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ymeskhout


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 20:00:51 UTC

				

User ID: 696

ymeskhout


				
				
				

				
12 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 20:00:51 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 696

"all top-level comments for the culture war threads" is accurate. I attached what the RSS feed I made looked like in Feedly.

The way we have this implicitly organized is a relic of how Reddit was built, and it doesn't necessarily have to continue the same way. We use the weekly CWR thread as a sort of "sub-forum" with each top-level comment functionally the same as a forum thread. I remember you saying how part of that is intentional, because you want people to accidently meander into a topic they might not have otherwise read. RSS feeds don't interfere with that, and in fact make me pay attention to each post much more.

With RSS feeds, I just plug it into Feedly and everything is delivered straight to my front door, and I don't have to worry about keeping track of what is and isn't read/unread. I'm actually very curious to know how people browsed the Motte without RSS, because the only alternative is "maybe I'll see if something is new at the Motte"

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I find myself easily overwhelmed with the idea of playing a new game mainly because of time constraints. It's a lot of commitment to spend the time to learn something new only to find out it isn't your bag. So I tend to gravitate towards the familiar, and revisit old flames. Currently that's been the chillaxed atmosphere of Anno 2070. I have a thing for city-builder games, and the Anno series is one of the best exemplars.

The core gameplay loop is setting up balanced supply chains across islands to satisfy your resident's needs. You'd start with low-tier workers who require basic food and drinks which can be produced within one island. But each island has only limited "fertilities" and inevitably you're pushed to settle new areas in order to upgrade your residents. The production chains for later items can get quite convoluted. There's combat in the game but it's always been an annoying after-thought that most players wish didn't exist. So for the most part, it ends up playing like a bonsai city simulator. It's just so cute and pretty and fun to develop a city with thousands of residents and seeing your little ships truck goods all over the map. I think that's the core appeal to me, but I remain somewhat confused as to why I find these types of games so compelling.

Any of the most recent Anno games (1404, 2070, 2205) are excellent in their own rights. I haven't played 1800 yet but watched plenty of LPs and it looks like it has improved upon every single aspect of the series.

Worst-case scenario that means it retains the current status quo, because the way LessWrong implemented it the agree/disagree vote has no effect on making a post more/less visible.

I generally find the 21st Century Salonnière’s (also known as Dolly) writing to be thoughtful and insightful, despite the controversial arena she roams around in. Back in April (I have a terrifying reading backlog, ok?) she published the post Sexual Offenses Are More Common Among Transwomen Than Men, a title as provocative as it is unambiguous.

Using prison data from both the UK and the US, Dolly finds that about 50% of trans prisoners are there for a sexual crime, in contrast to 11% - 19% of the general prison population. Hopefully it’s obvious that prisoners are overwhelmingly male by a huge margin, especially for violent offenses, and that the number of trans prisoners is so miniscule as to be almost a rounding error (in the UK there were only 142 trans prisoners out of a total prison population of 92,949 as of 2017).

Dolly’s overall argument is structured thus:

Premise- Trans prisoners are more likely to be there for a sexual offense

Conclusion- Trans people are more likely to commit a sexual offense

I’m not the only one who noticed some glaring omissions in this argument, and a few commentators pointed this out. I would hope my criticism is seen as constructive, but the main feedback I would give is to be more transparent about implicit assumptions. To be clear, Dolly’s operating assumptions (whether stated or not) may be perfectly reasonable, but the discussion is clouded when they're kept shelved away.

The two main assumptions implicitly made are:

  1. Trans prisoners are representative of the trans general population

  2. The amount of law enforcement attention spent on any particular crime is representative of that crime's frequency

I might be missing others, but those are at least the most important. Setting aside the validity of the prison statistics (I’m assuming they’re legit and have no reason to think otherwise) I remain skeptical these are reasonable assumptions for many of the same reasons “And I for truth” listed in their comment to the post:

It could be the case, for instance, that transwomen commit non-sex crimes at lower rates than other males but sex crimes at the same rates. It could also be that males in prison for sex crimes are more likely to claim a trans identity in the hopes of getting transferred to a woman's prison, either for nefarious reasons (access to women in prison) or self-protection (recognition of the higher risk that other male prisoners might commit violence against them). Both of those situations are consistent with the data you cite.

I’m also skeptical based on my experience as a public defender.

