The issue here is semantics and definitions of words.
"Crime" is far too broad a word for there to be an overwhelming consensus as to whether it's going up or down. That's the main issue.
If Scott A. had said "actual murders, property crime (defined as ____ ), ... and NOT perceptions of these" then there would be a more fruitful conversation.
All this stuff about greek is a red herring. "Crime" is a collection of discrete events that occur or don't occur. There are more or fewer of them per time period. Whether or not those events are recorded correctly or that people are more or less aware of them can be debated, but the actual numbers are the numbers.
No, the issue, as outlined in the post, is real problematic behavior of real people on the internet who are inclined to tell anyone who is skeptical regarding the data (whatever it may be) that they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.
The post is about the author, not crime. The critique of Scott. A's posts is an example of the kind of online content that led the author to become "apostate to the Church of Graphs".
I'm now in LA. There are illegal food stalls over over the place.
Some people like them but irrelevant, a crime is being committed, nothing is being done.
So every day I see these crimes. They weren’t here 10 years ago.
Hence, my experience is crime is up since I visibly see it every time I go out.
This is the first example provided. It is not new, and it is legal.
Don't mean to be curt, just, puzzled me to read to say the least. Googled it myself 2 months ago. [1]
In general, the problem is that the strong arguments in the essay are epistemically local - they say specific things about specific measurement gaps - but they're translated into a general license to privilege vibes over data. And that move is where the essay falls apart for me.
I think this is an important point lurking behind a lot of disagreements about these kinds of issues: basically, there are a fair number of things that are legal that people don't want to be legal, and there are a fair number of things that are not legal that people do want to be legal. The first category likely includes, for instance, all manner of tax trickery practiced by the wealthy; the latter category includes things like going 75 mph on the freeway.
There are also cases where it's not entirely clear what most people want, but where (I would say) the legality should be based on what most people want, but it is instead based on a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people. I would put the food stalls in this category. If more people want the food stalls in LA than do not, then they should be legal; if more people do not want them, then they should be illegal. But their legality should not depend on which advocacy group was able to muster a bigger war chest to fund their legal fees and win a court judgment one way or the other.
I believe this is a symptom of fundamental failures in our system of law and government that have caused it to be quite unresponsive to the actual desires of the citizenry. This causes us to waste a lot of time and energy fighting over things like "crime" without making much progress because we are working against the grain of the social/legal apparatus that some people put in place over a long period of time.
Don't read following as a caricature/driveby, really appreciated the thought and framing and it wins out over what I'm about to say, I'm just putting my thoughts after 2 minutes musing as concisely as possible:
There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.
i.e. "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things" - if it was popular to get rid of food stalls in LA*, should be pretty easy, people are pretty plugged in these days
There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.
* it wouldn't be, they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event. If someone said something like they did in real life, you'd ignore it because it's fringe, or, tell them to move to Newport Beach (ritzy suburb). Even just ~15 years ago, in Buffalo, it was perfectly polite to say "sounds like you should move to the suburbs."
> There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.
I think there's much less to be said for that than we currently are trying to say for it. :-)
> "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things"
Maybe to some extent, but overall I think not really. The thing is that the people working to change things are not, as far as I can see, actually working to find out what people want and then do that. Instead there are different groups each working to implement what they want, and it is a matter of who shouts the loudest and fights the hardest.
> There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.
Yeah that's a direction I think we should move in. I mean not exactly live poll, but the point is I think policy decisions should be structurally much more anchored to people's desires on individual issues. Right now our political system is mostly "vote for someone and then live with whatever they decide for two years". Representative democracy makes sense but increasingly it seems the perspectives and incentives of the representatives are out of sync with those of the citizenry. I think there should be a healthy role for direct democracy, a way for people to override or modify the representatives' decisions, basically saying "I may still be okay with you representing me, but you were wrong on this issue so we're going to change that one."
> they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event.
Well, maybe, but that too is a decision that should be based on what people actually want. Like maybe people are okay with the stands in certain locations, certain types of foods (e.g., meat vs. fruit), certain numbers of stands, whatever, but not others. And if that's the case it is those preferences of the population that should be aggregated to arrive at a decision.
> they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.
OK, I look at two objects [1] and posit that object B is larger than object A. I see it with my very eyes, I directly experience this feeling of largeness and smallness. How dare any data, any calipers or rulers (must be oppressive rulers!) tell me that my perception is wrong, and the sizes are equal?
The whole thing is based on the idea that seeing with one's own eyes is somehow not interpretation, but unadulterated truth. This is, unfortunately, not exactly so. No matter who you ask, Buddhist practitioners or cognitive scientists, anyone who paid attention to the problem know that "direct experience" is not very direct.
Tools to rectify biases in perception exist, and statistics (when properly implemented) are one such tool. But accepting one's own bias is psychologically hard; it's much easier to think that all these other people have a bias, or several. (It's an important part of growing up though.)
Part of the problem is that a lot of people are legitimately delusional, and the correct answer for them in their lives is, in fact, "discount your personal observations (they're not real)".
Like, if Fox news tells some people that San Fran has a ton of crime, then they will start seeing that crime. They will observe it. But that doesn't mean that crime has actually went up. It means they were primed and that they are biased.
When your political opinion relies on some set of facts being true, then you will just believe those facts to be true, ala 1984. And then to you, they are true. Your eyes can most definitely deceive you.
There's also tons of nuance that doesn't get caught in "feelings" - if the homeless outside your gated community are repeatedly murdering each other, you have a "high crime rate" that you may not care about at all.
