ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Somewhat of a coincidence, but I thought it was funny enough to make me want to share it. I happen to be reading through a book on home inspection, because I just want to know more about maintaining the house, and it's talking about roof inspections. It gives some factors for/against getting up on the roof in different conditions. ...then we get to the section on metal roofs. It says, "Never get up on a metal roof to inspect it: it’s too slippery, even in dry weather." The emphasis was in the original.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
There's always a question of whether a space was actively astroturfed, just became popular with certain types of folks, or was just taken over and shifted to driving out certain types of folks and being more attractive to other types of folks. I'm thinking /r/law, which prior to 2016 was a pretty good, legal-expertise-focused sub that usually didn't take the ridiculous political bait and could be pretty reasonable about what the law actually was, why, etc. It was visibly taken over by Orange Man Bad moderators who openly made it a rule that any comment that could be perceived as "helping Trump" in any way was verboten, regardless of the legal merits. The incredibly rapid descent to becoming /r/politics followed like clockwork.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Why they made the actual choices they made, what was wrong with their training, and what they could have done better is above my pay grade. I just think that if one of the questions is why did they seem to not take a pot of water as a threat at the beginning, but did immediately after she grabbed it, a plausible answer would be that they're almost as dumb as me and just mentally binned it in a completely different bin, just thinking about turning a stove off rather than it being a possible weapon. I could also see myself being able to read someone's face/body language as they pick up a pot like that and immediately think, "Oh shit, I guess that can be a weapon, and they might be wanting to use it."
When I was younger, I worked at a daycare for a bit. I had one troubled kid kind of try to attack me with a pair of scissors. I knew that he caused a variety of problems and that one of my main long-term goals was to try to improve his behavior, since he was one of the biggest trouble spots, but I hadn't really thought that he might actually try to attack me up to that point. The attempt was kinda pathetic, really, but it was also a moment where I very suddenly went from not thinking about him having scissors, because we had scissors and the kids used them for various things, to, "Oh shit, this fucking punk might actually try to stab me with a pair of scissors!" I'm also glad that I didn't have millions of people on the internet scrutinizing my reaction; I think I did okay, but I could definitely imagine hyper-critics going overboard on silly stuff.
I have a slight sense that there's a Schrodinger's Cop problem here. People want cops to stop being overly paranoid about possible threats, especially when they're more hypothetical than real, but when a hypothetical threat becomes a real threat, they want to complain that they weren't paranoid enough about the hypothetical threat before it became a real threat.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
So literally nothing to do with a choice of whether scrutiny in this specific case is "probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy" or otherwise. Got it.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
the cabin scenario doesn't sound like anything as collectivist as "obligations" to me, but like a trade: you pay your taxes, I don't show up at your cabin to do something about the lack of animal protein in my diet (and passively/actively support a system that will stop others with more hunger for protein than me from organising to do so, reporting them to the authorities rather than cheering them on).
TheMotte truly has a Leviathan-shaped hole. I suppose one could say that the only solution to the state of nature is a particular conception of a governmental authority with particular properties. I don't know if that conception and those properties are things you'd be "willing to trade" for or not.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.
This is a fully-general argument for taking literally any case national, no matter how local and how inconsequential to national issues. So long as you "want". Why would you want? For what purpose? What problem are you actually solving by taking it national? You're preemptively getting in front of some hypothetical injustice? Again, there can be hypothetical injustice that you could conceivably be getting in front of in literally any case ever. The system, in general, tolerates some non-zero percentage of actual, not hypothetical, injustice. It is not hard to have exposure either to the day-to-day workings of the system or even just exposure to those who have exposure to the day-to-day workings of the system and know that there is routine actual injustice (though 'routine' in a nation of almost 400M people is still a tiny percentage). Why even bother with hypothetical when you could spend your time on actual?
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I'm an adult human with tons of experience around a kitchen. I have no bloody clue how far anyone can throw various quantities of water out of variously-designed pots. To use the ML lingo, it's not a thing in my training set.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
If they thought she was dangerous at the outset, then don't let her get the boiling water.
Did they, though? I haven't watched the video, mostly just skimmed some of the comments here. But I could imagine them not even thinking about her possibly threatening them with a pot of water; who does that?! Instead, just give her a moment to turn the stove off, then she's not worried about it or whatever, and they can continue doing whatever they need to do. It's only after she grabs the pot and appears threatening with it that they might think, "Oh shit, that can be a weapon; what did we get ourselves into?"
What I'm really thinking is that this is something I could totally see myself doing (the not thinking about a pot of boiling water being a potential weapon bit, not various other things). I'm not sure if it would cross my mind until some sort of threatening action was taken with the pot in hand. It's too ingrained in my classification circuits as "just cooking".
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Does charging the cop with first-degree murder count as "stonewalling" and justify going national?