Sex criminals are by far the people treated the worst by the criminal justice system, both by the legal punishments but also informally by retribution from other inmates. When I'm dealing with a sex offense case, I make informal requests to the prosecutor and the judge to not read out their charges out loud, or to take their case last when the courtroom is emptier. Those same clients routinely ask me to not give them any paperwork about their case for fear that it would be discovered by others. All of this is done to protect them, by limiting the number of people who find out about the nature of their charges.

Inmates in general are almost by definition more violent that the general public, and beating the shit out of someone accused of a sex crime is the kind of violence most likely to be implicitly condoned by the powers that be. Correctional officers genuinely have a thankless and very difficult job, and the last thing on their mind is worrying about kiddie diddler getting shanked. Didn’t see it happen, and even if they did, it was self-defense because the rapist provoked it. So yes, the idea that someone accused of a sex offense is more likely to identify as trans once in prison solely for the purposes of better accommodations makes a lot of sense to me. This says less about the authenticity of trans gender identity and much more about the horrific conditions our criminal justice system casually tolerates.

There would also be an added filter at the investigation stage. Sex crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute, absent clear evidence of violence or coercion. Law enforcement is put in a very difficult situation because they WANT to be receptive of complaints, but they often can't do anything with them due to shoddy evidence. In most of the rape cases I've handled, there is rarely any dispute whatsoever that the people involved had sex, but then the only evidence of a crime is conflicting testimony from the only two witnesses (he said she consented, she denies it). For example, I once had a case where a guy in his 40s had a friends-with-benefits relationship with a 21 year-old for at least two years. The day she reported a rape to police, she was also seven months pregnant with his child. I am not at all saying it’s impossible to rape someone you’re in a relationship with (no matter how casual), but good luck convincing a jury of that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Prosecutors are thus more likely to pursue charges like this if there are other factors to tip the balance. In the case above, the guy had a domestic violence history from a very long time ago. I also have to assume that their age gap also played a role in moving the needle towards “prosecute”. It would not be surprising if a sex crime garners more lurid attention from the law enforcement apparatus just because the suspect is trans. Prosecutors openly advertising their preferred pronouns does not disavow them of any potential bias against trans people they may harbor, and either way they can only file charges when a beat cop or detective cares enough to forward a report. We’re not pulling from a progressive crowd here.

The overall methodology is complicated by the severe dearth of data on a population this miniscule — how many conclusions can you draw from a sample that is 0.15% of the population? This is further hampered by the relatively incoherent framework of gender identity, particularly when it melds into non-binary territory — how do you determine who should be counted in this group?

One of my hobby horses is being a spoilsport for when someone tries to hoist a heavy conclusion on some flimsy stilts. We can shore this up with some figurative gravel — perhaps some reasonable assumptions to close the gaps, but these should at least be stated outright and explicitly. Short of that, sometimes we just don’t have enough evidence to come to a conclusion, and it’s ok to admit when we don’t and can’t know something. This isn’t a call to give up on trying to answer questions, because even a failed attempt to resolve an inquiry can leave us with a useful blueprint for the future.

I think it's fair to hold people to their own professed standards. Also fair to consistently criticize other people's standards when they're incoherent.

"less likely" compared to what though? Saying something like "trans people are less likely to commit a non-sexual offense" doesn't really tell us anything about their overall criminality, which is useful information to have. Dolly's overall conclusion is that they're more likely to commit a sexual offense compared to men, but she doesn't try explaining why that might be the case (I assume that would delve into armchair psychology, implicating AGP and whatnot).

Oh, solid. I missed it back then but a lot of the same points are brought up.

This is a really good point, I'm embarrassed I didn't think about it.

Yes to all this, but it's also important to mention that he lost by default because being an obstinate litigant and refusing to comply with discovery orders was his entire MO. We'll see how the collection and bankruptcy after-action ultimately play out, but I can't imagine anyone thinking this ever had a chance of working in his favor. MAYBE his efforts (setting aside their morality/legality) helped him shield some of his assets, but that was in exchange for abandoning the field to swallow the default judgment poison pill. Moreover, this also means that he had to functionally abandon any actually real defenses, such as anything remotely grounded in free speech protections. I would love to see an earnest steelman of why his cases sets a bad precedent, but as far as I can tell it largely falls along tribal lines.

