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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   21524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Just before Covid, a gun store was robbed in my town. I worked in a different gun store, so we got some of the inside scoop. Proprietor of the robbed store used to work on my computer whenever I fucked it up too badly. The shop was the shittiest one in the county, lodged in a former meat market. The robbers just pulled part of the roof off the building to get into the secure room.

Turned out to be the local high school football team. They stole around fifty guns, fifteen of which have been recovered some seven years later. The recovered guns have been used in at least three homicides so far. One was just recovered at a traffic stop this year, one killed a high school senior just after prom not two weeks ago. Perp there hasn't been identified or caught.

The kids who robbed the place were caught within days. It remains unclear exactly how many people were involved, at least two unnamed juveniles were processed, but shield laws prevent the public knowing anything. Three of the older kids were charged for the robbery, one got no time, other two got three and ten months respectively, despite not cooperating with police in the recovery of the firearms or identification of other perpetrators. Everyone involved was put into a youth criminal diversion program that released them without a criminal record.

The ringleader and one who got the most time, one Travontis (Drink!) Miller, was given the ten month sentence, but due to the protective nature of the diversion program, it will never be public knowledge that he plead guilty to multiple firearm felonies or how long he actually served of that jail term. What we do know is that he was out prior to December of 2021, because that's when he was arrested for a series of other crimes we're not entirely sure what happened.

He was charged with assault and battery (strangulation), robbery and domestic violence, but once again was given protected youth status despite being in his twenties by this point (the program runs until age 24). He also picked up charges of resisting arrest and being in possession of one of the stolen firearms from the original gun store case. These charges too were concealed under the diversion program.

So when people tell me that what we really need to cut down on gun violence in this country is to ensure that every state has a different magazine limit, or force used gun sales into stores, or ban AR-15s, or not allow gun companies to advertise, it makes me irrationally angry. This dude, when he hits 25, will have no criminal record and will be able to pass a background check to buy a firearm legally. At least until his next felony, which I don't expect to take long.

Below are two quote sets for those who didn't read the articles, first the prosecution in the original case:

At the June sentencing, Stevenson objected to Borrello’s indication that he would grant the defendants HYTA status.

“In this case, the defendants stole 50 guns from Showtime Guns,” Stevenson said. “Fifty guns. Only 14 of those firearms have been recovered as of April 8 of this year. And no surprise, Judge, all of them have been found in the hands of convicted felons. In fact, one of those firearms was used in a homicide in December in which an 87-year-old grandmother was shot in the face and killed.”

The judge wasn't interested, and had The Science on his side.

"It’s very clear science, evidence-based conclusions that the brain isn’t fully developed in young men until roughly around the age of the mid 20s,” Borrello said. “These gentlemen allegedly committed these crimes when they were teenagers, not even adults. If I learned one thing in handling juvenile lifers, it’s that we have to look at these things a little bit differently than we look at adults making the same poor decisions that these gentlemen may have made.”

But sure, the problem with gun violence in the US is that Billy Bob put a giggle trigger on his PSA.

Edit: added/fixed links

Just a very friendly ping to @netstack to ask him to take special note of this part from this post:

The judge wasn't interested, and had The Science on his side.

"It’s very clear science, evidence-based conclusions that the brain isn’t fully developed in young men until roughly around the age of the mid 20s,” Borrello said.

Our previous conversation discussing it

Right now the biggest rhetorical weapon against young adults is this idea that your brain isn't finished developing until 25.

Huh. I’d forgotten all about that.

I maintain that I’ve never seen a zoomer use that reasoning as an excuse. 20somethings who are trying to prolong their childhood rarely act self-aware. I recognize that both you and @ThisIsSin have seen it happen. No idea what kind of filter bubble could separate us on that.

No idea what kind of filter bubble could separate us on that.

Well, I know (or rather, knew, they're older now) teenagers, and in particular whose parents tend to be pretty intelligent though on the old side- so they benefit/suffer from the same late-Boomer social/parenting patterns with which I am familiar. This filter bubble was honestly just luck [and to a degree did indeed provide a sort of second teenager-hood; it's uncanny the second time around].

It's partly cultural compression; I don't find circumstances growing up now to be particularly different from that which were present in my time, but that's also because most of the sabotage to the cultural push/rewards of growing up was already done before I got there, so there wasn't much left to take away. (This was mostly something that happened in the '80s, as I understand it.)

It's more just the room temperature and the 'artificially zero expectations during critical period' that does most of the damage resulting in these guys just acting slightly off, like they're invisibly handcuffed to something. "You shouldn't try because you're undeveloped" combined with teenagers being smart or agreeable enough to take that advice seriously is destructive (and can evoke certain Uncle Ruckus-like behaviors with respect to each other too). I think most adults tend to take for granted some in-built biological resistance to that meme because "well, if someone told me that I would have just done it anyway out of spite" but I'm not so sure. It's that kid who clicks "no" to the site banner that asks them if they're 18 yet, where honesty and conscientiousness become vices.

Some of them are even self-aware enough to wonder where the opportunity for them to create the stories their parents always tell is, or when it's going to show up. It's very strange and to be honest quite depressing that [society in general] still suffers from this problem, and I don't know (but think very often, perhaps too much) about how to break it (and trying to identify where to settle, in a place that maximally permits this sort of thing, is one of the things I tell myself delays family formation on my end).

20somethings who are trying to prolong their childhood rarely act self-aware

Self-awareness is really rare anyway; those who have it but would rather spend time Motteposting rarer still.

I noticed a good chunk of this effect in my 10s (perhaps I might say I was radicalized from an early age). The distractions that were thrown my way proved effective enough though (plus, even though I underrate this, I got a chance to work in places that are either illegal [now] or highly unusual- I didn't just do nothing, even though it feels like it a lot of the time), but a lot of time I'm recalling things I specifically promised myself at the time I'd remember (and commit to not doing in the future). Emotional states reacting to certain things, etc.

I'm well past 20something at this point, but for a couple of reasons won't clock (to even said aformentioned teenagers) as someone who's doing this. Part of that is that I'm just as meme-poisoned, I guess (I skip a certain piece of modern slang, but I also skipped modern slang back when I was an actual teenager, so...), but I think the bigger part of it is that I actually kind of like teenagers (or the stereotypical attitude they have more generally), and maybe the relative lack of awkwardness does most of the passing (or rather, I'm just as awkward around these guys as I am around everyone else, which is especially apparent whenever I interact with someone younger than that). But, who can say.

But then I never grew up in an area where the average 10-something was particularly stupid/irresponsible (i.e. exceeding expectations), went to what you'd call a charter school, and grew up in the (equivalent of the) Purple part of a Blue state. So the concept that the young are actually more thoughtful [and risk-averse] once out of adult earshot is pretty natural to me (and experience bears that out); whether that's simply caused by the assumption that they wouldn't be, I don't know.

It's also more widespread than that; more generally, I've noticed interactions (just walking around in public) where the kid notices something before the parent does (usually a car, or someone taking a photo), and the kid's already corrected the problem before the adult can tell them to. And I think that some of that's just caused by inherently having experienced them at their worst and most helpless, but I think a lot of it is either just not paying attention, or not having the time/context/energy to know when to pay attention to the fact they're going to automatically do it. Maybe "being told to do something I was already doing" is just uniquely annoying to me, but I don't think it is.

I think some of the problem is that we don't teach people how to lead properly, and now that there's less organic opportunity (both to make mistakes, and the mistakes made are costlier now) the people who did learn it organically are now failing to compensate for the fact you seem to have to intentionally encourage that development now. Because the teenage rebellion meme isn't strong enough and won't help the people who weren't going to do it anyway.

(And the people who don't aren't necessarily doing it on purpose, since there's the power angle to consider, and the biology angle, and the cost angle, and the "they're turning into someone you hate" angle, and the "I spent 13 years raising this kid why aren't my old strategies working please help me" angle... tend to frustrate the powers of observation -> ability to compensate for this in people I believe have those powers.)

It's kind of the definition of a wicked problem.