ControlsFreak
6d ago
the demographics which, according to you, "cannot be said"
I mean, that's not really what I said. So, perhaps that's the fundamental misunderstanding that led to my confusion going all the way back to your first comment, which seemed strange to me, as if you really just wanted to jump off from my comment to something else that was different.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
From the perspective of most people, insurance is just another name by which someone else should pay for you.
Sort of, yes? Back in the day, people had 'informal insurance' from community. If one person's barn burned down, lots of folks in their community would come help them rebuild it, "spending" at least their time to pay for someone else's loss. They community helped, because they thought that "someone else" should "pay" for it, and they were all the "someone else". Financialized insurance formalizes this and abstracts it away from individuals having to spend their own personal time to help someone else who rolled snake eyes, chipping in by a small monetary amount, in exchange for the belief that they will in turn receive the same help if they roll snake eyes.
A big part of the issue is that this formalization and separation from the community aspect, combined with terrible beliefs about redistributive government, caused folks to realize that this is yet another area where if they just control the powers of government, they can free ride and force others to pay for them while giving nothing in return.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
I don't have any particular concerns over the way most people raised this. It was a standard "parade of horribles", where you try to come up with the most extreme 'hypos' (in the legal lingo) to push an interpretation as far as it can go in order to see if that's really an interpretation that you can live with. This one is pretty extreme, because the President's powers in this area are pretty plausibly vast. We saw somewhat similar language pushing on "assassinate a US citizen" around the al-Awlaki business. The President's war powers are among the most dangerous powers given to anyone in the country; they sort of have to be. We want a President Lincoln to be able to order the killing of rebel soldiers and leaders, even on US soil, in cases of genuine rebellion. How to draw lines is hard, and frankly, we probably still haven't managed to lay out any lines with real conceptual clarity; it might just not be possible to do so a priori. I'm pretty fine with people at least considering different scenarios in order to argue that we need to be careful in how we draw the lines as a separate thing from, "Whelp, if we're going to draw the line where you want to draw it, President Biden actually should order Seal Team Six to assassinate Trump." Probably some blowhards on reddit actually said the latter thing, but most relatively serious folks (to the extent there are many left) were doing the more sensible thing.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Is Loury going to stop constantly talking with McWhorter in the way he isn't talking with many people to the right of his?
I doubt it. I don't think he chooses whether or not to talk to McWhorter based on political purposes. I think they do just honestly go way back as friends first. It's extremely easy to shun people who you're not friends with based on political differences. When you start doing it to your pre-existing friends, it's a short road to loneliness, above and beyond the typical concerns people have (especially influential public figures) with determining whether anyone who appears to be a friend is acting that way because they genuinely like being friends or if it's just a means to an end.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
It's the phenomenon mentioned a couple days ago by someone here - the more probable it becomes that Trump is going to win, the more value there is in having shown that you were "on his side"... or, at the very least, not against him. This is particularly poignant for extremely wealthy leaders of highly-regulable industry. Nobody wants the full Elon Musk treatment. Zuck may have genuinely believed various left-leaning things in the past or he may have just thought that he had a good deal going where they were mostly going to protect him so long as he played ball enough. It's impossible to know. Likewise, it's sort of impossible to know whether he's actually emotionally/intellectually moved to take this new lack-of-position, or if he's seen the writing on the wall enough that he feels compelled, for the sake of his company/industry, to find any plausible way to soften on political issues without getting crucified by the media or other interest groups that could cause him problems (like, for example, meta employees, who might already be having meltdowns that their boss can't even manage to oppose Hitler). He's baaarely inching out just hoping that the story of the assassination attempt will help give him even the smallest amount of cover from criticism. This is a guy who is scared to death that he's going to suffer regardless of what he does.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Now I'm just very confused. I thought this was all just old hat, been done before, obviously out there for anyone who cares to see. Now it's a SciFi concept come to life. I have no idea anymore...
ControlsFreak
7d ago
...and why would one say that it is wild?
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Thinking this implies he had no idea about the demographics of crime is kind of wild.
Let's walk through this, then. What do you think his tweet does imply?
ControlsFreak
7d ago
You (and others) have said this, that there's nothing new, everyone knows how this works, etc. Matt Yglesias didn't seem to know that. It's "wild" to him. Perhaps it is likewise "wild" to many others.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
I believe the old joke is, "Machine learning is just OLS with constructed regressors."
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Whenever I smell something like that (and some entire outlets), I just default to throwing the link in archive. If it's not there, the internet is telling me that I should skip it.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
On the topic of a small number of relatively 'known' people being involved in an outsized portion of the crime problem
or
AI is sometimes allowed to say things that are otherwise not allowed to be said, so long as they make sure to say that it's definitely not racist
Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It is the name of the paper. They took arrest/victimization records in Chicago and tried to predict who was likely to be shot in the next 18 months. 644,000 people in the data; of the top 500 with the highest predicted risk, almost 13% were shot. That's the top line. 13% accuracy might not seem like much, but they claim that the rate is 128 times higher than that of the average Chicagoan. For context, that's 64 shooting victims over an 18mo period. I don't know what the total 'shot but maybe didn't die' rate is, but Chicago has in the ballpark of 600 homicides (by all means) each year.
