shown you." Especially since shoplifting is pretty damn benign by the standards of someone who repeatedly been on the receiving end of the sort of life-ruining bullshit that a bad family, a bad community or a bad workplace can inflict on the unwary.
Now, there is a consequentialist argument that identifying such people and guiding them into a healthier mental state is too difficult, too costly or too risky and that "not allowing them to continue to exist in society" is the least-bad option. But the word "deserve" has no place in it. It's not justice, it's just another tragedy that we don't have the power to prevent. And somebody seriously taking that view must necessarily be open to novel solutions that *do* reduce the difficulty, cost and risk of rehabilitating such people down to an acceptable level (which makes them very different from arguments who treat such people as fundamentally bad actors, for which punishment is a desirable end in itself).
This all seems pretty reasonable. I think you've hit the disagreement pretty well.
I would say that someone who cannot cooperate (emphasis on can not), even when someone is cooperating with them, is very likely in your last paragraph here. I've met some people, including some that are pretty young, that just seem to be stuck on some form of defect in every scenario. Even when there's strong evidence that cooperate can work.
I would guess something is broken in their heads, likely very legitimately from experiences in their lives. I'm all for trying to help them fix it, and absolutely feel that one or even a few minor crimes still feels very fixable. I don't know if 10 is the perfect number or whatever, but there definitely feels like a time that the answer is no longer "slap on the wrist" levels of response.
I agree with Daniel that there does need to be escalation. Taking someone who is predisposed to defect under a given response and continuing to respond the same way is just unwise and counterproductive. That escalation can have a ceiling - I don't think the death penalty for misdemeanor theft is ever the right choice. It may be that sequestering them is the right choice. We actually have two levels of that in society, but we politely don't talk about the second, non-jail/prison, option - grouping undesirables in the same neighborhoods so they can defect against each other instead of the cooperating side of society. Whether this is overall a good idea is an interesting question. It's clearly bad for individual defectors, and clearly good for cooperators. Given that, and given that cooperation is necessary for society, it's likely a least-bad option, especially if the alternative is prison.
" I don't know if 10 is the perfect number or whatever, but there definitely feels like a time that the answer is no longer "slap on the wrist" levels of response. "
This feels like one of those disconnects that would likely be very hard to bridge. I certainly think that if the third, fourth and fifth mild-to-moderate smack don't manage to teach someone, there's not that much chance that the 10th one will either. But I ALSO don't think the problem can be adequately summed up as "clearly, you're not smacking hard enough." Once you start to become suspicious that no pattern of hammer strikes is actually proving efficacious, you should at least consider *finding a tool that is not a hammer* rather than winding up to smack even harder.
I look at it more like different levels of auto-defect. Some people are only mildly defecting, so you want to discourage that mildly (the first time offender scenario). If you overreact, you're more likely to cause harm (both to them, obviously, and also make them more resistant to future fixes) than fix a small problem. Most people who get caught shoplifting on a first offense will never do it again, even with mild punishment, such as a store security guard telling them to knock it off, or calling home to parents.
The goal at each level is to escalate to land on that sweet spot range where you're not overreacting and causing more problems, but still making it clear that the perpetrator should feel shame/remorse/fear or whatever negative emotion causes them to stop doing it again.
Once you've tried this enough times, it's clear that the escalations aren't working. At that point, we either have a core problem of misunderstanding what the individual values, or they are unusually resistant to the shame/remorse/fear and may in fact be immune to such concerns (a sociopath perhaps).
Now, is there a non-negative approach that might work instead of the negative reinforcement? Quite possibly! I think it's actually quite possible for first time offenders or even someone with a few offenses. I certainly appreciate not getting the book thrown at me for a few minor offenses when I was a teenager. There are problems with this approach.
What resources are needed to take this approach (i.e. a loving family at home, a support network, a good friend who encourages them, etc.)? Will the approach scale? How do you determine the difference between someone amenable to this approach and someone pretending in order to keep defecting? And so on.
Again, I'm not against such an approach, but it's very difficult to pull off and I think some of the prerequisites (the loving family side) are simply not available for large numbers of people.
"Again, I'm not against such an approach, but it's very difficult to pull off and I think some of the prerequisites (the loving family side) are simply not available for large numbers of people."
OK, yeah, this largely matches up with my view. I think that right now the justice system has very few tools beyond "hit the punish button hard" and "hit the punish button harder," which means that there are many sorts of problems it can't solve. But exactly because they require more tools and more complicated usage, they're much harder than simply tinkering with the amount and timing of punishment, to the point that I hardly feel qualified to even speculate about them.
I do think the "loving family side" hits at least one of the nails pretty squarely though. I think the psychological impacts of growing up with a loving family are important and hard to replicate. But on the flip side, I think there are practical advantages to it that might be rather easier to emulate at the community level or higher.
Specifically, having a (good) family means you have a group of people who know you and who are invested in your success. If you know you have a problem, there are people right there, available to ask for help. If you don't know you have a problem, there are people close enough to you that they might be able to recognize it. My suspicion is that quite a large number of the "lost cause" sorts of people, both among criminals and among the homeless are people who had problems that weren't actually that hard to solve: they just lacked either the knowledge or the capability to do it themselves. Note the word "had" though: I was too busy to comment on the homelessness discussions here a couple months ago, but the recurring thought that popped into my head while reading them was "clearly the best time to help these people was 10 or 20 years ago." Once it gets to the point where they're on their 10th shoplifting arrest, or where they're ranting on a street corner and accosting passers-by, I expect the problem to be much, much more difficult, if not impossible.
But I have only the faintest glimmers of ideas about what to do about that. It seems like the sort of problem that *should* be addressable through a concerted, top-down effort[1], But I don't have anything like a clear picture of how, just vague hints of how its connected to some of the other problems of modernity, which are similarly daunting.
[1] Albeit where "top" might be some level well below federal, like county or municipal.
Well, of all of the criticisms one could make of my viewpoint, that is certainly one of them. But I think banging this comment against a dictionary before you made it would substantially improved it (the comment, not the dictionary).
The belief (informed at least somewhat by experience, I might add) that exist are people that have been so thoroughly fucked over by life that they are essentially permanent outsiders to healthy human societies is about as far from "romanticized" as I could possibly conceive. Indeed, the world that contains ONLY the first type of shoplifter is both the essentially nicer world (justice is easy!) and the one that fits far better with Romanticism as a worldview. There is good and bad, heroes and villains, and while there heroes may struggle to triumph against the villains, there's no doubt that they ARE the heroes or that the Bad, Wicked Villains deserve their righteous comeuppance. When applied to real life, I believe we call it the Just World Fallacy: the notion that *necessary* things needs must be *inherently good* things, and that the only people who get punished are the Wicked, No Good, Very Bad People whose punishment we can all celebrate. No room for senseless tragedies, lose-lose situations or black-and-grey morality here, we have evildoers to smite!
That was a lot of words to make yourself look silly when I only need to use Google to do it for you. 'Romanticize' as a word isn't the verb form of the noun "Romanticism"
Google:
"deal with or describe in an idealized or unrealistic fashion; make (something) seem better or more appealing than it really is."
Well, then, I guess I should congratulate you for your efficiency: you made yourself look silly in FAR fewer word.
The connection to romanticism was intended to be a little bit tongue-and-cheek, but while the words aren't perfectly congruent, they are VERY CLOSELY RELATED. Romanticism the literary genre is very heavily concerned with painting an idealized-but-unrealistic picture of the world because that's prettier and makes a better story. Pointing out that the viewpoint is incompatible with the genre of Romanticism was a in-hindsight-probably-too-cute way to point out that it does not, in fact, paint a prettier, nicer, better or more appealing picture.
Now, to anyone who didn't have their head firmly lodged in the tight crevices of their own pedantry, I think my point ought to have been fairly clear, despite the embellishment. It is UTTERLY PREPOSTEROUS to respond to my original claim by insisting it paints a MORE idealized picture of the world. To say it again, for those of lesser reading comprehension: assuming that the ONLY people who routinely commit criminal acts both inherently evil and have nothing sympathetic in their motivation is FAR MORE "idealized and unrealistic" than assuming that SOME of them are actually broken in complex and difficult-to-fix ways that nevertheless cannot be rounded off as "they're just evil." The first view is the view of a child who cannot handle nuance or of an ideologue comfortably uninterested in anything that could challenge their simplistic worldview. The second is much less comfortable for everyone--as I noted, even if it's true it doesn't mean there's necessarily anything practical to be done about it--but seems likely to be more congruent to reality.
I was one of the people who answered 10 years for the repeat offender. My assumption was that if they had been able to commit 10 previous crimes, then various other methods must have been tried and found not to work.
>Now, there is a consequentialist argument that identifying such people and guiding them into a healthier mental state is too difficult, too costly or too risky and that "not allowing them to continue to exist in society" is the least-bad option.
Well, no, it's not too difficult, but "chuck them in jail for years" is going to help a lot with it. How exactly are you going to get them to show up at outpatient therapy when *by your own words* deterrents are void?
I appreciate this comment, not the least because I think it highlights a really significant disconnect. When you contrast "chuck them in jail" with "getting them to show up for outpatient therapy" my mind immediately goes "woah, woah, WOAH, those aren't the only two options."
But then I see that they ARE the only two options if one interprets "jail" in the right way. In particular, I think[1] that every the radical left end of criminal justice reform--the prison abolition movement--acknowledges the need for people to be involuntarily confined *sometimes.* They just don't think it should be in *prison* specifically. If someone considers "jail" or "prison" to cover any sort of punitive involuntary confinement the preceding sentence might well sound like nonsense. But when I hear about putting people in prison, to me that means putting them in the sort prisons that we actually have right now. Which seem primarily concerned with security, secondarily concerned with deliberately causing the inmates to suffer and (in most cases) not even slightly concerned with anything like treatment or rehabilitation.
So to be maximally clear on my point here, if someone has a substantial number of prior shoplifting convictions I think that:
1. It might be possible to help them break that cycle (though it's likely to be very difficult).
2.If it is possible to help them, it will almost certainly require some period of involuntary confinement.
but
3. Putting them in anything like the current standard for jail or prison will certainly be insufficient on its own, and likely highly counterproductive.
Of course, whatever alternatives to standard jail or prison one tries are near-certain to be more expensive per-inmate-day[2]. Which circles back to the utilitarian argument and whether helping such people can be done cost effectively. I think there's a reasonable case that it actually *could* be overall cheaper than our current system, but if so I expect it would take significant time and expense for it to get there, and thus would need much more political will than currently exists.
[1] Though I'm not heavily tuned-in to the movement, so I'm not 100% sure.
[2] Since our current system is fairly strongly optimized for being as cheap as possible without *usually* failing our (middling high) standards for security and our (usually very low) standards for comfort/tolerability.
I think it might be possible to arrange "involuntary confinement" at a cost substantially less than current prisons if, A: you're dealing entirely with non-violent prisoners and B: you've got traditional prison on hot standby for anyone who seriously disrupts operations at the soft not-a-prison-but-you-can't-leave thing.
Certainly, I agree that if a prison system supports prison gangs who commit crimes in prison and harden inmates into worse criminals, this is HCF; that prison system is not fit for purpose and needs to be fixed before we can start talking about subtler tradeoffs. I don't actually live in the USA, but I hear the Australian system does have some of the same issues.
There are a variety of possible solutions to this, the most obvious being to either solitarily confine or execute all the prison gang members (because apparently putting them in genpop didn't actually stop them committing crimes).
The problem I see is that if you get someone who will compulsively steal no matter what, you're effectively giving them life in prison. Which is probably going to be a lot more expensive than whatever it is they're stealing.
If someone steals ten times, despite going to jail for successfully longer times each time, I imagine the deterrent effect is basically zero. They're either going to be in jail or stealing. If you can find a way to make them work in jail to make it actually profitable and also not be totally inhumane, great. Otherwise, putting them in prison is taking more money from taxpayers, and I'd rather have more than less.
I'm not suggesting not to bother arresting shoplifters at all. You can probably stop most of them with a warning. The ones you can't, you'll probably stop after arresting them for a few months. Even the warning is probably more expensive than whatever they're stealing at the time, but worth it in the long run. But if you keep arresting them for longer and longer times, and it doesn't work, then arresting them for life is a worse option than just letting them shoplift.
That's not "shoplifting", that's the tenth conviction for shoplifting. I don't want to go straight to draconian measures but I do want to eventually incapacitate criminals enough to really curtail their effect on society (and also to avoid repeatedly spending all the resources needed to get someone properly convicted for trivial gains). So my idea is approximately exponential punishments: first two times are between a warning and a weekend in jail or community service, 3rd time serves 1 month, and then each following conviction multiplies it by something like 1.5. This results in 25 months by their 10th time (which I rounded down to 1 year in the survey). This is to someone who had already served 17 months for their 9th time and did it again anyway.
You are aware that shoplifting is the easiest and most casual form of crime, yes? It's literally just putting something in your bag and not paying for it at checkout. If you are at the grocery store every second day you'll have that number in 3 weeks.
Yeah, if someone gets caught 10 times (or even once) and still doesn't stop, that's a committed criminal, but I would not put that label on someone who simply added another habit/routine to their usual shopping once they realized there's no noticeable impact.
>"If you are at the grocery store every second day you'll have that number in 3 weeks."
Probably an ambiguity in the survey framing here: if such a person was only caught after three weeks of this behavior, I'd consider that a first conviction (even if it was on ten *counts* of shoplifting).
If others are implicitly interpreting it as I am, then "the tenth offense" is being caught & convicted for shoplifting after already having been punished nine previous times.
If someone's been convicted ten times for shoplifting and does it again, it is highly likely that he/she will shoplift again immediately upon getting out of jail, and be jailed again. At this point the result of "a weekend in jail and then you're free" is that he/she spends most of the next year in jail anyway, but commits 50+ more thefts in that time and requires 50+ more trials. Seems simpler to face reality.
I put "ten years" for the second one, because while the above argument means that long custodial sentences are required (at least, if you don't want to just let the shoplifter run wild), there are still a couple of avenues available for "can at some point function outside a jail" - aging out of criminality, and inpatient psychiatry/re-education. These are not fast, but they're why I wouldn't say "life" (or "death") without proof that they'd failed.
1) For shoplifters, did the last 10 convictions happen in the last, say, 2 years? 6 months? I think that changes the answer a lot.
2) For homeless encampments: is it actually hard to prove they were harassing people? Instead of breaking up the encampment, why not just put some cameras somewhere inaccessible and facing the encampment? Then put up a sign saying "This area is under surveillance. If you're harassed, note the time and file a police report. We'll check the footage and arrest the harasser." This feels like a better intermediate step to breaking up the encampment.
> For shoplifters, did the last 10 convictions happen in the last, say, 2 years? 6 months? I think that changes the answer a lot.
In which direction? I feel as if incidents over a longer period of time are stronger evidence that the individual is irreppairably defective, instead of simply having an episode.
If they stole a bunch of times like, many years ago, and then stole again now, I'd hit them with a less harsh punishment; some community service or a weekend in jail, or maybe even a warning. That seems like a person who fell off the wagon.
If they've been stealing a lot recently, that's a pattern and let's incapacitate.
They camera will be gone within a day. As will the sign. I have some direct experience with living near a homeless encampments and they will steal anything, especially signs telling them not to camp there or any other official message from the city.
I assumed the camera would be mounted, I've seen these people climb higher than I would have expected to filch stuff, particularly if they can hock it for opiates. The copper wire alone would be incentive enough for many of them.
You're going to arrest someone for stealing a sign? I'm in favor of it, but a lot of people would call it harsh.
I hear you. I'd imagined the camera is on a rooftop or something: not somewhere you can really get to it without either getting through a locked door or scaling a sheer wall.
I feel like prosecuting for stealing the sign is less harsh than clearing the encampment, and punishing the innocent along with the guilty. I'm also pretty confident that after a few sign arrests that sign will stop getting stolen. Or, if it isn't, and the law really is impossible to enforce on this encampment, well, then that's really justification for clearing it.
While I confess to being a "softie" (not particularly inclined toward punitive approaches) myself, it seems to me that shop-lifting is a case where even most capital punishment enthusiasts for, say, murder or child molestation, think of the action as largely about 1) young people who either 2) do it once or twice and then go straight whether caught or not or 3) have emotional/psychiatric problems that translate to "cry for help" and, at their age, are better solved with such "help" than with "punishment."
I just missed it (they implemented it after I got my hs diploma), so I asked my brother and in his view there wasn't much benefit of this program personal or social. For all we know they might have made it more useful since he did it, but the activities offered were not very useful: you could talk with old people or tidy up the offices of non-profits, but you couldn't choose picking up trash from public spaces or doing the groceries for old people which he felt would be more useful activities a high-schooler could do, so there is definitely room to develop this program.
That said, I definitely wish the governing party would focus more on these types of pro-social laws instead of the anti-democratic/anti-EU ones.
25% shoplifters is very strange to me. Do people count unknowingly taking things witbout paying? (I also did this) I don't think they should.
Related mildly interesting fact: If everyone who shoplifted says the proportion of people who shoplifted is 100% and everyone who did not shoplift says the proportion of people who shoplifted is 0%, then the average of the answers will be exactly the true proportion who shoplifted. (Maybe not that interesting, but I never before realised this.)
I'd count taking things by accident and not returning once you realised if you're still near the shop. But I'm surprised by how low the figure is tbh (bias: I shoplifted, not as a kid, not professionally/habitually, but not simply for thrills either).
Goes to show how dependent on our upbringing/social circles the idea of "normal" is. (I'm in the "this feels like a lot" team; intentional petty criminals almost feel like a different species to me)
I think it totally does, I'd say it's a cross between values and need. I stole stuff most when I had very little money day to day and easy opportunity to do so at low risk (in person visits to a large supermarket with a baby/toddler in a pram) so a saving of a tenner on a bag of nappies or a bottle of wine was meaningful -- let's say 15% of my weekly shop. Irrc it was accidental walking out with unpaid stuff that opened my eyes to that. I'm still p poor but don't steal now. Hard to tell why.
But I also know a lot of people (UK, middle aged, often with low grade university education, sometimes better than that) who would say something like "I'd never steal anything now, but when I was a teenager we'd nick makeup or sweets". And I suspect that among the respondent's to the survey this will be a big group, unless US is very different from the UK.
I'll say on my experience you shouldn't waste your time. I've done that a dozen or so times in my life and every time they didn't want the good back nor retroactive payment so I quit bothering if it was a honest mistake. You forget the employees don't care as they would have to do paperwork or answer questions about why/how, etc. Maybe a sole proprietorship would care but honestly I don't think they get shoplifted much as it is.
Interesting, in cases I did it by accident and decided not to steal the thing after all I'd just put it back on the shelf, often without alerting the staff at all.
I doubt most people who said they had shoplifted are in this category anyway.
That said, “I accidentally took it and forgot to check out” is by far the best cover for minor but practically beneficial shoplifting — having a middle class style pram of a “good” brand with an actual baby in it, sizable basket underneath and capacious folding hood to put stuff in and forget accidentally on purpose works really well, at least in British supermarkets and you can sort of convince yourself if you really want to that it WAS accidental.
I'd never steal from a small/non-chain shop so no idea how staff (often = owners) would react but I can't imagine them refusing to put an item through the till if you walked out with it and returned to pay for it.
Fair but likewise I'd suggest that it's also more true than not, i.e. the edge case really is the shoplifting over the accident hence they don't want alienate customers who made a legitimate error, you just write it off as a dead weight loss as part of doing business like restaurant food waste.
For me it usually happens when I'm using a shopping basket, rather than a cart, and I run out of room so I stick something in my pocket figuring when I go to get my wallet, I'll whack it and remember so put it on the on counter and then I end up missing it sometimes only to find out later that night when I'm at home and taking my clothes off or doing laundry later in the week.
The only real times I've gotten into arguments over shoplifting is I'm the sort that eats snack food in line (i.e. a single banana at the gas station while waiting to pay, I'll open the soda and drink it line, sip on the coffee prior to paying, etc.) and I've had an argument or two when a overzealously staffer about how I'm shoplifting as I hadn't paid yet and "the only reason you are paying is I caught you" .. yeah because nothing says shoplifting a diet coke like opening and drinking it right at the till.
PS: I'd never just sneakily put it back either though it crossed my mind. To me that looks more guilty, i.e. "I shoplifted but felt bad so I am trying to put it back" whereas since it was a honest mistake, no harm in just being open about it.
Not doing what? I'm not going to live my life in fear about eating a banana I'm going to pay for in thirty seconds while standing in line at the 7-Eleven. Nor am I going to go change out an entire basket of grocery for a cart because a potato didn't fit; we got pockets for a reason. Try not be scared all the time, you'll be happier for it.
Do they have to? The one time I accidentally shoplifted (I accidentally put it into my pocket instead of with the other stuff I was buying), I just snuck it back in the next time I went to the store and bought it normally. I suppose that could potentially cause problems with inventory, but I doubt it's worth doing paperwork for.
I fully admit I would never do that unless it was a small, independent shop.
Accidentally stealing from a giant corporation is not something I would consider morally wrong or even societally damaging if everyone did it. It's accidental after all.
I also would not consider it shoplifting since you never had the intention to do it in the first place.
Also there have been enough mistakes by cashiers in my life that made me pay too much.
We were a group buying stuff for grilling. Someone in the group took the initiative to, um, lower our bill. I went along with it. 1 perpetrator, 5-10 accomplices.
This kind of thing also has a certain thrill to it. There are many people who think of themselves as "I would *never* do that", but given a nudge, or a particularly favorable situation, it just slips out. Same with getting in a brawl, or drunk driving.
We have the letters of ordinary Germans during Hitler's regime, so to me it is perfectly natural that given the appropriate environment neurotypical humans can be convinced of anything. My surprisal comes from looking at the payoffs of this action in the current society. Maybe it's different for others, but where I live (Hungary) for most whitecollar job they require you to prove that you have no criminal record, so it seems a very risky decision to gamble your living for relatively little money.
A lot of people intentionally stole a candy bar at some point as a kid. (And I'm guessing a fair number of people who said "I've never shoplifted" actually did steal a candy bar and either forgot or don't want to admit it.) They are generally not adult serial shoplifters though.
It was a mix of adrenaline and fear of getting caught. If I squint hard enough, shoplifting addiction is something plausibly akin to people addicted to extreme sports, like free solo climbing. Using addiction in the non-chemical sense
I was something like 10 when I and two classmates noticed a plastic bag full of, ahem, not very child-appropriate magazines. Some pictures and some interesting read, not hard porn but definitely at least 16+. We helped ourselves to a copy each. The transgression of having such a thing in my possession dwarfed the "stealing" part, it didn't even register as a theft until much later. (By today's standards someone leaving that bag on a desk at school where kids could see it might face a much harsher punishment than a petty thief. Not that I think they actually did us any harm.)
I was something like 11 when I and some friends were playing on garage roofs and someone discovered (or possibly pried open, but I wasn't a part of that) a hole in one of them. We got in to look around, there was nothing interesting there save for a few bottles of some liquids. No idea what they were, one of them was identified as brake fluid I think. We stole them to see if they were flammable. I don't really remember what I thought at the time, save for the immense disappointment when none of the liquids deigned to burn.
I was something like 12 when I and two classmates helped ourselves to three ice creams from a vendor's freezer that was left unlocked. This time I clearly realized it was seriously wrong, and even considered paying for all of us. I never got around to, but that was it. Unless you count internet piracy or using public transport without paying.
I shoplifted a whole cart of groceries a few months back. I had bagged everything up and then found I didn't have my wallet. It was the end of the shift and a very tired employee voided the transaction and somehow making her return everything felt like a worse thing to do than just walking out with it.
That's a particularly extreme example, but between grabbing candy bars as kids, checking out organic fruit as regular, weird non habitual situations like my own, and accidentally walking out with something, I can easily see how it could be 25% answer yes to the ever , but less than 5% have actually intentionally, habitually lifted $50+ amounts.
If you have a smartphone, it's worth looking into getting Apple Pay or Google Pay or similar on it, for exactly this situation. (If your phone is your car key, like mine is, it's pretty hard to forget.)
Also, presumably this is a grocery store you go to regularly? You could make them whole on your next visit, after writing down or recording how much it cost.
I grew up in a pretty bad and poor neighbourhood, and my friends and I did it for some element of kicks (and being able to get things like candy when we didn't have money) by distracting someone and then running out.
