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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.

The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.

I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).

There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.

Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.

By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.

Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.

I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.

Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.

The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?

P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.

Back when I made the unfortunate decision to live in Seattle, I did actually live less than a 15-minute walk from a supermarket. And I literally never walked to it, because Seattle is full of steep hills similar to San Francisco's and even if it wasn't you can only carry so much in a single trip. Asking if it is a 15 minute cit is asking "Do you want to make a 30 minute round trip to the grocery store on foot every three days?" And I'm guessing for most Americans the answer is a resounding no.

Right. When we go to grocery store, we do it twice a month, we load up the back of our car with anything we could need for two weeks or more, and we also can visit several stores because one has good meat, another good veggies and another good dog food, etc. Replacing all of it with a walk to single supermarket with as much stuff as we could carry in our hands (actually I could, my wife couldn't carry much for that far) would be an insane drop in our quality of life. And while we're not very young, we're also not old yet and mostly healthy. What about those who are less healthy and agile than us? This is one of those "good ideas" that can seem good to a college freshman but dissolves quickly one you apply it to real people living a real life.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges a bit.

In cities where people shop by foot shops are not placed randomly but in close proximity to public transit, so what happens is that you shop much more frequently as part of another activity, such as going to and from work, which means you shop way less each time and that you won't have very heavy bags to carry.

This of course means that turning a car focused city into a "15 minute city" requires far more fundamental changes than just adding shops and this might not be viable or even thought of by the proponents, which is likely to make changes in that direction just make things worse.

you shop much more frequently as part of another activity, such as going to and from work

That is provided you can choose where you work and it's in a place near grocery store which carries all the things you need. And, of course, you have time and energy left after a full workday (or an energy to raise earlier - provided the store is open at that hour, and your workplace has storage facilities to store groceries for all the workers' shopping needs) to do the shopping. And you never buy anything you can't transport in your hands through an hour of commute.

At one period of my life, I have been commuting from my house in Bay Area to San Francisco office, on public transport. About an hour door to door. I've seen thousands of people doing the same commute. I don't remember many of them carrying groceries with them.

You don't carry them on the commute, there are supermarkets at literally every subway stop.

You get off at your stop, get your groceries from the supermarket right by the station and walk home with them.

Generally I would say that even the smaller stores carry 99% of what you would need but there can be reasons for you to go to a larger store occasionally anyway. I go to a larger store and buy a bunch of meat to keep in the freezer and larger packages of non-perishables, because those items significantly cheaper in the larger store.