If you steal a gun and it ends in the hands of someone who murders with it, a case could be made that this makes you an accessory.

Or selling dozens of guns could constitute depraved-heart murder in its own right. Arming the local felon population is similar to throwing rocks from a tall building without checking if anyone is in the impact zone. You might not intend to kill someone, but you certainly decided that to take your chances.

That sort of diversion program is so progressive we don't even have something close on Illinois. Domestic strangulation getting diversion is a joke. That's like 10 seconds from being attempted murder and another minute from actual murder.

Is the cultural difference between Illinois and Michigan that big?

Luckily he didn't get diversion for the strangulation. See my below post.

Yeah I saw it after I posted. Still an absurd program though. If he didn't keep screwing up over and over in such rapid succession he'd have cleared a lot of felonies. Even in IL its basically one gun or one drug case you can get out of. Even a misdemeanor domestic will stick as long as the victim cooperates.

OK, stealing a gun should carry harsh penalties and be charged at the limit of the law every time. But we don't live in a well run society(the recommended 'solutions' to gun violence are also stupid and will never happen), and it sounds like the issue was these people getting an unusually good deal due to their youth, not to the nature of their crime.

In what sense are they stupid in your view?

I strongly suspect that their race also had something to do with the kid gloves.

I don't. My impression is that middle-class white young offenders get off even more easily, though it is hard to tell because the vast majority of middle-class white kids who commit serious crimes have real, severe diagnosable psychiatric conditions.

Kids getting long jail terms for serious crimes short of murder is something that essentially doesn't happen in western countries, and probably should.

In my personal experience, white leftists often have an enormous guilt trip when it comes to black teens and are eager to 'do the right thing' even at general societal expense to give more chances and demonstrate how morally virtuous we are. I went to at least one primarily-black school and what I found there was that teachers would do almost anything to overlook black behavior and avoid disciplining blacks. Partly due to the incentives to not look racist, but partly because they seemed to have an attitude of "It's not really their fault, it's culture, and the legacy of white racism", etc.

I have seen this in schools, in the legal system, and even in personal life where someone assaulted by, or stolen from by, blacks has wanted to appear nonchalant about it because getting upset would be a bad look. "They needed it more" etc. so now it's an opportunity, if not obligation, to signal economic and social status by being above the situation. This is a surprisingly-common tendency.

None of the articles you linked to said that prosecution was still being deferred under the diversion program for the 2021 offenses. I checked the docket, and it looks like he was convicted and sentenced under them, so I'm not sure what the point of this post is. He got into a diversion program, failed, and was sentenced to jail.

Edit: The sentencing guidelines, assuming all the enhancements I think might apply actually do apply, call for 17–34 months, at least some of which would be jail time. The docket shows that when he was granted HYTA status he was given credit for 532 days he served in jail while waiting trial and sentenced to an additional 3 years of probation. When you take the sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender into consideration the sentence doesn't look unreasonable, and even if I underestimated the sentence it still isn't unreasonable when you take into consideration the possibility of a plea to lesser charges. It's not clear to me that going to trial would have resulted in a more substantial punishment, and he probably would have been released for time served in any event. The only advantage he got was the opportunity to escape without a record if he completed his probation, and if he were able to do that then nobody would have any problem with the outcome.

Since he could barely make it 3 months without committing another crime, the judge revoked his HYTA status, meaning the prior convictions go on his record, and they didn't have to arraign him for months because they were holding him on the probation violation. He was remanded to custody following his second arraignment, and eventually plead guilty to the 2021 charges.

Being extremely violent as a minor is indicative of a deep genetic behavioral problem that will never be fixed, while slipping up once at the age of 27 is indicative of external pressure such as poverty, conflict, or addiction, which could be fixed with a diversion program. So these judges have it turned on its head, high school aged felons should go to prison for life while older first time felons should be given a second chance more often.

Are you talking about committing the same crime, for the first time, at 15 versus 27?

Yes, like beginning to deal drugs or robbing.

It is observed approximately across the entire world that people (especially men) are worse at impulse control and thinking of consequences in their teens than in their late 20s and onwards. That them being more prone to violence (let alone a nonviolent crime like dealing drugs) is indicative of deep genetic unfixable problems is a claim I do not find even remotely substantiated, to put it mildly.

There are crimes that do indicate deep genetic unfixable problems, but that area is closer to "serial killing" than "drug dealing".

It is a confounding factor that most penitentiary systems I know of engender recidivism, either by leniency or by doing little other than locking first-time criminals in the same social circle as other criminals, while depriving them of opportunities to build a legal and dignifying career.

It is a confounding factor that most penitentiary systems I know of engender recidivism, either by leniency or by doing little other than locking first-time criminals in the same social circle as other criminals, while depriving them of opportunities to build a legal and dignifying career.

I agree that first-time criminals should not be housed together with recidivists, but what else could be done to support them? Having one full-time counsellor per four-five first-time offenders that serves as a positive male role and helps them turn their lives around?

It's my impression the positive male role models are best introduced before the teens break away from the social fabric and start working as dead droppers. Actually purging the drug dealer rings instead of the cops grazing off the pawns indefinitely would also help. Unfortunately, such things are against entrenched interests.

I'm far from a pedagogy expect, let alone a criminal pedagogy expert. The exact best way to realign the values of young men whose values are already misaligned is beyond my reach. The folk wisdom is that the conscripted army service shapes them up. Perhaps separate the reformative detachments from the regular college-dropout ones. (Not suggesting to send them to fight - fighting a war should be the privilege for the best men, not the punishment for the worst, at least if you want any respect for the purpose and goals of war in the first place).

It is my impression that "alternative service" in Russia is mostly in dead end low level jobs. Couldn't something be done to enroll youths in enforced, but compensated apprenticeship in trades and such? Some part of that already exists in the army, as I understand - you could get a driving license, for example.

fighting a war should be the privilege for the best men, not the punishment for the worst

That is not how armies worked between about 1600 and 1970. I would say that the British Empire was built by our worst men (led by some of our best - hence the officer-enlisted divide), and Wellington famously did say that at the time, but the counterargument was that it was actually built by the navy, which did enlist the best men it could find. (whether working-class boys as seamen, middle-class boys as warrant officers' mates and future warrant officers, or smart younger sons of the elite as midshipmen and future officers).

uilt by the navy, which did enlist the best men it could find.

What about press-ganging? Wasn't that just wandering around stealing random people?

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I think you're looking at it primarily through the lens of the innate qualities of people depending on their age group, while I'm thinking that social factors prevail. To sort this out, we need to know effect sizes. If the development effect size is very large, then you are more likely to be right, while if it's smaller, I am more likely to be right. IIRC, the actual difference on impulse control between a 17 and a 27 year old is at most something like 0.20 SDs. Which is like 3 IQ points. Being 3 IQ points lower will predispose you to crime, but not by that much.

What are the social factors, then? Well, minors are usually micro-managed. They're kind of pre-imprisoned, and also they're taken care of economically. There's also this idea that everyone has a per-year probability of committing a felony. Someone who commits a felony very young is expected to have a much higher latent probability than someone who does it much later. The impulse control effect size is too small to offset this fact.

And I was also thinking that a 27 year old will likely be motivated by economics, whereas a 17 year old is more likely to have pervasive anti-social behavior, since the 17 year old is supposed to be taken care of while the 27 year old has to deal with being relatively young in a shaky economy, maybe having a baby to feed and so on. I'm much more sympathetic to a 27 year old who robbed to feed his kids after getting laid off 4 months ago and struggling to find a job than I am to the 17 year old who did it because it was fun. It was not fun to me at 17. That 17 year old is a sociopath and brain development will not save them.

Of course, sometimes minors have economic pressures and are not being taken care of, or they are influenced by older criminal relatives to commit crimes, and I do agree with courts taking these factors into account when they are present. But the default way they look at age is naive at best.

I believe it is both development and social factors. Minors are more likely to be in a social group revolving around delinquency and crime, on account of not having a job that would take their time up (and be a better prospect for earning money). While they are usually fed and clothed, having a way to earn extra money gives them more freedom and status. Unfortunately, the state of the job market for young people looks like the opposite of freedom and status, even if manning the counter of McDonalds does pay a bit. Thus does drug dealing look more appealing.