You're incomplete. It this sets any precedent it's "anyone who is sufficiently and convincingly traumatized by speech can be awarded an arbitrarily large amount of money...provided they face a defendant who 100% gives up any semblance of legal defense and instead spends enormous resources trying to shield from liability as much of his multi-million dollar commercial enterprise as possible, by ineffectively trying to distribute it to family members and other antics."

I thought we were talking about Alex Jones? I have no idea what your hypothetical has to do with his cases.

Edit: Fixed link

For anyone interested, I did my first livestream where I show my face and everything with Counterpoints, a conservative/centrist in Florida who used to be a cop and is now an internet pundit (and WH40k enthusiast). We talk for about an hour and discussed our contrasting experience within the criminal justice system, domestic violence prosecution, drug policing, and very briefly get into race identitarianism.

Relatedly, Counterpoints made a video about the history of political YouTube which I thought was very interesting look into a phenomenon I hadn't been exposed to much. It's curious to me why this ever became a thing, and why so many online pundits got their start in video game streaming. When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.

Anyway, it was a fun experience with a format I had never tried before.

[reposting from last week, now with the permanent URL]

For anyone interested, I did my first livestream where I show my face and everything with Counterpoints, a conservative/centrist in Florida who used to be a cop and is now an internet pundit (and WH40k enthusiast). We talk for about an hour and discussed our contrasting experience within the criminal justice system, domestic violence prosecution, drug policing, and very briefly get into race identitarianism.

Relatedly, Counterpoints made a video about the [history of political YouTube] (HE TOOK IT DOWN FOR SOME REASON) which I thought was very interesting look into a phenomenon I hadn't been exposed to much. It's curious to me why this ever became a thing, and why so many online pundits got their start in video game streaming. When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.

Anyway, it was a fun experience with a format I had never tried before.

dear lord this dude is going to drive me crazy

Back in August 20 people were arrested in Florida as part of a sting operation on "voter fraud" heavily publicized by Gov. DeSantis. Each person had a felony conviction and voted, but I wrote about how each person was specifically told by election authorities that they were legally able to vote. The confusion stems from how felony voter right restoration was implemented in Florida, where the state insisted that everyone had to pay all outstanding fines while at the same time admitting it had no way of keeping track of all these fines.

A small update since then is that bodyworn video footage of the arrests has been released. The language in an arrest warrant issued by a court usually says something along the lines of "To every peace officer of blah blah, you are commanded to..." which means the decision to arrest is not discretionary. I've watched thousands of arrest videos by now and while the modal arrest is far less eventful that what the typical viral incident would have you believe, it's still an event that is inherently antagonistic. After all, the cop is placing handcuffs on you and taking you to jail, with serious retribution if you impede the process in any way.

I have never seen cops anywhere near as apologetic about an arrest as in the videos just released from Florida. They caught these people unaware outside of their homes, and as they explain the arrest warrant they pepper every sentence with "sir" and "m'am". When they explain that they're about to be handcuffed, they use "unfortunately" as a prefix. Thanks to qualified immunity along with the general deference courts give law enforcement, each cop would have had the legal authority to leg sweep each person and slam them to the ground if they displayed anything that could remotely be construed as resistance. Instead they take the time to calmly explain the process, including when they would likely be released, in a bid to secure as much of their cooperation as possible through what is understandably a distressing event for any person to go through. They're treated with astounding compassion. The people arrested start talking (of course they do), with one explaining how he was told he could legally vote, and the cop responds with "there's your defense". I've never seen a cop highlight legal defenses to the person they just arrested.

DeSantis is a Yale/Harvard educated former federal prosecutor. I would assume based on his background that he's not an idiot, and that he knows how criminal prosecutions work. If I keep my cynic hat on, DeSantis chose to make a big show of these arrests entirely as a means to appease the portion of the electorate that still believes the 2020 election was stolen and remains angry no one has gotten punished. But even so, what exactly was the follow-up supposed to be? Whatever charges one would levy against these people would require that you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew they weren't allowed to vote but voted anyway, and how would any prosecutor counter the fact that election authorities approved their registration? What this does also just brings more attention to the confusing labyrinthian mess around court fines the state of Florida intentionally created as a hurdle for felons pursuing voter right restoration.

If the cops conducting the arrest are expressing this much skepticism about the charges, you can surmise how a random jury pool would react. These charges were patently frivolous from the very start but setting that aside they don't even make sense from the political grandstanding perspective. Bewildering.