But if suddenly they stop murdering each other and only kill you (or someone like you) during the year, the crime rate has gone way, way down, but your perception of it has skyrocketed.
People keep telling me I'd be safer if I chose a self-driving car, citing overall car crash stats. Those include people who DUI, text while drive, are way too old, or drive a Tesla or Altima, where I'm none of the above.
> I want to forcibly confine the small number of criminals, street addicts, and lunatics responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of crime and disorder
I think for that alone the post should be flagged and removed. "Political" posts are commonly flagged for mentioning basic human and civil rights. Here is someone suggesting locking up everyone they call "lunatic" like in Victorian times because they don't want to see supermarket isles with locks and don't understand cafes may not take cash because it's simpler to install a payment terminal. They should read some texts on the prison complex first [1].
Store owners in certain "low crime" areas are taking up the serious cost of locking merchandise because they think the problem is really that bad. Maybe they're wrong, but I trust the money more than the public stats.
Even in those cases, they aren't wildly off the mark, at least the ones that survive. Maybe they spend a little extra on some overpriced enterprise solution, but it at least works. Locking up items is a big decision, cause it not only costs money but also discourages customers.
Then you might be surprised to know that a lot of those numbers were exaggerated. If you're trusting people to tell you accurate things based on numbers that they won't share.... you're gonna have a bad time.
This also distorts the shoplifting statistics. If two stores have equal rates of shoplifting but one has boxes and the other doesn't, they are not at equal risk. The one with boxes is at more risk. Flat shoplifting rates while boxes proliferate mean things got worse. (You can argue that boxes do nothing, but you would need strong evidence, cf parachutes.)
The number of shoplifting incidents is also a weak metric. Most shoplifting is not of serious economic concern. The problem is with repeat offenders and those doing it for profit. The value of merchandise lost is a much better metric but stores may be reluctant to share this due to concerns about insurance rates and public perception.
Crime statistics are very hard. And state capacity is declining, sadly. We can't expect bloggers to pick up the slack.
Sides aside (heh), arguing that personally experiencing something means that it is reasonable to claim a wider-than-you trend is utter insanity. And that's exactly what this post spends 5,680 words arguing for.
Misunderstanding of data is a big problem. That's not a problem with relying on data. That's a problem with widespread innumeracy. Pretending like you're some kind of universal subject to whom all things happen and all thoughts occur is really not the solution. Your eyes may not be lying, but you are still a very small fish in a very big pond, and your own personal experience is less than epsilon against the world at large.
There is a positionally valid form of knowing from experience of a thing happening: "I have seen a thing happen therefore the thing happens sometimes."
And there is an extremely invalid form, which is the form that the post defends and holds dear: 'When you generalize about “how people are likely to treat a stranger in need” or “how should one live to be happy” based on examples from your own life.'
The problem words there are "generalize", "likely", and "should".
It's a known cognitive bias, not something to lean into.
But if you want something shorter than a three word phrase, there's also a single word for it: egocentrism. It's bad. Let's please not uphold it as our guiding standard.
I have a different problem that I would also describe as a Church of Graphs.
I keep reading essays in which the author makes some claim and supports it by displaying a graph. The graph is not explained other than as proof that the claim it supports is correct. The axes are unlabeled, or labeled with meaningless abbreviations.
Apparently enough people find this persuasive that the practice has become widespread. But why?
Graphs can be abused and statistics can be misleading, and some things are hard to quantify and measure. But the author never makes any convincing case why the statistics would be wrong or misleading in this case: "I’m not here to argue with Scott’s statistics. I think they’re about as accurate as we could hope to make them. I’m here to argue that you don’t require them to make sense of the world".
His main argument is that many people feel crime is increasing, and that in itself is a good argument to disregard any falling numbers as obviously incorrect without any further justification being necessary.
The obvious problem is that people almost always say that crime is increasing, and they have consistently been shown to misjudge the actual trend for decades on end: "In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period." If we bought into the author's argument we would never be able to reach any other conclusion than that that crime has always been increasing and will always continue to increase.
During the satanic panic the the 1980's the populace at large were convinced that large swaths of satanists were routinely sacrificing and abusing children. The police was convinced it was a real problem and had special "satanic experts" to combat the issue, a huge amount of parents were genuinely afraid of their childrens' safety, and there were thousands and thousands of cases of reported ritual abuse. In reality and in hindsight there were zero evidence of satanic cults abusing children. The author's argument could, completely unmodified, be used to argue that we should listen to the people's lived experience instead of the evidence and conclude that the satanic cults must actually have been a real societal danger back then. Or is he only against disregarding someone's lived experience in favor of evidence when it is his lived experience?
It doesn't even matter if he is right in this case. Maybe the all the statistics is flawed and his feeling of rising crime rates is justified. The problem is that he offers no actionable heuristic that allows us to separate his intuition from other people's intuition that has been obviously wrong in hindsight, like the satanic panic.
I’m not familiar with this writer or the writer this is about so can someone help me out with something? This article is fawning over this Scott person, talks about how the audience is more intelligent than average and about how ‘impeccably sourced and credentialed’ this Scott person’s arguments are.
Am I missing an in joke somewhere or do people actually write like this?
An interesting article. I wonder if there's a valid point in here buried somewhere underneath the endless obnoxious comparisons of his opponents to cultists.
> I increasingly find myself in disagreement with Scott’s essays on social issues and public policy, despite broadly sharing his small-L liberal outlook.
Well, there's your problem. Scott isn't a "small-L liberal." He does a decent job at masquerading as one, but ask a fan to recount his "greatest hits" and they're all boring old orthodox conservatism: race realism [1], IQ [2], anti-identity politics [3], etc.