I do not believe robbery is always an expression of antisociality. Robbery is very high status and a lauded activity when you do it to outsiders, as part of an army or a warband. Thus we must look at the teen's connection to the broader society. Is he a part of it, and yet robbing the same kind of people he socializes with? Or does he consider society overall a separate group from himself and his warband? The society that, in your own words, pre-imprisons him?

I find it ironic that not long ago you extolled the virtue of society supporting its youth, to the extent of darkly hinting at taking everything from the useless olds, and yet it's somehow bad when teens actually rob the useless olds.

The court system is in a bind. Imprisonment as it currently exists is barbaric and appears to do the opposite of rehabilitating first-timers. Thus the court is moved to be lenient to sympathetic criminals that appear to be fixable, because no other kind of punishment exists. I increasingly favor corporal punishment. Straightforwardly and immediately unpleasant, hardly more undignified than locking you up for years somewhere where you're almost certainly be beaten just as much or more (but extrajudicially and invisibly), you don't get to hang out for years with the cool tough criminal guys in case you considered that kind of a man cool, and you go back to fixing your life immediately.

Because corporal punishment is violent, many people (particularly people who are otherwise violent anyway) want to do it to their outgroup to make them suffer. That alone is a reason to not do it. While it is logically possible to want to imprison people to make them suffer as well, people don't think that way as much.

Quite a lot of people who casually talk about wanting someone in prison clearly want the prisoner-to-be to suffer. I don't think the precise difference in sadism matters.

Nearly everyone knows prison sucks, many perceive that prison is more cruel and arbitrary in practice than intended by the law (the old "don't drop the soap in the shower", etc). They still want their enemies in prison, often gleefully emphasizing the cruel and arbitrary parts.

On the other hand, the attitude to corporal punishment as something that might seem cruel but actually done out of necessity and desire to reform is as old as time. "Spare the rod and spoil the child".

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Edit: Added a CDC study of gun violence by ethnicity for support, as requested by mod. Honestly I've never looked it up until now, the below was just based on my personal lived experience.

Guns and blacks just don't mix well if you don't want a society with high gun violence.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7242a4.htm

If you have significant amount of blacks in your society then you must ban guns entirely and make possession a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined black youth will eventually get their hands on guns through legal means or the black (pun intended?) market. It's unfortunate for the responsible gun users but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else. Of course, this would require a constitutional amendment in the US so it's basically impossible.

You could also toughen up juvenile sentencing to reduce the age of adult criminal responsibility to like, 10 or something. If guns are still legal in this scenario then blacks will still have high gun violence, but at least their genetic pool will slowly improve over time. You might have to wait a few thousand years to get any benefit of lowered aggression through genetic selection though, much faster to ban guns.

If you have significant amount of blacks in your society then you must ban guns entirely and make possession a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined black youth will eventually get their hands on guns through legal means or the black (pun intended?) market. It's unfortunate for the responsible gun users but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else. Of course, this would require a constitutional amendment in the US so it's basically impossible.

If you have significant amounts of men in your society then you must ban penetrative sex entirely and make not wearing male chastity belts a felony, or else aggressive and violently inclined men will eventually get their penises into unwilling vaginas. It's unfortunate for the responsible or homosexual men but it only takes a few people to ruin nice things for everyone else.

Your argument if I have it correct is that some men are rapists, so we should ban penetrative sex to prevent rape.

First, your proposed solution wouldn't work. Men would just dismantle or break the chasity belt before raping a woman.

Second, it's a violation of men's bodily autonomy. While we don't want men to rape others, we shouldn't attempt to violate the basic human rights of men to have their sexual organs freely accessible. All men are born with a penis, no man is born with a Glock 19.

I consider myself sympathetic to dissident rightist views and yet I find arguments such as this somewhat baffling. Endemic black gun violence wasn’t much of a social issue in the US until 1970 or 1980, was it? So American society was clearly finding entirely mundane ways of curbing it before that.

Endemic black gun violence wasn’t much of a social issue in the US until 1970 or 1980, was it?

A little earlier; the uptick in homicide starting after 1963. The limited data I can find suggests the homicides were of similar racial mix as today (and got more white as you get into the 1980s). It is tempting for the wrongthinker to draw a straight line between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and this fact, but I don't know of any direct evidence for that.

Redlining, or de facto segregation through discriminatory housing practices was one method of keeping black gun violence from spreading to white neighborhoods. Additionally, crack cocaine started being a problem around the 1980s, disintegrating the social fabric for black communities that previously held back violence in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_States

Is crack as a cause statistically proven or did it just correlate? Crack still exists today (Hunter Biden) and it’s easy to get cocaine but no one blames crack today for murder rates. Chicago I am more familiar with and most murder is over stupid shit. Like someone posted a video on YouTube calling you bad names.

Great Migration was over the prior few decades. Plus Civil Rights. So perhaps the first generation moving to big cities had some selection effects for behavior, but the kids did not who would have come of age in the ‘80’s. Honestly just spitballing a theory because crack caused murders to go boom makes less sense today since crack still exists and no one blames crack today.

Crack ruined the preexisting social order in black communities that kept gun violence down from previous decades. Afterwards, gun violence and gang wars became embedded and normalized in parts of black culture. So even without the crack, the gun violence continued because it had been normalized for an entire generation. Additionally, there were advancements in drug production chemistry know-how and increased world trade that led to increasing popularity of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. Now, we have Mexican drug cartels importing opioid precursors from China, and those drugs make their way into black communities.

So, my thesis is that black murder rates are high without crack for two reasons - gun violence normalization and alternative drugs supplanting crack in the drug economy ecosystem. Fentanyl doesn't lead blacks into gun violence directly, but I'm sure the dealers and distributors use violence to protect their business.

I guess corners mattered a lot more back then. Today they don’t. So maybe it did just cause a cultural thing. I know anytime I go thru Chicago murders it’s over very dumb stuff and rarely appears drug dealing related. Cartels I think have also cut down on drug murders. But someone from the southwest would know more. It’s bad for business so they keep the violent part of the drug trade in Mexico.

If you're advocating for racially-based denial of rights, you might as well instead advocate for just expelling blacks from the country. We don't care to enforce our civilization on them in their native lands, why bother doing it here?

Not advocating at all for racially based denial of rights, as in gun ownership. Easier and non-discriminatory to ban gun ownership for everyone.

Same problem, why deny fundamental rights to a people who are capable of handling them for the sake of peoples who cannot? Even if you care about uplifting them (an idea I am sympathetic towards, if pessimistic of the chances of it ever happening), it’d be much easier to do once your own societal capacity is improved in their absence, like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

I'm not too keen on expelling people who've been in the US since the British colonial days. Blacks were exploited as slaves, so even if blacks have problematic violence as a group it's a 'we broke it, we bought it' kind of issue in my opinion.

There's many problems with expelling blacks even if we were willing to do it:

Where are we expelling them to? Does any country in Africa have the capacity and/or willingness to absorb a massive foreign population? I don't think multiple African countries could do it sharing the population influx.

For blacks unwilling to leave voluntarily, are we using military divisions to drag them out of their homes and into a container ship? Seems like a genocide in the making.

Blacks were exploited as slaves, so even if blacks have problematic violence as a group it's a 'we broke it, we bought it' kind of issue in my opinion.

They've been "broken" since far before you involved yourself with them, and you can plausibly claim that the moral debt of slavery has been long since repaid by decades of wealth transfers in their favor.

Where are we expelling them to? Does any country in Africa have the capacity and/or willingness to absorb a massive foreign population? [...] For blacks unwilling to leave voluntarily, are we using military divisions to drag them out of their homes and into a container ship?