Also, we started a business making CD-R mixtapes as middle schoolers and I had the brainiac idea of saving on expenses by stealing the 100 pack of CD-Rs.
At one point, I got caught, got banned from the store by a lady who was kind enough not to call the cops and my mother bore down upon me the guilt-induding wrath of an angry immigrant mom. My friends, on the other hand, continued.
I shoplifted quite a bit as a teen and so did all my friends, male and female. It seemed like a victimless crime to us. By the time I was 20 I stopped and soon after I became horrified by the idea I'd ever done this. Now I would feel so guilty if I found an accidental chapstick in my bag that didn't get rung, I'd return it. But the shoplifting we did was not minor nor for thrills and I'd guess was more like thousands of dollars between me and my friends, if you aggregate the incidents.
Partly I think teenagers are slightly sociopathic selfish and I let care about their friends and social norms/status in their friend group. Partly I think it just goes to show how much your perspective changes when you have zero money and there are people and companies with more money than they can even keep track of, such that you know they'll barely notice. It doesn't escape me that I started to find shoplifting horrifying only once I had some money, and the immorality of it has seemed directly inversely correlated with my ability to pay for and obtain things without having to do that. So while I now see it as a clear wrong, I almost suspect my feelings on that, as it's very easy to think it's wrong for people with nothing to take things from people with stuff when you're one of the people who has stuff.
Assuming that community service is beneficial to the community and the shoplifter alike:
The damage to hours ratio should be designed to make the overall shoplifting phenomenon a zero sum for the non-shoplifters (including the damages by those who got away).
So we can eventually stop worrying about it at all...
I was very surprised by the 25% shoplifting figure, (I did the survey too early to have been asked to guess the answer). I would have guessed ~1-2%. The idea of shoplifting for me, as a child, would have been horrifying- that would have been something only really bad people did.
I shoplifted a small number of times as a child, nothing of real value. It was together with/inspired by my friends at the time. So I think it really depends on your influences, and I think young teens might probably do something like this as a dare or to impress one another. Overall, 25% for ever shoplifting doesn't seem too high to me
I haven't gone back to look at the original survey, but I think the results may be skewed a bit by starting with "did you ever shoplift?" to which I said yes because I once kyped a coke when I was in the third grade, under similar circumstances. So when the questions went on to ask about punishment I had a little more "There but for the grace of God" mindset, even though he did specify > $100.
Yeah it's tough to get the order right on those things, or even to randomize them well (it's basically all or nothing randomness with Google Forms as far as I know).
Bingo. Likewise tell the cashier it's something else. I def personally know some middle age soccer moms that always ring their produce as whatever is cheapest.
My guess is most of those people live in California. For the last 10 years it's been a free-for-all here and normal people are sick of seeing the security footage of obviously professional criminals clearing off shelves and then getting acquitted. I was equally horrified by the notion as a rule-following middle class suburban kid but I'm more than happy to cheat the self-checkout at the grocery store now. I lived in SF when the we-don't-stop-shoplifters trend began and I almost went and looted an Xbox from Target before figuring that the political theology was implicitly racial and that the DA would probably love to prosecute an upper-middle class white guy. I'm naturally a law-and-order conservative but I refuse to have my commitment to social order be a competitive disadvantage; I consider that a morally defensible position. Lots of my upper-middle class peers share this view.
The data do not bear this out. Californias are 26% likely to have committed shoplifting, fractionally lower than the US average of 27%. There's not a lot of worldwide variation either; the UK is 27%, exactly like the US. Germany is a bit higher, Russia a bit lower.
On a totally unrelated note, two people mis-typed "Denmark" in two different ways. Are Denmarkers particularly poor at typing, I wonder? :-) Sweden and Brazil both have one typo each; there don't appear to be any others.
I don't believe those data are either accurate or gathered in good faith. Much CA shoplifting stopped being reported in recent years because both shop owners and police know that the DA won't prosecute. Police have had a political incentive to obfuscate that fact in their reporting practices. Scott has written about this. I don't remember when exactly but I think it was ~2 years ago.
I keep being amazed by people's magical thinking about psychiatry. The modal position is *no* punishment for an actual crime (shoplifting) but *life* imprisonment for "mental illness"?
I guess most people are "softies" in the sense that they care a lot about whether something is labeled "punishment" or "care."
I'm a civil libertarian, which seems to be a very different sort of creature, where I care a lot about *only* punishing the guilty and not violating anybody's rights, but I don't mind if penalties are "harsh but fair."
It's very hard to have an utilitarian perspective on the insane's wellbeing. A lot of the involuntary confinement is purportedly "for their own good", implying a positive utility factor. And the amount of suffering that they already go through while carrying their lives means that the additional loss of liberty may not affect the balance that much.
Huh? What magical thinking? That position (which btw no single person actually needs to hold for the stats to shake out this way) is perfectly coherent in a framework of minimizing deadweight loss to society.
So what's your proposal for dealing with a paranoid schizophrenic who refuses treatment or medication? Let him spend all day screaming at people on his street corner? Wait until he murders someone? I don't want people to end up like McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest either, but I don't see any way of dealing with the problem without some form of involuntary commitment.
Wait for them to actually commit a crime (like screaming in someone's face). Don't force them into indefinite involuntary commitment unless 1) they commit crimes if they don't take their meds, and 2) they will not take their meds without involuntary commitment.
I'd probably also give them the option to stop taking their meds once they're committed and have been on them long enough to know they work. If they're going to be committed either way, what difference does it make?
This is a terrible idea lol and most families of paranoid schizophrenics will strongly push back against it. They want their loved one cared for medicated against their will if necessary, they don’t want them talking to lampposts and sleeping in a urine soaked sleeping bag under a bridge
Maybe I'm confused, but 18% of your readers actually never got COVID? Back when I was looking at models all the time I thought they implied that 99%+ of the human population had gotten infected by like 2022.
Last time I checked about 5% of population has not had covid. To ascertain whether someone had had covid, subjects took a nucleocapsid test, which reacts to the antibodies developed in response to actual covid but not to the antibodies developed in response to vaccine. I am pretty sure I have not had covid. It is unlikely that someone of my age and risk factors would have an asymptomatic case. And every time I've had either sniffles or general malaise I've tested, total of maybe 5 times since covid arrived, and all tests have been negative.
1. that false positive COVID test results are creating an impression of higher asymptomicity.
2. Any study using self-reported RDT results should considered suspect (this probably applies to Scott's survey question, as well).
3. Even studies that use PCR tests can give false positive results. For instance, bad primers can give false positives. (In fact, there was a scandal a while back about the shitty quality primers that one major medical supplier was selling.)
4. Of the studies that were done on rates of asymptomicity, the paper points out that many fail to disclose the type of tests they used to determine rates of asymptomicity—and few studies try to control for false positive rates.
5. Another problem with many of the studies was that they didn't monitor their subjects for a full two weeks. Symptoms can appear later in the infection and continue beyond the two week infection window.
Although I don't buy into the idea that there are no asymptomatic cases, I suspect they much much fewer than people assume. If SARS2 is hijacking your cell's machinery to reproduce itself, it should be causing at least mild symptoms — i.e. sore throat, sniffles, etc. And many people confuse peri-symptomatic (very mild symptoms) with being asymptomatic).
The question said "if it was either confirmed by a test, or you're more than 75% sure you had it", so most asymptomatic or nearly-asymptomatic infections don't count.
e.g. my father once got a sore throat which lasted like an afternoon and only tested himself on my mother's insistence which he gave in to because they already had a test at home -- if he hadn't, there would be no way he would have ever known it was COVID
Don't antibodies decay with time? If you hand an asymptomatic case in 2021 say, and was never vaccinated, we likely wouldn't be able to tell either way.
Yes, they do. They become undetectable 1-2 years after infection. After that, prior exposure to covid (as opposed to immunity from vax) can still be identified via t-cell tests, though I believe the blood bank study I’ve been going by did not do t-cell tests. So while for sure some of the people who tested negative on the nucleocapsid test had been positive on it earlier, it is implausible that all the people testing negative had had covid, just not in the 18 mo or so before the test.
Actually, a study was done of SARS2 antibody seroconversion, and only about 1% of the study group seroconverted in a year. But I believe they used a very sensitive test for that study. mRNA vaccines and push nAB titers to between ~3,000 - 10,000 BAU/mL in most people. The most sensitive (and therefore the most expensive) tests are sensitive down to 0.1 BAU/mL. Below 1.0 BAU/mL is considered to be seronegative because that value is below the noise level for those tests. But after a year, the majority of people vaccinated for SARS2 should still be well above that 1.0 BAU/mL cutoff point. I haven't seen any studies that track nAB titers over multiple years, though. And, of course, the rate of seroconversion may speed up over longer periods of time.
My friends in medical and medical-adjacent jobs, education, and a few others seem to all require testing on any respiratory infection.
My job doesn't do much beyond, "Stay home if you have a fever."
So while I may have a slight fever, I don't bother to figure out exactly what sort of virus it is. I just isolate for a few days, and watch for worsening symptoms; my friend the elementary school teacher with the same symptoms is required to test and learns they "Have COVID.".
I'd be interested in seeing good data about people who never had the right set of symptoms but nonetheless later had a positive antibody test.
Aside from asymptomatic cases (which other commenters have mentioned), if someone properly protected themselves from infection for the first year of the pandemic, then their immune system reacted well to the vaccine, they might well have never been meaningfully infected.
Yup, I think that is my situation. AFAIK, I either never had it, only had an asymptomatic case, or had so mild a case that the symptoms were ambiguous (we all sneeze now and then...).
Hi, I've never gotten covid. My husband did but I didn't catch it from him, and that was back when they were handing out tests like candy so I know I wasn't just asymptomatic. Only sniffles I've had since 2019 were from cold (the temperature, not the virus) or allergies.
I've never tested positive, had no respiratory illness during the pandemic, 3-4 since then (after I was vaccinated), which I would classify as "colds". Used rapid tests and all were negative. PCR was unavailable by that time.
I'm one of those people. I assume I actually got an asymptomatic case but I've used those over-the-counter tests for every cold I've had since 2020 and I've never tested positive.
But that's exactly right -- you are correct to assume you got an asymptomatic case and happened to never catch it with a test. I'm surprised that 18% of readers don't get that.
Nobody else has said this, but uh... devoted blog readers might have a lower quotient of "time spent outside with other humans" than the general public. I'm not dunking here, I mean, it's true of me! If you don't go into the world the COVID can't getcha.
According to the CDC, by partway through 2023 98% of people tested positive for antibodies. (https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/changing-threat-covid-19.html#:~:text=In%20January%202021%2C%20only%2021,one%20COVID%2D19%20vaccine%20dose.). However, not all of those people had had the virus. Some got their antibodies from infection, some from vax, and of course some from both: "In January 2021, only 21% of people aged 16 years and older had COVID-19 antibodies. By the second half of 2023, 98% had antibodies from vaccination, prior infection, or both. To date, more than 81% of Americans of all ages have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose."
Models are nothing more than hypotheses and should be considered tentative unless confirmed by actual data. The classic SIR models did a very bad job predicting the infection rates of the various vars during the pandemic. For a while, the CDC had a model tracking page for the expected case numbers for the coming month. About models for about 20 research groups were tracked on that page. None of them were accurate more than a week or two out, and most were wildly off. Eventually, they just began averaging all the model predictions together and stopped IDing the individual models, probably because it was embarrassing the modelers. Even the average trendline predictions were pretty bad.
Is it just me who finds the architectural winners kind of... unsettling? Like it's too much in a way.
I don't really mind the office winner (half of Central Europe urban centres looks like that after all (the image is Warsaw right?)), but it feels kind of imposing and I'd prefer a friendlier style.
While the house winner feels like a hyperstimulus, in an uncanny way
I like the office, and I know what you mean about European urban centres (it reminded me of Paris). But that house! I just see the huge amount of work it takes to keep something like that looking like that. And I see the poky insides of those upstairs rooms with half the walls being the roof — nowhere to stand an eight-foot tall bookcase! The horror! That is a house built to look at, not to live in.
Same. I choose the winning house for being the closest to vernacular architecture out of the bunch. But I would be going for a much simpler version. And definitely not keeping it up to such photogenic standards every day.
I was thinking - how on earth do I know whether I like it if I don't know how well-insulated it is, how drafty it is, how it will age, etc.
If you say "ignore that" - well, presumably you are asking me what house I'd like to live in? I mean, some Escher engravings look really nice, but would you like to live in a place without a well-defined upwards direction?
Yes, that's exactly what it's asking. I certainly took it as "Assume all else equal regarding insulation, ease of cleaning, etc."
And yes, I think it's meant to be a place you'd like to live, but probably a fair proportion of the answers were influenced by the looks "from the outside", especially since that's how the question about the office block was phrased.
Right, but it's difficult to believe that they are equal regarding insulation, ease of cleaning, etc.
At some level that's actually impossible - the Franklloydwrightesque house is better for places with lots of sunlight in summer, because of the overhangs; it will waste less energy on AC.
Ah, that one is *actually* by FLW. I guess calling it FLWesque is still technically correct (and even conveys information - there may be FLW houses that are less obviously by FLW or his school).
Warsaw? No, it’s obviously the older part of San Francisco!
I think that was my second favorite, I’m surprised to see it won. The house may also have been my second favorite, and I do see what you mean about hyperstimulus. That said, it had an actual garden (which didn’t have any tomatoes, but tomatoes are plantable) and was a reasonably old-fashioned style, and those tend to be the things I care about.
Also wood frame. Very important for dealing with earthquakes.
I think I rated it highly and this makes me reconsider.
Warsaw is not a pleasant place to live in, and the buildings aren't really appealing in context (i.e., when you're walking right underneath, rather than taking a photo from a pleasant faraway angle). (To be fair, this is true of pre-modernist, modernist and contemporary glass-covered buildings alike.)
I wonder how much of the "appeal" of traditional buildings comes from, well, increasing the distance. Including metaphorically, by not having to interact with them all day every day. The best places to actually live in I've encountered are more or less brutalist - just don't show the buildings off, hide them behind trees. Focusing on the visual appeal of the architecture is probably optimizing for the wrong thing in the first place.
That's why I thought the buildings were AI generated - to remove associations, positive or negative, with real-world places or when it comes to houses also potential privacy issues.
I am personally a fan of traditional architecture and I liked that office building the most as well. However, I have worked only in brutalist and modern buildings, preferred the modern ones as they had more open and common spaces. I also used to live in an old apartment building from 1800s whose facade unfortunately underwent some sad reconstruction, but many other buildings in the area were preserved in the old aesthetics (like the building in the picture, but this was in Germany) and I liked the area for it.
I think it is possible to optimize for both comfort/function and outside appearance at the same time. If there is a compromise, I find it's more often in very new buildings as old buildings typically have simple shapes with embellished surfaces while the very modern ones can have slanted walls and such that can affect the interior.
Considering that much of Vienna looks like the warsaw building and is the city with the highest quality of life in the world (and where I live, it's very nice for the most part) l'm not convinced by your assessment.
I also don't get the point of them not being appealing when you walk below them. I find brutalist building horrifyingly ugly from any distance.
Nope, not just you. I want less of that, too - I assume my brain dislikes it because it's much more 'busy' than the simple geometries of modern architecture, but I don't *really* know if that's the reason. I do know that I find the "favourite style of house" image actively ugly and hope something like that doesn't pop up in my neighbourhood, but I accept that I'm apparently the odd one out. I'm also an avid lover of winter as a season (and strongly opposed to summer), so being the odd one out is normal to me, anyway. Maybe something's just crosswired in my head.
One of Scott's well-known prejudices (which I share, BTW) is his dislike of modern architecture that looks like it was 1990s CGI. I'd expect his blog to be enriched in people who like older styles.
Wouldn't it be logically inconsistent for a large majority of ACX readers to shoplift a lot and also prefer severe punishments for shoplifters? Unless they're feeling guilty, have very poor self-control, and have high self-awareness of responding well to external incentives?
There are two kinds of self-control. One is for preventing action that look good in the short term but will end up hurting you (through the reaction of your peers e.g.). The one you are talking about is about managing your karma when nobody is watching.
It is consistent to want a coordination problem solved by societal intervention rather than by asking everyone to "be good".
The punishment question specifies a minimum of $100. The "have you ever shoplifted" question has no qualifiers. It seems perfectly consistent to me to have--for example--swiped a candy bar as a kid and still support more severe punishments for higher-value shoplifting. Individual, small items worth $100 or more aren't that easy to come by in most stores: to me a threshold like that implies a somewhat higher degree of deliberation and ill intent (though I still skew towards leniency).
I downloaded the results just to try this and it takes filtering *three* columns (all fairly public info about me) to get the results down to just me. (Filtering two columns gets it down to four people, one of whom is likely my brother.)
This concerns me also to the point I left many answers blank. Maybe next time I will fill in everything but opt out of data sharing, or just claim to live one state over.
It's probably worth some thought why the comment section is so much more *extra* than the median respondent; for instance, it may be that there's a pathological cascade where more extreme voices make more moderate commenters feel timid, or it might be that overly-online extremophiles post early and often, filling up the comments before more chill people even see the post. Either way, it could suggest different moderation approaches.
I, for one, don't feel the need to advertise/debate opinions that I consider standard/normal. For example, I'm against both slavery and factory farming, but the slavery argument is well and truly won in the court of public opinion, right? I really don't need to start a post on the open thread laying out my reasons for holding my anti slavery position.
I think it's the same reason that online reviews attract extreme opinions. I don't bother writing a Yelp review unless the restaurant is either awesome enough or terrible enough to overcome my inertia.
I think I'm in the "verges on extreme" category on here, at least in terms of combativeness. I do it because I'm a high-disagreeability conservative and this is about the only forum online that I can actually engage with intelligent liberals without getting censored or banned. If the general culture was less oppressive towards conservative viewpoints then I'd probably have less pent-up energy to vent here. My guess is that argumentative conservatives are overrepresented on ACX because it's one of their only outlets.
This is massively to Scott's credit, btw, especially since he's nominally liberal. This really is one of the few forums anywhere (at least that I'm aware of) where both sides can come together in respectful debate.
Among 611 cisgender women respondents, 154 think men have it harder dating, 331 say the same, 80 say women, the rest didn't answer.
Among 121 transgender women respondents, 49 think men have it harder, 43 say the same, 14 say women, the rest didn't answer.
Among 4682 (!) cisgender men respondents, 1953 said men have it harder, 1998 say the same, 401 say women.
There were 21 transgender men respondents so I figure the sample size is too small.
I was expecting everyone to blame the other gender, and you do see more men saying they have it harder, but a plurality seem to say the genders have it the same.
Well, that one has an empirical answer. Scott stripped out the ones digit, probably for privacy reasons, but we can still stratify by age.
Looking at cisgender people because the transgender population will give me all subsets below 100:
Women in their 20s (n=79): 34 say men, 30 say the same, 5 say women
Women in their 30s (n=242): 71 say men, 134 say the same, 21 say women
Women in their 40s (n=160): 33 say men, 89 say the same, 27 say women
Women start moving from saying 'men' to 'the same' in their 30s. The surprising thing to me is how few women think women have it harder. I put it down to sampling bias given the lack of female nerds...um, ACX readers. (The lopsided sample sizes speak for themselves!)
Men in their 20s (n=509): 260 say men, 181 say the same, 36 say women
Men in their 30s (n=1718): 820 say men, 675 say the same, 121 say women
Men in their 40s (n=1455): 547 say men, 662 say the same, 121 say women
I would definitely say the effect is there among men, though it doesn't really seem to kick in until after 40 (!).
Non-nerd women don't think women have "dating" harder either. Am nerd woman. Most of my friends are not as nerdy. It is simply obvious that we have had a much easier time dating than any of our boyfriends based on, I don't know, having functional sensory organs to perceive the world with.
That isn't to say women may not have it harder in relationships later on; I do think it balances out later (and have some controversial opinions on the subject). We're just aware it's much easier to find men who are attracted to you than women who are attracted to you initially.
Yes, I basically agree with you as long as we're talking nerds--this is an ACX survey after all, not Barstool Sports or Refinery 29. (And your final statement, perhaps intentionally, still evaluates to 'true' whether you're a man or woman seeking women!)
My point is we're stuck with sample bias and it may not apply elsewhere. I always seem to read non-nerd women in the papers complaining about how hard it is to find someone and how awful men are.
Later on in relationships, I agree--if you want kids there's the whole 'get to commit before your eggs run out' thing I don't envy, and the risk of abuse etc. Conversely there's all the ways women can weaponize the various court systems and the way people tend to sympathize with the woman in disputes. It's one of these things where it's always easier to see how the other side has it better, which is why I am surprised we didn't see that pattern here.
Controversial opinions? This is ACX, go for it. :)
This question doesn't seem very interesting, the results should be completely unsurprising and anyone who thinks they're remotely surprising or interesting is almost certainly equivocating on the meaning of "dating".
If you asked about sex, then obviously it's a fact that men have a greater intrinsic desire for sex, obviously everyone is aware of this, and the only people who would think to deny it (or who would think to portray the resulting fact that women can far more easily get something they don't want, precisely because they don't want it, as something remotely interesting or significant) are people for whom acknowledging the existence of objective biological reality is absolutely
Off The Table.
If you asked about marriage, I don't see why there wouldn't be an equal balance, most likely with each sex favouring their own to a small extent. There's no reason to think "who has it easier in getting married" wouldn't even out, assuming equal numbers of men and women.
"Dating" is ambiguously between these in emphasis, but I think because of Modern Society people are likely to interpret it slightly more towards "sex". Thus explaining the partial skew.
There's a lot of these equiovocations going on in these kinds of discussions, and a laziness about defining terms.
I think we underestimate how much extreme positioning is social posturing.
Social posturing is weirder than it's usually depicted in this blog - people do social posturing alone in their rooms, or with hostile audiences, all the time. The point isn't entirely signaling to others. It's partially creating a consistent and well-defined self-concept, *keeping in mind* that that self-concept will be judged by peers and friends.
I run in extremely far-left circles (and am not thrilled about it). But I've noticed activists that actually do activist things in the world are way way more moderate than people who just post on the internet. Actually interacting with the problem instead of talking a lot naturally introduces you to realities that force you to depart from ideology.
For anyone who just wants to do some simple looking through the data, I've (well, mostly Claude) made a simple to use Google Sheet where you just enter the column letter and it does a GroupBy and charts it:
If I read this right, of people who took the survey, you changed about 500 of their votes. But your audience is some multiple larger than the number of people who took the survey, and to the extent the survey is a representative sample of your audience, you could infer you changed an even larger number of votes within the population of your whole audience.
Not to engage certain, uh, "Spencer's Gifts" stereotypes, but has anyone formally studied whether the self-reported profundity of psychedelic experiences is IQ-linked?
I'm hesitant to endorse harsher punishment for "10 prior arrests" because I value the principle of innocent til proven guilty, and it wasn't specified that this person had actually been previously _convicted_. Though maybe you'd eventually bring me around through some Bayesian argument based on the sheer number of arrests clearly incidating a pattern of some kind.
This feels like dodging the hypothetical on a technicality, but I do concede that in the event that someone has been arrested ten times for shoplifting, and not a single one of those occurrences resulted in a conviction, then a lengthy prison sentence would be unwarranted.
You're still assuming the person wasn't innocent, convictions don't change that. I have multiple convictions including some people consider extremely heinous that I got a decade for, I'm genuinely innocent of everyone of them. You seem be confused about the US legal system in practice, not theory.
It's been written about, here and other places and no I'm not going to relink it. It's a story full of injustice, tragedy, and corruption like any good Greek comedy complete with no happy endings but likewise it's quite banal as well. The nutshell though is in society you will always have those people that for whatever reason, the general population just instinctively finds them utterly repulsive and as such wants them harmed and they know that by aura alone for lack of a better word, i.e. you know the people I'm talking about. People you utterly hate just by looking at them or within five seconds of a conversation whether it's tone, body language, etc. and I'm just one of those people.
