what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Modern American meritocracy is bad because I see no reason why the child of two Brahmins deserves vastly more wealth and power than the child of two average Mayflower descendants just because the former is “more intelligent”.
You are making the same error that leftists do when they complain that not enough minorities are doctors or CEOs, qualifications be damned. It's not a question of "deserving power." It's a question of, "who is best for the job?" because whether important jobs are done well matters. As Scott once wrote:
The intuition behind meritocracy is this: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.
The Federal Reserve making good versus bad decisions can be the difference between an economic boom or a recession, and ten million workers getting raises or getting laid off. When you’ve got that much riding on a decision, you want the best decision-maker possible – that is, you want to choose the head of the Federal Reserve based on merit.
This has nothing to do with fairness, deserts, or anything else. If some rich parents pay for their unborn kid to have experimental gene therapy that makes him a superhumanly-brilliant economist, and it works, and through no credit of his own he becomes a superhumanly-brilliant economist – then I want that kid in charge of the Federal Reserve. And if you care about saving ten million people’s jobs, you do too.
Now, obviously, IQ is not the only factor that determines if someone is going to be good at such a job. And I would greatly like to separate/reduce power over other people from as many positions as possible, even if what they do is important, because the existence of the "ruling class" is the problem, not the details of who is in it. This is relatively easy for surgeons; less so for the chairman of the Fed. But the only way for the Fed not to have power is not to have a centralized monetary system, and similarly the only way for a politician not to have power is to have as small and weak a government as possible. And favoring "Mayflower descendants" over 1st generation immigrants accomplishes, in my view, pretty much nothing on either front. What if we flip your example; do Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power just because their ancestors from 400 years ago fled England?
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
That would be my guess as well. In addition, these likely reflect reports rather than any sort of confirmed illness (edit: I would guess coming from https://vaers.hhs.gov/). In attempting to make its point seem stronger, in my opinion, it actually makes it weaker: how could a single vaccine (not even a new idea, just a different way of making them) causes eye injuries (something the article itself admits is unusual for a vaccine), vascular disorders, skin and tissue, ears, respiratory, breast or reproductive... the list goes on. It also is clearly doing the thing of "Big! Numbers!" by pointing to the number of different categories, even though looking at the list a "category" may be extremely specific, such as differentiating "vaccination site pain" "...swelling" "...discomfort" and then repeating them all for "vaccination site joint X".
Oh yeah, and the author is also advertising their book, which looks like a very reasonable and dispassionate review of scientific evidence.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I actually don't think most of it is psychological, although it may have a vaguely related, CW cause. Autoimmune disease, with allergy being a prime example, seems to be more common in developed countries. One common (although not universally accepted) hypothesis is that the autoimmune system overreacts when it doesn't have anything to do, or otherwise malfunctions if not exposed to pathogens when young. First world countries are so clean and disinfected that our immune systems have started to break down. The idea of increasing exposure to allergens has actually become mainstream enough that the director of the NIH recommends early exposure for kids at risk of peanut allergy (although does caution this isn't universal advice--some allergies probably are just genetic and not caused by a modern sterile environment). The allergies are very real--no amount of psychology will change your immune system's antibodies (although a friend of mine indicated they were able to slightly reduce their peanut allergy as an adult participating in an exposure study).
If you're wondering what the CW angle is, you may notice (if you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt's work, or Nassim Taleb's notion of antifragility) the similarity to the generally-accepted biological fact that muscles grow by being damage, and bones heal stronger than they were to start, and the hypothesis that we need exposure to psychological and emotional adversity in order to be able to handle disagreement and discomfort. And indeed, Haidt uses these biological mechanisms as analogies in his presentations (see the section starting around 26:00 in https://youtube.com/watch?v=B5IGyHNvr7E&ab_channel=PennStateMcCourtneyInstituteforDemocracy). By telling pregnant mothers whose babies are at risk of peanut allergies not to consume any peanuts, we've increased peanut allergies. Are we doing the same for immune systems more generally with excess cleanliness, and for human psychology with helicopter parenting (and general excess adult supervision)?
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
On the other hand, I still find it plausible that it's just art-school, shock-the-normies, absolutely cringe bullshit. If it's the latter, these people are merely gross and pathetic rather than unbelievably evil. I
I do think it's more likely that "artsy" types who are under constant pressure to be creative and put out new things and push boundaries, and who rely on public acclaim (or at least on not being too widely hated) for their career, are in fact pushing boundaries, than it is that they are subtly admitting to possibly the most despised crimes in modern culture.