Quick plan I came up with in 5 minutes: seize some rural chunk of land on the West African coast (or anywhere really, in fact it might be better optics if it's not in Africa), create a settler colony there, then reintroduce transportation as a punishment for felonies following the Australian model. Considering that IIRC about 1/3 of black men will be charged with a felony in their lifetime, you could relocate millions of blacks while encouraging their friends and families to follow them in tow, all with plausible deniability for your ultimate motive. If push comes to shove, you can in fact just enforce your will on people, as has been the state of affairs for 4000 years and counting. It wouldn't be trivial, but if there's anyone who can pull it off, it's the white man.

All of this is coup-complete, of course, but so is ~every tenable solution to the problem.

Well, I agree that your proposal to expel black felons would improve the genetic pool quickly and reduce gun violence without banning firearms entirely. We may as well go further and simply expel all felons regardless of color, it would improve everyone's genetics and could be argued as a non-discriminatory policy. Also, for children over 10 who commit crimes that would result in a felony for an adult, we'd expel the child and both parents/guardians too. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to avoid 'underage' criminals as shown by @JTarrou and they would have more time to spread their genetics.

Instead of annexing land, the US might as well annex an entire country if the status quo is being discarded anyway. A non-nuclear power with poor international standing. I suggest Venezuela. Or Iran if we're willing to make the ground troops commitment anyway, may as well get rid of a long term foe.

You can slice statistics any way you want, it just depends on what factors you actually care about. The black vs. white disparity is about the same as the male vs. female disparity, but I doubt you'd recommend the alternative scenario where we say that guns and men don't mix well.

  1. You are correct on ratios and just looking at ratios the male female gap is the same.
  2. Absolute levels matter too. 46/1000k black men die by murder per year. Over a roughly 80 year life (simplified) that’s like 3250 black men out of 100k die by murder. 3.25%. Perhaps that is a rate society can deal with. If you do another similar jump in murder rate it would be close to 50% of a group dying by murder. Probably can’t do civilization then.
  3. America wouldn’t exists without white men having guns. America would exists if black men didn’t have gun. The backbone of the US military has always been white men. The backbone of global security is white men.

Though for (3) with infantry not being important anymore I guess in the modern area it would be fine to argue you can have white men in fighting wars and they don’t need gun culture.

FWIW I have no interests ever owning a gun.

The backbone of the US military has always been white men.

Southern white men, actually, in fact, if I'm not mistaken.

True. I did try to hedge on that point since the future of the military seems to be nerds playing video games controlling drones. The future of the military is probably not a redneck with a gun. The past has been a redneck who likes guns.

Depends on what exactly you mean by "southern", but to a degree. Texas is wildly overrepresented, rural appalachia etc., though that includes West Virginia, Tennessee, parts of Pennsylvania etc. Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, Florida etc? Not so much. Don't know if I ever met a Louisiana boy in the infantry. OTOH, Virginia is the backbone of the Navy.

OTOH, Virginia is the backbone of the Navy.

I don't think that has a damn to do with southernness beyond Tidewater simply being where the biggest/most important shipyards/naval bases are. That's a feature of geography, not the Mason-Dixon line. I mean, maybe there's an alternate history where Fore River or New York shipbuilding gets politicked to be more prominent than Newport News post-WWII, but I doubt it.

You can slice statistics any way you want, it just depends on what factors you actually care about. The black vs. white disparity is about the same as the male vs. female disparity, but I doubt you'd recommend the alternative scenario where we say that guns and men don't mix well.

I think it's interesting to note that there are plenty of neighborhoods in the US where the population is 50% male which feel (and are) very safe. There are very few neighborhoods in the US where the population is 50% black which feel (and are) very safe. So assuming that the male/female and black/non-black crime discrepancies are roughly the same, it seems like these numbers aren't telling the whole story.

Perhaps part of what's going on is that society is comfortable with incarcerating violent offenders even though this greatly disproportionately affects men. If the authorities arrest, prosecute, and imprison 100 people, and 95 of the people are men, there isn't serious outcry over the system being biased.

Actually, I would say that guns and men don't mix well either. FBI says 89% of gun violence offenders are male, where the gender is known.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide

If there was a way to restrict civilian gunownership to all females only, then that would also probably lower black gun violence simultaneously. But we'd probably just have women acting as gun buyers and gun mules for young black men and nothing would change.

I don't know about gun crime specifically, but I've seen analysis that concludes that, according to the FBI, black women commit violent crimes at a rate greater than white men. Which is certainly counterintuitive to me but also doesn't seem completely absurd.

Black women have higher levels of testosterone compared to other women, so it may partly explain the increased violent crime rate. That and the fact that black women are in closer social and familiar proximity to black men may explain the rest.

You’re making some pretty dramatic claims there. Proactively provide evidence rather than just asserting that “you must” do something. Why do you think that? How have you ruled out other explanations, models? These are the questions people are going to ask you. Preempting them helps to keep things…civil.

Evidence has been provided for decades. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring. And it's biased that you guard this specific topic with the provide evidence rule much more than other topics.

Yes. Paying the evidence tax is what turns it from an argument into a debate. The more controversial a topic, the more important it is to explain your reasoning.

@sleepyegg added an example. This is an improvement. Now people who disagree have something to address rather than going straight to “nuh-uh.”

It doesn’t even have to be statistics, though. Citing his own experience would have been fine. The important thing is that there is a chain of reasoning which lets people engage without making up a position for him. It’s also why we discourage sarcasm and weakmanning.

  1. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time?

It might be a good idea. It just takes a link (which @sleepyegg actually has in his post, maybe he added it after @netstack's comment). If posters assume familiarity with such things, newcomers might be bewildered and turned off. FBI crime statistics aren't like "the sun rises in the morning", which you can assume everyone other than insane people acknowledges. Vast numbers of people, including many intelligent ones, have absolutely no idea about the FBI crime statistics you are talking about. It's not that they've even been exposed to the information and rejected it. It's that they have absolutely no idea the information exists. It might not be good for the site to turn (even more) into an insular group of users who assume familiarity with controversial and relatively obscure information.

  1. Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again?

Arguing against HBD doesn't make someone a gaslighter.

Arguing against HBD doesn't make someone a gaslighter.

I've come to accept Hanlon's razor as true:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Is HBD denial adequately explained by stupidity? Not basic denial, no. Trailer-park dwellers intuit the crime statistics. They do not intuit many other controversial ideas. I think the fact that HBD is more controversial in academia than it is among normies is suitable reason to reject the razor in this case. The reverse pattern holds for many other taboo topics, so the razor holds for them.

Even the FBI crime statistics, by themselves, aren't enough to support the original claim. The claim was that (paraphrasing a bit) you can have guns, black people, or a society without much violence, pick two. For that to be true, you need more than statistics which show "look, most crimes are committed by black people", because it does not follow from such statistics that most black people are committing crimes. You need evidence to bridge that gap, the crime statistics themselves can't get there.

You don't need to show that most black people are committing crimes. You can alternately show that you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so, which seems to be empirically correct.

You can alternately show that you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so

Except you haven't shown that. As @FCfromSSC observes we, as society, know how to create better outcomes. The problem is that the required actions are not seen as politically acceptable because there are a lot of bigots and grifters who's egos and livelihoods depend on problems not getting solved.

I can't help but notice that the same people who say "you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so" are the same people who also lionize George Floyd, defend DeCarlos Brown as "a victim of circumstance", and make excuses for liberal AGs releasing violent schizophrenics back onto the street for the umpteenth time.

We can stop the trolly at any time but doing so would require the liberal striver class to admit that they fucked up.

The problem is that the required actions are not seen as politically acceptable because there are a lot of bigots and grifters who's egos and livelihoods depend on problems not getting solved.

The actions are not politically acceptable, and that is why we cannot implement them. It does not matter if there are ways of stopping black criminals if we cannot implement them. We've seen what happens if we try -- the pushback gets stronger until we stop doing it, people who notice the issue are ostracized, it becomes illegal to use data to demonstrate things, and if the data stubbornly keep showing the wrong things, they just stop publishing or collecting it.

We can stop the trolly at any time but doing so would require the liberal striver class to admit that they fucked up.

Then we can't stop it.

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Evidence has been provided for decades. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time?