Two good examples here are once I was leaving a large municipal family oriented festival, the crosswalk light changed but there were still so many people that the crowd kept crossing. I was individually pulled out of that crowd of five hundred "jaywalkers" by a police officer standing by doing crowd control, thrown to the ground, kicked, and then ticketed for jaywalking all in front of my family and thousands others simply for making eye contact with the officer (and he was quite open about that). Another time back during the BLM times, I was doing my daily five mile walk around the park as I do every day and had for years and BLM just happened to be holding a protest. As I walked by it, one of the activists ran over and punched me in the face right in front of my kid and right in front of an officer because "I was the problem" (i.e. I'm not black). The cop walked over and said "I hope you learned your lesson. We don't want your kind here, GTFO. the park or I'll arrest you and have your child taken by family services while you sit in a cell for three days". During COVID I got assaulted three times by mobs right in front of a police officer for not masking outside at a gas station and they just smiled and walked away.
Also once you pick up a record you no longer get any positive discretion, every interaction with any officer of the legal system hostile and charged. You don't get warning for speeding, you don't get cops looking the other way for missing the crosswalk timer by two seconds, etc. hence why repeat offenders are common as is recidivism, it's not that they commit crimes at a higher rate that the general public, it's simply they have a microscope on their lives now and a target on their back so the slightest infraction will always cause the maximum penalty. For example while I was on probation I got two months in jail for going 1 mph over the speed limit as a technical probation violation because it's a probation violation to do the impossible, not commit any crime where the standard is "was attested by someone that wasn't you", i.e. you don't even need a conviction nor arrest for the parole violation to trigger.
As for my heinous crime, I was convicted of recklessly committing a strict liability speech crime because "A reasonable person, not you obviously, would have refrained from engaging in legally protected speech because they know there are edge cases where said speech is criminal depending solely on the recipient of it and it's impossible to know ones audience. As such you were unreasonable in speaking and here's ten years for it". I would have actually got less time had I did it intentionally or knowingly the judge said as then I could show remorse or be rehabilitated but because it's impossible to rehabilitate or show remorse for a reckless strict liability crime as there was no knowledge, no bad action, nor did bad intent existed hence nothing to fix, he felt obligated to impose the maximum sentence since I couldn't get "better".
Now one might ask how can one even logically reckless commit a strict liability speech crime and you'd be amazed how the legal system doesn't even try and explain it. They simply said "We have proof you said something and that speech is offensive out of context but not a crime unto itself normally. Luckily for us we changed the law last year to criminalized said words when said to police officer but not anyone else to facilitate stings. Unfortunately for you, the guy you were talking with was a undercover police officer goading you specifically so he could arrest you under the law enforcement speech exception as otherwise it wouldn't have been a crime even, in fact the legislation in passing the law change explicitly prohibited us from charging that exact speech to anyone that wasn't a cop". Basically I jokingly in a bar agreed that I'd give ten dollars to see some politician dead with a random bar stranger I'd just met five minutes ago and was having a good humor bar convo with over some drinks while watching some politician give a speech on the bar television and I was successfully convicted for solicitation of murder and yes it stuck because the black letter law criminalized those words alone based on the legal theory of recklessness and legal presumptions about contracts and truthfulness of speech, i.e. "you said it so it must be true and you no longer have a presumption of innocence", i.e. "you on tape stated you would give money to see someone dead to an undercover police officer" and since the law explicitly made it strict liability, yes jokes are illegal too as they don't have to prove any intent.
I don't mean this in a rude way; I mean it very earnestly as helpful feedback: I don't think the issue is that you are a person people "utterly hate just by looking at them or within five seconds".
Maybe some of what you say is true, but I do not believe it with the details you presented, and so many hard-to-believe claims cast doubt on your honesty and/or capacity to accurately perceive reality.
In particular...
It does not seem credible to me to claim that a police officer would assault a member of a crowd in front of thousands of witnesses, and then openly admit to having committed assault.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that a police officer threatened to arrest you after he saw you become a crime victim during your morning walk.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that there were "mobs" violently enforcing mask-wearing, or that they on three separate occasions committed assault against you in front of police officers.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that speeding 1 mph was, in isolation, considered a parole violation that would lead to two months of jail time.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that you were were convicted of a crime just for making a joke about killing a politician, because the US (where you seem to live, if you bumped into BLM protests on your morning walk) has very strong protections for speech that cannot be overridden by state or federal law.
And yet it's all true, spend more time around the criminal law system, it's quite common place. Likewise true, though you won't find it credible, is every woman I personally know in this municipality who has ever had a formal interaction with the police, has been sexual assaulted by the police including, my own daughter, at least once in their life. My teenager daughter for example three weeks ago was pulled over for failing to come to complete stop, the cop fondled her for "his safety" and then told her if she showed him her breasts he would let her go without a ticket.
And you are wrong on speech, there are free speech exceptions and the big three, which many people go to prison on myself included, which the SCOTUS consistently upholds, is conspiracy, solicitation, and speech integral to the crime. There is no requirement for mens rea in the Constitution, it's just assumed unless the legislation explicitly says otherwise and in my states case, they did. My state has defined ONLY in the case of communication with a police officer, that simply writing, saying, or engaging in pure speech in which exchanging resources for the death of another is stated, that is the entirety of the crime and both the state and US supreme courts have upheld it including under recklessness. The law is what it is, it's not what you want it to be.
It used to be we required things like intent, knowingly, actus reus, etc with strict liability crimes being reserved for petty misdemeanors but legislators across America, ever since the SCOTUS upheld strict liability felonies during the start of the drug war, have starting spreading them to speech as well to combat "hate", "violence", "trafficking", etc because catching criminals takes effort hence it's easier to manufacture them.
Your lack of imagination to the point it can't even cover reality as it is is why the US criminal justice system is broken, because people like you make up the overwhelming average juror and can't fathom the system as it really is. It's not Law and Order like on TV. Innocent people are routinely convicted to the point it's the norm.
A lot of "and I just did this teeny minor thing and the law system threw me in jail for parole violation" turns out to be "on top of having committed sixteen serious violations which I didn't mention".
So if any of this stuff happened, our friend here might be "there is no reason at all to think I'm a vicious criminal even if I did do vicious criminal stuff because I think I'm justified in my actions and the pigs are just out to get me for no reason other than they hate me" type.
I would bet all the money I have that this is full of embellishments if not nearly entirely made up. It's not just the fantasy and unlikeliness of the stories; you have similar writing to conspiracy theorists and schizophrenics. I can't tell if these are lies or delusions.
I could've maybe believed any one of the claims in isolation except the pro-masking mob assaulting him three times in front of cops. That one's clearly the product of a mind untethered from reality.
The long run-on sentence about the bar incident does sound very like the schizo train of thought, when describing incidents they believe happened but didn't, that I've heard used by schizophrenic person.
I don't know if I believe you. Getting punched by a BLM rioter is plausible, but "get out or I'll have your kid taken by social services" by the cop immediately afterwards? Bit too much of an escalation. "Get out of here or I can't protect you", yes I'd believe that. "Get out of here or I'll give you something to cry about", even I could believe. But the whole "and then I'll get you and your little dog too" is too much gilding on the lily.
That sounds like the Gwen and company account, in the Ziz cult discussion, of what they claimed happened after they were arrested for the CFAR protest: "and they sexually assaulted us, refused us food and water, inflicted concussions and hypothermia on us, and much more!"
Given that this account was believed without too much demur, and the associated set of people went on to commit assault and murder, yeahhhh... I'm thinking this "for no reason at all people attack me and jail me" account is also somewhat embellished by someone who, if arrested, maybe did do something to deserve it.
How about suspended sentences? Ten previous arrests, ten previous convictions, but sentences suspended to 'give them a second chance' etc.
I think if you've had ten+ arrests and convictions, never spent any time in jail, and get arrested yet again for the same crime, then jail time looks like what is needed and not "this is your fifteenth second chance".
The distinction between commenters and survey results makes me wonder about the "silent majority" on other publications. I have a negative opinion of the Free Press mainly because of their comments.
In "Why We Did It" Tim Miller writes that after the Breitbart founder's death, Steve Bannon followed a strategy of "centering the commenters" in editorial decisions. Those folks were the the precursors to MAGA. Wouldn't surprise me to learn Catturd2 was one of them.
There's another explanation for attractiveness (or intelligence, or driving ability) having the majority above average, unlike height. There's not a single accepted measure of attractiveness, so rugged people think ruggedness is handsome, thin people think (correctly) thin is in, etc. A rugged person might correctly rank themselves among rugged people, and might rank the thin ones correctly among thin people, but will boost rugged people over thin people. I call it the Lake Wobegon Effect.
I like this explanation. I don't know if you meant it but it reads like the preferences are downstream of one's own appearance, so I want to point out there could also be different reasons. First, obviously, one's opposite-sex parental figure during their formative years seems likely to be the primary source of preferences, and if they are their biological parent or other close relative, there should be a significant correlation because of that. But second and somewhat more interestingly, if preferences are partly genetic we would still expect this to contribute to correlation because one's biological parents tend to be attracted to each other and one inherits half of these genes from each parent, too.
I think there's also a social aspect. If a group has a particular beauty standard, people who are attractive by that standard will get a lot of positive reinforcement for hanging out with that group. So I would expect people to (in expectation) wind up in social groups that rate them as somewhat above average.
Thanks for doing this survey and publishing the results, year after year. It's refreshing to have someone do the legwork of actually collecting some real data about the world, and to look at it for real, instead of the ever-present temptation of just theorycrafting in the safety of one's own mind.
The first question that pops to mind is if this is due to higher neuroticism or that masks give them freedom from awkward stares. My guess is the former.
It's both, and also that masking makes passing significantly easier. Hides facial hair + various other facial secondary sexual characteristics that contribute heavily to snap gender-gestalt impressions, gives an entirely plausible excuse for voice distortion/not talking much (frequent giveaway), lowers makeup-required surface area. And for the autist comorbid, also helps hide blankface awkwardness + inappropriate facial expressions + lack of willingness to talk, which are also fairly easy tells.
But I think neuroticism still dominates more than pragmatism. I try to keep my "community" at a long arm's length these days, yet it's still hard to miss the Covid Disproportionately Affects Trans People, New Genocide Vector-type mindset, even in current_year.
Could you please elaborate on this? I can see at least two very different ways you could get from sterility to it not being genocide, and there are probably others.
Sterile -> no common ancestry -> not an ethnicity -> not genocide
Sterile -> defective -> okay to kill -> not genocide
Also it's just not a genetically-based group definition, so the concept of genocide is nonsensical. You can't interrupt the propagation of a group if that group already doesn't propagate. Like you can't 'genocide' Star Wars fans.
I like your analogy. Imagine if someone went out of their way to destroy star wars fandom, trying to ban star wars fanfics, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-star-wars ads, etc. I probably wouldn't call that genocide, but that person is obviously evil and something is very very wrong with them.
I always figured it was politically coded, and most transgender people are going to be more left-wing because the right loves to use them as a punching bag. You'll also note more women still mask than men.
I liked the mask results, showing once again the Astral Codex virtue signalling crowd is strong hence why I take most comments here with a grain of salt; you all goose-step much as the general population.
The "What is your height in centimeters" question has a lot of anomalous answers between 20 and 30. I'm pretty sure that those are Americans who accidentally divided their height in inches by 2.54, instead of multiplying it by 2.54.
Similarly there are nine answers between "1.57" and "1.85", which clearly accidentally answered in meters instead of centimeters.
I think there was a major confounder for the repeat offender question: What punishment they've had in the past. The question didn't say, so probably people either made guesses based their experience, or assumed they previously had received the punishment they gave in the first question. So for example someone who wants to be tough on crime might have assumed they were under-punished previously, and selected an even higher desired punishment than they would if that person had been more harshly punished than they would be in (this person's perception of) reality.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? If they had received a harsh punishment before and they relapsed anyways, that necessitates an even harsher punishment this time around.
Or maybe it means it's time to admit punishing them isn't working, so either they'll keep on shoplifting or spend their whole life in prison, and the first one is less expensive.
ACX Meetup Czar here, of course I went straight to the meetup numbers.
Meetup (2025)
Have you ever been to an Astral Codex Ten meetup?
No, I don't want to: 1701, 30.7%
No, I want to but I just haven't made it there yet: 1461, 26.3%
No, I don't know of any, or can't make it to any: 1010, 18.2%
Yes, I attended one meetup: 544, 9.8%
Yes, I've attended a few meetups: 585, 10.6%
Yes, I attend meetups regularly: 244, 4.4%
Meetup Approval (2025)
For people who went to ACX meetups: how much did you enjoy it?
4: 572, 41.7%
3: 335, 24.4%
5: 312, 22.7%
2: 119, 8.7%
1: 34, 2.5%
Then I compared them to the 2022 numbers
Meetup (2022)
Have you ever been to an Astral Codex Ten meetup?
No, I don't want to: 2221, 32.1%
No, I want to but I just haven't made it there yet: 1884, 27.3%
No, I don't know of any, or can't make it to any: 1337, 19.3%
Yes, I attended one meetup: 630, 9.1%
Yes, I've attended a few meetups: 605, 8.8%
Yes, I attend meetups regularly: 233, 3.4%
Meetup Approval (2022)
For people who went to ACX meetups: how much did you enjoy it?
5: 330, 22.4%
4: 639, 43.4%
3: 359, 24.4%
2: 120, 8.2%
1: 23, 1.6%
Overall that looks like noise, possibly meetups are getting a tiny bit less attended and a tiny bit worse. That's discouraging. I took over as ACX Meetup Czar at the start of 2023, so this is the range where I might have impacted things and these are obvious questions to check if I'm changing anything. Meaningfully changing these numbers is on the one hand ambitious (the in-person community is big and only a small piece of it is gathered in any one place) but I'm an ambitious person.
Looking back, there's not much I did that I would have expected to move the needle on whether someone attends a meetup. ACX Everywhere (I think) the main source of new attendees, but that was going on for years before I started. There's a bunch of things I've done to try and upgrade how much people enjoy ACX meetups though, and none of that's showing up. Worthwhile for me to think about as I'm planning this year I guess.
In my experience, the NYC meetups have gotten worse (for my preferences). In 2021 it seemed like a diverse group of interesting blog readers, now seems like mostly Rationalists with low social skills. So I no longer go.
I think there are also other communities in NYC for people to hang out with that have "better" but also similar vibes, like TPOT/Fractal.
There was a dramatic shift from '21 to '22 specifically in NYC - I think it went from ~150 to ~35 people and I really don't know why. Maybe '21 specifically got a boost from pent-up social energy after Covid, and I think His Scottness personally attended that year which also helped. But I don't see how either of those could explain a 75% or so drop.
There seems to be a general decline in attendance numbers starting around 2022 or 2023. My two primary guesses are that the jump was a post-covid event, or that my predecessor was better at this role than I am. A third guess is something about general excitement- SSC went on hiatus in 2020, and ACX came back in 2021.
My guess from survey results is that Scott attending a meetup usually boosts attendance by ~3x, so the 75% drop is a bit steep but not out of range of my expectation. This rough pattern shows up a lot, and it's the kind of thing I keep an eye on in surveys for.
From what I understand NYC's ACX meetups have a tremendous amount of influence from the OBNYC group. Your story isn't uncommon, and I've heard versions of it from a few other people in New York. Figuring out whether to and how to skill up the social skill waterline of rationalists groups is an unsolved problem, one I've taken a couple cursory stabs at. I want to say I appreciate your feedback!
"No one impressive goes there, so no one impressive wants to go there" is a known chicken and egg problem. If the energy has moved to TPOT and/or Fractal, long live TPOT and Fractal, though I'm likely to hang out in the Rationalist and ACX end of things for now. (Since, you know, ACX Meetup Czar instead of Fractal Meetup Czar.)
I assume you mean 500 people of those who took the survey? I.e. do you expect many more total? I have no idea what fraction of regular readers are survey takers. 1/5? 1/100?
The question "Have you ever shoplifted?" is all too common example of a question I don't know how to answer. I was 5 or 6 years old and did it once (bubble gum and baseball card) and was almost caught. So I could answer "yes" but that seems counter to the intent of the question.
Can we take a second to talk about what's going on with those dating-to-marriage age chart?
What I'm mostly curious about is what exactly happens when you get close to 40? Why are your chances of meeting a spouse practically nil? Is it that people give up on marriage by that point if they haven't gotten married already? Maybe they were never meant for it to begin with? Or they realized it wasn't what they wanted, with the benefit of time and wisdom?
For most people, if you wanted to get married badly enough AND you were capable of it, you would've done it by then. There are a few edge cases where that doesn't apply but for the 95% it covers it.
I think that Scott must have done a rather good job of weeding out the Lizardmen given that the percentage of people demanding death for all shoplifters is basically zero.
Regarding punishments for shoplifters, annoying/dangerous homeless people, and really any other category, one missing variable is whether we're talking about the penalties imposed at sentencing or the penalties actually experienced by the convict. I answered the questing in the latter sense, but I know that if I actually want the persistent shoplifter to spend a month in jail, that probably only happens if he's sentenced to a year in jail.
I really like modern architecture (a la Richard Meier) but had to vote against it because I didn't like the specific house you used. For something like that, I think a group of different houses in the same style would be way better than a single picture for each example.
I've been increasingly feeling like Scott is responding to vocal minorities of extremists in his articles - from politics to prison to moral philosophy.
Here are the plots for some of the variables that are poorly displayed by Google forms : age, State, IQ, SAT (math and verbal/reasoning), height and BMI.
Most Americans know their height rounded to the nearest inch, not nearest centimeter. Since inches are larger units than centimeter, they offer less precision. That means that after converting heights from inches to centimeters, the results will peak at centimeter values which closest correspond to a whole number of inches. {5’6”,5’7”,5’8”,5’9”} = {168,170,173,175}
That's interesting, I'd like to see how over/under-represented readers are. Like which states are higher or lower in readership by population of the state etc.
Over-represented: the West Coast and (non-southern) East Coast, especially Washington D.C., plus Utah. All are blue states except Utah.
Under-represented: the South, especially Florida, and inland red states, especially West Virginia and the Dakotas. Those three States have just 5 reported readers together.
The average Floridian is 10 times less likely to read (and respond to) ACX than the average Massachusettsan and 30 times less likely than the average (D.C.-) Washingtonian.
The British guy who reported a state of "self-doubt" made me chuckle.
There's a cluster of subcultures that consistently drift toward philosophical idealist metaphysics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism) (consciousness, not matter or math, as fundamental to reality): McKenna-style psychonauts, Silicon Valley Buddhist circles, neo-occultist movements, certain transhumanist branches, quantum consciousness theorists, and various New Age spirituality scenes. While these communities seem superficially different, they share a striking tendency to reject materialism in favor of mind-first metaphysics.
The common factor connecting them? These are all communities where psychedelic use is notably prevalent. This isn't coincidental.
There's a plausible mechanistic explanation: Psychedelics disrupt the Default Mode Network and adjusting a bunch of other neural parameters. When these break down, the experience of physical reality (your predictive processing simulation) gets fuzzy and mailable while consciousness remains vivid and present. This creates a powerful intuition that consciousness must be more fundamental than matter. Your conscious experience is more fundamental/stable than your perception of the material world, which is all you have access to.
The fun part? This very intuition - that consciousness is primary and matter secondary - is itself being produced by ingesting a chemical which alters physical brain mechanisms. We're watching neural circuitry create metaphysical intuitions in real-time.
This suggests something profound about metaphysics itself: Our basic intuitions about what's fundamental to reality (whether materialist OR idealist) might be more about human neural architecture than about ultimate reality. It's like a TV malfunctioning in a way that produces the message "TV isn't real, only signals are real!"
This doesn't definitively prove idealism wrong, but it should make us deeply suspicious of metaphysical intuitions that feel like direct insight - they might just be showing us the structure of our own cognitive machinery.
Yeah, that's what I always figured (though without your level of eloquence). Just because you thought mind precedes matter after meditating, taking some drug, or crossing the Abyss and defeating Choronzon doesn't mean it's actually so.
The Matrix works better as a metaphor for media manipulation than as a basis of actual radical doubt in my opinion.
re long COVID could be a survivorship bias where actually compounding C19 impacts kill (unlikely, i think this would be more visible and talked about) or debilitate (if long COVID has a 10 IQ point penalty, do I drop out of the ACX readership? flowers for algernon?) and hence the reason your scores are stable is that you don’t get responses from non-readers.
"the justice system doesn’t have the capacity to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which homeless people are harassers... and which ones aren’t". Why not? Can you not just put some cameras up like a few weeks before the raid?
Can the homeless people not just disable the cameras as soon as they are installed? Seems like that would be fun and satisfying at least, and it's not like they have anything better to do with their time.
I'd love to see some analysis of the responses on satisfaction. It's interesting that life satisfaction exceeds satisfaction with one's job or social life, or one's standard mood. It's also interesting that the responses on romantic satisfaction look entirely unlike the other measures. Romantic satisfaction is not a bell curve the way almost all other answers are. You have way more people answering they are satisfied at a 10/10 level. And way more people entirely dissatisfied, it's a much flatter distribution than most of the other responses. Would love to know what other factors are correlated with the high and low responses on that measure.
A month in prison is far too weak, and people should be ashamed to express that opinion
"most businesses would be happy if a shoplifter shoplifted $100 and then it was compensated 2-3x that in money or free labor"
Not if only a tiny fraction of shoplifters are caught/punished.
Or their labor is negative-value. Some employees are not worth hiring even at $0.
Especially someone who has already demonstrated an interest in taking your stuff without paying.
As with civil forfeiture, you (ok, I) want to be careful about designing incentives such that the state wants to punish more people.
To an extent, doing low status community service (e.g. picking up trash) is somewhat like the old punishment of being put in the stocks - subject to some public humiliation. Is that worth the loss of potential value of having the offender do something more useful?
( FWIW, for minor initial offenses, I, personally, would put a much higher emphasis on increasing the _probability_ of punishment than the _severity_ of punishment. )
I will note that if I ran a retail store, I probably wouldn't want known shoplifters working there as community service, because I'd have to make sure they didn't shoplift more during their community service.
As someone who worked retail and didn't shoplift, it's standard practice to search employee bags at the door when they leave already.
The colors in repeat offender shoplifting made me first think that 35% of commenters want death for shoplifting, which seemed *quite* unlike being a big softy...
I think that people's general idea of a shoplifter is a 13-year-old kid stealing a candy bar, and even adjusting it for 100$ worth of goods doesn't change it *that* much, which might affect the willingness to let go with a warning.
For what it’s worth — I don’t know how representative I am — although I didn’t pick the softest possible option, I was softer than not, and I did assume that the shoplifter was an adult.
I think I picked death penalty, but only if they were aware of the punishment beforehand.
It feels a little unfair to spring the death penalty on somebody who was expecting a slap on the wrist.
Yeah I think we're talking about the general structure of a system more than the hypothetical of single judge's decision on a single case.
What made you choose death? Would you not expect someone like that to learn their lesson after 1 or 10 years in prison, or what factors into that for you? I'm definitely on the soft side of things, myself, so a death penalty is next-to-incomprehensible for me.
For me, after 10 previous arrests (and presumably 10 convictions with increasingly harsher punishments) they are clearly incorrigible, so that's why I chose death. I was disappointed to learn that I was wrong in thinking that 35.9% were in agreement with me.
10 previous arrests is but the floating of a dandelion seed on the soft summer zephyrs when it comes to the hardcore shoplifters, and drug addiction seems to be behind a good deal of it:
https://www.dundalkdemocrat.ie/news/crime---court/1708969/suspended-sentence-given-to-woman-who-shoplifted-in-dundalk.html
"A Dublin drug addict, with 342 previous convictions, who carried out three shoplifting incidents in Dundalk, has been given a suspended sentence after the local district court heard she is now on a methadone treatment programme."
Yes, that is the future I imagine is the most likely for someone with 10 arrests, that they will continue to victimize members of their community, dozens and hundreds and thousands of times, unless and until they are forcefully stopped from continuing down that path. To me it seems that we as a society (in most Western countries) have chosen that it is more important that we keep our collective hands clean by not punishing criminals too harshly than that we prevent those offences – though I would be happy to be convinced of some more charitable explanation for this strange behaviour on the part of our systems of justice.
I used to be more in favor of the death penalty. What persuaded me to change my mind was an increasing belief in the fallibility of the system on the margins. Life in prison is reversible. Also, carrying out the death penalty often doesn't save money due to the numerous appeals. But having it on the books likely does save money in terms of encouraging people to plea bargain.