Like with bullies and mass shootings, the best way to discourage it is to just not take it seriously. Outrage and engagement are what they're looking for. Just roll your eyes and pretend to be bored while saying "don't cut yourself on all that edge" like they're a 13 year old writing poems in black eyeliner and swearing on counterstrike.
Maybe I just find it hard to get outraged about a child holding some stuff they probably just didn't understand, when earlier this week an 11 year old was killed because someone modified their truck, the brakes failed, and so far they've only been charged with misdemeanors. Where's the pearl clutching and outrage here? Why can you speed and ignore signs, kill someone, and get a misdemeanor?
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
In the US, each side pays their own legal bills. Pretty much every other developed country defaults to the loser paying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fees)
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Why would you expect them to have well-thought-out risk/reward tradeoffs? Other than what's in the other replies, most of what I know about Andrew Tate comes from youtube and instagram bits where he's bragging about how much money he has and insulting men who aren't rich, and how he has a surefire way for you to get rich. Sounds like walking survivorship bias to me, where someone made bad gambles that paid off for a time but have come around to bite him. Also, "plenty" of revenue is never enough for some people.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
This is valid, but then you have to make sure this is actually what's happening. It seems like it might be easy to assume that this is happening, without looking closely at the history of the ideas. Or you might even have different groups coming to a vaguely similar conclusion, but independently--neither is trying to "fix" the other.
My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it. The moderate liberals aren't coming in and cleaning up after the radicals made a mess, tidying up the support columns after they accidentally built a beautiful cathedral. They're both reacting to perceived injustice, but one is going further in the other direction than the other. Sometimes the arguments they use ("racism is bad") will overlap, sometimes they won't ("we can entirely replace police with X"/"no we can't").
Scott's post seems to blur this distinction as well. It's a combination of "social dynamics that cause strange groupings of people" and "what is actually correct?" If all you, personally, care about, is whether God exists, then you should only care about the strongest arguments from the most reasonable proponents. If you, personally, are just trying to decide on what public policy to support, then it shouldn't really matter what the relationship is between moderate reform liberals and radical DTP leftists. But it does matter politically, for the reasons Scott describes.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally.
What defines a "community"? Is it your neighborhood? Your street? Literally just your family? The town? The state? The country? Right now most of these laws are passed at the municipal level, but municipalities can range in size from millions of people to a handful, and as current events in California indicate, if you change from town to state, you can get very different policies.
In general I don't think that "collective ownership" is a good framework for coordination problems. At some point, a plot of land (or building, etc) needs a person who is going to make decisions and be responsible for the outcome; rule by committee or democracy is marked by lots of public choice problems. A market with individual owners, and Coasian bargaining for externalities, is usually going to be better at capturing everyone's preferences given all of the relevant costs and other information. Complete bans are a very heavy-handed and unnecessarily extreme solution.
It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not. You might not want to live next to an unmarried couple, but are you willing to pay for all of the costs that come with forcing neighborhoods to be that way?
To take your argument about NIMBYism more generally: In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people. Highly-paid software engineers need to find multiple roommates just to live near the center of their industry. Professionals with families and white-collar jobs are forced to live an hour commute from downtown, because "home values" are literally sacred. In the most extreme cases, it exacerbates the very homeless problem it attempts to, well, not solve, but avoid. And it imposes, on other people, very similar externalities to the ones you are trying to avoid. Cars are a good example: NIMBYism inevitably requires lots of driving because everything is low-density and stores are required by law to be far away from homes. Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US, and a substantial portion of those deaths are not drivers. They're also very loud, they pollute, etc.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
In my opinion Randal O'Toole makes arguments that are mostly not worth taking seriously. For example, he writes a bunch about how density and affordability are negatively correlated. Obviously! Places that a lot of people want to live are both denser and more expensive than other places. That's how supply and demand works, especially when supply is artificially constrained! As far as I can tell, he never addresses this reverse causality. The best quality evidence (e.g. natural experiments) show a causal effect of more housing -> lower housing prices.
