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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2612 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

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Spiked has a lengthy write-up about the Zizians, whose intended readership is normies who've never heard of rationalism, Eliezer and so on. I'm glad that people are still talking about this story, I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.

I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.

If so, it is to highlight the routine laziness and incompetence of ordinary law enforcement work. (Yes, you can shoot your parents, do the minimal work to do not be caught at the crime scene and you will get away with it. Yes, if you are wanted, you can just let it know you died in boating accident and TPTP will let it slide)

The Zizians were anything but 180IQ master criminals from pulp fiction, but the limited smarts they had were sufficient to get away with everything for long time.

There are enough stories about the laziness and incompetence of ordinary law enforcement work out there already. "Here's a video of the guys who burgled my house driving away; their license plate number is clear." "Well, we can't prove the owner of the car was the one driving the car, so our hands are tied." "Can you at least check out their garage, where my AirTag says my stuff still is?" "Huh?" I don't want to call this all routine incompetence, since surely I'm only reading about the worst cases that made it through social and news media selection bias, but it's at least repeated incompetence. (these examples also aren't necessarily law enforcement's fault - e.g. if they can't get a judge to issue a warrant or a DA to prosecute in situation X then it's hard to blame cops who just give up on X)

But the incompetence of enforcement of extraordinary cases, with the death toll up to six here, is still shocking to me. Rationally, I know the US homicide clearance rate is down to 50/50, and I know that's in spite of the low average intelligence of people dumb enough to commit murder, but I still like to pretend to myself that cops are just too busy to stop the little crimes because they're on the case on the big ones.

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