(No, I'm in the mood to debate his positions on any of this, it's all been done to death and further debate isn't going to change anyone's mind, let alone his. The citations are there to establish that he is aligned with these views, whether or not it's warranted.)
One fringe benefit of belonging to "The Church of Graphs" that I don't think the author really touches on is that believers can do motivated reasoning _very_ easily. Scott is an expert at laundering his motivated reasoning through well-researched citations and data that supports his points, but he's not so great at giving the other side a fair hearing.
My main problem with Scott Alexander is this: To draw correct conclusions from data, a necessary (though insufficient) condition is to be an expert in the field from which the data is drawn and/or to which the data applies. Otherwise, you might not know how accurate the sources of the data are and, more importantly, whether you're considering enough context (i.e. whether you have all the right data to draw your conclusion). At the very best, you can consider the objections you've heard, but are these (all) the right objections? For example, when I read Paul Krugman on international trade or central banks, at least I know that he's an expert in that subject matter so he knows what context may be more or less relevant. When he's not an expert in some subfield of economics, at least he knows who the experts are and refers to them.
Scott Alexander is not an expert in almost anything he writes about. As far as I know, he's not done any scholarly work outside his area of practice, psychiatry. In relation to this post's subject, Alexander is not an expert in criminology, law enforcement, political perception, or sociology. Then again, neither is the author of this post (at least they don't say what their relevant credentials are). It seems neither of them even know who the experts are. I can understand why they find the question interesting, but they're ill-equipped to provide answers. Both personal perception and data can obviously be misleading, which is precisely why people who truly want to understand something spend years becoming experts.
It seems to me that both Alexander and the author of this post are, actually, members of the same church whose members are those who believe that people can draw correct conclusions from a smattering of data without the necessary scholarship and expertise, and that you can understand something complicated without putting in all the effort required to understand it: the Church of Dunning–Kruger Dilettantism.
Of course, anyone is free to write their thoughts on anything, and readers are free to form opinions on what they read. What this reader sees here is two people arguing over something that both know far too little about to offer the relevant insight. What is interesting to me is that someone who's not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of crime took the time to write a long rebuttal to another post about crime written by someone else who knows just as little. I can guess that's because that church is large.
> It seems to me that both Alexander and the author of this post are, actually, members of the same church - the church of those who believe that people can draw correct conclusions from a smattering of data without the necessary scholarship and expertise, and that you can understand something complicated without putting in all the effort required to understand it. It's the Church of Dunning–Kruger Dilettantism.
We are all like that, we have no other options, haven't we? I mean, either we try to understand the world around us, or we are not. We can't be experts in everything, so in most cases we are go by Danning-Kruger Dilettantism.
Scott made the dilettantism into a profession, he has its methods and he sharpens them. He debates things with other dilettantes, and it helps them to improve themselves. To me, personally, it is one of the main attractions of the blog. I'm dilettante in a lot of topics, but still I don't want to simply ignore them, because I'm not an expert.
> What is interesting to me is that someone who's not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of crime took the time to write a long rebuttal to another post about crime written by someone else who knows just as little.
It is not about crime really. The author we discussing talks about methodology, they are on a meta level of a discussion, the crime discussion is just one data point for a meta-discussion.
Your post is the part of the same meta-discussion about methodology, though your attack comes from the other direction.
> We can't be experts in everything, so in most cases we are go by Danning-Kruger Dilettantism.
Or care enough to find out what the experts say? Surely that's the best way to start understanding the world around us. And if the experts don't agree on an answer, the people who know less probably won't contribute much, but at least it raises the level of discussion.
> Scott made the dilettantism into a profession, he has its methods and he sharpens them. He debates things with other dilettantes, and it helps them to improve themselves.
I won't judge the methods people use to improve themselves, but I can say that this is not a good method of getting closer to the truth, just in case that is also something they're interested in beside self betterment. No amount of thought or debate can substitute scholarship.
> The author we discussing talks about methodology
Methodology of what? Self-improvement or getting to the bottom of why people think there's a rise in crime? Because if it's the latter, a better methodology than either would surely begin with studying the subject more seriously.
> Or care enough to find out what the experts say?
And what do expert way about crime? I don't care about crime levels, so I have no idea where to look really. It seems that no one knows where to look, as in comments on Scott's blog, so on HN. Could you find an expert take on this discrepancy between reported levels of crime and perceived levels of crime?
If you can't, and no one can, so maybe it is a good question to try our abilities to work with data and draw conclusions?
> this is not a good method of getting closer to the truth
I do not care about crime, but I know that I can't ask expert all the question I have. So I just have no other options.
> a better methodology than either would surely begin with studying the subject more seriously.
You can't be expert in all topics at once, so this is not an option. Probably you can create a think tank, inviting experts in different areas into it, which can answer all your questions. But where do you get the money for that?
There have been numerous studies on crime perception and fear of crime in the last 50 years. Here's just a small touch of what an internet search brought up in ten minutes:
For example, one of these sources, in the British Journal of Criminology begins with: For over 40 years, the fear of crime has been a stable of North American, British and European criminological research. Hundreds of publications have sought to illuminate the social and emotional risks associated with worry about crime (Ferraro 1995; Hale 1996; Visser et al. 2013).
> If you can't, and no one can, so maybe it is a good question to try our abilities to work with data and draw conclusions?
Not like that. You'll find that most questions for which there's good data (and even if there isn't) that more than one person is interested in already have experts thinking about. If there aren't, and you're qualified (i.e. have the requisite context) people will pay you to work on the problem through something called "research grants".