(This debate always baffles me because on on the one hand, you have some YIMBYs agreeing with most NIMBYs that restrictive zoning increases prices ("home values" from the NIMBY PoV), but then O'Toole is on the side of various leftist groups that claim to hate the rich suburbanites but also claim that building more housing doesn't make housing cheaper. It's literally parody, but real.)
Similarly with the CA growth boundaries. I don't like them as a policy, but the idea that most of the population of CA is "forced" to live in a few metro areas is absurd. Many people want to live near the places that have jobs, other people, things to do, etc. Telling them to live in even further suburbs and drive 3 hours is not a solution!
And, of course, the idea that zoning is a property right. Keep in mind that O'Toole freely compares the aforementioned growth boundaries to feudalism or communism. But your neighbors have basically unlimited right to tell you what you can and can't do with your property, because they're a majority--that's fine! It's one of the most obvious "coming to the conclusion first" arguments I've ever seen. I mean, take this:
Zoning land as a substitute for deed restrictions and then yanking away that zoning betrays the homeowners in such neighborhoods.
You can't just say that one thing is kind of like another thing, and therefore one counts as the other. For one, it's not even the case that zoning is fixed in place--the local government can modify like with any other law, and they often do. Or they put in a nebulous approval process without any restriction at all. But also, you could say the same about repealing any restriction or changing any law. It's a betrayal to alcohol and tobacco companies to legalize marijuana. We can never change IP law, even if it's clearly being abused to enforce a monopoly. Changing how taxes work betrays people who saved based on different laws. Repealing a tariff isn't fair to the company that bought off politicians lobbied for it.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Is it a realignment? This article doesn't really provide evidence of that. It shows that Trump is doing better among non-whites when looking at Republican voters and comparing to other Republican candidates. This doesn't necessarily generalize to doing better among non-whites in general, or doing better compared to non-Republican politicians. I believe that Scott has a few posts that show some evidence that he did (or e.g. improved his performance among non-whites from 2016 to 2020), although the effect is not as strong as the one described in this article.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
"This other hypothesis is wrong" and "my hypothesis is correct" are not the same thing. Many different hypotheses are plausible.
Economists think about this all the time--see, for example, this video from David Friedman, but it's also one of the first things that are discussed in introductory Econ right after the perfect competition model. But I don't think this post does a great job of identifying such cases; the video I linked has what I consider to be better examples.
How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
For the most part, it's up to each person to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs. Most people can determine how much they like drinking; an estimate of other people's preferences won't help you much. But... what does this have to do with diffusion? Generally, each person experiences the costs and benefits of their own drinking. If anything, the cost of drinking is more diffuse, since health care costs are often socialized even in the US, so non-drinkers will pay for drinkers' drinking-related health care.
Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.
Again, I'm confused as to what this has to do with your general thesis. Generally, both the benefits and the costs of more road space are relatively diffuse, at least in North America, since most people drive most of the time (edit: this depends on the road/project; for one road serving one area, what I said is wrong. For expanding many roads serving many areas, it's more correct, although there still will probably be some agents with more or less benefit and cost). If anything, since many more people drive than bike, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are spread around (sanity check: if the benefits were concentrated, it would be easy to privately fund roads; this almost never happens).
(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).
And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around
I can't tell what this has to do with costs or benefits being diffuse at all. It sounds like you're just dropping an argument for zoning into the post at random. A zoning law has a very clear, concentrated cost (someone who would like to build a different type of housing unit on their land) with diffuse benefits (spread across all of their neighbors). (edit for clarity: Zoning, like many policies, can have both concentrated and diffuse costs and benefits. I was trying to get at the point that there's nothing particularly concentrated or diffuse about the particular argument you mentioned).
Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes).
First, I think your math is wildly off. 1.46 looks to be roughly the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, while 5 miles is, presumably, the distance of one commute. So 1.92 minutes is the risk due to your car making 1 commute, which means that these values are actually extremely similar.
But also, where are these numbers coming from? If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time (certainly the converse, where adding road capacity does not reduce congestion, has been consistently observed--see the ID argument just above; you don't seem to dispute that ID occurs, simply how to interpret it).
That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger.
I really want to emphasize this point, though. By driving, you expose other people to danger while slightly reducing your own exposure to danger and increasing your convenience. This is a highly negative externality and deserves to be heavily "taxed" to discourage it, or you should be forced to negotiate. If the math does work out as you claim, it should cost an absolutely trivial amount for you alone to pay off all of the cyclists and pedestrians in the city to keep the roads.