I picked 10 years. My logic being that you give someone like a week or two for the first offense and then N-1 years in prison for the Nth offense. Or maybe something exponential rather than linear. But the point being that it ramps up such that after they get out of jail they are either terrified of an even harsher sentence the next time, or they just end up in jail permanently if they can't stop themselves.
People sometimes age out of the criminal lifestyle. It seems unnecessary to execute a 30 year old for being a career criminal when they might be a better person by the time they're 40 or 50. If shoplifting is the worst of their crimes, we can afford a couple of repeat offenses to offer second chances. If it was something harsher then I would agree with you (although ideally they'd be in jail too long to even reach 10 separate convictions in the first place).
Yeah, the age-out issue is why I also picked 10 years rather than life (I'm generally against imposing the death penalty other than as a "you've been sentenced to life without parole; do you want to be executed instead?" or as a "we don't have a prison that can hold him, so this is the only way to prevent reoffence").
One alternative that I find appealing would be to offer assisted suicide on demand to all incarcerated criminals. In many Western countries, the death penalty is politically impossible, while euthanasia is within the Overton window.
My stance for repeat offenders is based on the priors that: 1) The majority of repeat criminals cause far more harm to others both in and out of prison than they generate positive utility, and I’d probably say this is true in expectation for their whole lives; 2) Life is net-negative for the majority of repeat criminals themselves (due to substance abuse/mental health issues etc.) and would get worse in prison - therefore their death is a moral good regardless of whether it disincentivises crime; 3) not exactly sure how to compare gradations of the two, but prison is absurdly inefficient and costly. My sense is that efficient and humane prison has more costs to society than efficient and humane execution.
Keep in mind that the average cost to the Federal government (U.S.) of a death penalty sentence is estimated to be $1M more than the cost of imprisonment for life.
Only because the system is inefficient by design. A lot of those costs could be cut by making the trials shorter and reducing the opportunity for appeals.
But then, the prison system is inefficient by design as well. I'm pretty sure NKVD troikas and a bullet in the head were extremely cheap, but Gulag imprisonment cost was negative.
Yeah. In China it's more efficient - there are two expedited appeals, including one by the Supreme Court. The average time between sentencing and execution is two months.
I always find it interesting how getting a criminal case in front of a judge takes many months, but whenever Trump issues an executive order there's somehow a Federal judge somewhere ruling against it within hours. How does the case pipeline even work?
It's nice to see Scott Alexander tacitly admitting in this post that this comment section has become a cesspool.
Too bad there's not much one can do about it.
Although I don't doubt that some people on ACX have toxic, posturing attitudes to crime and punishment, I haven't really noticed any in this thread. People on both sides have responded thoughtfully and respectfully.
Are you respectful to other posters? Sure. Respectful to humanity? Nope. Your vitriolic policy prescriptions show a lack of regard for others is astonishing.
And that's a major weakness in the current system. Most defendants have no idea what's the maximum or typical sentence that applies to their case, or even may delude themselves into thinking that 3-strikes laws will not apply, they'll get community service, etc.
The execution method should be "death by slapping on the wrist."
Even if you leave out humanitarian considerations, the fact is that the death penalty removes an incentive gradient. There is this famous story from the Qin dynasty, who had decreed that being late to a job warranted the death penalty. So when two generals were delayed by bad weather, they had no incentive not to start a rebellion.
I think limiting the sentence for habitual shoplifting to a year or so is much better. Someone who makes a living from shoplifting will still be out of circulation mostly, but the incentive gradient still remains. The message is "shoplifting will not be tolerated and you will (eventually) go to prison for it, but turning to robbery will get us really mad at you, and don't even think about starting to murder witnesses".
This is one of the few good counter-arguments - I definitely agree that we need incentive gradients, so this kind of policy couldn't be done in isolation.
The downsides of reduced incentive gradient are pretty well documented (three strike rule increases murder rate): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/468112
My ideal system would be a relatively steep gradient from 1) very short but certain prison/cell time; 2) increasingly severe corporal punishment; 3) death penalty. There should be lots of carrots to go with the sticks, such as rewards for good behaviour, psychological treatment, and educational/work opportunities.
Also, as you mentioned imperial China, they were the masters of incentive gradients compatible with the death penalty.
Perpetrators of lesser crimes were allowed to be executed through simple beheadings, while with more heinous crimes, you could be 腰斩 "decapitated at the waist", 五马分尸 pulled limb from limb by 5 horses, or 灭九族 all of your relatives within nine generations would be killed as well.
Someone convicted of 10 shoplifting offenses should definitely receive a painless execution.
Didn't want to bring in ling chi or, Wikipedia tells me, 凌遲?
Given the risk of rape in jail (and contracting HIV, which can't be cured even if there are drugs for it now), I wonder if the corporal punishment should come first.
I have a hard time with the death penalty for shoplifting, but maybe I haven't lived in San Francisco lately. I think quite a few San Franciscans would be OK with the death penalty for public defecation at this point.
Good catch, I'd forgotten about 凌迟！On the jail point, I agree entirely, my idea was more "a couple of nights alone in a holding cell" rather than prison with other criminals.
I always figured it was a low Lizardman's Constant (i.e. people making a joke). But you never know.
Thought so as well, but the previous graph didn't have it. So if this is it, more people thought the joke was appropriate with 10 prior offenses.
I went a step beyond, and thought that was a good way to filter the lizardmen, who then didn't vote for life-in-prison or very long sentences.
I did pick death penalty (assuming ~linear increasing punishment prior to the 10th offense); "10 strikes and you're out (for good)" seems more than fair. 10 charges establishes a pattern of behavior suggesting that the perpetrator is incapable of peacefully existing within the confines of modern society. The means of removal (death penalty, life imprisonment, exile to some uninhabited island where they can live as barbarously as they wish) are not super relevant, the key is identifying when someone belongs to this group ("irredeemably and openly contemptuous of civilization") and doing both them and us a favor by, well, removing them from civilization.
Still seems a bit much for shoplifting (they *could* be doing it to survive), but thank you for explaining.
Some are doing it to survive, but when you're seeing "professional life-long thief" and "drug addict with string of convictions" and not "penniless mother needs to feed starving baby", that tilts the balance towards stern measures.
She's a believing Catholic, so I'm so sure she could give you a bullet-pointed refutation from the Catechism.
You and the rest of the tough on crime posturers seem totally unwilling or unable to grapple with the truth that addiction is literally a disease. Not just after a matter of speaking.
Even someone suffering a disease has some responsibility to society. If you are infectious with TB and you know it, you have little to no excuse for going out in public and coughing on people.
Professional shoplifters make their 'disease' impact on ordinary people and they are responsible for their actions.
Any sympathy for addicts I have is being rapidly burned through; there was a story in the media here about opening a safe injection site. Very nice, very heartwarming, included an addict talking about how great this was to restore her dignity and how she hated injecting in public in dirty alleyways because of the danger to her health and her safety.
So, if she hated that so much, was she trying to get clean? No, she was going to use the safe site to continue indulging in her addiction (and the heavy implication of "society owes this to me").
No, we don't owe it to you to make it easier to destroy yourself and (more pertinently) have a bad effect on the people and environment around you. She wants to get clean and heal up as much as is possible? She should definitely be supported in that. She wants to remain a junkie but now it is the duty of the state to babysit her while she shoots up, and if she feels she is not getting all her demands and not being treated with dignity, that is the fault of the state and she is owed more free stuff in compensation? I disagree.
If they're doing it to survive then the appropriate thing may be to place non-survival on the other side of the scales too, to persuade them to find a different survival method like the rest of us.
It would be a highly effective way of ensuring that no jury will ever convict anyone of a tenth offense.
Maybe we need better juries.
You overestimate the empathy of juries. Juries routinely convict innocents, rarely apply "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard hence why every jury is a crap shoot, and routinely find people guilty knowing full well the Draconian punishment they will receive. Jurors have no skin in the game hence their default is kill them all, let God sort it out.
Sure we get news stories sometimes of juries doing the right thing but that's it, it's news because it's rare. You look at a case like Daniel Penny and there are hundreds just like him with even more favorable circumstances rotting in jail, and even then nearly all the jurors found him guilty, he just got lucky he had two holdouts which is rare. That was a fluke, not a feature.
At least in some trial contexts, knowing about defendant's prior convictions is not allowed, as is talking about the penalties on the table for the current accusation.
I didn't respond to the survey, but I would have chosen community service for a first time shoplifter and the death penalty for the 10x repeat offender
Yeah, that was confusing. And having worked in retail and suffered from shoplifters, I went "okay, death does seem a reasonable choice here" 😀 I'm probably very much biased, though, by the experience of having my purse stolen in a shopping centre years back, leaving me more or less stranded with no money and no way home. So my view of "thieving is a victimless crime" is "boiling in oil is also victimless, I mean nobody ever complained afterwards".
They might complain during! Let's split the difference at "electric chair".
Hmm... If we _did_ want someone to serve as a long term reminder to others, as gibbets once did, are there technologies that could help? "Picowaving" (irradiation via gammas or e-beam) could render a shrink-wrapped condemned felon shelf-stable in the process of dispatching them...
A shoplifter is threatening violence. If you confront him, you might get hurt by him. The state can also hurt a guard who is considered too aggressive (both financially and physically), acting on behalf of the criminal. As you know, many stores now have a policy of never confronting robbers at all.
"A shoplifter is threatening violence." My goodness, this is incredible torturing at the English language. A person is not actually threatening violence until they are, you know, threatening violence.
Truly mind boggling to me to learn you are a purse carrier. So much for stereotypes..
Tsk tsk Chance, were you assuming my gender? 😁
I didn't mean "purse" as in the American sense which seems to correlate to "handbag" but the British version (see below):
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/purse
Besides, that doesn't tell you if I'm a boy or a girl or both or neither, in these freewheeling days!
YOU are not freewheeling. So yes, if you were truly talking about a handbag, that would be pretty good evidence of your gender.
You being British explains a lot. Your country is awash with violent crime; last I checked, the violent crime rate was 42 percent higher in London than in New York City. I imagine living in such an environment might traumatize a person and make them unable to really address this subject objectively. I feel the same way about Americans that had to live through the lead addled, crime heavy 70s as adults.
"You being British explains a lot."
By the gods, sirrah, those are fighting words! Naught but blood can wipe out the stain of such a foul imputation, and so prepare to betake yourself to the field of honour! Pistols for two, breakfast for one!
I think you and Banana should meet up, at least on here; you both seem to have very certain opinions in my regard 😁
Oh yes, I have very strong opinions about you. You and anomie both, with your grimly Teutonic commentary style.
For what it's worth I felt like the gaps between the options were very large, especially at the relevant level- one month is not enough, a full year seems like too much.
Not sure I thought "adult", but information I missed was: a) how often in the last year (was it 2 thefts per years of less value than one night in prison will cost ...) b) how high the risk of conviction per theft in the location. If you can assume only three shopliftings before you get caught AND "convicted" - that is different from ten or 40 thefts per one conviction.
Finally, it depends - that's why we have judges. I know a mentally disturbed elder bag-lady who does something foolish every few months - and gets caught almost every time. Last time she took tools from the library, worth 150$. Fine: Library shut her out for the next 8 months. Lady kept the tools, too. What the point of putting her into any expensive prison?! - "Death penalty for asocial elements" we did that in Germany 1933-45. Somehow derailed.
I was one of the death pickers but I was equally coaching it in an actual just system, i.e. where the person is actually guilty of it having both genuine rens mea and genuine actus reus as opposed to some judge or jury just felt so. Would I support it in the current US system, no, I wouldn't make it a crime at all beyond a private tort.
I feel there is no crime more heinous than intentional physical theft, kill them all.
Based on my wife's experiences working retail, the standard concern is teenagers lifting cosmetics and costume jewelry rather than candy bars but I think your description of our snap perception is broadly correct.
I like the idea of community service as the penalty for petty offenses. There's a poetic justice to it, providing value and partially mending the "social fabric" damage around the offender because their community sees them making good (willingly or not). Broadly it seems like a more pro-social punishment for petty crime than prison or state violence.
My vague impression is that our current justice system doesn't escalate punishment very smoothly for pretty crime. I have a similarly fuzzy idea that there is a community service element to being in prison but broadly it's just intensely bored prisoners knocking around a small area, under constant stress from rival gangs, and buddying up with more hardened guys. I agree with the conventional wisdom that this send more like a strategy for criminal hardening than rehabilitation.
Given that, my intuition is to fill out the punishment curve; insert more forced community labor + smaller reductions in freedoms e.g. house arrest into the escalation stack for pretty crime before getting to jail time. I'd also offer labor sentences as an alternative to fines for people who can't afford them. Maybe the community service programs could hire out work teams and the funds of those teams go into a pool for reimbursing victims of petty crimes.
Major violent crimes should still probably get the stick. Forced community service seems unlikely to deter e.g. gang violence.
Hmm... "Warning" can cover a fairly wide range of penalties. "Receives a note in the mail" != "Has a policeman scream in their face for an hour."
The "person shoplifts by accident" issue is why I said "warning" for first offence.
The "age" and "state" responses are poorly displayed in google forms (understandable as a limit of the form, but maybe there's a way to get it to show it in... graph form? Or at least a %?)
I was one of those who entered yea to having shoplifted and guessed 25%. My thinking is that probably most ever-have-shoplifters are like me - I was a 10 year old who saw something shiny and put it in my pocket (a cool-looking glass paperweight) and have never done anything illegal since, except maybe privately partaking of some substances - and that the majority aren't pathological thieves or particularly harmful to society. "One in four people steals something at any point in time, most learn their lesson, and a much smaller number of them keep doing it and need the justice system to step in and punish them in lieu of their parents" just generally... jives with my understanding of the world.
I wonder how much overlap there actually is between sexual orientation and relationship style preference (i.e. I doubt it's true that actually every bi person is the same as every poly person, it's just funny the numbers work out that way.)
The 22 people who said they want 8 children: I hope you find each other.
The self-rating physical attractiveness sure looks like people here might be more deluded than we'd like to think. Not me, though, obviously I'm perfectly objective about myself in every way /s.
Some of the write-in responses to Religious Denomination are a bit worrisome. Same with the responses to "what is your height in centimeters". I mean, what unit are the people saying 20-30 even using?
"Madokaist (I swear this is serious and not a joke)" - I just wanted to say to whomever wrote that in... watching that entire show while on LSD is the closest I have ever come to feeling religious epiphany, so I relate.
The even steps up in "school choice" results make me wonder about the reasoning for people for picking what they did. I don't remember exactly how the question was phrased but it's rare to see a response graph like that, isn't it?
https://substack.com/@aella/p-155127275 "People Are Delusional About How Hot They Are"
I was fairly disappointed by this one. There were zero actually hot people of either gender, and it basically just clusters in the middle, with a positive bias for both genders, and men "reaching" a little more in self evaluation over their outside-rated hotness.
I took the female-rating-male survey when Aella posted it. There were some "extremely hot" examples in the original dataset, but they were AI-generated images. Even the ones who were exactly my type were in the uncanny AI valley, so I rated them worse than if they had been real.
Also, the real images were pictures that Aella solicited from her twitter followers. This was explicitly framed as "hey, are you self-conscious about your looks? Let's find out if your feelings are well-founded!" No guy who is genuinely hot probably wanted to participate.
Could be. My visual estimation of myself as a 3 from looking at Aella's pics roughly corresponded with the number I got when you were briefly able to get your actual rating out of OKCupid about 10 years ago.
(They had a 'search by looks' feature, and you could see the extra code appended to the web search in the search bar...there was a variable that went from 0 to 10000. So if you put a weird language in as one of your languages and then created a second account, you could search for that language as well as the code that only searched people of given attractiveness levels...then move the attractiveness levels up and down until you figured out where you showed up. They're a lot more sophisticated now.)
I think the physical attractiveness thing doesn't necessarily imply any self-deception.
1) ACX survey takers are fairly young, slim, wealthy and intelligent, which are associated with physical attractiveness. I wouldn't assume that the median ACX survey respondent is near the societal median, just as I wouldn’t assume this for income or intelligence.
2) Even if 1) doesn't cover it, the question doesn't necessarily imply a normal distribution. People could interpret "very attractive" and "very unattractive" as unevenly distributed in society generally. Someone at the societal median could correctly class themselves as 6-7, (using something like the 4chan attractiveness chart), because the lower-end has more variation.
When my daughter was around age 4 or 5, she stole something shiny from a store. My wife took her back to the store and made her apologize and pay for it (like $2 or something). I think this had a good effect on my daughter, and was quite harmless to the store. The clerk at the store didn't want to take the money, said it was okay. We obviously disagreed, and felt that it was more important for our daughter to do what was right than learn that you can occasionally steal stuff and nobody cares.
I think children imbibe this pretty quickly. I used to work in a library, and a number of times when parents who had not been library users as adults (which was most people) got a card for the first time, their little children were often quite astonished and concerned that they could take things away "without paying".
The survey shoplifting question perplexed me. I answered yes, because I am pretty sure I shoplifted on one occasion only, when about nine or ten, alongside a friend, when I didn't yet know the term. We used to ride our bikes up to the drugstore, whose one cash register was at the back, to buy candy. It's hard for me to imagine that we discussed this in advance, as I think even our feeble little brains would have balked at baldly countenancing theft. And it wasn't that we didn't have enough money in our pockets for bubble gum. Instead, the scenario must have wordlessly presented itself to us as a little thrilling game - getting out of the store undetected, with the gum in hand, because the proprietor was at the back.
I'm sure he or she was quite aware of the possibility that this was being entertained.
In any case, the thrill, once accomplished, was not so great that I ever tried it again; and I expect that I probably suppressed the thought of it, because of course on reflection even I could perceive that it was stealing, which was one of the commandments.
But yet I find or want to find this distinct from "shoplifting" as generally practiced.
0- 9 ( 0.0%)
10-19 ( 0.1%)
20-29 (11.7%) █████
30-39 (37.5%) ██████████████████
40-49 (30.1%) ███████████████
50-59 (10.3%) █████
60-69 ( 5.8%) ██
70-79 ( 3.6%) █
80-89 ( 0.9%)
90-99 ( 0.1%)
Some basic awk-foo should do the trick.
Thank you.
I'm pretty sure that the people answering 20-30 for "what is your height in centimeters" are Americans who accidentally divided their height in inches by 2.54, instead of correctly multiplying it by 2.54. So to get useful data from those, you gotta multiply their number by 2.54^2 = 6.45
Ain't sanitizing data fun?
> The "age" and "state" responses are poorly displayed in google forms
I made plots at https://imgur.com/a/Shp6Ez6
This is after removing many "lizardmen".
Fun that the number of Washington State respondents is 206 (area code for Seattle).
I wonder if the big softie vs maximum punishment is mostly a bravery debate over what people think is the current state - you read the results as softie, I actually read them as pro-more punishment, which makes me suspect we have different views on what the current level of punishment is (with the pro-maximal punishment people mostly just going "turn the punishment dial up without worrying about it going too far").
>I think a lot of liberals have been told that weed smokers and shoplifters get slammed in federal prison for years or something, and seriously believe it.
I don't think that many people think shoplifters are in prison (liberals/leftys do have incorrect views about the number of drug users in prison, also some subset of the left hates big business and actively supports shoplifting) but instead think that the cost benefit of enforcing shoplifting is wrong because in any given instance enforcing the rules doesn't outweigh the cost. The problem is once it becomes public knowledge that shoplifting is not punished norms change and the cost to society is much larger.
I think Scott's baseline was relative to comment section geist rather than current laws of particular policy.
Hm, so I think the dynamic is that a small group of people who actually are maximally harsh (the tail in the pie chart) speak out, and then a lot of the more moderate people express directional support (because they think we should go in that direction even if not all the way), so it comes off like a consensus for maximum punishment
Imagine if people <i>actually got</i> 20 hours of community service for first-time shoplifting! So harsh. It might even dissuade enough shoplifters that stores could stop banning backpacks, and people who don't own cars could get groceries more easily.
I've never had a store in NYC give me trouble for coming in with a backpack (maybe because most people there don't have cars? Or because despite stereotypes it's relatively low crime for an American city?)
Maybe this is more of a problem outside of larger cities. Both stores I've seen with this policy are in towns of about 10,000. In which case, yeah, most people do have a car and I happen to be an oddball for shopping without one.
If you're PKU I'll say that in hayward (and now you know who I am) I have been basically told every time I enter a store that I can't bring my backpack, so I end up putting it in like a cubby and then pick it up at the end to store my groceries.
I have been called a shoplifter 3 times (even though I've shoplifted 0 times) because I was wearing a backpack out the store.
Scott - check notion forms out, it might help you better organize data for this
It would be interesting to explore the stark difference between the average ACX commenter and the average ACX survey respondent.
Could it be that people who are more extreme in the punishments they want to see doled out are way more likely to share that stance? Maybe because they feel angry at the world for being so lenient? Or because they know they're in the minority, and thus want to increase their ranks among the masses?
Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post? Then, their anonymized answer to the survey does not involve the same incentive so they revert back to a more "middle ground" approach?
I was surprised to see the 25% shoplifting figure, both real and expected by respondents. I'd be interested in seeing a country/continent breakdown here, because as a European I feel like we might have a different view on both the probability and the severity of the punishment.
I expect the survey to be much more representative than the comments section. People filling out the survey don't need a particularly strong motivation to input their position, while people in the comments probably do. The other factors you mention probably move the needle, too, though I wouldn't put too much weight in the middle-ground-reversion idea.
What is your take on the shoplifting stuff that surprised you? I'm German, but I don't feel too surprised by the results (though hindsight and all that). In particular, 25% for ever-shoplifting seems quite expected to me, if we include kids. Would you have expected a higher or a lower rate?
I guess I answered the shoplifting question from the point of view of adults or teenagers doing it. If I had thought about kids too, I probably would have gone to 25-35% myself. I have lived in a few large European cities over the past ten years and I've talked to people from all walks of life, and I just get a feeling that shoplifting is exceedingly rare nowadays from a teenagers-and-adult perspective. I've never been to the US so I was wondering if there's a different moral (perception on shoplifting) and actual (shoplifting rates) framework at play.
US retail shrink, which includes shoplifting but isn't limited to it, cost about $113B (1.6% of retail sales) in 2022 (https://www.grocerydive.com/news/retail-shrink-theft-changed-little-in-2022-nrf/694979/).
Deloitte says £7.9bn were lost to stock theft for UK retailers in 2023 (https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/Industries/consumer/blogs/the-future-of-shrink-the-increase-of-shoplifting.html), and that's on £517bn of revenues (https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06186/SN06186.pdf) implying 1.5% of shrink.
Based on this alone, it doesn't look like there's a major difference in the amount of shoplifting between the UK and the US. I'm fairly happy generalizing this to the rest of Europe - my gut feeling was wrong!
I see. I mean we don't really know whether people tended to include kids or not in their model (@Scott something to better clarify in the form in the future). Thanks for clarifying
The fact that generalising the UK with Europe (different cultures, different languages), and not with the US (same language, same cultural origin) is seen as such a natural thing to do is a symbol of so many things wrong with the current world.
I guessed 10%, and thought I was being suitably pessimistic.
I would guess that people who have emotions about a topic are very strongly overrepresented, and those people hold more extreme views. Not just on ACX, but on any social media, and to slightly less extent also in traditional news. You get the same effect if you compare any representative survey with any online survey. On most questions, the average opinion in representative surveys is quite moderate and boring. It happens rarely to me that I find the majority opinion of such a survey outrageous or even remarkable. Whereas I find the majority opinions in online surveys or social media often crazy.
By the way, this already drove me crazy in Scott's post: IN WHICH DIRECTION were you surprised? Sorry for screaming, but I honestly don't know, and it's itching me.
This probably applies across most topics. I mentioned this in a thread one time already I think, but the pro/anti Trump comments before the election seemed pretty close to 50/50, which is way out of step with the political demographics from the surveys.
I think this is kind of everything everywhere though, which is why Twitter is so horrible.
>Could it be that there is an incentive to be controversial or to take overly strong stances on such matters when someone already has it in mind to post a comment on an ACX post?
Wrong way around. Normally, the motivation for making a comment is that you disagree strongly with something; people with unpopular views disagree strongly more often.
As one of the softies — though not the softest of the softies — I just don’t have any interest in arguing about it in the comments section of a well-trafficked blog.
That makes sense, but how come the toughies *do*?