> You can't be expert in all topics at once, so this is not an option. Probably you can create a think tank, inviting experts in different areas into it, which can answer all your questions. But where do you get the money for that?
Well, in Europe we have these things only we call them universities, not a "think tanks", and while far from perfect, they're the actual best way humanity has come up with for trying to answer hard questions. They work like this: people spend some years getting the needed context in various fields, and then different people spend years studying different areas. These people publish their findings periodically, and so people who aren't experts in a particular field can read what the experts wrote. Because people make mistake, multiple people explore every question, and then they argue with each other, but when they do, they already know what they're talking about. This turns out to work better than people starting with a blank slate trying to ponder their way to an answer in the course of days or weeks.
Of course, because many things that interest people are non linear systems, there are many things we can't really get definitive answers for, and it's a fun exercise to think about the (currently) unanswerable questions. But to do it well, you need to start from the current state of knowledge and at least survey what the experts have so far rather than start from scratch with some pieces of data you may not have the right context to analyse.
That's why Scott Alexander isn't taken seriously. He's playing a game based on the plot of the film Memento: He makes sure he has just the right pieces to make something interesting for him yet simple enough to think through in days or weeks and maybe reach a conclusion (and a conclusion perhaps could not be reached without erasing enough information to paint a simple-enough picture). Some people find it entertaining, and I can see why; it evokes natural philosophy, which has certainly produced a lot of entertaning prose. But ultimately it's a game of fantasy science.
> There have been numerous studies on crime perception and fear of crime in the last 50 years.
Nice, so there are relevant studies. Pity no one tried to troll Scott with these, it would be interesting to watch.
> Not like that. You'll find that most questions for which there's good data (and even if there isn't) that more than one person is interested in already have experts thinking about. If there aren't, and you're qualified (i.e. have the requisite context) people will pay you to work on the problem through something called "research grants".
The existence of experts is not a guarantee they will answer your questions, or that they will publish their answers in an accessible way.
Grants are not the answer: you need to become an expert in a topic, to get a grant, but you can be an expert in all topics and get all the grants.
> Well, in Europe we have these things only we call them universities, not a "think tanks"
You can call them as you like, but if it is not you who pays money for researchers, they will probably won't answer your questions.
> to do it well, you need to start from the current state of knowledge
One can't do it in most of the cases. It is possible for a selected small range of topics, but not for all questions I can want answers for.
> at least survey what the experts have so far rather than start from scratch with some pieces of data you may not have the right context to analyse.
Yeah, I agree with that.
> That's why Scott Alexander isn't taken seriously. He's playing a game based on the plot of the film Memento: He makes sure he has just the right pieces to make something interesting for him yet simple enough to think through in days or weeks and maybe reach a conclusion (and a conclusion perhaps could not be reached without erasing enough information to paint a simple-enough picture). Some people find it entertaining, and I can see why; it evokes natural philosophy, which has certainly produced a lot of entertaning prose.
Yeah, hard to argue with that.
> But ultimately it's a game of fantasy science.
I can't resist and not to ask "and what?"
Universities are not really good in most cases. It is a rare occasion to read a take of a PhD on something like Iran war (Brett Devereaux just couldn't resist it), mostly all you have are opinions of self-proclaimed experts, and if you are lucky, if will be an opinion of Scott Alexander. Alternatively you can try to churn data yourself. Well, maybe if I had money to bring down paywalls all around the Internet I could read PhDs talking about the world around us all day long, but it needs too much money.
And when it comes to using far from perfect sources to understand what is going on, the only strategy I know is to stick to some number of those "experts". You'll learn their strengths and weaknesses with time, you'll learn how to form your own opinion based on their thoughts. You can't just stick to real experts, because you'll need really a lot of them to cover wide enough knowledge, so you'd better find some non-experts, who covers a wide range of topics, for most of them they will not have a qualification. Know your sources and watch them argue with others. You'll know when they are right and when they are mistaken.
> Pity no one tried to troll Scott with these, it would be interesting to watch.
I would assume that's because people who generally try to learn things from sources that communicate acquired knowledge aren't Scott Alexander's audience in the first place.
> You can call them as you like, but if it is not you who pays money for researchers, they will probably won't answer your questions.
Seems like you're not familiar with academia. One of the biggest problems with academia these days is a glut, not a dearth, of questions being explored. And beside, even if Scott Alexander were to try and answer your questions, there's no reason to trust his answers because he just doesn't have the necessary tools to answer them. What you're saying sounds like, well, if science won't answer your question, ask a medium. Sure, a medium might be happy to answer your question, but why would you think that the answer is correct?
If no one who is qualified to answer your question can answer it or wants to answer it, then it remains unanswered. There are lots of open questions. People who insist on getting answers to everything are asking to become gullible and accept wrong answers. Such a demand produces a supply of hacks who will be happy to answer anything.
Personally, I find it interesting that there are so many unanswered questions, but even if you're not, the belief they can be answered by some cursory assembling of some data and a few days of thinking is just wrong. I mean, you'll get an answer, but it probably won't be the right answer.
> Universities are not really good in most cases.
I don't know what "good" is judged against, but what the experts produce is typically superior to what Scott Alexander produces (which is why he's not taken seriously).
> You can't just stick to real experts, because you'll need really a lot of them to cover wide enough knowledge
If anything, there are too many, not too few. This means that in some niche areas you end up with bad experts. But that's no worse than the hacks.
> so you'd better find some non-experts, who covers a wide range of topics, for most of them they will not have a qualification.
