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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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(This turned into a kind of meandering post on epistemics rather than a direct reply. Feel free to ignore)

A common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true, is rather meaningless: such a small number of people commit violent crimes that the observation "X are more likely to be victims than perpetrators" is true of essentially every demographic, and there's persuasive evidence that, ceteris paribus, mentally ill people are more likely to commit violent crimes than sane people.

Huh. You know, I had this exact thought on first hearing that line a couple months ago. It is a clever little evasion, and one I suspect gets most people. It's a notable entry in the genre of 'The Media [and Officialdom More Generally] Very Rarely Lies...' but very often tries to deceive.

The lesson I took from it was 'be wary of those offering metrics no one asked for.' Obviously the intended question is the one you mention: Do the mentally ill possess a higher propensity for violence? I am actually not sure, prima facia, if they do -- those with some disorders certainly do, but major depressive disorder presumably has the opposite effect, and it's comparatively common -- but the fact the politically correct answer is the above rather than 'no' suggests strongly the answer is 'yes.'

Unfortunately, it turns out in practice getting the obvious metrics is often difficult for some reason, or they don't actually mean what you'd think they do. My attempts to apply the rule ran into a barrage of false positives and a bare handful of likely hits, all of which were political activism which raised much more obvious red flags. Not sure there's really anything to glean here, besides 'carefully consider what you're being told on a case-by-case basis,' which is good advice I'm sure everyone's heard a thousand times before.

Mid-2010s Scott would have written up a classic post called like "Beware Proxy Metrics" or some such.

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