Perhaps the same thing that makes someone inclined to be very tough on crime makes them more likely to talk about it -- extremists of every stripe are louder than moderates, yeah?
Sounds reasonable. Where are the extremists on the other extreme of the spectrum? Or are there really none/so few they don't get much attention? Could be.
I mean, there are certainly extremists who talk about abolishing police etc. They may not be in this blog post but they do exist and they are loud. Those would read as the opposite side to me. I want to say... "zizians"?
I would like to abolish policing in its current form as it exists in certain polities. People think of it as an eternal and necessary, but it was only invented 200 years ago. There's no intrinsic reason that the institution responsible for investigating murders should also be the institution who control riots. The penetentiary model of prison-as-punishment is also about the same age and should also be abolished.
It's next to impossible to have a productive conversation about this in a blog comment section, however.
Why not open to debate?
The idea that the riot police be different from the detective police is interesting but that is the case within police forces already.
I find the whole “we’ve only been locking people up for 200” years a bit disingenuous. It’s true that prisons arise with the enlightenment, more or less, but punishment doesn’t start then. It was harsher beforehand, Prior to prisons, there were multiple punishments like corporal punishment, flogging, whipping, branding, mutilation, stockades, pillories, ducking stools, capital punishment (beheading, hanging, crucifixion, burning at the stake), breaking on the wheel, banishment, exile, outlawry, transportation to colonies , restitution, wergild, debt slavery, public fines, forced labor, galley slavery, workhouses, penal colonies, indentured servitude, public shaming, dunking, cucking stools, the brank, tarring and feathering and for religious punishments, ordeals, trial by fire, trial by water, trial by combat, penance, pilgrimage, excommunication and death.
Part of being tough on crime is making everyone know that we're going to be tough on crime. If 4% of shoplifters were randomly and quietly disappeared, it would only reduce shoplifting by 4%.
...But we already know that harsher punishments don't have a noticable effect on disincentivizing crime. The point is to increase the percentage of shoplifters that disappear.
They do have such an effect. There are limits to this, but deterrence does scale somewhat.
> If 4% of shoplifters were randomly and quietly disappeared, it would only reduce shoplifting by 4%.
This would only appear to be true if you assume that all shoplifters have nobody else in their lives.
It’s a lot easier to get excited about, “we can make society meaningfully better with this one weird trick: Actually locking up criminals,” than it is to get excited about commonly-held default opinion #2596.
Sounds a lot like an old Scott chestnut: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Many who espouse the more extreme positions (on most topics) tend to be incapable of nuance (possibly just unwilling). It often makes for a rather unrewarding discussion.
My honest guess is that they have less natural empathy and that makes it easier for them to argue all day about how human beings should be executed without feeling burned out at the prospect.
Im generally tough on crime because of empathy. Not that I support the death penalty, but largely the system as it is (here in the U.K.) - with some leeway for petty crimes and drug use.
Obviously the US is different.
My empathy is for the victims, who are invariably poor and powerless. Not caring about crime is, consciously or unconsciously, a vicarious display of wealth.
By the standards of this comment section and survey, that makes you soft on crime.
Because they're unhappy with the status quo. Current policy is soft so softies have no reason to pipe up.
For the same reason that toughies are generally not arguing about it on the EA forum.
Normal urges for those who partake in this sort of blog + Internet Tough Guy Syndrome.
It's like those dudes who start slicing the pie every time they hear a bird land on their roof; going online and talking about how good it would be to just exterminate all the brutes give you a little thrill right in the amygdala without you actually having to go out and maybe get your ass beat.
Possibly because it gives a modest but addictive adrenaline rush to say something incredibly transgressive online? And since your moderation weeds out many types of extreme transgression, like blatant insults, the tough on crimers and "foreign human life has no inherent value" types are the only extreme transgressors left.
Do you ever worry that reading thousands upon thousands of words from these homicidal types might cause you psychic damage?
I would hope that reading not garbage ideas along with those garbage ones helps to lessen the psychic damage overall
I would understand that. As boop says below, toughies are going to feel better about talking about it.
I kind of am, but I don't really have a logical argument for being a softy other than "well, if they can do it to shoplifters, they can do it to me for something else they define at a later date." I don't really trust the government. Of course, I don't trust business, the right, the left, or women either, and if I were a practicing rather than a theoretical bisexual I'd probably distrust men too!
>Obliterated my atheism, inverted my world view no longer believe matter is base substrate believe consciousness is, no longer fear death
This is bad. Are there any instructions how to avoid this?
"Don't do consciousness-affecting drugs that are widely claimed to sometimes change the way people think"
Can’t emphasize this enough. If you don’t want your beliefs altered, don’t take them. Read this SSC post if you haven’t for more evidence. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/
I don’t mind having my beliefs challenged, but so many first hand accounts of people’s new beliefs either don’t make any sense, are obviously bullshit (are you sure the ayahuasca is what cured your autoimmune disease?) or are based on woo (your left and right hemispheres are in “proper order” now?) So I think the main fear is not that it will affect my beliefs, but rather that it will fuck up my brain to the point that I believe things that are dumb. Essentially, I would be interested to try a psychedelic if it seemed likely to make me see reality more clearly rather than less, but “less clearly” seems to generally be the more likely outcome as far as I can tell.
a drug changing your belief and a drug making your beliefs dumber are almost synonymous. Except if you have some mental illness, I guess taking some substance that does something to your brain will mostly make your thoughts worse. Just as banging your head against the wall will probably make your beliefs worse not better.
>I guess taking some substance that does something to your brain will mostly make your thoughts worse
Mostly agreed, but ... caffeine?
My suspicion on the autoimmune disease one is that they hadn't actually been diagnosed with a clear cut autoimmune disease, but had nonspecific symptoms and a spurious high ANA and the nonspecific symptoms resolved.
> Essentially, I would be interested to try a psychedelic if it seemed likely to make me see reality more clearly rather than less
They do neither. Psychedelics provide you, as someone says further down the comments, with first-hand evidence that direct realism is false. They do this by replacing your normal interpretive framework with a radically different one. Some people unfortunately don't get the message, and conclude it replaces false perceptions with true ones.
I have some advice. One is that the effect-vs-dose curve for psychedelics is convex, not linear. Doubling the dose more than doubles the effects and I have a personal suspicion that a good chunk of ayahuasca's reputation comes from the traditional use being at a really high dose relative to other psychedelics. You'll be much better off with psychedelics if you just travel to the lowlands of notably altered thinking and pretty visual effects and stop there rather than climbing up the mountain of "might rewrite my soul". If you're especially cautious, microdosing is recommended, as in terms of the magnitude of mental effects, it's the psychedelic equivalent of having one beer.
As for the clearness of seeing reality... I'd say that psychedelics push your cognition into a very different mode with both strengths and weaknesses relative to sober thought. It's common to have novel realizations where sober-you goes "yeah, this checks out and is important". But just because there are true insights doesn't mean that everything that feels insightful at the time is a true insight. This is another reason to stay with lower doses, they leave your metacognition somewhat intact and you have the ability to go "this feels really profound but it's probably just bullshit". This is analogous to a person on a moderate dose of alcohol going "this seems awesome but sober-me would say it's a bad idea, I won't do it". Low-to-moderate doses give you a saving throw, pretty much.
There's lots of possible good effects from psychedelics. I've had very connecting conversations on XTC with friends who normally have difficulty with intimacy. The double helix of DNA is famously conjured on LSD. This podcast on re-opening critical developmental periods is also very enlightning.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-ecstasy-of-an-open-brain/transcript
Do other drugs!
..or don't. Even safer.
Don’t take steps to seek enlightenment?
"No fear of death" seems underspecified. it seems healthy to be at peace with one's inevitable mortality, but dysfunctional to actually lack any inhibitions against endangering oneself. My impression is that most spiritual and psychedelic experiences that sound like this quote refer to the healthy, peaceful kind of "no fear of death". (And I say this as a donor to life-extension research. Saving and extending lives is good, but realistically, I expect most or all people alive today to be mortal, and we may as well live with it.)
By contrast there are a lot of accounts of ketamine use that suggest that the sense of self-preservation can be lost, especially when they coincide with stories of fatal accidents or suicides. My guess is that ayahuasca (which is primarily serotonergic like other psychedelics, rather than NMDA-inhibiting like the dissociatives) does not cause higher-than-usual rates of self-harm or reckless accidents, but that's the thing to watch for.
Not instructions, but having a strong epistemology, emotional attachment to truth, and a strong understanding that direct realism is false go a long way. Understanding indirect realism allows you to understand that the reality bending experience you just had was not an insight into the external world, but one into your mind and your perception of the world.
I'd love to know more about this person, my hunch when I hear conversion stories like this is that the convert didn't have a gears level understanding of why the religion is false (maybe they were raised in a non religious setting, so they just don't know anything about the religion or why they don't believe), got converted via weak evidence and emotional appeals, and then exaggerate how staunch of an atheist they were to make the story more exciting. I see this a lot in christian conversion stories, where they hype up how they used to be an atheist but found god, but when you hear their story they kinda believed in god the whole time but never cared about the religion till they "converted", or they didn't have any understanding of the religion and weren't a committed and knowledgeable atheist before converting.
To make a analogy, peek-a-boo works on a baby because they don't understand object permanence, and an intense psychedelic trip converts people to religions or makes them believe in aliens or think that they saw external other dimensions because they don't understand indirect realism, what you see/feel/hear does not always equal objective external reality, even when it's "realness" feels "more real" than normal
https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/03/08/memetic-vaccine-against-interdimensional-aliens-infestation/ this can also be applied to religious insights. If there are supernatural entities, and they do communicate with us during altered states like ayahuasca trips, how the hell can we know that they're benevolent and not trying to manipulate us with pretty imagery and feelings?
edit: see also
- https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-09-22-how-to-use-dmt-without-going-insane.html
- https://qualiacomputing.com/2023/03/05/aligning-dmt-entities-shards-shoggoths-and-waluigis/
- http://slehar.com/wwwRel//cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html
>this can also be applied to religious insights. If there are supernatural entities, and they do communicate with us during altered states like ayahuasca trips, how the hell can we know that they're benevolent and not trying to manipulate us with pretty imagery and feelings?
Evangelicals and Fundamentalists would wholeheartedly agree with you. From my own experience if you explain DMT and the "machine elves" to one who's never heard of them before they will 100% of the time conclude that people are talking to demons.
Ayahuasca is like doing percussive maintenance to your mind.
Don't do it if you're afraid of shaking some things loose.
Yeah, this thing keep bugging me in the context of psychodelics.
It seems obvious that if you take some substance that alters your brain chemistry according to material rules, this can't be evidence in favor of idealism. No matter how wonderful the experience is, the methodology is completely off.
And yet people keep becoming more religious/less confident in materialism due to psychodelics. The standard explanation is that such people are simply gullible doofuses who suck at epistemology. But I have troubles accepting it, especially when we are talking about people in rationality adjacent spheres.
A more sinister explanation is that psychodelics irreversibly break something in the brains, making people more gullible and less capable of reasoning correctly. And if so, they are really really bad and should be restricted much harder.
I'm someone who's psychedelic use has updated me strongly in favor of materialism, for exactly the same reason you describe
The sinister explanation seems like the obviously correct explanation. Only other possible explanation would be that there is some sort of being that would choose to impart wisdom mostly through drugs, and that seems like an odd choice
There is one other possible explanation: that the human mind is capable of perceiving the spiritual, and that these drugs facilitate that perception. Imagine if someone was born blind, and a doctor came up with a drug that would allow them to see for a few minutes. After the drugs wore off would it be surprising that many of those who took them now believe colors are real?
But a seeing person can easily prove to others that he's no longer blind, even to other blind ones, for example by distinguishing something from a distance, which can then be confirmed by touch. The problem with spiritualism of all sorts is that objective evidence of it has always been close to non-existent.
But he can’t prove to them that colors exist. They’d have to take him on faith for that.
You can easily demonstrate color-discerning superpower as well, by telling a milk-filled bottle from a water-filled one, say. I'll grant that describing what colors _are_ is a much more difficult proposition.
It's conceivable, of course, that spirits exist but aren't particularly entangled with the ordinary stuff, but their proponents usually claim that they are impactful in the real world, and not only in the afterlife or whatever.
What seems to happen on psychedelics is a loosening of priors and people's perceptions not matching up with "direct" realism.
I agree that experiences on drugs or on meditation don't give you insight into the true nature of things. However, neither do experiences when you are completely sober. In the end it's all groundless/incomplete/uncomputable. Any (metaphysical) position is as justifiable as any other. Ofc. this also comes from a certain perspective. I am using language and concepts ...
From a bayesian perspective it would about finding some kind of universal prior which is arbitrary.
In some way it also reminds me of people switching from the radical left to the radical right or the other way around.
Be smart and an analytical high-decoupler. I took shrooms for the first time a couple years ago (in my 40's) and was completely underwhelmed by the experience. You'd have to be pretty dim and/or pretty emotionally/philosophically immature to be impressed by it. Maybe I just had an atypical experience, but I can't imagine any drug experience altering my worldview. No matter what I thought I saw I would immediately write it off as "well that's what happens when you screw with your brain". I don't think I would ever be tempted to interpret it as a glimpse into universal truth. I suspect that those who do have deep personal problems.
I always wondered how much continuity there is of brain function across different domains. What you say makes sense--yeah, if you're skeptical you *shouldn't* be as susceptible to spiritual surprises from shrooms. But is that actually the case? If we give 100 engineers and 100 artists shrooms, we'd *expect* the artists to trip balls more often, but has anyone actually tried? (After all, you have weird counterexamples like Jack Parsons of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who got into Thelema and did an occult ritual with L. Ron Hubbard.)
Interesting idea. I suspect there's not a big difference: look at the composition of Burning Man. Lotsa techies. And I knew plenty of STEM guys in college who were deeply into psychedelics.
Maybe I'm wired atypically - Ecstasy didn't do anything for me either - but my model is that I'm an unusually unemotional and abstract thinker so shrooms took me to a place that I already live in. I do like stimulants so maybe I'm just a dopamine guy? One of these days I'm gonna give DMT a try. Maybe that'll shake something loose. If nothing else I'll be able to set that pretentious bat straight.
Who knows? I'm just wondering how well sensitivity to these things actually correlates with personality type. It could be that it does, or it could be it's superficially plausible but it's actually some other aspect of brain architecture that doesn't at all, like the way painting your house watery blue won't protect it against fire. But I don't think we're going to see the research anytime soon.
I'm going to refrain from giving advice, though. I've never even done pot and I wouldn't know what I'm talking about. :)
> yeah, if you're skeptical you *shouldn't* be as susceptible to spiritual surprises from shrooms
Related anecdata: Took LSD, kept expecting _something_ to happen to my belief set or sense of self, but under scrutiny it turned out to be really solid and so my tautological take-away from the trip was "huh, I guess I've got a pretty solid model of myself and the world? Neat." I wouldn't bank on that being the right insight, either.
It did very fun things to my ability to navigate, though. Do not try out new routes through a park you like if you're on LSD. I would describe the effect as "it took my map of the park, and shattered it into a million pieces, so that I could tell at any one point that I had been in a particular place before (or not), but not how it related to the other pieces."
It did, however, get rid of my anxiety! That was fairly useful. I wouldn't have described myself as high-anxiety before, but on reflection, yeah... yeah, I was. I just had a lot of copes.
Wow, that's interesting! People keep talking about being one with the universe and that's a more pleasant way of describing shutting off your sense of spatial relations (or more likely, an actual experience of the thing being more pleasant).
We're at n=2 now, so it really is anecdata rather than just an anecdote.
I've heard about the anxiety thing too. I'm a little chicken to try because there's no reason at all I couldn't be in the 1 percent that has a bad reaction and has their life fall apart. But it's good to share experiences for the most adventurous.
It makes sense shamans and so on used to use this stuff, though. Probably it does act as a useful psychiatric medication for some people. I feel like Timothy Leary and Co. kind of set us back a long way by tying it to the counterculture, but who knows? Maybe it was never going to happen any other way.
Is it though?
I'm Atheist; but I do hold a bit of an open mind for the consciousness is fundamental world view. It's not falsifiable, but it is verifiable. Who knows what you discover in these "higher forms of consciousness". Probably its just creating a false but more beautiful narrative to existence. Ah well, what to say, fine by me.
Man, using almost the same shade of green for "Death" and "A Month in Prison" made me think ACX was wildly mad about shoplifting. Good thing you had the text underneath to clear that one up!
Thus was so confusing :D
Imagine the judge uses a color-coded chart at sentencing. "Hmm. Death? Well, okay. I guess that's the law."
"the justice system doesn’t have the capacity to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which homeless people are harassers/mentally ill and which ones aren’t"
If an encampment is a known trouble spot, couldn't the city station a couple of police officers there and/or install cameras? Then there would be clear evidence of harassment (and also probably a reduction in harassment, which is good in itself).
I agree determining whether a harasser is mentally ill is hard, but they can be arrested and removed from the scene either way. Mental health status could come into play later, to determine whether repeat offenders should be jailed or institutionalised.
I don't think determining whether someone is harassing people is hard or beyond the capacity of the system.
A YEAR in prison for shoplifting?! Y'all...
Yeah, I agree. For $1100 worth of shoplifting (at most)? But 1/4 of the people here are like... yep, sounds good.
It's not $1100 worth of shoplifting, that would be the *minimum* only if they were caught and convicted every single time (extemely unlikely).
In any case, it's not about the dollar amount, it's about the sheer quantity of previous infractions with no improvement in behavior.
Deterrence requires escalating consequences.
I suspect we have a lot of angry San Franciscans and Seattleites.
What are the embedded assumptions in that?
What % of shoplifters get caught, should we multiply the punishment by the inverse of that?
How much does it cost to process and adjudicate a shoplifter, relative to the direct financial harm of them shoplifting? Should we multiply the cost by that ratio?
What do we expect to be the deterrence value?
Waving away most of that, let's say you have a 20% chance of getting punished, and shoplifting yields you $1000. Then the punishment needs to be substantially in excess of $5k utility to you.
A year in prison seems reasonable?
It's not just the processing. How does the cost of keeping someone in prison for a year compare to the cost of just letting them keep shoplifting?
Prison isn't free. It's not even cheap.
Yeah for sure, normal/rational economists can make those arguments, and sane people need to acknowledge that's part of the ledger.
But surveys can't accurately capture 'what society you want to live in, how will it be enforced, etc.'
If you say 'the punishment should be 1 year' that might also be bundled with a bunch of other beliefs like 'we want to live in singapore, where repeat offenders are deported or serious offences are punishable by death, and also there is a very strong culture of crime for any reason is not acceptable; or at least 10% closer in that direction than we are now'
For a single offense - horrible idea. For 10+ repeat offenses (10 that we know about, chances are much much higher in reality) that may be worth the cost just to keep the person from lowering trust in society.
The worst repeat offenders don't seem to care about lesser punishments, sometimes don't care about punishments at all.
It is incredibly easy to not shoplift ten times in your life. If someone has gotten caught and arrested for shoplifting ten times and still isn’t getting the message, I don’t see any value whatsoever in allowing them to continue to exist in society. No well-meaning citizen would ever find themselves in that situation. You have to retaliate against willful defection with escalating punishment. This is just basic game theory.
Maybe it’s my own lack of imagination, but I can’t even imagine the possible mental state of someone who has gotten arrested ten times for shoplifting, but also doesn’t deserve to spend at the very least multiple years in jail.
"No well-meaning citizen would ever find themselves in that situation. You have to retaliate against willful defection with escalating punishment. This is just basic game theory. "
While I think "game theory" is a potentially useful lens here, extreme care must be taken in making judgements like this because many people fundamentally *haven't been playing the same game you have.*
My mental model of repeat offenders does include SOME people who are the human equivalent of DefectBot: that is, arrogant, low empathy people who think everyone who trusts others and follows the rules is a sucker just waiting to be taken advantage of. But it also includes quite a lot of people whose experience of "society" is being *constantly and egregiously defected against.*
If somebody has been repeatedly screwed over by authority figures all their life, the idea that just following the rules will lead to better outcomes--the idea that cooperate-cooperate is a state that can *ever* happen--is probably pretty alien. In such a mindset, shoplifting is just trying to get by in an unfair world. Getting caught and punished is just one more example of the unjust system screwing them over *again.* To the extent that it merits a change in behavior, that behavior is "try harder not to get caught," not "spontaneously start displaying the respect for authority that authority has never, ever shown you." Especially since shoplifting is pretty damn benign by the standards of someone who repeatedly been on the receiving end of the sort of life-ruining bullshit that a bad family, a bad community or a bad workplace can inflict on the unwary.
Now, there is a consequentialist argument that identifying such people and guiding them into a healthier mental state is too difficult, too costly or too risky and that "not allowing them to continue to exist in society" is the least-bad option. But the word "deserve" has no place in it. It's not justice, it's just another tragedy that we don't have the power to prevent. And somebody seriously taking that view must necessarily be open to novel solutions that *do* reduce the difficulty, cost and risk of rehabilitating such people down to an acceptable level (which makes them very different from arguments who treat such people as fundamentally bad actors, for which punishment is a desirable end in itself).
This all seems pretty reasonable. I think you've hit the disagreement pretty well.
I would say that someone who cannot cooperate (emphasis on can not), even when someone is cooperating with them, is very likely in your last paragraph here. I've met some people, including some that are pretty young, that just seem to be stuck on some form of defect in every scenario. Even when there's strong evidence that cooperate can work.
I would guess something is broken in their heads, likely very legitimately from experiences in their lives. I'm all for trying to help them fix it, and absolutely feel that one or even a few minor crimes still feels very fixable. I don't know if 10 is the perfect number or whatever, but there definitely feels like a time that the answer is no longer "slap on the wrist" levels of response.
I agree with Daniel that there does need to be escalation. Taking someone who is predisposed to defect under a given response and continuing to respond the same way is just unwise and counterproductive. That escalation can have a ceiling - I don't think the death penalty for misdemeanor theft is ever the right choice. It may be that sequestering them is the right choice. We actually have two levels of that in society, but we politely don't talk about the second, non-jail/prison, option - grouping undesirables in the same neighborhoods so they can defect against each other instead of the cooperating side of society. Whether this is overall a good idea is an interesting question. It's clearly bad for individual defectors, and clearly good for cooperators. Given that, and given that cooperation is necessary for society, it's likely a least-bad option, especially if the alternative is prison.
" I don't know if 10 is the perfect number or whatever, but there definitely feels like a time that the answer is no longer "slap on the wrist" levels of response. "
This feels like one of those disconnects that would likely be very hard to bridge. I certainly think that if the third, fourth and fifth mild-to-moderate smack don't manage to teach someone, there's not that much chance that the 10th one will either. But I ALSO don't think the problem can be adequately summed up as "clearly, you're not smacking hard enough." Once you start to become suspicious that no pattern of hammer strikes is actually proving efficacious, you should at least consider *finding a tool that is not a hammer* rather than winding up to smack even harder.
I look at it more like different levels of auto-defect. Some people are only mildly defecting, so you want to discourage that mildly (the first time offender scenario). If you overreact, you're more likely to cause harm (both to them, obviously, and also make them more resistant to future fixes) than fix a small problem. Most people who get caught shoplifting on a first offense will never do it again, even with mild punishment, such as a store security guard telling them to knock it off, or calling home to parents.
The goal at each level is to escalate to land on that sweet spot range where you're not overreacting and causing more problems, but still making it clear that the perpetrator should feel shame/remorse/fear or whatever negative emotion causes them to stop doing it again.
Once you've tried this enough times, it's clear that the escalations aren't working. At that point, we either have a core problem of misunderstanding what the individual values, or they are unusually resistant to the shame/remorse/fear and may in fact be immune to such concerns (a sociopath perhaps).
Now, is there a non-negative approach that might work instead of the negative reinforcement? Quite possibly! I think it's actually quite possible for first time offenders or even someone with a few offenses. I certainly appreciate not getting the book thrown at me for a few minor offenses when I was a teenager. There are problems with this approach.
What resources are needed to take this approach (i.e. a loving family at home, a support network, a good friend who encourages them, etc.)? Will the approach scale? How do you determine the difference between someone amenable to this approach and someone pretending in order to keep defecting? And so on.
Again, I'm not against such an approach, but it's very difficult to pull off and I think some of the prerequisites (the loving family side) are simply not available for large numbers of people.