This is not about who did the shooting; it's about who was shot. The implicit argument is that most shooting victims are close enough to the criminal world. Even if they were just purely victims before, it is at their doorstep. Plausibly, if a little old lady just happens to live in a really terrible neighborhood and had to report being the victim of various prior crimes, this could indicate that she is also at risk of getting shot, too.
They definitely go out of their way to say that, yes, Black males are more likely to have prior data in the system, but that the system still predicts with similar accuracy across demographics.
I don't know how practical these sorts of things will be to actually use for any purpose, but this paper dropping is definitely adding some fuel for the folks who think that a variety of criminal problems are mostly concentrated within a relatively small subset that could, at least in theory, be somewhat identified.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Man, from the depths of my memories of Supreme Court cases comes Wood vs. Moss, where Bush the Younger made a last-minute change in his plans, up and deciding to have dinner somewhere that wasn't on the schedule. They were going to eat on the outdoor patio, to boot. The only problem was that protest areas had already been approved for two groups (one of supporters, one of opponents), and the SS thought that the opponents' location was too close for them to be able to secure it. Rather than be all, "Sorry, Mr. President; you can't eat here tonight," they decided to move the protesters. This led to a lawsuit which claimed that the real, hidden, motivation for moving the opposing group was to discriminate against their viewpoint in favor of the supporters.
I imagine the SS has to deal with stuff like this all the time. They probably have to be carefully selective about when they actually choose to tell the President, "No." Most of the time, they probably just scramble and try to hold on. Of course, heat of the moment, credible threats, etc. all end up smashed together in a horrible, subjective scale for what type of action you take. They probably have to be pretty careful in trying to manage the relationship, too, where, similar to what you're saying, different VIPs may have different preferences/risk tolerances. They don't want to piss off the President by saying no too often, but if you end up with a dead President, you don't want to be left only being able to say, "Yeah, but this guy always got pissed when we said no or took some conservative action, so we just got into a habit of accepting more risk for him." It'll never play well, especially if anyone is looking to blame you for not being cautious enough in the aftermath of a tragedy.
Of course, no one on TheMotte is going to have any insight whatsoever on what Trump's relationship to the SS actually looks like, similar to how there was all the haranguing in his first term about how he was engaging in the PDB. Some folks wanted to skewer him, and others were saying that they worked toward productive, engaging meetings, and others yet were sure that the bureaucracy was intentionally being intransigent and sabotaging the relationship. Only the tiniest percentage of people actually know, and they're generally not talking unless they are doing so to promote some agenda or another.
If I were forced to steelman, perhaps it could be done. I've been reading some of the articles about what their plan was and what went down (NYT just had a pretty detailed one that didn't seem atrocious). The biggest aspect would be the SS/local divide. Folks in this thread have already made jokes about the local folks probably being incompetent, screwing stuff up and not doing what they're supposed to do. The SS could have thought, "Yeah, we're not going to have some obese local hanging out on that roof all day, just hoping that that they don't hurt themselves," while still thinking that their own counter sniper team was obligated to take such a position, for lack of any better positioning options... plus a little overconfidence that their guys would totally be capable of handling it, even though the dumb locals couldn't (as I mentioned, I think this belief turned out to be wrong, considering that both their guys immediately started slipping down the roof).
I still totally agree that things were immensely screwed up, because that roof is the single most obvious place to attack from in the area.
EDIT: I also think that if their reasoning was something like this, they really can't vocalize, "The reason why we thought it was a safety issue is because we have no confidence in obese, incompetent locals." Too much social desirability bias.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment.
Plausibly so. One area that is grossly lacking any remotely suitable theory is one of character development, especially on a large scale such that it could produce any sort of a coherent values environment (not even necessarily a rigid one). To even think about such a project descends into questions of things like deterrence/rehabilitation and perhaps even free will, itself. One tension I observe is that when the left/communists engaged in large-scale projects of "character development" (given that it is a type of character that many in this forum would think is bad/harmful), many folks are pretty okay with believing that it can, indeed, be relatively successful in producing a coherent values environment (perhaps one that is, indeed, rigid).
That is to say, it is perhaps all well and good to have a heuristic rule where one looks at the population which is considering adopting a norm of free speech and concluding, "If such a population has sufficiently coherent values, a norm of free speech is potentially plausible/possibly beneficial, but if it does not, then it is not." But the core problem is somewhat upstream of that, and it is one that we have almost no clue concerning how it works. There are likely, indeed, almost surely, some feedback loops back upstream, but it becomes an even more impossible task to perform any analysis on such feedback without any conception whatsoever of how the thing it's feeding back into works.
It has held thus far; maybe it will continue to hold; who can predict? But half the time when I go there, I still have that sinking feeling that they're one little break in modship away from cracking, resulting in there being approximately zero usable spaces left on the internet for rational legal discussion.
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