Yes, but the good ones cover what the relevant experts say. The kind of stuff you may find in, say, the Economist or Paul Krugman's blog.
Scott Alexander's writing read to me like something written by a bright middle-schooler who has lots of thoughts and ideas, but little relevant knowledge. And because the people who are interested in actual knowledge know they won't find it in his writings, what you end up with is an entire community where you can find a very lively debate among a bunch of people, none of whom know what they're talking about.
It becomes interesting. You sounds as an advent of Church of Science from the very beginning, but now it becomes unmistakable. Science has no monopoly on truth. I'm not familiar with academy, you are right, I don't know how much Science share your ideas, but if it is, then Science has defeated itself. I hope that it is not so, and I believe it is not so.
Below there is a list of reasons why we cannot grant Science a monopoly on truth. I'm not claiming it is a comprehensive list, it is just reasons from top of my mind. But before that I'll say two more things.
Science doesn't have a monopoly on truth and Science is not a perfect instrument. Therefore I'll seek wisdom in all places, and I'll use my own brains to think, even if I'm not an expert in a topic. I will not ask medium, but it is not because I believe it is absolutely useless, it is because I have a limited time and I need to prioritize sources with high expected value of their answers. But still I will not bind myself to highest value sources either, because the path to the truth is not linear, you'd better remember about Monte Carlo methods and add some randomness to your moves.
I want also to say about "unanswered questions". It is really good, that you feel yourself comfortable despite uncertainty. Most of people are not, they can't sleep if they have unanswered questions and they could pick a random answer just to make the question answered. But it is possible to do better, than just stuff a question in a pile of unanswered questions. If you accept the idea of an answer as a probability distribution over all possible answers, then you can have an answer for any question and move all the uncertainty into the distribution of the answer. You can deal with the uncertainty in a more conscious way, and sometimes using more intricate methods. You can seek answer, find no definitive "yes" or "no", but still update your distribution. The unanswered questions stop being unanswered, they become questions with high entropy answers. Entropy is a continuous function, so question can become more unanswered or less unanswered.
And now the list of reasons to reject Science claim for a monopoly on truth.
1. There are phenomena Science can't deal with due to its methods. The most glaring class of such phenomena are single irreproducible events. Did Christ rise from death? Science can't answer this question and probably it never won't be able to answer it, because it can't do multiple observations. Scott Alexander recently wrote again on topic of a collective vision of Virgin Mary[1], and science can't tackle the question. I think you should read it through. Because you'll notice that it seems that now science can meaningfully join the discussion, because there are similar events, but before these events we found, all the science could do about the vision, is to keep its proud silence on the topic.
2. We cannot trust Scott Alexander, but we cannot trust Science either. Science can be mistaken, and sometimes it may be mistaken for no good reason at all. Did you read Judea Pearl "The Book of Why"? Pearl tells the history of statistics in his book, and particularly the roles of Pearson and Fisher, who doesn't look as people prioritizing truth over everything else, they where fighting the truth due to... well, I'd say because they were humans with all our failings. Science can be led astray in its search for truth behind Alzheimer disease because of a junk-paper published 30 years ago. Or Science could spend enormous efforts to build String Theory and then... just chuck it away.
We should hope that Science will correct itself eventually in all such cases, but should we just wait for it, or maybe we are allowed to stray from Science and use our brains instead? Maybe Science is close to truth than anything/anyone else, but still it is not the Truth. Which means than you need to use your own brains, and to accept any statement with a grain of salt. We have to part with boolean logic and embrace the probabilistic nature of truth even when we talk about scientific truths.
3. Science develops the scientific method and employs the state of art methods to seek truth, but it is a scientific propaganda. xD I mentioned The Book of Why of Judea Pearl, which shows examples of Science rejecting better methods, and the causality proposed by Judea Pearl and his students is not a method science really wield. Bayesianism is the previous idea of Judea Pearl, it is older than causality by 10 years, and Science still relies on debunked p-values[2]. There are better methods, but Science still clings to old ones, rejecting the prospect of learning new tricks.
4. Science is a part of a bigger system and it can't avoid pressure from it. SJW pressured Science to a point, when its answers on questions including words "black", "white", "male", "female" are just plainly unreliable. Scientists can't publish a paper stating that black people are somehow "worse" than white. It doesn't matter if the paper contains truth or not, scientist just not allowed to publish it. So now any study talking about correlation of skin color or sex or gender with anything is just don't worth time needed to read it. I don't know other examples of this, but you need to be careful when seeking scientific answers, and keep in mind that some answers cannot be uttered. Or science is not allowed to diagnose politicians based on observations of their behavior. Science is restricted by society, culture, moral and ethical considerations. We should keep it in mind when we are seeking scientific answers.
5. There is knowledge Science never bothered itself to incorporate, or it just can't incorporate it. If my granny shows me how to use a specific herb to treat a wound, should I reject her knowledge as unscientific? Lets suppose I can't find a scientific answers about the herb, so what should I do? But knowledge can be just beyond Science. Science works with knowledge that can be written on a paper. If it can't then Science is out of luck. There is intuition for example, it cannot be written down. I use it to write English, I don't know grammar rules, I rely on intuition. I can't formalize my intuition, I can just use it. Well... English maybe not the best example for me, because English is my second language, and I'm not enough proficient with it to compete with professional linguists, but I am proficient in Russian to use it in ways that no linguist could explain. No grammar would accept my ways, but other Russians will understand what I'm doing. You see? I'm more proficient in Russian than Science with all its linguistic studies and thousands of linguists.