But I wanted to get at something else: what might keep people from trying certain drugs is not necessarily the cost, but the social stigma and the kind of seedy people you would have to deal with in order to try it.

This is true, I don't disagree. But it's also a double-edged sword because the stigma itself makes it more dangerous (which in turn can further discourage use). I can't order medical-grade heroin from Amazon Prime, so the only avenue available is stuff that has been stepped on and laced with who knows what. I can't use heroin in any facility supervised by medical professionals, so the only avenue available is to find an out-of-the-way location (alley, park, stairwell, etc.) which significantly increases the risk of dying from overdose. Etc.

So it's very plausible that more people would try heroin if it was fully legalized. At the same time, it will be significantly safer to use. It's possible that the net effect will result in more harm overall, but I am skeptical because the harm from legalization would need to be so high that it overcomes the harm that we currently have from prohibition. The latter has quite the laundry list as it stands.

In economics, the formula for how to punish crime has to take into account the chance of getting caught. The idea is that to the extent crime will remain unsolved, you can compensate for that differential by just punishing extra hard the people that do get caught. It makes sense, assuming perfect information and rational actors and blah blah blah.

The problem is that the system will be run by mortals. I had a class with Alex Tabarrok and he tried to argue for the dissuasion effect of the death penalty by saying "How many people would speed if the penalty was death? Zero of course." Well, no. If the penalty for speeding was death, cops will pretend to be blind, prosecutors will pretend they don't know the definition of 'speeding', and judges will curiously start finding all sorts of violations to dismiss these cases. This is sort of what happened in Victorian England where the penalty for sodomy on paper was death, but judges got around that by just writing 'death recorded' — poetically relegating the penalty to also only exist on paper.

So to go back to car prowling, this is a highly opportunistic crime. Any car left parked on the street will forever be vulnerable to have its window smashed, and there is no realistically feasible amount of surveillance that you can implement to sufficiently tamp down on this. Yes, maybe you can install cameras everywhere, hire a cop on every corner, and RFID tag every potential suspect, etc. but obviously the costs mount up. Safeguarding the nation's car windows is not going to be worth that. So if the solution is to compensate for the low risk of getting caught by going HAM on the bozos that do get snared up, you're necessarily going to have to advocate for prison sentences that span several decades and maybe centuries. Then you're just back to the 'death recorded' scenario, because people within the system are just not going to have the appetite to implement this policy.

My alternative of just giving free heroin already exists in the world and would be more effective than trying to scare drug addicts chasing a high with hypothetical eons in prison.

Do you think that this action will, on the margins, increase or decrease the chances of someone attempting actual voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Florida?

The answer isn't obvious. These actions will absolutely discourage anyone with a felony conviction from trying to vote, even if they are legally permitted to, because who wants to risk getting arrested years down the line over something as individually trivial as voting? Felony disenfranchisement currently affects almost a million people in Florida, almost 10% of the adult population, so it's bound to have a significant effect.

In contrast, actual voting fraud is extremely rare. Just for perspective, 19 foreign nationals were charged for illegally voting in North Carolina in 2020. To me, it's not obvious how many of those foreign nationals were acting with malicious intent, or whether they made an honest mistake. Jeopardizing one's immigration status to cast one vote seems like an idiotic gamble. Beyond that, the scenarios where voter fraud is clearly motivated by malicious intent are too sporadic to get a comprehensive accounting for. I'm aware of very few cases, like for example this Nevada man who used his dead wife's ballot to cast a vote.

I suppose you can defend the heavy-handedness if your overriding priority is primarily to tamp down on the handful of actual voter fraud that takes place. But if so, I would like to at least see an earnest attempt to address the collateral damage. Is dissuading a handful of bad actors worth putting some innocent people in jail? Worth dissuading large swathes of the population from legally voting? If so, say so.

Probably it'd make the most sense for Governor DeSantis to order an investigation of whoever the Office of Election Crimes reports to, as the big fuck up seems to be there.

golf clap

Were these people voting illegally?

I addressed this in my first two links. Your question is not so simple because so much of it depends on the whims of various bureaucrats scattered throughout the state because of how convoluted the system for tracking court fines is. It's possible for a felon to pay every single outstanding fines he knows about, and then (legally) registers to vote. But then the next day a court clerk opens a dusty drawer and finds out there's a $3.50 outstanding fee still owing and boom suddenly that voter registration is no longer valid.

the Republican party was unable to perform any investigation into it for 30+ years

What does this even mean? Are you assuming that voter fraud is only/primarily committed by Democrats? Because why would it be the Republican party's responsibility? And why/how were they "unable" to investigate the issue? What was law enforcement doing this whole time?