"Again, I'm not against such an approach, but it's very difficult to pull off and I think some of the prerequisites (the loving family side) are simply not available for large numbers of people."
OK, yeah, this largely matches up with my view. I think that right now the justice system has very few tools beyond "hit the punish button hard" and "hit the punish button harder," which means that there are many sorts of problems it can't solve. But exactly because they require more tools and more complicated usage, they're much harder than simply tinkering with the amount and timing of punishment, to the point that I hardly feel qualified to even speculate about them.
I do think the "loving family side" hits at least one of the nails pretty squarely though. I think the psychological impacts of growing up with a loving family are important and hard to replicate. But on the flip side, I think there are practical advantages to it that might be rather easier to emulate at the community level or higher.
Specifically, having a (good) family means you have a group of people who know you and who are invested in your success. If you know you have a problem, there are people right there, available to ask for help. If you don't know you have a problem, there are people close enough to you that they might be able to recognize it. My suspicion is that quite a large number of the "lost cause" sorts of people, both among criminals and among the homeless are people who had problems that weren't actually that hard to solve: they just lacked either the knowledge or the capability to do it themselves. Note the word "had" though: I was too busy to comment on the homelessness discussions here a couple months ago, but the recurring thought that popped into my head while reading them was "clearly the best time to help these people was 10 or 20 years ago." Once it gets to the point where they're on their 10th shoplifting arrest, or where they're ranting on a street corner and accosting passers-by, I expect the problem to be much, much more difficult, if not impossible.
But I have only the faintest glimmers of ideas about what to do about that. It seems like the sort of problem that *should* be addressable through a concerted, top-down effort[1], But I don't have anything like a clear picture of how, just vague hints of how its connected to some of the other problems of modernity, which are similarly daunting.
[1] Albeit where "top" might be some level well below federal, like county or municipal.
Your romanticized hard done by image of repeat shoplifting assholes is completely unrealistic
Well, of all of the criticisms one could make of my viewpoint, that is certainly one of them. But I think banging this comment against a dictionary before you made it would substantially improved it (the comment, not the dictionary).
The belief (informed at least somewhat by experience, I might add) that exist are people that have been so thoroughly fucked over by life that they are essentially permanent outsiders to healthy human societies is about as far from "romanticized" as I could possibly conceive. Indeed, the world that contains ONLY the first type of shoplifter is both the essentially nicer world (justice is easy!) and the one that fits far better with Romanticism as a worldview. There is good and bad, heroes and villains, and while there heroes may struggle to triumph against the villains, there's no doubt that they ARE the heroes or that the Bad, Wicked Villains deserve their righteous comeuppance. When applied to real life, I believe we call it the Just World Fallacy: the notion that *necessary* things needs must be *inherently good* things, and that the only people who get punished are the Wicked, No Good, Very Bad People whose punishment we can all celebrate. No room for senseless tragedies, lose-lose situations or black-and-grey morality here, we have evildoers to smite!
That was a lot of words to make yourself look silly when I only need to use Google to do it for you. 'Romanticize' as a word isn't the verb form of the noun "Romanticism"
Google:
"deal with or describe in an idealized or unrealistic fashion; make (something) seem better or more appealing than it really is."
Well, then, I guess I should congratulate you for your efficiency: you made yourself look silly in FAR fewer word.
The connection to romanticism was intended to be a little bit tongue-and-cheek, but while the words aren't perfectly congruent, they are VERY CLOSELY RELATED. Romanticism the literary genre is very heavily concerned with painting an idealized-but-unrealistic picture of the world because that's prettier and makes a better story. Pointing out that the viewpoint is incompatible with the genre of Romanticism was a in-hindsight-probably-too-cute way to point out that it does not, in fact, paint a prettier, nicer, better or more appealing picture.
Now, to anyone who didn't have their head firmly lodged in the tight crevices of their own pedantry, I think my point ought to have been fairly clear, despite the embellishment. It is UTTERLY PREPOSTEROUS to respond to my original claim by insisting it paints a MORE idealized picture of the world. To say it again, for those of lesser reading comprehension: assuming that the ONLY people who routinely commit criminal acts both inherently evil and have nothing sympathetic in their motivation is FAR MORE "idealized and unrealistic" than assuming that SOME of them are actually broken in complex and difficult-to-fix ways that nevertheless cannot be rounded off as "they're just evil." The first view is the view of a child who cannot handle nuance or of an ideologue comfortably uninterested in anything that could challenge their simplistic worldview. The second is much less comfortable for everyone--as I noted, even if it's true it doesn't mean there's necessarily anything practical to be done about it--but seems likely to be more congruent to reality.
I was one of the people who answered 10 years for the repeat offender. My assumption was that if they had been able to commit 10 previous crimes, then various other methods must have been tried and found not to work.
>Now, there is a consequentialist argument that identifying such people and guiding them into a healthier mental state is too difficult, too costly or too risky and that "not allowing them to continue to exist in society" is the least-bad option.
Well, no, it's not too difficult, but "chuck them in jail for years" is going to help a lot with it. How exactly are you going to get them to show up at outpatient therapy when *by your own words* deterrents are void?
I appreciate this comment, not the least because I think it highlights a really significant disconnect. When you contrast "chuck them in jail" with "getting them to show up for outpatient therapy" my mind immediately goes "woah, woah, WOAH, those aren't the only two options."
But then I see that they ARE the only two options if one interprets "jail" in the right way. In particular, I think[1] that every the radical left end of criminal justice reform--the prison abolition movement--acknowledges the need for people to be involuntarily confined *sometimes.* They just don't think it should be in *prison* specifically. If someone considers "jail" or "prison" to cover any sort of punitive involuntary confinement the preceding sentence might well sound like nonsense. But when I hear about putting people in prison, to me that means putting them in the sort prisons that we actually have right now. Which seem primarily concerned with security, secondarily concerned with deliberately causing the inmates to suffer and (in most cases) not even slightly concerned with anything like treatment or rehabilitation.
So to be maximally clear on my point here, if someone has a substantial number of prior shoplifting convictions I think that:
1. It might be possible to help them break that cycle (though it's likely to be very difficult).
2.If it is possible to help them, it will almost certainly require some period of involuntary confinement.
but
3. Putting them in anything like the current standard for jail or prison will certainly be insufficient on its own, and likely highly counterproductive.
Of course, whatever alternatives to standard jail or prison one tries are near-certain to be more expensive per-inmate-day[2]. Which circles back to the utilitarian argument and whether helping such people can be done cost effectively. I think there's a reasonable case that it actually *could* be overall cheaper than our current system, but if so I expect it would take significant time and expense for it to get there, and thus would need much more political will than currently exists.
[1] Though I'm not heavily tuned-in to the movement, so I'm not 100% sure.
[2] Since our current system is fairly strongly optimized for being as cheap as possible without *usually* failing our (middling high) standards for security and our (usually very low) standards for comfort/tolerability.
I think it might be possible to arrange "involuntary confinement" at a cost substantially less than current prisons if, A: you're dealing entirely with non-violent prisoners and B: you've got traditional prison on hot standby for anyone who seriously disrupts operations at the soft not-a-prison-but-you-can't-leave thing.
Fair point, you may well be right. I'd certainly be open to seeing it tried somewhere.
Certainly, I agree that if a prison system supports prison gangs who commit crimes in prison and harden inmates into worse criminals, this is HCF; that prison system is not fit for purpose and needs to be fixed before we can start talking about subtler tradeoffs. I don't actually live in the USA, but I hear the Australian system does have some of the same issues.
There are a variety of possible solutions to this, the most obvious being to either solitarily confine or execute all the prison gang members (because apparently putting them in genpop didn't actually stop them committing crimes).
>No well-meaning citizen would ever find themselves in that situation.
Everyone, no matter how well-meaning, needs to eat. Not everyone can find employment, and social safety nets are full of holes.
I've never been in a "shoplift or starve" position, but if god forbid that happened to me, I'd probably get arrested more than once.
What percentage of shoplifters are doing it because they're starving, and have no other reasonable recourse, would you say?
Just look at all the shoplifters caught with $100 worth of rice and beans.
First time: warning
Second time: 10 hours community service
Third time: 3 lashes + 10 hours community service
Fourth time: 1 weekend in jail
Fifth time: 4 weekends in jail
Sixth time: Solid month in jail
Seventh time: Solid month in jail
Eighth time: 2 months in jai
Ninth time: 3 months in jail
Tenth time: 6 months in jail
Yes, I can see how someone can get to 1 year after 10 times. This is assuming 10 prior convictions, though. The question was about arrests.
The problem I see is that if you get someone who will compulsively steal no matter what, you're effectively giving them life in prison. Which is probably going to be a lot more expensive than whatever it is they're stealing.
You'd have to factor in the deterrent effect though.
If someone steals ten times, despite going to jail for successfully longer times each time, I imagine the deterrent effect is basically zero. They're either going to be in jail or stealing. If you can find a way to make them work in jail to make it actually profitable and also not be totally inhumane, great. Otherwise, putting them in prison is taking more money from taxpayers, and I'd rather have more than less.
I'm talking about the deterrent effect on people other than the repeat offender who see him going to jail.
I'm going to sue you for $3,000. The cost of your time and of hiring a lawyer is probably more expensive than that. Better just give in.
I'm not suggesting not to bother arresting shoplifters at all. You can probably stop most of them with a warning. The ones you can't, you'll probably stop after arresting them for a few months. Even the warning is probably more expensive than whatever they're stealing at the time, but worth it in the long run. But if you keep arresting them for longer and longer times, and it doesn't work, then arresting them for life is a worse option than just letting them shoplift.
That's not "shoplifting", that's the tenth conviction for shoplifting. I don't want to go straight to draconian measures but I do want to eventually incapacitate criminals enough to really curtail their effect on society (and also to avoid repeatedly spending all the resources needed to get someone properly convicted for trivial gains). So my idea is approximately exponential punishments: first two times are between a warning and a weekend in jail or community service, 3rd time serves 1 month, and then each following conviction multiplies it by something like 1.5. This results in 25 months by their 10th time (which I rounded down to 1 year in the survey). This is to someone who had already served 17 months for their 9th time and did it again anyway.
On the 10th offense. No one accidentally shoplifts 10 times, that's a committed criminal. Fuck those people.
You are aware that shoplifting is the easiest and most casual form of crime, yes? It's literally just putting something in your bag and not paying for it at checkout. If you are at the grocery store every second day you'll have that number in 3 weeks.
Yeah, if someone gets caught 10 times (or even once) and still doesn't stop, that's a committed criminal, but I would not put that label on someone who simply added another habit/routine to their usual shopping once they realized there's no noticeable impact.
>"If you are at the grocery store every second day you'll have that number in 3 weeks."
Probably an ambiguity in the survey framing here: if such a person was only caught after three weeks of this behavior, I'd consider that a first conviction (even if it was on ten *counts* of shoplifting).
If others are implicitly interpreting it as I am, then "the tenth offense" is being caught & convicted for shoplifting after already having been punished nine previous times.
If someone's been convicted ten times for shoplifting and does it again, it is highly likely that he/she will shoplift again immediately upon getting out of jail, and be jailed again. At this point the result of "a weekend in jail and then you're free" is that he/she spends most of the next year in jail anyway, but commits 50+ more thefts in that time and requires 50+ more trials. Seems simpler to face reality.
I put "ten years" for the second one, because while the above argument means that long custodial sentences are required (at least, if you don't want to just let the shoplifter run wild), there are still a couple of avenues available for "can at some point function outside a jail" - aging out of criminality, and inpatient psychiatry/re-education. These are not fast, but they're why I wouldn't say "life" (or "death") without proof that they'd failed.
1) For shoplifters, did the last 10 convictions happen in the last, say, 2 years? 6 months? I think that changes the answer a lot.
2) For homeless encampments: is it actually hard to prove they were harassing people? Instead of breaking up the encampment, why not just put some cameras somewhere inaccessible and facing the encampment? Then put up a sign saying "This area is under surveillance. If you're harassed, note the time and file a police report. We'll check the footage and arrest the harasser." This feels like a better intermediate step to breaking up the encampment.
> For shoplifters, did the last 10 convictions happen in the last, say, 2 years? 6 months? I think that changes the answer a lot.
In which direction? I feel as if incidents over a longer period of time are stronger evidence that the individual is irreppairably defective, instead of simply having an episode.
If they stole a bunch of times like, many years ago, and then stole again now, I'd hit them with a less harsh punishment; some community service or a weekend in jail, or maybe even a warning. That seems like a person who fell off the wagon.
If they've been stealing a lot recently, that's a pattern and let's incapacitate.
They camera will be gone within a day. As will the sign. I have some direct experience with living near a homeless encampments and they will steal anything, especially signs telling them not to camp there or any other official message from the city.
The camera would be mounted, like, on the high floor of a building.
If they steal the sign on camera, isn't that an easy arrest?
I assumed the camera would be mounted, I've seen these people climb higher than I would have expected to filch stuff, particularly if they can hock it for opiates. The copper wire alone would be incentive enough for many of them.
You're going to arrest someone for stealing a sign? I'm in favor of it, but a lot of people would call it harsh.
I hear you. I'd imagined the camera is on a rooftop or something: not somewhere you can really get to it without either getting through a locked door or scaling a sheer wall.
I feel like prosecuting for stealing the sign is less harsh than clearing the encampment, and punishing the innocent along with the guilty. I'm also pretty confident that after a few sign arrests that sign will stop getting stolen. Or, if it isn't, and the law really is impossible to enforce on this encampment, well, then that's really justification for clearing it.
While I confess to being a "softie" (not particularly inclined toward punitive approaches) myself, it seems to me that shop-lifting is a case where even most capital punishment enthusiasts for, say, murder or child molestation, think of the action as largely about 1) young people who either 2) do it once or twice and then go straight whether caught or not or 3) have emotional/psychiatric problems that translate to "cry for help" and, at their age, are better solved with such "help" than with "punishment."
BTW: i'd like to see some significant hours of community service as mandatory once-per-life service like conscription.
Would make sure that the shoplifter gets in contact with more average Joe at service.
In Hungary it is mandatory to do 50 hours community service to get a high school diploma.
So from your personal experience:
Is the service a personal benefit (without unlocking the diploma)?
Call me a romantic, but i hope that "mandatory" just overcomes the inertia and when grown some decades older we are thankful for the experience.
I just missed it (they implemented it after I got my hs diploma), so I asked my brother and in his view there wasn't much benefit of this program personal or social. For all we know they might have made it more useful since he did it, but the activities offered were not very useful: you could talk with old people or tidy up the offices of non-profits, but you couldn't choose picking up trash from public spaces or doing the groceries for old people which he felt would be more useful activities a high-schooler could do, so there is definitely room to develop this program.
That said, I definitely wish the governing party would focus more on these types of pro-social laws instead of the anti-democratic/anti-EU ones.
In Switzerland there's the civil service and civil protection service, which you can do instead of military service.
25% shoplifters is very strange to me. Do people count unknowingly taking things witbout paying? (I also did this) I don't think they should.
Related mildly interesting fact: If everyone who shoplifted says the proportion of people who shoplifted is 100% and everyone who did not shoplift says the proportion of people who shoplifted is 0%, then the average of the answers will be exactly the true proportion who shoplifted. (Maybe not that interesting, but I never before realised this.)
I'd count taking things by accident and not returning once you realised if you're still near the shop. But I'm surprised by how low the figure is tbh (bias: I shoplifted, not as a kid, not professionally/habitually, but not simply for thrills either).
Goes to show how dependent on our upbringing/social circles the idea of "normal" is. (I'm in the "this feels like a lot" team; intentional petty criminals almost feel like a different species to me)
I think it totally does, I'd say it's a cross between values and need. I stole stuff most when I had very little money day to day and easy opportunity to do so at low risk (in person visits to a large supermarket with a baby/toddler in a pram) so a saving of a tenner on a bag of nappies or a bottle of wine was meaningful -- let's say 15% of my weekly shop. Irrc it was accidental walking out with unpaid stuff that opened my eyes to that. I'm still p poor but don't steal now. Hard to tell why.
But I also know a lot of people (UK, middle aged, often with low grade university education, sometimes better than that) who would say something like "I'd never steal anything now, but when I was a teenager we'd nick makeup or sweets". And I suspect that among the respondent's to the survey this will be a big group, unless US is very different from the UK.
Common child behaviour here in Canada too. Sometimes you just want a chocolate bar, and no one's watching.
I'll say on my experience you shouldn't waste your time. I've done that a dozen or so times in my life and every time they didn't want the good back nor retroactive payment so I quit bothering if it was a honest mistake. You forget the employees don't care as they would have to do paperwork or answer questions about why/how, etc. Maybe a sole proprietorship would care but honestly I don't think they get shoplifted much as it is.
Interesting, in cases I did it by accident and decided not to steal the thing after all I'd just put it back on the shelf, often without alerting the staff at all.
I doubt most people who said they had shoplifted are in this category anyway.
That said, “I accidentally took it and forgot to check out” is by far the best cover for minor but practically beneficial shoplifting — having a middle class style pram of a “good” brand with an actual baby in it, sizable basket underneath and capacious folding hood to put stuff in and forget accidentally on purpose works really well, at least in British supermarkets and you can sort of convince yourself if you really want to that it WAS accidental.
I'd never steal from a small/non-chain shop so no idea how staff (often = owners) would react but I can't imagine them refusing to put an item through the till if you walked out with it and returned to pay for it.
Fair but likewise I'd suggest that it's also more true than not, i.e. the edge case really is the shoplifting over the accident hence they don't want alienate customers who made a legitimate error, you just write it off as a dead weight loss as part of doing business like restaurant food waste.
For me it usually happens when I'm using a shopping basket, rather than a cart, and I run out of room so I stick something in my pocket figuring when I go to get my wallet, I'll whack it and remember so put it on the on counter and then I end up missing it sometimes only to find out later that night when I'm at home and taking my clothes off or doing laundry later in the week.
The only real times I've gotten into arguments over shoplifting is I'm the sort that eats snack food in line (i.e. a single banana at the gas station while waiting to pay, I'll open the soda and drink it line, sip on the coffee prior to paying, etc.) and I've had an argument or two when a overzealously staffer about how I'm shoplifting as I hadn't paid yet and "the only reason you are paying is I caught you" .. yeah because nothing says shoplifting a diet coke like opening and drinking it right at the till.
PS: I'd never just sneakily put it back either though it crossed my mind. To me that looks more guilty, i.e. "I shoplifted but felt bad so I am trying to put it back" whereas since it was a honest mistake, no harm in just being open about it.
...Have you considered not doing those things? Seems like a really dumb reason to potentially get shot.
Not doing what? I'm not going to live my life in fear about eating a banana I'm going to pay for in thirty seconds while standing in line at the 7-Eleven. Nor am I going to go change out an entire basket of grocery for a cart because a potato didn't fit; we got pockets for a reason. Try not be scared all the time, you'll be happier for it.
Jesus. Talk about an american perspective. Getting shot for shoplifting?
Do they have to? The one time I accidentally shoplifted (I accidentally put it into my pocket instead of with the other stuff I was buying), I just snuck it back in the next time I went to the store and bought it normally. I suppose that could potentially cause problems with inventory, but I doubt it's worth doing paperwork for.
No idea, I just don't see why bother. No need to be sneaky.
I fully admit I would never do that unless it was a small, independent shop.
Accidentally stealing from a giant corporation is not something I would consider morally wrong or even societally damaging if everyone did it. It's accidental after all.
I also would not consider it shoplifting since you never had the intention to do it in the first place.
Also there have been enough mistakes by cashiers in my life that made me pay too much.
We were a group buying stuff for grilling. Someone in the group took the initiative to, um, lower our bill. I went along with it. 1 perpetrator, 5-10 accomplices.
This kind of thing also has a certain thrill to it. There are many people who think of themselves as "I would *never* do that", but given a nudge, or a particularly favorable situation, it just slips out. Same with getting in a brawl, or drunk driving.
We have the letters of ordinary Germans during Hitler's regime, so to me it is perfectly natural that given the appropriate environment neurotypical humans can be convinced of anything. My surprisal comes from looking at the payoffs of this action in the current society. Maybe it's different for others, but where I live (Hungary) for most whitecollar job they require you to prove that you have no criminal record, so it seems a very risky decision to gamble your living for relatively little money.
I heavily doubt that getting caught shoplifting once gives you a criminal record in most places in the world. Certainly doesn't where I live.
I looked it up and you are right. It only goes on your record if you shoplifted over 127$
A lot of people intentionally stole a candy bar at some point as a kid. (And I'm guessing a fair number of people who said "I've never shoplifted" actually did steal a candy bar and either forgot or don't want to admit it.) They are generally not adult serial shoplifters though.
I shoplifted a small item once to see the appeal of it after reading about people addicted to shoplifting. I was in my early 20s
And? How was your experience?
It was a mix of adrenaline and fear of getting caught. If I squint hard enough, shoplifting addiction is something plausibly akin to people addicted to extreme sports, like free solo climbing. Using addiction in the non-chemical sense
Why? Either you don't see the appeal, you do and now you want to shoplift but always have to resist, or you really do and get addicted to shoplifting.
To experience how shoplifting addicts feel. It's been many years and I've not had any urge to try again
I was something like 10 when I and two classmates noticed a plastic bag full of, ahem, not very child-appropriate magazines. Some pictures and some interesting read, not hard porn but definitely at least 16+. We helped ourselves to a copy each. The transgression of having such a thing in my possession dwarfed the "stealing" part, it didn't even register as a theft until much later. (By today's standards someone leaving that bag on a desk at school where kids could see it might face a much harsher punishment than a petty thief. Not that I think they actually did us any harm.)
I was something like 11 when I and some friends were playing on garage roofs and someone discovered (or possibly pried open, but I wasn't a part of that) a hole in one of them. We got in to look around, there was nothing interesting there save for a few bottles of some liquids. No idea what they were, one of them was identified as brake fluid I think. We stole them to see if they were flammable. I don't really remember what I thought at the time, save for the immense disappointment when none of the liquids deigned to burn.
I was something like 12 when I and two classmates helped ourselves to three ice creams from a vendor's freezer that was left unlocked. This time I clearly realized it was seriously wrong, and even considered paying for all of us. I never got around to, but that was it. Unless you count internet piracy or using public transport without paying.
Is there a way to tag Scott? A digital piracy question might be a fun addition to the survey
I shoplifted a whole cart of groceries a few months back. I had bagged everything up and then found I didn't have my wallet. It was the end of the shift and a very tired employee voided the transaction and somehow making her return everything felt like a worse thing to do than just walking out with it.
That's a particularly extreme example, but between grabbing candy bars as kids, checking out organic fruit as regular, weird non habitual situations like my own, and accidentally walking out with something, I can easily see how it could be 25% answer yes to the ever , but less than 5% have actually intentionally, habitually lifted $50+ amounts.
If you have a smartphone, it's worth looking into getting Apple Pay or Google Pay or similar on it, for exactly this situation. (If your phone is your car key, like mine is, it's pretty hard to forget.)
Also, presumably this is a grocery store you go to regularly? You could make them whole on your next visit, after writing down or recording how much it cost.
I grew up in a pretty bad and poor neighbourhood, and my friends and I did it for some element of kicks (and being able to get things like candy when we didn't have money) by distracting someone and then running out.
Also, we started a business making CD-R mixtapes as middle schoolers and I had the brainiac idea of saving on expenses by stealing the 100 pack of CD-Rs.
At one point, I got caught, got banned from the store by a lady who was kind enough not to call the cops and my mother bore down upon me the guilt-induding wrath of an angry immigrant mom. My friends, on the other hand, continued.
I sometimes walk out of chain stores without paying if I have an item that is less than four dollars and the line is 10 minutes long or more.
I shoplifted quite a bit as a teen and so did all my friends, male and female. It seemed like a victimless crime to us. By the time I was 20 I stopped and soon after I became horrified by the idea I'd ever done this. Now I would feel so guilty if I found an accidental chapstick in my bag that didn't get rung, I'd return it. But the shoplifting we did was not minor nor for thrills and I'd guess was more like thousands of dollars between me and my friends, if you aggregate the incidents.