Yeah, the claim that generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups is very obvious and very well supported.

In my view, the inflammatory claim is the opposite. People who claim that blacks behave more or less the same as every other group are the ones who should be proactively providing evidence. Because, in effect, they are claiming that people who observe and comment on black dysfunction (and its intractability) are either delusional or are liars.

Obviously a society where (1) guns are freely available to adults; and (2) there are a lot of black people, is a society where there will be a lot of shootings.

Yeah, the claim that generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups is very obvious and very well supported.

It most certainly is not. If you want to make that claim, you best bring receipts if you want people to take it seriously (or if you want the mods to not ding you for making inflammatory claims without evidence).

It most certainly is not.

Just so we are clear, are you highly skeptical of the following claims:

(1) In the United States, black people commit crime at rates which are significantly disproportionate;

(2) In the United States, black people become parents out-of-wedlock at rates which are significantly disproportionate;

(3) In the United States, black people save money and accumulate wealth at rates which are significantly under-proportionate;

None of those is the claim you originally made, so I'm not going to get dragged to a debate on any of those points. What you said was "generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups". For that to be true, it would require most black people to behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner (because that is what "generally speaking, (group) behaves" means). To show that a group has higher rates of such behavior does not suffice for proving that most members of the group have that behavior.

None of those is the claim you originally made,

The claim I made was that "generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups"

A reasonable way to evaluate this claim would be to look at crime; out-of-wedlock births; and financial behavior. But let me put the question to you: What sort of evidence would it take to convince you of the claim?

For that to be true, it would require most black people to behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner (because that is what "generally speaking, (group) behaves" means)

No, because I said "compared to members of other groups." So for example, if 5% of blacks behave in an antisocial and/or irresponsible manner, while only 2% of other groups do so, my claim would be correct. (And to be clear, I'm not going to get in a debate over what I meant. I know what I meant and that's what I meant. It was reasonably clear, but even if it wasn't, it's clear now.)

Here on this forum it is often stated outright or implied that those problems are strongly intractable, i.e. that there is no sociocultural intervention (cutting race-based leniency, welfare reforms, penitentiary reforms, less glorification of crime in pop media, etc.) that would, if not completely erase the gap between racial groups, at least make them decent enough neighbors. I do not find that immediately obvious or well supported.

I do not find that immediately obvious or well supported.

You've tried for 60 years, isn't it obvious now?

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"we can't fix this at all"
vs
"everything we've tried to fix this has failed"
vs
"actually, we have a way to fix this, but solutions are being blocked by specific actors for specific reasons".

The difference between these three positions really matters.

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It is not that there is no sociocultural intervention that would reduce the gap. It is that there is no politically acceptable intervention, because all of them will look like they are disproportionately punitive to black people.

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Here on this forum it is often stated outright or implied that those problems are strongly intractable, i.e. that there is no sociocultural intervention (cutting race-based leniency, welfare reforms, penitentiary reforms, less glorification of crime in pop media, etc.) that would, if not completely erase the gap between racial groups, at least make them decent enough neighbors. I do not find that immediately obvious or well supported.

I disagree, but in any event, but the claim -- charitably interpreted -- is that if guns are freely available to adults in the population; and there are a lot of blacks in the population; one can reasonably expect a lot of shootings by black people. My position is that this is so clear and obvious that pro-active evidence is not necessary. I take it you disagree?

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It is not actually obvious at all to the average intelligent person who might make a good Motte commenter but comes from a sheltered liberal or moderate-conservative background. The vast majority even of intelligent, generally well-informed people have never looked at the relevant statistics, and many of them have also been exposed enough to the "the racist law enforcement system is the reason for such statistics" theory that the bare statistics wouldn't even be enough by themselves.

It is not actually obvious at all to the average intelligent person who might make a good Motte commenter but comes from a sheltered liberal or moderate-conservative background. The vast majority even of intelligent, generally well-informed people have never looked at the relevant statistics, and many of them have also been exposed enough to the "the racist law enforcement system is the reason for such statistics" theory that the bare statistics wouldn't even be enough by themselves.

For such a person, what evidence could be provided to substantiate the claim that "generally speaking, blacks behave in an irresponsible and anti-social manner compared to members of other groups"

I imagine the same evidence that convinced you would be a good place to start.

I imagine the same evidence that convinced you would be a good place to start.

Well, that would be (1) general, informal observations; and (2) publicly available statistics.

Apparently, this hypothetical intelligent person does not accept publicly available statistics. And it doesn't seem likely that an anonymous interpret poster's summary of his general informal observations will carry much weight.

Yes. We had a 20 year campaign to deny the truth. So a lot of people have never been exposed to it. And it’s honestly clustered in upper middle class people since they often live in a highly filtered environments and wouldn’t see results on the ground. Even athletes are extremely filtered for intelligence. Antonio Brown is the exception that proves the rule. You need to be highly disciplined and usually more intelligent to make it to the nfl

I mean Antonio Brown's hardly the only nutjob in the NFL he's just had a combination of 'did a bunch of funny nutjobbery and only lapsed into criminality later in his career', 'good enough to stick around even with the character issues' and 'got spotlighted'. Modern sports are pretty good at filtering, but there's always going to be a subpopulation of those who are just so freakishly naturally gifted that they get away with being a moron otherwise.

He’s the leading brand. But I do think most professional athletes are on the more intelligent side. Analytics are probably pushing it farther as the schemes and techniques continue to become more complicated. Body-maxxing is also far more complex. Even with professional experts telling you what to do it takes a lot of discipline to follow the diets and exercise routines. It’s year round training now.

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What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring.

One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.

At the very least, you could link to a past discussion on the Motte or somewhere else that you think did a good job rigorously interrogating the evidence and policy choices, while arriving in the neighborhood of /u/sleepyegg's assertions, so that those of us who are interested in high effort discussions and a free search for truth can have something to sink our teeth into.

One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.

It „used to be that way” and is not that way now, because the Motte did not reward effort posting enough. In my mind the reward for effort posting should be no more „evidence please” for the same dry topic; just go browse the AAQCs or some canonical blog posts, maybe from some of those effort posters who you chased away. If the mod feels the need to chime in, maybe they should chime in with links to some of those instead of demanding another poster do it. There's no point to having a debate if you can never make any progress.

Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier. It's not a particular failure of the Motte to fail to make progress on this topic. If anything, the Motte is better than most places when it comes to it. But what is more interesting to me than rehashing it again is looking at the meta question of, is one side operating in bad faith? I think so, probably. Which deflates my motivation to engage in the object-level debate with high effort.

If the mod feels the need to chime in, maybe they should chime in with links to some of those instead of demanding another poster do it.

We will demand posters follow the rules.

Alternatively, DM me to discuss rates since apparently you are dissatisfied with the level of effort being made by volunteers.

Maybe you haven't been exposed to any decent anti-HBD arguments. Personally, I think there probably is a genetic component to racial differences in criminality. However, I think that pro-HBD people often overstate their case.

@2rafa's recent post about Irish Travelers is interesting when it comes to the explanatory power of HBD.

There are also many examples in history of savage, unintellectual people later becoming great intellectuals without, perhaps, the genetic stock changing much. If one used a time machine to observe the founding Indo-European-speaking stock circa 2000 BC, one would probably find it hard to imagine that 1500 years later they would have descendants like Thucydides and Euclid. If one observed the Germanic people around 0 AD, one would find it hard to imagine that their descendants would include many of the world's foremost scientists and mathematicians.

There are also many examples in history of savage, unintellectual people later becoming great intellectuals without, perhaps, the genetic stock changing much.

You should look up some medieval descriptions of Vikings for fun reading on this. Or German writings about Swedes from around 1630 for that matter. That same genetic stock rather famously produced Alfred Nobel.

If one observed the Germanic people around 0 AD, one would find it hard to imagine that their descendants would include many of the world's foremost scientists and mathematicians.

