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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.

And it only gets worse when you get married and have kids. I briefly had to bike to the supermarket almost daily to buy meat and vegetables and other sundries for our family of five. It was a short bike ride, but the sheer amount of stuff required ghetto engineering to get home. Several time I had to lash a box of diapers to the back of my bike because my basket and backpack were full. First world problem, perhaps, but simply living close isn't always enough to make walking or biking convenient. We have a car now and life is way easier.

Sorry that's just a poor excuse. There are plenty of bikes in Europe which have cargo space.

https://electrek.co/2020/11/21/bunch-the-coupe-cargo-e-bike-dutch-design/

The fundamental problem is that the US is a car-centric society and too many Americans try to find ways to keep it that way.

There's a good intro/overview of these bikes, which are quite common in the Netherlands, here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

Sorry, but no, it's really not. I was living in Tokyo at the time, and Japan is not really a car-centric society. Not only do they not sell bikes like that in Japan (never seen one in years living there) but the sidewalks and parking areas are way too small for something like that.

Congrats to the Netherlands I guess, but not every country has been built around bikes in the same way and so you can't extrapolate what works in the Netherlands to other non-car-centric countries.

Also not to get personal but I'm tempted to ask whether you have personally spent a year carting groceries back and forth on a giant tricycle for your spouse and children. Have you done it with a 39 degree fever? Have you done it when it's raining? Freezing cold and snowing? While heavily pregnant? When your spouse is travelling and you've got no one to watch the kids? It's not as easy as "get a giant trike bro."

Would you be surprised to know that urbanists scoff at most of those things? Here's NJB saying "cold weather is just an excuse; the real problem is inadequate bike infrastructure". Here's him again saying "it sucks to have to walk or bike in the rain, but by golly, it's simply better to force me to exercise". I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with other defenses against objections of someone being pregnant or has a 39-degree fever. And that's if they consider them at all and don't just say "okay but most of the time you don't have these conditions; really you're just being lazy".

For the record, I agree with you and do not agree with NJB; I'm presenting this because I've spent way too long trying to get into the headspace of online urbanists and can recite most of their arguments from memory.