Can't imagine why you'd want to chance it in a state where races can be extremely close.

I don't disagree that this is the motivation behind the current system. Black voters are much more likely to be disenfranchised because of a felony record, and that demographic heavily votes Democrat. It's true that in total, there are way more white voters who lose their right to vote, but the voting pattern of the ex-con in general is not as lopsided as it is for the black demographic. So there's good reason to suspect that allowing felons to vote would benefit democrats, even slightly, but as you note there were enough close-call elections for that to be a real risk for republicans. Therefore, it made sense for the Republican legislature to do as much as it did to kneecap the implementation of the 2018 felony voting restoration amendment. Given the demographics, it was better for the republican party to keep as many felons disenfranchised as possible than to take a gamble with election results.

As for the rest of your post, I struggle to understand how it's relevant. You post about some election precincts in Florida having problems around keeping track of ballots. Assuming these were legitimate issues, I don't see how you solve that problem by targeting individual voters who are mislead by election officials. If I understand your argument correctly, you believe that prosecuting individual felons who were mislead by the government will have a collateral dissuasion effect on other (potentially higher-up) voter fraud that could happen, right? If so that seems to me to be needlessly attenuated. Why wouldn't these investigations just focus directly on the election officials responsible instead? What kind of messaging is sent by the government taking random nobodies to jail because they were dumb enough to believe something the government told them? I don't get it.

I'm inclined to agree that the proclivity towards violent crimes is relegated to a small and fairly stable minority of the population. It seems at least plausible that you could reduce violent crime significantly through incapacitation solely by focusing on the chronic recidivists. But petty property crime is almost entirely motivated by drug addiction, and that has the potential to affect a large and constantly shifting segment of the population, depending on trends and circumstances. So for incapacitation to work in this case you'd need a dragnet big enough to encompass every drug addict who turns to theft to feed their habit, which most eventually do. Given the experience with the drug war so far, I don't see this as a viable solution.

Desantis seems to actually care not just about looking good and winning his own elections, he seems to care about establishing systems which will, over a longer term, support his allies and thus increase the chances his goals will be achieved in the future.

Right, and scaring the shit out of anyone with a felony record about even thinking about voting (even if they are legally allowed to) is likely to have a beneficial effect for the Republican party's election chances. Do you disagree?

Yeah I agree, that would've been great! You do realize that the text of Amendment 4 simply said "This amendment would restore voting rights automatically upon completion of all terms of a sentence, including parole or probation", right? It was the Republican legislature that worked very hard to enshrine into law that "all terms of a sentence" actually also includes any potentially unpaid fines. They did this despite (or more accurately and less charitably because) everyone involved was loudly raising the alarm that there was no viable system in place for the state to keep track of unpaid fines.

Here's just one excerpt of the mess from the lawsuit that followed:

An example is a flat $225 assessment in every felony case, $200 of which is used to fund the clerk’s office and $25 of which is remitted to the Florida Department of Revenue for deposit in the state’s general revenue fund. Another example is a flat $3 assessment in every case that is remitted to the Department of Revenue for further distribution in specified percentages for, among other things, a domestic-violence program and a law-enforcement training fund.

And here's one guy's efforts to pay all his fines:

Mr. Wrench was convicted of felonies under two case numbers on December 15, 2008. The State introduced copies of the judgments, but it is unclear whether the copies are complete. The criminal judgments, or at least the portion in the record, do not show any financial obligations. But on February 2, 2009, a civil judgment was entered under the first case number for $1,874 in “financial obligations”—no further description was provided—that, according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. Similarly, on March 15, 2011, more than two years later, a civil judgment was entered under the second case number for $601 in unspecified “financial obligations” that, again according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. It is unclear what amount, if any, the State asserts Mr. Wrench must pay on these convictions to be eligible to vote.

None of this had to be this way. Voting restoration that only needed to look at when a prison or probation sentence ended would've been infinitely easier to implement that the system Florida chose instead, where the existence of an unnoticed $3 unpaid fine in some court clerk's drawer decides whether someone's vote is legal or a felony offense.