1500+ years later. Which is about 75 generations. At just +0.01 SD per generation, that can add up to 0.75 SDs in that time. Which is 11.25 IQ points. Which is a rise from a mean of 88.75 to 100. This can be produced by having an average r=0.02 correlation between fertility and IQ during that time by the way. We're experiencing 5x that selection pressure in the opposite direction right now.

Why should the rate be .01 SD/generation? Why should it even be linear?

If the one sample set we’ve got today is a somewhat stronger negative correlation, I would expect that to extend backwards. I know that was the case in 1800s America.

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Any HBDer would readily agree melatonin level does not cause low IQ. With the right selection pressure with a certain amount of time African Americans would begin dominating science and engineering.

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Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier.

Look, I'm fully open to the idea that I'm totally wrong-headed on these topics, and I always try to keep the idea that I might be biased and believing what I want to believe in view as a possibility. But I genuinely think there are a lot of questions that a lot of HBD people I've interacted with seem ill-equipped to deal with.

For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.

Like, I'm fully aware of the "13% of the population commits 50% of the murders" argument, but surely if we were just genuinely tough on crime and caught the bad eggs, there would be no reason for segregation, since the vast majority of African Americans are not murderers? Like, if you just look at averages and standard deviations, then the smartest non-outlier African American in the United States has an IQ of 145. I don't understand why we need a system that segregates that IQ 145 person away from everyone else, just because 1% of his same race cohort are murderers or whatever.

I kind of just don't see why the Steven Pinker-style of HBD-aware liberalism isn't still possible, even if HBD turns out to be 100% true? Do you really assert that we've known since 1995 that such a system was and is impossible with any realistic social arrangement?

Segregation has some issues because very clearly you have some Africans perhaps even well over 50% that do not cause any issues and are perfectly fine mixing with the rest of society.

The best evidence for segregation is America spends an insane amount of money to do segregation without doing segregation. This is essentially all housing regulations in America. Minimum lot sizes, building restrictions, etc that are all designed to make sure poorer people can not get into your neighborhood. It’s car culture. If you look at relatively homogenous populations - pre-19th century Europe, Tokyo, Buenos Aires they all build a lot of dense urban housing. All the cities built after the Great Migration in America are essentially suburbs connected to each other. With local coordination to keep low income folks out of their communities. Sure you can disagree with this argument. You can say it’s just the car and people like backyards. That I guess is viable. Tokyo largely developed posts-car and is dense.

Completely changing how people live (cities to restricted suburbs) is a huge amount of gdp and utility. It’s big enough to justify explicit segregation.

You can honestly just change any argument wokes made for racism caused bad things and instead attribute it to lower class black people bad behavior and then add up all the mitigating costs the rest of the society does to avoid mixing.

I think it’s fairly obvious the US spends trillions per year to achieve segregation without explicit doing segregation. Private schools would barely exists if segregation was legal.

They don't want poor white people in those neighborhoods either, you know. Far less than they want wealthy blacks.

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For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.

Sleepyegg didn't argue for Jim Crow, and you pled for him to include basic race-differences fact links in his post.

For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.

We can't have this discussion properly when you aren't actually willing to grant the basic race facts. You don't just grant for the sake of the argument here; you must grant for the sake of reality. Then we can talk about policy. The way it works, though, is that when we try to establish the facts, we get shouted down. So there is no point and there can be no discussion. The facts remain the facts, and the fact remains that the facts remain denied.

Like, I'm fully aware of the "13% of the population commits 50% of the murders" argument, but surely if we were just genuinely tough on crime and caught the bad eggs, there would be no reason for segregation, since the vast majority of African Americans are not murderers?

That means someone has to die before we act, and we also have to be tough on crime, which is ugly and anti-liberty.

I kind of just don't see why the Steven Pinker-style of HBD-aware liberalism isn't still possible, even if HBD turns out to be 100% true? Do you really assert that we've known since 1995 that such a system was and is impossible with any realistic social arrangement?

No, we have known that the facts about race differences are as sleepyegg stated. We also know race blind liberalism is possible, since the United States lives under it (and to some extent Europe). Do you like the system?

Also, I personally don't argue for Jim Crow and don't know any serious HBD people who do. I would prefer a holistic class based system where race differences are accepted, and races assort into classes in proportions which accord to their talents. Blacks would not be bared from the nobility, but would probably only be a small percent of it, and that is expected based on their racial averages. This is anything but a normal HBD belief, though. It's more like Moldbug multiplied by HBD; most HBD people are slightly racist liberals who just want to be a little more tough on crime and restrict immigration. I would like a society which is run by and for its nobility, which competes against contemporary peasant states by attracting a lower class willing to accept explicit subordination based on superior economics. Its values would be truth, beauty, human flourishing, and biologically improving the human species.

We also know race blind liberalism is possible, since the United States lives under it (and to some extent Europe). Do you like the system?

I mean, isn't the complaint that it isn't actually race-blind? Either because we're too lenient on black defendants, or because of affirmative action and DEI?

My preference as a heterodox libertarian would be for a race blind system that actually punished people where appropriate. If that means a higher percentage of black people end up in prison, so be it. So yes, I like the theoretical idea of race-blind liberalism, more or less.

We can't have this discussion properly when you aren't actually willing to grant the basic race facts. You don't just grant for the sake of the argument here; you must grant for the sake of reality. Then we can talk about policy. The way it works, though, is that when we try to establish the facts, we get shouted down. So there is no point and there can be no discussion. The facts remain the facts, and the fact remains that the facts remain denied.

I don't think I've ever shouted anyone down for anything here on the Motte.

Don't get me wrong. I've been working my way through books recommended here and elsewhere. But it is slow going, and I'm not yet fully on board with HBD in its most common form here.

My biggest hang up has always remained that I just don't think that establishing the facts of HBD should have much effect on public policy besides immigration. We have the people inside of the country that we have. We can do some amount of voluntary eugenics under a libertarian/liberal regime, but even changing my view to agree with the common HBD consensus wouldn't really change anything about how I think society should be organized. I had already priced in that some people are naturally going to be more violent, or stupid, and I still think we should treat them as individuals and let them rise or fall on the basis of their own merits.

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Science should have nothing to do with law. If the science says something, let Congress reflect that in the law, but Judges do not have the authority to simply declare this kind of thing. Warren and his court have been a disaster for this country.

All well and good to note, but that's not the legal reality.

There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.” You surely don’t find the principle alive in science or the animal kingdom. Some technocratic societies seek to implement a limited version of that in specific domains, but an entire society founded on such principles I’d imagine would be a very miserable one for anyone who’s not a top performer.

There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.” You surely don’t find the principle alive in science or the animal kingdom.

I feel like you have a bit of a category error here. I don't take "equality before the law" to have to do with the facts about people one way or the other. It is more of a commitment that the legal system tries to make to be fair and impartial to the extent that it can.

Of course, because humans made this system we will fail to live up to that commitment again and again. But when we say that, say, a bicycle thief and a tech CEO are equal before the law when charged with the same crime, we're not saying that they have equal intelligence or abilities, or even equal likelihood to have actually committed the crime. We're saying that we're committed to giving them approximately the same chance to prove their innocence, in approximately the same legal proceedings.

No, I know that’s what you were saying. My point is that there’s a reason why that moral precept is put before science and it’s not a conclusion of it. If a person wanted to wholly structure a society purely based on the scientific facts of the matter, it’s not one they would likely want to live in.

There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.”

No they don't; the under-[age] are far less equal, and any attempt to raise that age is simultaneously an attempt to undermine that norm.

In some select domains, sure. But I’m also pretty confident the Dred Scot decision isn’t being upheld anywhere in the US anymore.

I've started listening to SCOTUS oral arguments as a podcast, and some of my consistent complaints are the lack of statistical literacy, and some justices really wanting to lean on "scientists" as an unelected fourth branch of government.

I think your suggestion here is the right one: let Congress interpret the science in writing laws; don't have the Judicial branch try to do scientific literature reviews.

It's not like we don't have lots of evidence of negligent or even outright fraudulent publications in even reputable journals.