Also, from a more dry utilitarian point of view, expected amount of time is not the only relevant variable. A small risk of dying increases the variance a lot, and is something that people definitely care about. In this case, downweighting the diffuse costs is entirely appropriate.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).
Is this at all surprising? Totally unrelated to any trans issues--I would not be surprised at this behavior for any scandal at a public school, or indeed any institution. This is perhaps a slightly extreme example, but really only because the initial crime is so bad. (I'd like to think it might be less bad at a non-public school, but that's probably just my bias showing.)
how is it that in a community that has been self-enclosed for thousands of years only two people are black?
Wheel of Time did this as well. Two Rivers is an isolated farming village surrounded by mountains, several days away from even a moderately sized trading down. But some of the main characters are white (Rand, Mat), some are mixed (unsure, but Perrin is from the UK so I'm guessing white and black) and others indigenous Australian/New Zealander (Egwene and I believe Nynaeve). They also made Lan Asian, which works well IMO except he's supposed to be 6'5" but is shorter than literally everyone else.
For some characters it probably doesn't matter, but throughout the books characters' appearance indicates where they're from (the main region where most of the book series takes place, nicknamed "Randland" by readers, is roughly the size of the US and has everything from lily-white to extremely dark-skinned character, but each country has very distinct appearances and accents). In addition, Rand's appearance is totally central to the entire plot and if the Aiel don't have a consistent appearance, then lots of things don't make sense. But they've already changed the story by quite a lot, so I maybe it won't end up mattering.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
5-15 years seems like an exaggeration. Graduating from high school is not hard for most people and is pretty important for getting a reasonable paying job (also being 18). After that, college is a 4 year endeavor, and very few people spend any time in school after that. Even finishing a bachelor's is something that only a little over a third of those 25-30 have done (although closer to 2/3 have at least "some college" which might indicate a lot of wasted time failing to graduate--this number is probably far too high given the costs of college). The drop in fertility is much more widespread than that.
There's definitely a portion of the population going through higher education, and then trying to get started in a career to pay off student loans/justify so much college, and then don't have a lot of time left in between that and being too old, especially if you have trouble getting pregnant because you only started looking for a partner at age 30. I know people in this situation. (Of course, I also know people in this situation who got married young and got divorced and remarried, nothing to do with college at all). But this group is too small to explain the bulk of the trend.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I don't think I've seen the claim that having covid now will greatly increase your chance of dying over the next decade expressed anywhere. Can you provide some evidence for this claim? (Obviously the mainstream belief is that vaccines reduce deaths in the short term, because there are very large RCTs that got a lot of scrutiny showing that this the case.)
I think they would put it at 1% per infection, and with infections every six months that’s about 20% mortality in a decade
I also don't think a lot of people would give you these numbers or anything particularly close. I know a lot of liberals and leftists who took covid fairly seriously (and even continue to do so) and I don't think they would say this if you asked.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Addendum, entirely my own opinion: One reform that I would like to try is to make lawsuits default to "loser pays." Almost every other developed country requires the losing side in a lawsuit to pay for the other side's legal fees. I think it's generally well known that lawsuits are often a tool used to bully people into complying by making that cheaper than defending the lawsuit. Meritless lawsuits are still very expensive to defend, and almost every story I read about cost inflation seems to mention lawsuits at some point. Suing over a missed period in an environmental impact review as is common in CA, or suing because a building would be taller than surrounding "historic" buildings like in Miami, or for minor procedural limitations like with Austin's CodeNext, or Cambridge suing Boston because of "visual impact" of a bridge redesign during the Bid Dig, is very common. I think this happens in medicine, too: Malpractice insurance isn't cheap, but probably far more expensive is the vast amount of extra tests done for reasons of "CYA." Loser pays would discourage lawsuits that are likely to fail, but costly to defend.
(The only thing preventing me from declaring this the Solution to All Cost Disease is that I haven't seen a lot of discussion of lawsuits in educational cost disease. However, one might also think about the attitudes described above in both of those contexts: Do we insist on expensive and impressive-looking inputs, regardless of cost or efficacy? Are we highly insensitive to price? Is it considered unethical to reject the "best" solution because it's costly? Do bears shit in the woods? etc.)