6. There are questions that are beyond Science. Like what does it mean to be conscious? When scientists try to answer this question, they are not better than laymans. For example, Anil Seth says that "consciousness is biological"[3] and kinda stops there. What a shame. Or Steven Hawking proclaiming that philosophy is dead. You can't just ask Science what is conscious and get an answer, because Science doesn't understand the question: it is a philosophical question right now. It can become a scientific question, but for now it is not.
First, science is what we call the best epistemological methodology. Of course it makes mistake, but what makes it unique is that it makes fewer mistakes than any other methodology.
Second, I'm all for using your brain to get as close as possible to answers to the questions that interest you, but using your brain should lead you to choosing a good method of learning about the world. For example, using your brain will tell you that the difference between us and the ancient Greeks is a lot of intense study over millennia of people standing on the shoulders of those who came before them and continuing their painstaking study. So your brain should tell you that on almost any topic there are better sources than Scott Alexander, and these are the sources people who really want to do the best they can use. When I read Alexander, I didn't think he's a total moron; I just thought that he's not at all interesting, insightful, or knowledgeable compared to what else is out there. I just wonder why people who claim to want to use their brain pick such a third-rate source to read. Using your brain should also lead you to conclude that no amount of processing of information would lead you onto the right path to the answer if you're not starting out with all the relevant information. Again, it's like that film Memento: deductions from missing information lead you to wrong conclusions.
> First, science is what we call the best epistemological methodology. Of course it makes mistake, but what makes it unique is that it makes fewer mistakes than any other methodology.
Yes. But it is a tradeoff. When your first priority is an epistemological quality of generated knowledge, you lose agility that can be needed for practical purposes. I mentioned Judea Pearl before, he describes how epistemological methodology of Science prevented it for years, more than a decade, from stating clearly and unambiguously that smoking tobacco leads to a lung cancer. To be honest, I should mention that other social institution where no better than that, and they failed to ban or limit tobacco smoking before Science declared the causal link. So science is still better than that, the story supports your claim that science has the best epistemological methodology. But still I can't help but to wonder if it is possible to do better?
I believe you can do better at individual level. When it is all about your decisions as of individual, you could decide that smoking causes cancer and quit smoking long before science reached a consensus.
> I just wonder why people who claim to want to use their brain pick such a third-rate source to read. Using your brain should also lead you to conclude that no amount of processing of information would lead you onto the right path to the answer if you're not starting out with all the relevant information.
Our world generates insane amounts of relevant information and in a lot of cases it is still not enough to get as much as you need. You have to lean how to reason in uncertainty. You have to learn how to come to conclusions and make decisions when you have not enough information. Either because information you need is not available or because you have a limited time to make a decision.
It is one more deficiency of Science we could add to my list: it concerned about truth too much, and is not that useful when you need to make a decision right now, when you need it so bad as you are going to base your decision on guesses, not on a proven scientific truth.
Science has tools for that, but it leaves them to practitioners, and concentrates on generating truths of a solid scientific quality, not best guesses.
> When I read Alexander, I didn't think he's a total moron; I just thought that he's not at all interesting, insightful, or knowledgeable compared to what else is out there. I just wonder why people who claim to want to use their brain pick such a third-rate source to read.
Well... I can't answer this question. You see, I can't show you any charts as well I can't cite any reputable sources. My answer will be neither of Church of Charts nor of Church of Science. All I can is to give you a personal anecdote.
Scott Alexander writes not only on topics he is under-qualified in. There are two exceptions:
1. People minds. He is a psychiatrist, so he is qualified to write about human minds. I'm not sure that the quality of his writing is of a good scientific quality still: he cites some studies sometimes, but while the existence of references is a necessary condition for a quality scientific writing, it is not sufficient by itself. But still his writing on this topic goes to at least top 0.1% of all Internet writings about people minds. I have a bachelor degree in psychology, I can see it with my eyes closed: everyone believes themselves competent enough when talking about psychology, and the Internet and book stores are filled to a brim by psychological garbage. Substantial amount of peer reviewed scientific papers are crap. It is not really hard to go to top 10% or even to top 1%, but Scott Alexander is still better than that.
BTW, now AI is a hot topic, and while Scott Alexander is not an AI expert, it is useful to see at AI through eyes of a psychiatrist. You need to filter out a lot of he is saying on the topic, but still you can get some insights.
2. A bunch of topics that are more of a philosophical kind. You can't expect science to have any consensus on those topics. Science is just not good for these topics, till they migrate from a philosophy to a normal science.
One of directions of his blog... It is hard to verbalize, but I can explain through history: Scott Alexander started with Yudkowski. It is an idea of "rationality", or a magic tool that allow you to reach the best possible conclusions in any situation. Yudkowski was (and probably still is) insane, he created a Cult of Yudkowski's Rationality. I have learnt a lot from Yodkowski, especially from his posts on why what he created was not a cult. Scott Alexander is much more saner, he writes these long blog posts about crime level or whatever, but he enumerates his mistakes also. I didn't read the references you provided above, but I've read titles and some abstracts, I'd bet that the crime levels will be one of Scott Alexander mistakes of '26. It is very interesting how you can use your brain the best in practice, and Scott Alexander explores exactly this. He maybe not perfect at this, but who is? Can you find someone who is better at it? I'm very concerned how humanity can tackle the loss of authorities of truth (no more media or public figures you can trust), people are believing in stupidest things, but how I manage to do better? (Do I?) Can I teach others or maybe can we create something that will help others to navigate the ocean of lies to find islands of truth? Scott is not about this, but still close enough to keep me interested.
