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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere and I missed it, but Scott recently wrote an essay on prison and crime. I did not love the essay, it seemed very similar to his homelessness essay, where he presents an adversarial system where people have worked very hard to make it expensive/difficult for our society to do something, then he throws up his hands and says given the cost benefit analyses (at the current, inflated prices) it is impossible to do the solution that really sounds like it would work. So I guess we need to do something else (that I just happen to like more).

At least, that is what it felt like to me. I actually wanted to focus on something else though. In the essay he reviews three meta-analyses of the situation, and presents their biases. While it goes unstated (or I missed it), the impression I got was that he was also supposed to be a 'neutral' voice, just looking at the data. However, he got in a bit of an X spat with Cremieux over one aspect of the essay, and in the back and the forth, he said the following,

But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

Which is interesting, because it is bringing in a component that goes totally unanalyzed in the original essay, and yet seems profoundly important to his moral and ethical understanding of the question. Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?

In the original essay he did drop something that sounded weird to me, but I mostly overlooked it on my first reading,

Whatever career skills you once had are ten years obsolete ... Your partner has long since filed for divorce and is happily remarried to someone else. Your kids have long since moved on; if they remember your name at all, it’s as “that guy who was never there for us”. All of your friends have drifted away, forgotten you, or have nothing in common with you anymore.

Which seems to present the modal criminal receiving a lengthy prison sentence as a married father of 2.5 children with a stable career in the tech industry who one day randomly tripped and fell into a ten year felony conviction. Not only does it seem wildly at odds with reality, it also seems at odds with the quote above, where he seems to be saying that the average prisoner is basically retarded.

Is he just saying whatever he thinks will be most convincing depending on the context to arrive at the conclusion he has already decided is morally correct?

I do not read ACX that frequently any more, but this and the homelessness essay, both feel like pieces that 2014 Scott would have torn apart, whither Tartaria indeed.

He's charitably describing even the best-case scenario of someone who was at least functional before going to prison, something blue-collar or menial, had a wife he slapped around occasionally and kids he'd over-discipline when drunk. Not a great human being, but a step or two above the functional scum they are now.

This is fair, but I highlighted the ten year obsolete job skills for a reason, blue-collar and menial jobs just do not change much on that time scale.

Yes they do. The bottom end of my trade overlaps with the top end of people who go to jail- my memories are that guys who went to jail for aggravated assault or making sex tapes with their teenaged girlfriends or whatever lost their career skills in the meantime.

Obviously, they weren’t top of the field to begin with. And they could usually start over at the very bottom instead of somewhat near the bottom. But still.

I mean, maybe that is true in your trade specifically? I was thinking of jobs that I have done, like working at a bar, or a restaurant, or working retail, or working at UPS loading trucks, even working at an auto-shop the loss of a couple years is basically nothing. I am not even sure what 'skill loss' looks like for most of the menial labor I have done such that it is a coherent concern.

Fair enough, but it can come up at least potentially.

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