Partly I think teenagers are slightly sociopathic selfish and I let care about their friends and social norms/status in their friend group. Partly I think it just goes to show how much your perspective changes when you have zero money and there are people and companies with more money than they can even keep track of, such that you know they'll barely notice. It doesn't escape me that I started to find shoplifting horrifying only once I had some money, and the immorality of it has seemed directly inversely correlated with my ability to pay for and obtain things without having to do that. So while I now see it as a clear wrong, I almost suspect my feelings on that, as it's very easy to think it's wrong for people with nothing to take things from people with stuff when you're one of the people who has stuff.
Assuming that community service is beneficial to the community and the shoplifter alike:
The damage to hours ratio should be designed to make the overall shoplifting phenomenon a zero sum for the non-shoplifters (including the damages by those who got away).
So we can eventually stop worrying about it at all...
I was very surprised by the 25% shoplifting figure, (I did the survey too early to have been asked to guess the answer). I would have guessed ~1-2%. The idea of shoplifting for me, as a child, would have been horrifying- that would have been something only really bad people did.
I shoplifted a small number of times as a child, nothing of real value. It was together with/inspired by my friends at the time. So I think it really depends on your influences, and I think young teens might probably do something like this as a dare or to impress one another. Overall, 25% for ever shoplifting doesn't seem too high to me
I haven't gone back to look at the original survey, but I think the results may be skewed a bit by starting with "did you ever shoplift?" to which I said yes because I once kyped a coke when I was in the third grade, under similar circumstances. So when the questions went on to ask about punishment I had a little more "There but for the grace of God" mindset, even though he did specify > $100.
Yeah it's tough to get the order right on those things, or even to randomize them well (it's basically all or nothing randomness with Google Forms as far as I know).
i think a lot of people might buy organic bananas and put them in the self checkout as cheaper regular bananas. things like that.
Bingo. Likewise tell the cashier it's something else. I def personally know some middle age soccer moms that always ring their produce as whatever is cheapest.
My guess is most of those people live in California. For the last 10 years it's been a free-for-all here and normal people are sick of seeing the security footage of obviously professional criminals clearing off shelves and then getting acquitted. I was equally horrified by the notion as a rule-following middle class suburban kid but I'm more than happy to cheat the self-checkout at the grocery store now. I lived in SF when the we-don't-stop-shoplifters trend began and I almost went and looted an Xbox from Target before figuring that the political theology was implicitly racial and that the DA would probably love to prosecute an upper-middle class white guy. I'm naturally a law-and-order conservative but I refuse to have my commitment to social order be a competitive disadvantage; I consider that a morally defensible position. Lots of my upper-middle class peers share this view.
The data do not bear this out. Californias are 26% likely to have committed shoplifting, fractionally lower than the US average of 27%. There's not a lot of worldwide variation either; the UK is 27%, exactly like the US. Germany is a bit higher, Russia a bit lower.
On a totally unrelated note, two people mis-typed "Denmark" in two different ways. Are Denmarkers particularly poor at typing, I wonder? :-) Sweden and Brazil both have one typo each; there don't appear to be any others.
EDIT: sorry I misread your comment. You're right.
I don't believe those data are either accurate or gathered in good faith. Much CA shoplifting stopped being reported in recent years because both shop owners and police know that the DA won't prosecute. Police have had a political incentive to obfuscate that fact in their reporting practices. Scott has written about this. I don't remember when exactly but I think it was ~2 years ago.
I'm pretty sure he was referring to the data in the ACX survey, which would not be affected by such things.
Oh that makes sense. I totally misread that, thanks.
I keep being amazed by people's magical thinking about psychiatry. The modal position is *no* punishment for an actual crime (shoplifting) but *life* imprisonment for "mental illness"?
I guess most people are "softies" in the sense that they care a lot about whether something is labeled "punishment" or "care."
I'm a civil libertarian, which seems to be a very different sort of creature, where I care a lot about *only* punishing the guilty and not violating anybody's rights, but I don't mind if penalties are "harsh but fair."
It's very hard to have an utilitarian perspective on the insane's wellbeing. A lot of the involuntary confinement is purportedly "for their own good", implying a positive utility factor. And the amount of suffering that they already go through while carrying their lives means that the additional loss of liberty may not affect the balance that much.
Huh? What magical thinking? That position (which btw no single person actually needs to hold for the stats to shake out this way) is perfectly coherent in a framework of minimizing deadweight loss to society.
So what's your proposal for dealing with a paranoid schizophrenic who refuses treatment or medication? Let him spend all day screaming at people on his street corner? Wait until he murders someone? I don't want people to end up like McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest either, but I don't see any way of dealing with the problem without some form of involuntary commitment.
Wait for them to actually commit a crime (like screaming in someone's face). Don't force them into indefinite involuntary commitment unless 1) they commit crimes if they don't take their meds, and 2) they will not take their meds without involuntary commitment.
I'd probably also give them the option to stop taking their meds once they're committed and have been on them long enough to know they work. If they're going to be committed either way, what difference does it make?
This is a terrible idea lol and most families of paranoid schizophrenics will strongly push back against it. They want their loved one cared for medicated against their will if necessary, they don’t want them talking to lampposts and sleeping in a urine soaked sleeping bag under a bridge
Maybe I'm confused, but 18% of your readers actually never got COVID? Back when I was looking at models all the time I thought they implied that 99%+ of the human population had gotten infected by like 2022.
nn% aymptomatic and never knew it.
Last time I checked about 5% of population has not had covid. To ascertain whether someone had had covid, subjects took a nucleocapsid test, which reacts to the antibodies developed in response to actual covid but not to the antibodies developed in response to vaccine. I am pretty sure I have not had covid. It is unlikely that someone of my age and risk factors would have an asymptomatic case. And every time I've had either sniffles or general malaise I've tested, total of maybe 5 times since covid arrived, and all tests have been negative.
I love the title of this paper: "COVID-19 ‘asymptomatic’ patients: an old wives’ tale" by Dimitra S. Mouliou et al.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17476348.2022.2030224
The authors point out...
1. that false positive COVID test results are creating an impression of higher asymptomicity.
2. Any study using self-reported RDT results should considered suspect (this probably applies to Scott's survey question, as well).
3. Even studies that use PCR tests can give false positive results. For instance, bad primers can give false positives. (In fact, there was a scandal a while back about the shitty quality primers that one major medical supplier was selling.)
4. Of the studies that were done on rates of asymptomicity, the paper points out that many fail to disclose the type of tests they used to determine rates of asymptomicity—and few studies try to control for false positive rates.
5. Another problem with many of the studies was that they didn't monitor their subjects for a full two weeks. Symptoms can appear later in the infection and continue beyond the two week infection window.
Although I don't buy into the idea that there are no asymptomatic cases, I suspect they much much fewer than people assume. If SARS2 is hijacking your cell's machinery to reproduce itself, it should be causing at least mild symptoms — i.e. sore throat, sniffles, etc. And many people confuse peri-symptomatic (very mild symptoms) with being asymptomatic).
The question said "if it was either confirmed by a test, or you're more than 75% sure you had it", so most asymptomatic or nearly-asymptomatic infections don't count.
e.g. my father once got a sore throat which lasted like an afternoon and only tested himself on my mother's insistence which he gave in to because they already had a test at home -- if he hadn't, there would be no way he would have ever known it was COVID
No, there is a way: a nucleocapsid test. Look it up.
Don't antibodies decay with time? If you hand an asymptomatic case in 2021 say, and was never vaccinated, we likely wouldn't be able to tell either way.
Yes, they do. They become undetectable 1-2 years after infection. After that, prior exposure to covid (as opposed to immunity from vax) can still be identified via t-cell tests, though I believe the blood bank study I’ve been going by did not do t-cell tests. So while for sure some of the people who tested negative on the nucleocapsid test had been positive on it earlier, it is implausible that all the people testing negative had had covid, just not in the 18 mo or so before the test.
Actually, a study was done of SARS2 antibody seroconversion, and only about 1% of the study group seroconverted in a year. But I believe they used a very sensitive test for that study. mRNA vaccines and push nAB titers to between ~3,000 - 10,000 BAU/mL in most people. The most sensitive (and therefore the most expensive) tests are sensitive down to 0.1 BAU/mL. Below 1.0 BAU/mL is considered to be seronegative because that value is below the noise level for those tests. But after a year, the majority of people vaccinated for SARS2 should still be well above that 1.0 BAU/mL cutoff point. I haven't seen any studies that track nAB titers over multiple years, though. And, of course, the rate of seroconversion may speed up over longer periods of time.
I think at this point pretty much everyone should be more than 75% sure that they've had it.
Overall? Yes. Recalling a specific point in time and being 75% sure you had covid *at that time*? No.
One factor in that is what your job is.
My friends in medical and medical-adjacent jobs, education, and a few others seem to all require testing on any respiratory infection.
My job doesn't do much beyond, "Stay home if you have a fever."
So while I may have a slight fever, I don't bother to figure out exactly what sort of virus it is. I just isolate for a few days, and watch for worsening symptoms; my friend the elementary school teacher with the same symptoms is required to test and learns they "Have COVID.".
I'd be interested in seeing good data about people who never had the right set of symptoms but nonetheless later had a positive antibody test.
Aside from asymptomatic cases (which other commenters have mentioned), if someone properly protected themselves from infection for the first year of the pandemic, then their immune system reacted well to the vaccine, they might well have never been meaningfully infected.
Yup, I think that is my situation. AFAIK, I either never had it, only had an asymptomatic case, or had so mild a case that the symptoms were ambiguous (we all sneeze now and then...).
Hi, I've never gotten covid. My husband did but I didn't catch it from him, and that was back when they were handing out tests like candy so I know I wasn't just asymptomatic. Only sniffles I've had since 2019 were from cold (the temperature, not the virus) or allergies.
I've never tested positive, had no respiratory illness during the pandemic, 3-4 since then (after I was vaccinated), which I would classify as "colds". Used rapid tests and all were negative. PCR was unavailable by that time.
I'm one of those people. I assume I actually got an asymptomatic case but I've used those over-the-counter tests for every cold I've had since 2020 and I've never tested positive.
But that's exactly right -- you are correct to assume you got an asymptomatic case and happened to never catch it with a test. I'm surprised that 18% of readers don't get that.
I responded "never had it." I view that as the most appropriate answer. I interpreted it as "never knowingly had it."
How do you know Wanda is correct to assume that? Why couldn't it be that they really haven't had it?
Nobody else has said this, but uh... devoted blog readers might have a lower quotient of "time spent outside with other humans" than the general public. I'm not dunking here, I mean, it's true of me! If you don't go into the world the COVID can't getcha.
I was going to gloss it as 'risk-averse', but...yeah. Well said.
According to the CDC, by partway through 2023 98% of people tested positive for antibodies. (https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/changing-threat-covid-19.html#:~:text=In%20January%202021%2C%20only%2021,one%20COVID%2D19%20vaccine%20dose.). However, not all of those people had had the virus. Some got their antibodies from infection, some from vax, and of course some from both: "In January 2021, only 21% of people aged 16 years and older had COVID-19 antibodies. By the second half of 2023, 98% had antibodies from vaccination, prior infection, or both. To date, more than 81% of Americans of all ages have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose."
Here's a chart, also from the CDC (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#nationwide-blood-donor-seroprevalence-2022) that breaks down the group with antibodies into people who had been infected (blue) and people who had not , but had antibodies from vax (orange): https://imgur.com/F1cj1gh
Models are nothing more than hypotheses and should be considered tentative unless confirmed by actual data. The classic SIR models did a very bad job predicting the infection rates of the various vars during the pandemic. For a while, the CDC had a model tracking page for the expected case numbers for the coming month. About models for about 20 research groups were tracked on that page. None of them were accurate more than a week or two out, and most were wildly off. Eventually, they just began averaging all the model predictions together and stopped IDing the individual models, probably because it was embarrassing the modelers. Even the average trendline predictions were pretty bad.
Is it just me who finds the architectural winners kind of... unsettling? Like it's too much in a way.
I don't really mind the office winner (half of Central Europe urban centres looks like that after all (the image is Warsaw right?)), but it feels kind of imposing and I'd prefer a friendlier style.
While the house winner feels like a hyperstimulus, in an uncanny way
I like the office, and I know what you mean about European urban centres (it reminded me of Paris). But that house! I just see the huge amount of work it takes to keep something like that looking like that. And I see the poky insides of those upstairs rooms with half the walls being the roof — nowhere to stand an eight-foot tall bookcase! The horror! That is a house built to look at, not to live in.
Yeah, all the houses in the survey put me off due to being too big and too much.
Same. I choose the winning house for being the closest to vernacular architecture out of the bunch. But I would be going for a much simpler version. And definitely not keeping it up to such photogenic standards every day.
That too. Should I have imagined that I have a family of 10?
I was thinking - how on earth do I know whether I like it if I don't know how well-insulated it is, how drafty it is, how it will age, etc.
If you say "ignore that" - well, presumably you are asking me what house I'd like to live in? I mean, some Escher engravings look really nice, but would you like to live in a place without a well-defined upwards direction?
Yes, that's exactly what it's asking. I certainly took it as "Assume all else equal regarding insulation, ease of cleaning, etc."
And yes, I think it's meant to be a place you'd like to live, but probably a fair proportion of the answers were influenced by the looks "from the outside", especially since that's how the question about the office block was phrased.
Right, but it's difficult to believe that they are equal regarding insulation, ease of cleaning, etc.
At some level that's actually impossible - the Franklloydwrightesque house is better for places with lots of sunlight in summer, because of the overhangs; it will waste less energy on AC.
Ah, that one is *actually* by FLW. I guess calling it FLWesque is still technically correct (and even conveys information - there may be FLW houses that are less obviously by FLW or his school).
Warsaw? No, it’s obviously the older part of San Francisco!
I think that was my second favorite, I’m surprised to see it won. The house may also have been my second favorite, and I do see what you mean about hyperstimulus. That said, it had an actual garden (which didn’t have any tomatoes, but tomatoes are plantable) and was a reasonably old-fashioned style, and those tend to be the things I care about.
Also wood frame. Very important for dealing with earthquakes.
It is Warsaw (I originally thought all those buildings were AI generated but I tried reverse image searching that one and turns out it is in Warsaw):
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamienica_Wilhelma_Rakmana_w_Warszawie
I think I rated it highly and this makes me reconsider.
Warsaw is not a pleasant place to live in, and the buildings aren't really appealing in context (i.e., when you're walking right underneath, rather than taking a photo from a pleasant faraway angle). (To be fair, this is true of pre-modernist, modernist and contemporary glass-covered buildings alike.)
I wonder how much of the "appeal" of traditional buildings comes from, well, increasing the distance. Including metaphorically, by not having to interact with them all day every day. The best places to actually live in I've encountered are more or less brutalist - just don't show the buildings off, hide them behind trees. Focusing on the visual appeal of the architecture is probably optimizing for the wrong thing in the first place.
That's why I thought the buildings were AI generated - to remove associations, positive or negative, with real-world places or when it comes to houses also potential privacy issues.
I am personally a fan of traditional architecture and I liked that office building the most as well. However, I have worked only in brutalist and modern buildings, preferred the modern ones as they had more open and common spaces. I also used to live in an old apartment building from 1800s whose facade unfortunately underwent some sad reconstruction, but many other buildings in the area were preserved in the old aesthetics (like the building in the picture, but this was in Germany) and I liked the area for it.
I think it is possible to optimize for both comfort/function and outside appearance at the same time. If there is a compromise, I find it's more often in very new buildings as old buildings typically have simple shapes with embellished surfaces while the very modern ones can have slanted walls and such that can affect the interior.
Considering that much of Vienna looks like the warsaw building and is the city with the highest quality of life in the world (and where I live, it's very nice for the most part) l'm not convinced by your assessment.
I also don't get the point of them not being appealing when you walk below them. I find brutalist building horrifyingly ugly from any distance.
Nope, not just you. I want less of that, too - I assume my brain dislikes it because it's much more 'busy' than the simple geometries of modern architecture, but I don't *really* know if that's the reason. I do know that I find the "favourite style of house" image actively ugly and hope something like that doesn't pop up in my neighbourhood, but I accept that I'm apparently the odd one out. I'm also an avid lover of winter as a season (and strongly opposed to summer), so being the odd one out is normal to me, anyway. Maybe something's just crosswired in my head.
One of Scott's well-known prejudices (which I share, BTW) is his dislike of modern architecture that looks like it was 1990s CGI. I'd expect his blog to be enriched in people who like older styles.
Wouldn't it be logically inconsistent for a large majority of ACX readers to shoplift a lot and also prefer severe punishments for shoplifters? Unless they're feeling guilty, have very poor self-control, and have high self-awareness of responding well to external incentives?
There are two kinds of self-control. One is for preventing action that look good in the short term but will end up hurting you (through the reaction of your peers e.g.). The one you are talking about is about managing your karma when nobody is watching.
It is consistent to want a coordination problem solved by societal intervention rather than by asking everyone to "be good".
The punishment question specifies a minimum of $100. The "have you ever shoplifted" question has no qualifiers. It seems perfectly consistent to me to have--for example--swiped a candy bar as a kid and still support more severe punishments for higher-value shoplifting. Individual, small items worth $100 or more aren't that easy to come by in most stores: to me a threshold like that implies a somewhat higher degree of deliberation and ill intent (though I still skew towards leniency).
I downloaded the results just to try this and it takes filtering *three* columns (all fairly public info about me) to get the results down to just me. (Filtering two columns gets it down to four people, one of whom is likely my brother.)
And no one other than you cares enough to do this, so you're grand!
This concerns me also to the point I left many answers blank. Maybe next time I will fill in everything but opt out of data sharing, or just claim to live one state over.
It's probably worth some thought why the comment section is so much more *extra* than the median respondent; for instance, it may be that there's a pathological cascade where more extreme voices make more moderate commenters feel timid, or it might be that overly-online extremophiles post early and often, filling up the comments before more chill people even see the post. Either way, it could suggest different moderation approaches.
I, for one, don't feel the need to advertise/debate opinions that I consider standard/normal. For example, I'm against both slavery and factory farming, but the slavery argument is well and truly won in the court of public opinion, right? I really don't need to start a post on the open thread laying out my reasons for holding my anti slavery position.
That's an excellent point!
The slavery position could be open for debate depending on whether you include things like sweatshops or factories with suicide nets to be slavery.
I think it's the same reason that online reviews attract extreme opinions. I don't bother writing a Yelp review unless the restaurant is either awesome enough or terrible enough to overcome my inertia.
I think I'm in the "verges on extreme" category on here, at least in terms of combativeness. I do it because I'm a high-disagreeability conservative and this is about the only forum online that I can actually engage with intelligent liberals without getting censored or banned. If the general culture was less oppressive towards conservative viewpoints then I'd probably have less pent-up energy to vent here. My guess is that argumentative conservatives are overrepresented on ACX because it's one of their only outlets.
This is massively to Scott's credit, btw, especially since he's nominally liberal. This really is one of the few forums anywhere (at least that I'm aware of) where both sides can come together in respectful debate.
Among 611 cisgender women respondents, 154 think men have it harder dating, 331 say the same, 80 say women, the rest didn't answer.
Among 121 transgender women respondents, 49 think men have it harder, 43 say the same, 14 say women, the rest didn't answer.
Among 4682 (!) cisgender men respondents, 1953 said men have it harder, 1998 say the same, 401 say women.
There were 21 transgender men respondents so I figure the sample size is too small.
I was expecting everyone to blame the other gender, and you do see more men saying they have it harder, but a plurality seem to say the genders have it the same.
Well, that one has an empirical answer. Scott stripped out the ones digit, probably for privacy reasons, but we can still stratify by age.
Looking at cisgender people because the transgender population will give me all subsets below 100:
Women in their 20s (n=79): 34 say men, 30 say the same, 5 say women
Women in their 30s (n=242): 71 say men, 134 say the same, 21 say women
Women in their 40s (n=160): 33 say men, 89 say the same, 27 say women
Women start moving from saying 'men' to 'the same' in their 30s. The surprising thing to me is how few women think women have it harder. I put it down to sampling bias given the lack of female nerds...um, ACX readers. (The lopsided sample sizes speak for themselves!)
Men in their 20s (n=509): 260 say men, 181 say the same, 36 say women
Men in their 30s (n=1718): 820 say men, 675 say the same, 121 say women
Men in their 40s (n=1455): 547 say men, 662 say the same, 121 say women
I would definitely say the effect is there among men, though it doesn't really seem to kick in until after 40 (!).
tl;dr: your hypothesis is correct.
Non-nerd women don't think women have "dating" harder either. Am nerd woman. Most of my friends are not as nerdy. It is simply obvious that we have had a much easier time dating than any of our boyfriends based on, I don't know, having functional sensory organs to perceive the world with.
That isn't to say women may not have it harder in relationships later on; I do think it balances out later (and have some controversial opinions on the subject). We're just aware it's much easier to find men who are attracted to you than women who are attracted to you initially.
Yes, I basically agree with you as long as we're talking nerds--this is an ACX survey after all, not Barstool Sports or Refinery 29. (And your final statement, perhaps intentionally, still evaluates to 'true' whether you're a man or woman seeking women!)
My point is we're stuck with sample bias and it may not apply elsewhere. I always seem to read non-nerd women in the papers complaining about how hard it is to find someone and how awful men are.
Later on in relationships, I agree--if you want kids there's the whole 'get to commit before your eggs run out' thing I don't envy, and the risk of abuse etc. Conversely there's all the ways women can weaponize the various court systems and the way people tend to sympathize with the woman in disputes. It's one of these things where it's always easier to see how the other side has it better, which is why I am surprised we didn't see that pattern here.
Controversial opinions? This is ACX, go for it. :)
The question was bad since it's totally unspecified.
Getting dates? Has to be easier for women.
Getting quality dates/long term relationships? Probably equal.
Not having to worry about getting raped by someone you rejected? Easier for men.
Another thing men have harder in dating is that they are constantly told that women view them as creepy rapists.
Like outlet said "who has it harder" is a very superficial question. I expect men and women on average have it hard in very different ways.
This question doesn't seem very interesting, the results should be completely unsurprising and anyone who thinks they're remotely surprising or interesting is almost certainly equivocating on the meaning of "dating".
If you asked about sex, then obviously it's a fact that men have a greater intrinsic desire for sex, obviously everyone is aware of this, and the only people who would think to deny it (or who would think to portray the resulting fact that women can far more easily get something they don't want, precisely because they don't want it, as something remotely interesting or significant) are people for whom acknowledging the existence of objective biological reality is absolutely
Off The Table.
If you asked about marriage, I don't see why there wouldn't be an equal balance, most likely with each sex favouring their own to a small extent. There's no reason to think "who has it easier in getting married" wouldn't even out, assuming equal numbers of men and women.
"Dating" is ambiguously between these in emphasis, but I think because of Modern Society people are likely to interpret it slightly more towards "sex". Thus explaining the partial skew.
There's a lot of these equiovocations going on in these kinds of discussions, and a laziness about defining terms.
Good points. Suggest it for the next survey.
Surveys are so much better than comments at discovering the truth.
I think we underestimate how much extreme positioning is social posturing.
Social posturing is weirder than it's usually depicted in this blog - people do social posturing alone in their rooms, or with hostile audiences, all the time. The point isn't entirely signaling to others. It's partially creating a consistent and well-defined self-concept, *keeping in mind* that that self-concept will be judged by peers and friends.
I run in extremely far-left circles (and am not thrilled about it). But I've noticed activists that actually do activist things in the world are way way more moderate than people who just post on the internet. Actually interacting with the problem instead of talking a lot naturally introduces you to realities that force you to depart from ideology.
For anyone who just wants to do some simple looking through the data, I've (well, mostly Claude) made a simple to use Google Sheet where you just enter the column letter and it does a GroupBy and charts it:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/106lOcaA7FMpYjdECRHV14T7Md1ackB28IvCeb3Gqbs8/template/preview
Example: https://i.imgur.com/caqYuu1.png
You'll have to be signed into google and click use this template.
Edit: Fixed for multi character columns, AA etc
Edit 2: Totally missed that you can see it all on the Google Forms response, I jumped straight to playing with the data 😆
If I read this right, of people who took the survey, you changed about 500 of their votes. But your audience is some multiple larger than the number of people who took the survey, and to the extent the survey is a representative sample of your audience, you could infer you changed an even larger number of votes within the population of your whole audience.