And, you see, you can have a discussion with smart people sometimes. Like this one for example. Such discussions force me to write down my thoughts and to think them through. They can help me to find my own blind spots. For example, I didn't thought really about data Scott Alexander relies to. I could do better earlier because I know, that you can't interpret data without understanding how it was generated. I know the theory behind it, I faced this issue on practice. But I never noticed Scott Alexander is interpreting data without understanding how it was generated and he does nothing about it. I mean, if you try to reach quick and dirty conclusion, you can just ignore some inconvenient question, but maybe you can do better without diving into the question for months? I have some ideas about this, but it is irrelevant to our discussion. What is relevant: discussions triggered by Scott Alexander are attracting people of a kind that can point to me to my blind spots and make me better.
> I mentioned Judea Pearl before, he describes how epistemological methodology of Science prevented it for years...
Yes, but you're making the same argument. Science is flawed, but it is the least flawed methodology. It means that other paths could lead to better results, but only by chance. This is good enough on a societal level, and it plays the role of mutations in natural selection. Most mutations aren't adaptive, but over many enough of them, some will be and selection is likely to eventually amplify those. Because science is "least incorrect imperfect methodology" most other approaches will do worse (probabilistically, they must), but a few will do better (again, probabilistically this needs to happen) and those will become part of the new methodology, i.e. part of science.
> I believe you can do better at individual level
Only by chance and only with low probability.
> You have to lean how to reason in uncertainty. You have to learn how to come to conclusions and make decisions when you have not enough information.
Yes, and the best methodology for that is called science. And when science doesn't know better than even chance, you must still make a choice, but there can be no methodology that could consistently lead to a better outcome, because if there were, it would be science.
> What is relevant: discussions triggered by Scott Alexander are attracting people of a kind that can point to me to my blind spots and make me better.
Good, but at some point it's better to raise the bar. Alexander and other Rationalisticists write like members of a top US high-school debate team. They're among the best - at the high school level.
> Yes, but you're making the same argument. Science is flawed, but it is the least flawed methodology.
I believe you are missing that science is not just a methodology, it is a social institution also. It can have the least flawed methodology (though comparing with what? science still relies on p-values, isn't it a flawed methodology? one can do better than that, there are widely known methods), but it can be very flawed as a social institution, just because it is social institution. p-hacking, paper mills -- they are all fruits of a social institution. Science can have the best possible methodology, but still get flawed papers.
You can do better sometimes just because you are not social institution.
> Only by chance and only with low probability.
Well... I'm not sure that I can agree. I'm confused by your use of a probability here.
If I try to come with a replacement to quantum mechanics I have zero chances to come with something better than a scientific consensus. But if I watched public debates about possible causal link between smoking and cancer at 1950s, maybe even in 1940s. I could do better with pretty high probability. Science couldn't figure it out because it lacked methods, it couldn't stage an experiment, it couldn't find physiological mechanism leading from smoking to cancer, it could rely on growing heap of correlational data. And a troll of a statistician (R.A.Fisher) kept dismantling all the arguments, noting that there are other possible explanations for correlations. Tobacco companies kept buying "research" proving that smoking is fine.
You can be much better than science in such a situation. You can end up with: "tobacco causes cancer" has 50% of probability to be true. (Maybe not 50%, but 80% or 30%, idk). Then you could weight pros and cons of smoking with probabilities and come to a conclusion that risk doesn't worth it. And you could come to this conclusion 10 years before science stated it with confidence close to 100% and politicians started to ban smoking ads.
How to measure the probability of such success?
Or how about predictions for Iran war outcomes? What science is saying? Can I learn its predictions now to write them down along with my predictions, so I could compare them later to see who was right?
How about economics? I read different experts in economics, and they miss the mark all the time, and sometimes it just... You see, when Putin started the war, economists were all like "it will take half a year for Russian economics to collapse". After six months they were predicting a collapse in a year. Now their predictions are very weighted. Like "a tipping point", "trends are..." and so on. _I_ could do better than that. And why? Because I know limitations of economists, they are too much into their models tuned for normal states, so I know to rely on a bigger picture, not on economics data alone. Economists predict that China will face consequences of its stupid investment strategies for decade at least (maybe for longer, I just got a habit of reading economists' predictions ~10 years ago). And? It is the same issue: models have their limits, people forget about it often, even if they have PhD in economics.
> Good, but at some point it's better to raise the bar.
I'm working on it as well. For example, right now I'm into systems analysis. I missed the whole discipline somehow, I should have read the basics at least a decade ago or even earlier. It is obvious stuff mostly, but still it helps to organize knowledge, make it explicit.
> Alexander and other Rationalisticists write like members of a top US high-school debate team. They're among the best - at the high school level.
I don't know what my phrasing lack, so it is so hard to understand. But you see, Scott Alexander is not the worst I'm reading regularly. I like debates, I believe 2 things about them:
1. If you want to keep your thinking sharp, you need to become a guru of debates
2. You cannot be guru of debates if you hadn't mastered debates at all levels[1]
(I can elaborate on (1) if you want, but I'm not going to explain (2): it becomes obvious when you practice it, but too long to explain for non-enlightened people.)
I read debates in 4chan style, where trolls are trolling trolls. I kinda lost enthusiasm to take part in this, even when I could spend some time on it, but I keep reading it.
> science still relies on p-values, isn't it a flawed methodology? one can do better than that, there are widely known methods
Not generally, no. When there are better methods, of course they are used.
> You can do better sometimes just because you are not social institution.
I'm not sure what that means. Again, if something is probabilistically the best, by definition it's possbile to do better sometimes, but only by chance.