A $50,000,000,000 bill on the sidewalk is empowering Cremieux Recoil (or, humbly, moi, or several other candidates, or a committee composed thereof), to make a statistics exam which is administered to currently empowered decision makers. Those who fail after being provided 1 year to study for it are exiled. It will never happen because we live in an idiocracy, but one can dream.

It's not like we don't have lots of evidence of negligent or even outright fraudulent publications in even reputable journals.

There was a meta analysis done once that showed about 50% of peer reviewed papers turn out to be false. If you look at something like PubMed epidemiological literature, a lot of it is riddled with multicollinearity that severely impacts the precision of their regression estimates. This was actually acknowledged in findings of their own studies. But it generalizes across disciplines. You find it in Neoclassical economics where models have been repeatedly subjected to different datasets and the existing structure falls completely apart.

This is the replication crisis. And it wasn't just one metastudy. People try replicating published results from prominent journals and keep finding around half don't replicate. And of course for psychology it is a vast majority not replicating.

I think I've said it before here: given the replication crisis a single published paper is a very weak unit of evidence. No one should significantly shift their views based on so little and so weak of evidence. If many papers by different researchers all point in the same direction then we should seriously consider the results.

Yep. I’ve mentioned the Reproducibility Crisis here before. Science isn’t as airtight and rock solid as people think it is. Small sample size effects, lack of long-term consistent results, etc.

At some point in the last 50 years or so it seems to have become acceptable to let students take classes like "Statistical Analysis" without having first demonstrated basic competence in Calculus and I would argue that this has had a disastrous effect on rates of numeracy across a multitude of disciplines.

How do you recognize an error in your estimate if you do not have a clear understanding of what that estimate represents?

It's extremely bad in ML literature, where pressure to publish and get your citation + h-index up means that people publish all kinds of non-replicate-able junk. Nobody wants another incremental advancement paper so every paper is revolutionary. I cannot tell you the number of times I've taken a paper that looked interested, either used their code or re-implemented it approximately, used their datasets and gotten far worse results. The new trick, or really old trick making a resurgence, is to include all kinds of arcane math in the paper and not provide any code so its impossible to replicate it without a math PhD in that area.

Research papers are written for phds, and if you don't have a phd then you are not the target audience. Unreproducibility and over-mathiness of ML research is a common meme among the online ML-adjacent communities, but it's just not true. The ML community has done far more than any other community to encourage reproducibility and they've had a lot of success in doing so.

Source: I am an ML researcher with only a mediocre publication record. I've got my own gripes with the system that have led to my pub-record being mediocre, but reproducibility is not one of them.

I am a ML researcher, in Industry without a PhD. The papers are absolutely for me. (And if they aren't then thats a major clique/circle-jerking issue, as I'm the one actually trying to apply what is being done)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-07087-2 This paper I recently tried to replicate for research on IoT cuffless BP, it absolutely fails to replicate. Not only that, but it also suffers from massive subject leakage on how it splits the data. It's pretty much overfit with a 75% overlap between signals and then it shuffles those between train and val. Even copying it's splitting approach I failed to get more than a MAE SBP of 6.07 and DBP of 4.3. Paper claims sub 2.0 for both.

Then there's this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19428. Maybe you know Grassmann flows and manifolds but I definitely did not learn this naturally. I pretty much need a background tutorial on this.

I actually enjoyed this paper's concept: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14972 But needing to read 2-3 additional papers, one of which was super mathy proving out the intuition was a lot of work. It still takes me a bit to conceptualize this because it is DEEP in the bayesian world.

Maybe you are in a different subfield than I am, but I have consistently failed to replicate paper results for the occasional paper for the last 4-5 years. It happens, it's a thing. If I say that to other industry researchers they pretty much agree. One of the reasons we think poorly of academics.

Nature paper ...

Without looking at this paper I agree it is shit. This paper is not a machine learning paper (and basically nothing in Nature is). The failure to replicate is a problem of the culture of medical science and not ML.

Just because a researcher uses a compiler in their research does not make them a "compiler researcher", and similarly, just because someone uses machine learning in their research does not make them a "machine learning researcher". Papers at PLDI are not targeted at people who are "trying to apply compilers" and papers at NeurIPS/ICML are not targeting people who are "trying to apply ML". (If you actually want to see a "mathy" paper, BTW, you should take a look at the papers at COLT... these are definitely not for you and these are definitely hard-core proper machine learning papers.)

Grassman flows paper

This paper is definitely an ML paper, and honestly is pretty reasonable. It's not earth shattering, but it's exactly the kind of work that I would expect from a decent phd student (which the author is). It's pretty bread-and-butter ML to take a model and explore ways to reduce the representational complexity of the model. Grassmann manifolds are outside of standard ML math, but the explanation in 2.2 was easy to follow. The math here is no harder than the math in standard graduate textbooks.

Causal Foundation Models paper...

Again, this doesn't seem very mathy to me. The notation all looks like standard stuff from the Pearl textbook (admittedly not standard ML, but definitely standard for anything causal), and anyone who has worked through Bishop (which should be literally everyone with an ML phd of a certain age) should have no problem.

Having to look up 3 references to read and understand a paper seems absolutely reasonable to me.

We seem to have a different definition of what constitutes "ML Research". I'd break it down into two forms: Basic Research and Applied Research. Basic is probably not the precise word because a lot of core research is non-basic, but core is also an imprecise word, as is making a boundary around theoretical.

But Applied Research is pretty straight forward. It is the application of ML theory and algorithms/models to real-world practical problems. The "Basic" Research is generally more on developing the ML theory of what can work or is possible. You seem to think Applied Research is not actual "ML Research". I'm not sure the ML community agrees with you because there are prevalent conferences like CVPR or the NLP one I am blanking on. These are considered ML conferences, focused on a particular practical field. Industry research is almost always Applied, not all of us have the luxury of working on grants, business want returns and the research is around applying ML theory to real-problems. Like the Cuffless BP Nature paper. I think your definition is overly purity focused, though I imagine our tension is one as old as time between Academic PhDs and Industry Researchers.

The last two are definitely the "core/theoretical/basic" side of research because they aren't actually applying it to real problems. One's just a theory on Causal Modeling al la Pearl or Schölkopf. The pipeline is that someone like me takes these more theoretical models and implements them in the real-world.

Grassmann manifolds are outside of standard ML math, but the explanation in 2.2 was easy to follow.

Maybe I suck at math (a real possibility) or maybe you are just good at math (also a possibility) I still am very shaking on what a Grassmann manifold is. I don't think the paper is earth shattering in itself. I've seen several papers about kernelizing attention, or linearizing it, or anything to make it non-quadratic.

Again, this doesn't seem very mathy to me

I don't think this one is mathy, but it is arcane on the applications of meta-learning as bayesian priors to allow a model to generalize across out of distribution problems during inference time. Claiming it can do zero-shot inference on unrelated tasks because it learns how to formulate problems as an approximation of bayesian inference in a practical amount of time is a wild idea. It's making a very complicated claim that takes a long time to wrap your head around.

Having to look up 3 references to read and understand a paper seems absolutely reasonable to me.

Unfortunately this is a constraint in industry, I have a job, there is work to get done. spending 8+ hours to digest a theory paper is a large impact on my time. Even if it leads to something useful.

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Speaks really poorly of the quality of the publication too, if it’s allowed to pass. I remember reading a paper once in a “journal” (that actually had some legitimate backing) about the possibility of igniting Saturn with a nuclear weapon and I was thinking, “What the fuck is this shit?,” as I made my way through it. Academia in no way is this sort of purified, pristine landscape of nothing but rigorous logical and scientific clarity that people think it is. There’s at least as much bad science as people think there is good. And some areas of it are outright corrupt.

"It’s very clear science, evidence-based conclusions that the brain isn’t fully developed in young men until roughly around the age of the mid 20s,” Borrello said.

Hasn't this been pretty thoroughly repudiated by more recent studies? Yet it seems to live on in legal activism circles and anti-drug PSAs.

Basically everyone knows it, though, and they don't need a fancy man scientist to tell them so- even if it fails to replicate, it's a conclusion that everyone over 25 already believes.