But also, I think you can see similar attitudes reflect in the people filing those lawsuits, or otherwise being obstructionist (such as county officials who drove up the price of CA's HSR by demanding it take circuitous routes). They would rather tank an entire project to benefit millions of people, than not get their pound of flesh or deal with a minor inconvenience of something changing or having their property appreciate in value slightly less quickly. Even as a libertarian who's usually very suspect of "people being selfish ruin everything" style arguments, it seems like borderline narcissism or sociopathy.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
You want to "fix" the housing problem? Kick women out of the workplace and a married family will be able to raise their kids on a single salary, with mom at home keeping an eye on the schools and housing prices will be within the reach of a single-family income.. as they were until the mid-late-60s.
Is there even the slightest shred of evidence for this claim? The number of new housing units being built has declined compared to population. The incomes of households will not change the underlying fact that there isn't enough housing.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given that this isn't even the 5th boldest claim you've made in this post without providing any sort of argument.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Honestly, "trying to mislead foreign countries about what capabilities the US has" doesn't seem like a terrible explanation. It's certainly within the capability of the CIA to take whatever our most advanced technology is and recruit a few pilots and former spooks to exaggerate what they saw in front of Congress (or just lie). Maybe some of the Congresscritters are even in on it.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I don't see how it being an act changes whether something is an insult or not. Jones may not seriously believe that Sandy Hook was a false flag, but it would still be pretty hurtful to hear someone say that you faked your own child being dead for a political fight (and it seems like some people did believe him). Like with most bullies and charlatans, the correct response is not to take them seriously, whether you agree or disagree, not to engage. But I also don't think it's entirely an act; he is actually living in Romania, after saying (as another poster quoted) that you can get away with rape there by bribing the cops.
And if it is an act, then Tate is still a greedy asshole, selling desperate men on get-rich-quick schemes, like 10,000 con men before him. Does that sound like a man with a great grasp of risk management to you?
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Narcissism
Sounds like it to me, although I'm no psychiatrist.
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this?
In her tweet, she claims the son is autistic. Could be real, although if it has anything to do with his mother, I suspect "mother seized upon some minor tics to she could feel special by claiming an autistic child" is the most likely relationship.
Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any.
I find it a little hard to believe that you couldn't find any such people if you looked. For example, do you think that megapastors who claim God wants them to buy a private jet are any less narcissistic? (Also claiming that COVID was already over in March 2020 due to prayer and that even those who lost their job should continue to give him money). As far as I can tell, people like Copeland and Joel Osteen are just as delusional and narcissistic as Jones and have suckered in at least as many people.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
How much freedom do those cars provide to children, anyone with a disability that prevents them from driving, people who are too old to drive safely, or anyone for whom a car is a significant expense? Or even someone who just dislikes driving? Who gets to experience those exit rights when housing is so expensive?
Cars are still entirely dependent on the government decides to do. Where roads go, when roads are closed, how lights and signs are used to direct traffic flow, road maintenance, etc. I'm all for freedom, but heavily-subsidized "freedom" is a contradiction in terms and an illusion. Dense, walkable, urban environments with a mix of things are what people created spontaneously. Car-dependent suburban sprawl is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.
Yes, cars provide some benefits. They also have a lot of costs.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Technically, if true, all it tells you is that African Americans are more likely to make this specific kind of error. An error is not necessarily tax evasion (which at least to me implies intent), and there are probably lots of errors that are not counted. I would say more such errors is Bayesian evidence in favor of more actual evasion, but it's weak, and the error being made is this one.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Individual teachers are responsible for designing their own curriculum for AP courses and selecting appropriate college-level readings, assignments, and resources. This publication presents the content and skills that are the focus of the corresponding college course and that appear on the AP Exam. It also organizes the content and skills into a series of units that represent a sequence found in widely adopted college syllabi. The intention of this publication is to respect teachers' time and expertise by providing a roadmap that they can modify and adapt to their local priorities and preferences.
It's been a while since I took AP courses, but the history exams I took definitely had a mix of more open-ended questions where students had to be able to evaluate evidence and make arguments, and also a section of multiple-choice fact questions. In addition, some of the writing questions required you to know all of the relevant information already (FRQ). Even for the part that gave you primary sources and required you to evaluate them (DBQ), you would have to have at least some context and outside information in order to be able to do that evaluating. So although you could emphasize different themes, there was still quite a lot of factual information you had to have in order to get a decent grade on the AP exam.
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
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