> But if I watched public debates about possible causal link between smoking and cancer at 1950s, maybe even in 1940s. I could do better with pretty high probability.
But you're selecting your experiment after the fact. If you're complaining about p-hacking, this is probably the crudest form of it.
> I read different experts in economics, and they miss the mark all the time
Yes, nonlinear systems are pretty much impossible to predict. Of course they miss the mark a lot. The question is, can you come up with a system that misses the mark less? If you could, that would be the new economics.
> I'm working on it as well. For example, right now I'm into systems analysis.
I would suggest studying some mathematics, because your point above about p values tells me you're unfamiliar with some basics. You might have heard some stuff, but you can't really understand it until you actually study the subject.
> If you want to keep your thinking sharp, you need to become a guru of debates
I just hope you understand the difference between debates that can move a field of knowledge forward - those are typically conducted in writing and over a long time, and all parties have already spent years becoming experts in the field - and the sort of debates we have at the Oxford Union, which are a sport. It's a fine hobby, and you can become better at it, but it's not really "the way" to sharpen your mind. It's a skill you can develop like in any sport.
There are no shortcuts. You have to put it in the years to really know a subject, and then you can learn from others who've studied other subjects.
This is an interesting article. I feel like the point the author thinks he's making isn't maybe the one he's actually making, or at least not the one he ought to be making.
The problem is he sets this up as a contrast between, on the one side, quantification, evidence, "graphs", and the like; and, on the other side, "your eyes", "lived experience", and so on.
But these are not necessarily in opposition. There is nothing unquantifiable about "lived experience" or people opinions about crime, nor is there any reason to dismiss such data as irrelevant to policy decisions.
Even if the "church of graphs" showed crime on a clear upswing, it would be absurd to say, "Crime has gone up, therefore we must build a new prison." To justify that action requires more than just that bare fact; it requires some kind of causal analysis that explains why that action would play a causal role in producing some desirable effect (like reducing crime).
On the flip side, it is not absurd to say "Surveys show that the perceived level of crime has gone up, so we should explore policies to address that." This is especially true if you swap "perceived level of crime has gone up" for "perceived quality of life has gone down", because perception is in some measure an irrefutable judgment on quality of life. (That is, if you think your quality of life has gone done, then to at least some degree it factually has, because part of what it means to have a good life is to know that your life is good and to be happy about that.) Such a swap is likely warranted, because many of the author's examples of "crime" in the article make more sense as examples of quality of life. Seeing things locked up in stores is not experiencing crime or even perceiving an increase in crime; it is experiencing a decline in quality of life which may plausibly be an effect of an increase in crime, but that's not the same thing.
So just having data doesn't tell you what to do, and just having feelings and perceptions doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything. What's missing in both cases is the causal explanation of how the data and/or the perceptions arose.
Whenever I see people talking about "lived experience" I get a bit leery, because often that seems to be a lead-in to an argument of the form "I personally experienced X, therefore large-scale change Y should be implemented." The fallacy there is not starting from perception or from gut feelings; it's starting from just your own perceptions and gut feelings. If you can get data that shows a lot of people share your perceptions and gut feelings, then we can have something to work with. What we do with that information can vary: sometimes there is a causal theory to be developed and action to be taken that can trickle down into a change in those perceptions; sometimes the answer is better education or messaging that makes clear to people that their perceptions were inaccurate. But the problem is not a "church of graphs".
With regard to the issue of crime as discussed in this article, it seems likely to me that the data adduced in support of the "there is no crime problem" position is missing something important that has a genuine impact on people's quality of life. This doesn't mean the data we have is wrong or irrelevant; it just means it's not the whole story. If you have a bunch of data on temperatures in different places around the world and you use that to pick the best place to live, you may be disappointed if you get there and find it's raining all the time. That doesn't mean your data was bad (temperature surely is a major determinant of what makes us like a certain climate) but that it's incomplete (you need more than just temperature).
The solution to this is not to give up on data, it's to bring more data into the fold. Data on people's perceptions is immensely useful as a starting point for policy. It's not an endpoint, but then neither is any other data.
> Members of The Church of Graphs live by one primary commandment: thou shalt not believe your lying eyes.
Ah, how familiar this is from some colleagues in tech.
Demands of evidence are asymmetric: make a bold claim that's aligned with the group, and it slips by; make a hint of a misaligned claim, and you get chided for not being a researcher in the field and spreading misinformation.
Author loses me when he starts pearl clutching about the harms of seeing boarded-up windows, and his wife having to walk past unhoused drug users. (Who, let us be clear, are the ones who are actually experiencing harm.)
This guy isn't a liberal, he's a guy looking to justify his discomfort by dressing it up with a bit of rehydrated bible-school epistemology
The intro paragraph threw me for a while, too. The author says he stopped liking Scott Alexander's posts because of the tenor of Scott's politics. Usually in the past couple decades when someone's said that it's meant "Scott's too Republican-coded for me on things like race and feminism"; but this post's author is actually arguing that Scott is too Democratic-coded for him on social issues like crime (and, by extension, immigration and race: TFA's author doesn't approve of the number of "obviously illegal" food trucks he sees on the street, for example).
"Crime" is far too broad a word for there to be an overwhelming consensus as to whether it's going up or down. That's the main issue.
If Scott A. had said "actual murders, property crime (defined as ____ ), ... and NOT perceptions of these" then there would be a more fruitful conversation.
All this stuff about greek is a red herring. "Crime" is a collection of discrete events that occur or don't occur. There are more or fewer of them per time period. Whether or not those events are recorded correctly or that people are more or less aware of them can be debated, but the actual numbers are the numbers.