Not to engage certain, uh, "Spencer's Gifts" stereotypes, but has anyone formally studied whether the self-reported profundity of psychedelic experiences is IQ-linked?
I'm hesitant to endorse harsher punishment for "10 prior arrests" because I value the principle of innocent til proven guilty, and it wasn't specified that this person had actually been previously _convicted_. Though maybe you'd eventually bring me around through some Bayesian argument based on the sheer number of arrests clearly incidating a pattern of some kind.
This feels like dodging the hypothetical on a technicality, but I do concede that in the event that someone has been arrested ten times for shoplifting, and not a single one of those occurrences resulted in a conviction, then a lengthy prison sentence would be unwarranted.
You're still assuming the person wasn't innocent, convictions don't change that. I have multiple convictions including some people consider extremely heinous that I got a decade for, I'm genuinely innocent of everyone of them. You seem be confused about the US legal system in practice, not theory.
You should write about this! It sounds like a very interesting story.
It's been written about, here and other places and no I'm not going to relink it. It's a story full of injustice, tragedy, and corruption like any good Greek comedy complete with no happy endings but likewise it's quite banal as well. The nutshell though is in society you will always have those people that for whatever reason, the general population just instinctively finds them utterly repulsive and as such wants them harmed and they know that by aura alone for lack of a better word, i.e. you know the people I'm talking about. People you utterly hate just by looking at them or within five seconds of a conversation whether it's tone, body language, etc. and I'm just one of those people.
Two good examples here are once I was leaving a large municipal family oriented festival, the crosswalk light changed but there were still so many people that the crowd kept crossing. I was individually pulled out of that crowd of five hundred "jaywalkers" by a police officer standing by doing crowd control, thrown to the ground, kicked, and then ticketed for jaywalking all in front of my family and thousands others simply for making eye contact with the officer (and he was quite open about that). Another time back during the BLM times, I was doing my daily five mile walk around the park as I do every day and had for years and BLM just happened to be holding a protest. As I walked by it, one of the activists ran over and punched me in the face right in front of my kid and right in front of an officer because "I was the problem" (i.e. I'm not black). The cop walked over and said "I hope you learned your lesson. We don't want your kind here, GTFO. the park or I'll arrest you and have your child taken by family services while you sit in a cell for three days". During COVID I got assaulted three times by mobs right in front of a police officer for not masking outside at a gas station and they just smiled and walked away.
Also once you pick up a record you no longer get any positive discretion, every interaction with any officer of the legal system hostile and charged. You don't get warning for speeding, you don't get cops looking the other way for missing the crosswalk timer by two seconds, etc. hence why repeat offenders are common as is recidivism, it's not that they commit crimes at a higher rate that the general public, it's simply they have a microscope on their lives now and a target on their back so the slightest infraction will always cause the maximum penalty. For example while I was on probation I got two months in jail for going 1 mph over the speed limit as a technical probation violation because it's a probation violation to do the impossible, not commit any crime where the standard is "was attested by someone that wasn't you", i.e. you don't even need a conviction nor arrest for the parole violation to trigger.
As for my heinous crime, I was convicted of recklessly committing a strict liability speech crime because "A reasonable person, not you obviously, would have refrained from engaging in legally protected speech because they know there are edge cases where said speech is criminal depending solely on the recipient of it and it's impossible to know ones audience. As such you were unreasonable in speaking and here's ten years for it". I would have actually got less time had I did it intentionally or knowingly the judge said as then I could show remorse or be rehabilitated but because it's impossible to rehabilitate or show remorse for a reckless strict liability crime as there was no knowledge, no bad action, nor did bad intent existed hence nothing to fix, he felt obligated to impose the maximum sentence since I couldn't get "better".
Now one might ask how can one even logically reckless commit a strict liability speech crime and you'd be amazed how the legal system doesn't even try and explain it. They simply said "We have proof you said something and that speech is offensive out of context but not a crime unto itself normally. Luckily for us we changed the law last year to criminalized said words when said to police officer but not anyone else to facilitate stings. Unfortunately for you, the guy you were talking with was a undercover police officer goading you specifically so he could arrest you under the law enforcement speech exception as otherwise it wouldn't have been a crime even, in fact the legislation in passing the law change explicitly prohibited us from charging that exact speech to anyone that wasn't a cop". Basically I jokingly in a bar agreed that I'd give ten dollars to see some politician dead with a random bar stranger I'd just met five minutes ago and was having a good humor bar convo with over some drinks while watching some politician give a speech on the bar television and I was successfully convicted for solicitation of murder and yes it stuck because the black letter law criminalized those words alone based on the legal theory of recklessness and legal presumptions about contracts and truthfulness of speech, i.e. "you said it so it must be true and you no longer have a presumption of innocence", i.e. "you on tape stated you would give money to see someone dead to an undercover police officer" and since the law explicitly made it strict liability, yes jokes are illegal too as they don't have to prove any intent.
I don't mean this in a rude way; I mean it very earnestly as helpful feedback: I don't think the issue is that you are a person people "utterly hate just by looking at them or within five seconds".
Maybe some of what you say is true, but I do not believe it with the details you presented, and so many hard-to-believe claims cast doubt on your honesty and/or capacity to accurately perceive reality.
In particular...
It does not seem credible to me to claim that a police officer would assault a member of a crowd in front of thousands of witnesses, and then openly admit to having committed assault.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that a police officer threatened to arrest you after he saw you become a crime victim during your morning walk.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that there were "mobs" violently enforcing mask-wearing, or that they on three separate occasions committed assault against you in front of police officers.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that speeding 1 mph was, in isolation, considered a parole violation that would lead to two months of jail time.
It does not seem credible to me to claim that you were were convicted of a crime just for making a joke about killing a politician, because the US (where you seem to live, if you bumped into BLM protests on your morning walk) has very strong protections for speech that cannot be overridden by state or federal law.
And yet it's all true, spend more time around the criminal law system, it's quite common place. Likewise true, though you won't find it credible, is every woman I personally know in this municipality who has ever had a formal interaction with the police, has been sexual assaulted by the police including, my own daughter, at least once in their life. My teenager daughter for example three weeks ago was pulled over for failing to come to complete stop, the cop fondled her for "his safety" and then told her if she showed him her breasts he would let her go without a ticket.
And you are wrong on speech, there are free speech exceptions and the big three, which many people go to prison on myself included, which the SCOTUS consistently upholds, is conspiracy, solicitation, and speech integral to the crime. There is no requirement for mens rea in the Constitution, it's just assumed unless the legislation explicitly says otherwise and in my states case, they did. My state has defined ONLY in the case of communication with a police officer, that simply writing, saying, or engaging in pure speech in which exchanging resources for the death of another is stated, that is the entirety of the crime and both the state and US supreme courts have upheld it including under recklessness. The law is what it is, it's not what you want it to be.
It used to be we required things like intent, knowingly, actus reus, etc with strict liability crimes being reserved for petty misdemeanors but legislators across America, ever since the SCOTUS upheld strict liability felonies during the start of the drug war, have starting spreading them to speech as well to combat "hate", "violence", "trafficking", etc because catching criminals takes effort hence it's easier to manufacture them.
Your lack of imagination to the point it can't even cover reality as it is is why the US criminal justice system is broken, because people like you make up the overwhelming average juror and can't fathom the system as it really is. It's not Law and Order like on TV. Innocent people are routinely convicted to the point it's the norm.
A lot of "and I just did this teeny minor thing and the law system threw me in jail for parole violation" turns out to be "on top of having committed sixteen serious violations which I didn't mention".
So if any of this stuff happened, our friend here might be "there is no reason at all to think I'm a vicious criminal even if I did do vicious criminal stuff because I think I'm justified in my actions and the pigs are just out to get me for no reason other than they hate me" type.
I would bet all the money I have that this is full of embellishments if not nearly entirely made up. It's not just the fantasy and unlikeliness of the stories; you have similar writing to conspiracy theorists and schizophrenics. I can't tell if these are lies or delusions.
Believe whatever you want man, I'm indifferent. He asked me to tell my story do I did. It's all true though.
I could've maybe believed any one of the claims in isolation except the pro-masking mob assaulting him three times in front of cops. That one's clearly the product of a mind untethered from reality.
The long run-on sentence about the bar incident does sound very like the schizo train of thought, when describing incidents they believe happened but didn't, that I've heard used by schizophrenic person.
I don't know if I believe you. Getting punched by a BLM rioter is plausible, but "get out or I'll have your kid taken by social services" by the cop immediately afterwards? Bit too much of an escalation. "Get out of here or I can't protect you", yes I'd believe that. "Get out of here or I'll give you something to cry about", even I could believe. But the whole "and then I'll get you and your little dog too" is too much gilding on the lily.
That sounds like the Gwen and company account, in the Ziz cult discussion, of what they claimed happened after they were arrested for the CFAR protest: "and they sexually assaulted us, refused us food and water, inflicted concussions and hypothermia on us, and much more!"
Given that this account was believed without too much demur, and the associated set of people went on to commit assault and murder, yeahhhh... I'm thinking this "for no reason at all people attack me and jail me" account is also somewhat embellished by someone who, if arrested, maybe did do something to deserve it.
How about suspended sentences? Ten previous arrests, ten previous convictions, but sentences suspended to 'give them a second chance' etc.
I think if you've had ten+ arrests and convictions, never spent any time in jail, and get arrested yet again for the same crime, then jail time looks like what is needed and not "this is your fifteenth second chance".
The distinction between commenters and survey results makes me wonder about the "silent majority" on other publications. I have a negative opinion of the Free Press mainly because of their comments.
In "Why We Did It" Tim Miller writes that after the Breitbart founder's death, Steve Bannon followed a strategy of "centering the commenters" in editorial decisions. Those folks were the the precursors to MAGA. Wouldn't surprise me to learn Catturd2 was one of them.
Steve Bannon runs the Free Press now? I knew they were considered on the right, but not THAT far right.
Sorry, I left out Breitbart. Will edit.
Could you supply the text of the binned questions, so we at least know what we're missing?
There's another explanation for attractiveness (or intelligence, or driving ability) having the majority above average, unlike height. There's not a single accepted measure of attractiveness, so rugged people think ruggedness is handsome, thin people think (correctly) thin is in, etc. A rugged person might correctly rank themselves among rugged people, and might rank the thin ones correctly among thin people, but will boost rugged people over thin people. I call it the Lake Wobegon Effect.
I like this explanation. I don't know if you meant it but it reads like the preferences are downstream of one's own appearance, so I want to point out there could also be different reasons. First, obviously, one's opposite-sex parental figure during their formative years seems likely to be the primary source of preferences, and if they are their biological parent or other close relative, there should be a significant correlation because of that. But second and somewhat more interestingly, if preferences are partly genetic we would still expect this to contribute to correlation because one's biological parents tend to be attracted to each other and one inherits half of these genes from each parent, too.
I think there's also a social aspect. If a group has a particular beauty standard, people who are attractive by that standard will get a lot of positive reinforcement for hanging out with that group. So I would expect people to (in expectation) wind up in social groups that rate them as somewhat above average.
Whoa, Jim Parinella reads SlateStarCodex.
...I guess that makes sense.
(I was introduced to SSC in 2014 by two fellow ultimate players!)
Thanks for doing this survey and publishing the results, year after year. It's refreshing to have someone do the legwork of actually collecting some real data about the world, and to look at it for real, instead of the ever-present temptation of just theorycrafting in the safety of one's own mind.
Can we get some kind of helpful graphical display for income, sat scores, etc?
In case anyone's curious about masking % by gender:
M (cisgender) 2.54%
F (cisgender) 5.40%
F (transgender m -> f) 13.22%
M (transgender f -> m) 14.29%
Other 12.98%
TBH I expected the difference between cis and trans to be even higher.
The first question that pops to mind is if this is due to higher neuroticism or that masks give them freedom from awkward stares. My guess is the former.
It's both, and also that masking makes passing significantly easier. Hides facial hair + various other facial secondary sexual characteristics that contribute heavily to snap gender-gestalt impressions, gives an entirely plausible excuse for voice distortion/not talking much (frequent giveaway), lowers makeup-required surface area. And for the autist comorbid, also helps hide blankface awkwardness + inappropriate facial expressions + lack of willingness to talk, which are also fairly easy tells.
But I think neuroticism still dominates more than pragmatism. I try to keep my "community" at a long arm's length these days, yet it's still hard to miss the Covid Disproportionately Affects Trans People, New Genocide Vector-type mindset, even in current_year.
Wait, how can transgenders be subject to genocide? They're all sterile already.
Could you please elaborate on this? I can see at least two very different ways you could get from sterility to it not being genocide, and there are probably others.
Sterile -> no common ancestry -> not an ethnicity -> not genocide
Sterile -> defective -> okay to kill -> not genocide
The first one.
Also it's just not a genetically-based group definition, so the concept of genocide is nonsensical. You can't interrupt the propagation of a group if that group already doesn't propagate. Like you can't 'genocide' Star Wars fans.
I like your analogy. Imagine if someone went out of their way to destroy star wars fandom, trying to ban star wars fanfics, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-star-wars ads, etc. I probably wouldn't call that genocide, but that person is obviously evil and something is very very wrong with them.
I always figured it was politically coded, and most transgender people are going to be more left-wing because the right loves to use them as a punching bag. You'll also note more women still mask than men.
I liked the mask results, showing once again the Astral Codex virtue signalling crowd is strong hence why I take most comments here with a grain of salt; you all goose-step much as the general population.
The "What is your height in centimeters" question has a lot of anomalous answers between 20 and 30. I'm pretty sure that those are Americans who accidentally divided their height in inches by 2.54, instead of multiplying it by 2.54.
Similarly there are nine answers between "1.57" and "1.85", which clearly accidentally answered in meters instead of centimeters.
How does that correlate to self-reported SAT math scores? lol
I think there was a major confounder for the repeat offender question: What punishment they've had in the past. The question didn't say, so probably people either made guesses based their experience, or assumed they previously had received the punishment they gave in the first question. So for example someone who wants to be tough on crime might have assumed they were under-punished previously, and selected an even higher desired punishment than they would if that person had been more harshly punished than they would be in (this person's perception of) reality.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? If they had received a harsh punishment before and they relapsed anyways, that necessitates an even harsher punishment this time around.
I'm not sure. Could go either way I guess.
Or maybe it means it's time to admit punishing them isn't working, so either they'll keep on shoplifting or spend their whole life in prison, and the first one is less expensive.
No, it isn’t. It absolutely isn’t.
ACX Meetup Czar here, of course I went straight to the meetup numbers.
Meetup (2025)
Have you ever been to an Astral Codex Ten meetup?
No, I don't want to: 1701, 30.7%
No, I want to but I just haven't made it there yet: 1461, 26.3%
No, I don't know of any, or can't make it to any: 1010, 18.2%
Yes, I attended one meetup: 544, 9.8%
Yes, I've attended a few meetups: 585, 10.6%
Yes, I attend meetups regularly: 244, 4.4%
Meetup Approval (2025)
For people who went to ACX meetups: how much did you enjoy it?
4: 572, 41.7%
3: 335, 24.4%
5: 312, 22.7%
2: 119, 8.7%
1: 34, 2.5%
Then I compared them to the 2022 numbers
Meetup (2022)
Have you ever been to an Astral Codex Ten meetup?
No, I don't want to: 2221, 32.1%
No, I want to but I just haven't made it there yet: 1884, 27.3%
No, I don't know of any, or can't make it to any: 1337, 19.3%
Yes, I attended one meetup: 630, 9.1%
Yes, I've attended a few meetups: 605, 8.8%
Yes, I attend meetups regularly: 233, 3.4%
Meetup Approval (2022)
For people who went to ACX meetups: how much did you enjoy it?
5: 330, 22.4%
4: 639, 43.4%
3: 359, 24.4%
2: 120, 8.2%
1: 23, 1.6%
Overall that looks like noise, possibly meetups are getting a tiny bit less attended and a tiny bit worse. That's discouraging. I took over as ACX Meetup Czar at the start of 2023, so this is the range where I might have impacted things and these are obvious questions to check if I'm changing anything. Meaningfully changing these numbers is on the one hand ambitious (the in-person community is big and only a small piece of it is gathered in any one place) but I'm an ambitious person.
Looking back, there's not much I did that I would have expected to move the needle on whether someone attends a meetup. ACX Everywhere (I think) the main source of new attendees, but that was going on for years before I started. There's a bunch of things I've done to try and upgrade how much people enjoy ACX meetups though, and none of that's showing up. Worthwhile for me to think about as I'm planning this year I guess.
In my experience, the NYC meetups have gotten worse (for my preferences). In 2021 it seemed like a diverse group of interesting blog readers, now seems like mostly Rationalists with low social skills. So I no longer go.
I think there are also other communities in NYC for people to hang out with that have "better" but also similar vibes, like TPOT/Fractal.
There was a dramatic shift from '21 to '22 specifically in NYC - I think it went from ~150 to ~35 people and I really don't know why. Maybe '21 specifically got a boost from pent-up social energy after Covid, and I think His Scottness personally attended that year which also helped. But I don't see how either of those could explain a 75% or so drop.
There seems to be a general decline in attendance numbers starting around 2022 or 2023. My two primary guesses are that the jump was a post-covid event, or that my predecessor was better at this role than I am. A third guess is something about general excitement- SSC went on hiatus in 2020, and ACX came back in 2021.
My guess from survey results is that Scott attending a meetup usually boosts attendance by ~3x, so the 75% drop is a bit steep but not out of range of my expectation. This rough pattern shows up a lot, and it's the kind of thing I keep an eye on in surveys for.
From what I understand NYC's ACX meetups have a tremendous amount of influence from the OBNYC group. Your story isn't uncommon, and I've heard versions of it from a few other people in New York. Figuring out whether to and how to skill up the social skill waterline of rationalists groups is an unsolved problem, one I've taken a couple cursory stabs at. I want to say I appreciate your feedback!
"No one impressive goes there, so no one impressive wants to go there" is a known chicken and egg problem. If the energy has moved to TPOT and/or Fractal, long live TPOT and Fractal, though I'm likely to hang out in the Rationalist and ACX end of things for now. (Since, you know, ACX Meetup Czar instead of Fractal Meetup Czar.)
"Overall we changed about 500 people’s votes."
I assume you mean 500 people of those who took the survey? I.e. do you expect many more total? I have no idea what fraction of regular readers are survey takers. 1/5? 1/100?
The question "Have you ever shoplifted?" is all too common example of a question I don't know how to answer. I was 5 or 6 years old and did it once (bubble gum and baseball card) and was almost caught. So I could answer "yes" but that seems counter to the intent of the question.
Can we take a second to talk about what's going on with those dating-to-marriage age chart?
What I'm mostly curious about is what exactly happens when you get close to 40? Why are your chances of meeting a spouse practically nil? Is it that people give up on marriage by that point if they haven't gotten married already? Maybe they were never meant for it to begin with? Or they realized it wasn't what they wanted, with the benefit of time and wisdom?
Both.
For most people, if you wanted to get married badly enough AND you were capable of it, you would've done it by then. There are a few edge cases where that doesn't apply but for the 95% it covers it.
I think that Scott must have done a rather good job of weeding out the Lizardmen given that the percentage of people demanding death for all shoplifters is basically zero.
Regarding punishments for shoplifters, annoying/dangerous homeless people, and really any other category, one missing variable is whether we're talking about the penalties imposed at sentencing or the penalties actually experienced by the convict. I answered the questing in the latter sense, but I know that if I actually want the persistent shoplifter to spend a month in jail, that probably only happens if he's sentenced to a year in jail.
I really like modern architecture (a la Richard Meier) but had to vote against it because I didn't like the specific house you used. For something like that, I think a group of different houses in the same style would be way better than a single picture for each example.
I've been increasingly feeling like Scott is responding to vocal minorities of extremists in his articles - from politics to prison to moral philosophy.
I agree with you, and now we have data to support our feelings!
Here are the plots for some of the variables that are poorly displayed by Google forms : age, State, IQ, SAT (math and verbal/reasoning), height and BMI.
https://imgur.com/a/basic-dataviz-of-astral-codex-ten-survey2025-Shp6Ez6
The height graph was pretty funny. Do the stark ups-and-downs show most people are rounding up their height?
Most Americans know their height rounded to the nearest inch, not nearest centimeter. Since inches are larger units than centimeter, they offer less precision. That means that after converting heights from inches to centimeters, the results will peak at centimeter values which closest correspond to a whole number of inches. {5’6”,5’7”,5’8”,5’9”} = {168,170,173,175}
That's interesting, I'd like to see how over/under-represented readers are. Like which states are higher or lower in readership by population of the state etc.
Over-represented: the West Coast and (non-southern) East Coast, especially Washington D.C., plus Utah. All are blue states except Utah.
Under-represented: the South, especially Florida, and inland red states, especially West Virginia and the Dakotas. Those three States have just 5 reported readers together.
The average Floridian is 10 times less likely to read (and respond to) ACX than the average Massachusettsan and 30 times less likely than the average (D.C.-) Washingtonian.
The British guy who reported a state of "self-doubt" made me chuckle.
That is hilarious - love to see stereotypes validated lol. But also makes me proud of Utah!
There's a cluster of subcultures that consistently drift toward philosophical idealist metaphysics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism) (consciousness, not matter or math, as fundamental to reality): McKenna-style psychonauts, Silicon Valley Buddhist circles, neo-occultist movements, certain transhumanist branches, quantum consciousness theorists, and various New Age spirituality scenes. While these communities seem superficially different, they share a striking tendency to reject materialism in favor of mind-first metaphysics.
The common factor connecting them? These are all communities where psychedelic use is notably prevalent. This isn't coincidental.
There's a plausible mechanistic explanation: Psychedelics disrupt the Default Mode Network and adjusting a bunch of other neural parameters. When these break down, the experience of physical reality (your predictive processing simulation) gets fuzzy and mailable while consciousness remains vivid and present. This creates a powerful intuition that consciousness must be more fundamental than matter. Your conscious experience is more fundamental/stable than your perception of the material world, which is all you have access to.
The fun part? This very intuition - that consciousness is primary and matter secondary - is itself being produced by ingesting a chemical which alters physical brain mechanisms. We're watching neural circuitry create metaphysical intuitions in real-time.
This suggests something profound about metaphysics itself: Our basic intuitions about what's fundamental to reality (whether materialist OR idealist) might be more about human neural architecture than about ultimate reality. It's like a TV malfunctioning in a way that produces the message "TV isn't real, only signals are real!"
This doesn't definitively prove idealism wrong, but it should make us deeply suspicious of metaphysical intuitions that feel like direct insight - they might just be showing us the structure of our own cognitive machinery.
Yeah, that's what I always figured (though without your level of eloquence). Just because you thought mind precedes matter after meditating, taking some drug, or crossing the Abyss and defeating Choronzon doesn't mean it's actually so.
The Matrix works better as a metaphor for media manipulation than as a basis of actual radical doubt in my opinion.
I'm surprised that Polymarket isn't a larger fraction of the crypto use. That's the only thing I ever use crypto for.
re long COVID could be a survivorship bias where actually compounding C19 impacts kill (unlikely, i think this would be more visible and talked about) or debilitate (if long COVID has a 10 IQ point penalty, do I drop out of the ACX readership? flowers for algernon?) and hence the reason your scores are stable is that you don’t get responses from non-readers.
"the justice system doesn’t have the capacity to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which homeless people are harassers... and which ones aren’t". Why not? Can you not just put some cameras up like a few weeks before the raid?
Can the homeless people not just disable the cameras as soon as they are installed? Seems like that would be fun and satisfying at least, and it's not like they have anything better to do with their time.
Is that not also a crime?
The crime responses show how little people here are really utilitarians.
I'd love to see some analysis of the responses on satisfaction. It's interesting that life satisfaction exceeds satisfaction with one's job or social life, or one's standard mood. It's also interesting that the responses on romantic satisfaction look entirely unlike the other measures. Romantic satisfaction is not a bell curve the way almost all other answers are. You have way more people answering they are satisfied at a 10/10 level. And way more people entirely dissatisfied, it's a much flatter distribution than most of the other responses. Would love to know what other factors are correlated with the high and low responses on that measure.
"Put on a bus to San Francisco" is the humane and practical way to dispose of the 10+ conviction shoplifter, and the homeless camp.
I like Donald Trump.
Aah those Ayahuasca results! Fantastic, very good of you to ask.