What does "fully" developed mean? Does it matter? It's not like people are useless potatoes until one day in their mid 20s the switch is thrown and everything lights up. Young adults can and do function in the knowledge that serious crimes are serious crimes. These are not complex abstract concepts, certainly not as complex as deliberately not cooperating with the police is.

What does "fully" developed mean?

My cynical interpretation is "it's only downhill from there".

If you want cynicism then the next step is "They still can't be held responsible because science says now their brains are in decline". Heads they win, tails you lose.

It doesn't take achieving the utmost zenith of cerebral maturation to grasp that robbing a gun shop is breaking the law and invites serious consequences, and as such the matter of peak brain development is moot. Normal brain development for their age is more than adequate. And if they cynically calculate that claiming inadequate brain development is a mitigation then by the same token they should lose their remaining adult privileges.

Yep, I think there are two points at which the brain could be said to no longer be developing -- one is when it begins to decline as you suggest. And the other is death, as indicated by the aphorism "Biologists have a special word for 'stable': dead".

I mean medically that's definitely a thing - but it's variable and diffuse and complicated and 100% should not have legal ramifications.

I think 21 as legal age of majority should have been kept, reducing it to 18 for "you're an adult" was bad decision because at that age your bones are still not set (as the saying goes in my country). But the modern tendency to go to the other extreme and declare that people in their mid twenties are still not fully adult and can't be held responsible for any mistakes they make, because their brains are still developing, is rubbish.

18 year old does stupid and criminal shit? Okay, maybe give him a chance.

He's 24 and still doing stupid and criminal shit? Old enough to know better, throw the book at him.

I’m fine with 18 as the age of adulthood mostly for practical reasons— if you wait until 25 or more, the average person would have been living independently for at least 5-7 years by that point, they can join the military etc. and so it makes no sense to say “military, sure, renting a place or living on your own in a dorm is fine, but no contracts and no beer.” If you’re able to live on your own, you should be treated like an adult.

I think 21 as legal age of majority should have been kept, reducing it to 18 for "you're an adult" was bad decision because at that age your bones are still not set (as the saying goes in my country). But the modern tendency to go to the other extreme and declare that people in their mid twenties are still not fully adult and can't be held responsible for any mistakes they make, because their brains are still developing, is rubbish.

Bones are not fully set in men at 21. You can see it in the face quite easily. So, given that fact, and the weight you place on your folk saying, would you like to re-evaluate how rubbish the modern consensus is?

Why are we constantly raising the bar and treating adults as children? They are not so underdeveloped that they should be lacking this much in the sense and good judgment department. In my parents heyday, young children were doing very complex tasks (no they weren’t doing hard labor, thank God) and learning on the fast track. There’s been a great coddling of people in the 21st century.

People I work with at my current job think I’m some kind of magical worker for no other reason than the fact that I do my job. It has nothing to do with that at all. It’s a product of the culture I was raised in. Young children are adults in training.

They are not so underdeveloped that they should be lacking this much in the sense and good judgment department.

I think the argument isn't really "this 20-year-old is so young he couldn't understand the severity of what he was doing". It's more about how we shouldn't punish his future 30-year-old self over what he did at 20, in the way that we would feel comfortable hampering a 40-year-old's freedom over crimes he committed at 30, because a 30-year-old is much less likely to repeat his 20-year-old self's mistakes than a 40-year-old is likely to repeat a 30-year-old's.

(I'm not impressed by the argument as it pertains to 20-year-olds, but I think that's the basis on which we don't try, say, 9-year-olds like adults. 9-year-olds are not inherently "lacking in the sense and good judgment department" in the sense of not being responsible for their own actions; they know that killing is wrong and they shouldn't do it. But you aren't in any realistic sense keeping people safe by keeping a 9-year-old murderer off the streets for forty years, the likelihood of someone committing murder aged 9 is basically apples and oranges to their likelihood of committing murder aged 40 unless genuine mental illness is involved.)

Why are we constantly raising the bar and treating adults as children?

Because the gerontocracy has a massive incentive to pull the ladder up behind it. Gerontocrats favor increasing conservatism and fear of... well, life in general[1] so as the balance of power (being a zero-sum game) in society is stretched thinner, it's inevitable that the law protects but does not bind the old while binding but not protecting the young.

It's basically just racism, but for age; complete with the exact same skull-measuring behaviors.

The problem with modern society is a failure to reinvest with "but muh risk" as the excuse, one would expect that to impact its most vulnerable members first, which it has. And this happens all the way up the honor roll, so to speak; as we punish parents who the aged don't judge sufficiently risk-averse for that reason as well.

[1] New advancements that nullify their stores of value for retirement are inherently threatening, so 'just being able to go do things' inherently conflicts with their class interest. Which is exactly what we have seen since the '80s.

It's also a ridiculous world if we're gonna be saying in some cases that like a 24 year old isn't adult enough to be held responsible for crime, while also in other cases charging 15 year olds as adults..

And for bonus points, getting charged as an adult for a crime that can only be committed by a minor.

The system is broken, and the young are too weak to purge it.

I heard that one of the major problems with 21 was that 18-20 year old males are really really useful in war, and so drafting them was too useful to get rid of. And it seemed rather unfair to them that they don't have all the same rights as those of majority age. Perhaps they could get the rights but not the responsibilities? Perhaps 18-20 year olds should have the option of of opting out of selective service but then they lose the adulthood rights until 21?

Of course, the fact that the US still limits alcohol consumption to 21+ is another quirk. Then there's also the fact that 18 is likely not the lowest age at which males become really really useful in war; would 16 be more reasonable? What about 14? 10-year-olds have smaller fingers which could be really useful for some things in life-or-death situations involving machinery, and not to mention much lower calorie needs, and they could probably follow orders well enough...

The experiment has been run; the Germans had entire regiments made up of sixteen year olds, which fought as well as their conventionally drafted peers. On the other hand younger teens often lack the physical capabilities adult male soldiers need all those calories to support, and tend to do things like fall asleep on watch.

On the whole, setting the age of majority at sixteen doesn't seem distinctly worse than eighteen or twenty one. But you have to pick an arbitrary line somewhere and it's going to be wrong for quite a lot of people, that's what an arbitrary line is.

Of course, the fact that the US still limits alcohol consumption to 21+ is another quirk.

It's not just alcohol. It's also handguns, and tobacco, and we are now at the point where hotels refuse to check you in unless you are 21. Combine with the increasing expectation that everyone goes to college, and it seems like the modern age of adulthood has effectively become 21-22. If you do adult things at 18, like working full-time, getting married, having children, or serving in the military, you are considered low class.

At the limit, the only thing considered high class by a gerontocracy is death, and the forced worship thereof crowds out everything else, including the concept that men should expect to live at all.

And it seemed rather unfair to them that they don't have all the same rights as those of majority age.

Old enough to fight, but not old enough to have the alcohol/smoke part of your ration.

Old enough to fight, but not old enough to have the alcohol/smoke part of your ration.

Why are Americans so insane about alcohol? In my country it's easy to buy beer at 16 years old.

Why are Americans so insane about alcohol?

Historical legacy. Alcoholism used to be what fentanyl addiction is now. It's still a problem, but people who are prone to this kind of thing moved on to much harder stuff, so alcohol is largely not a huge deal anymore. But some cultural trauma remained.

So it's just communism? Oppress the majority for a bad minority?

You know, I never thought about heroin/cocaine/fentanyl saving alcohol’s reputation but when you say it I can see what you mean. That’s a very interesting perspective.

We mostly have Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a neo-temperance movement, to thank for that

And why do Americans empower their mothers to be against drunk driving? Sounds pathological.

We just break the law. Mass disrespect of the law and youth alcohol consumption are common. Starts in high school for most. College is awash in alcohol.

Used to. Between state capacity increases, parental helicoptering, and the gentling of youth through chemical means, a lot fewer high school students drink than used to.

Used to be even worse... the old Prohibition movement/amendment. Which honestly might be related: the legacy of some of the Baptist denominations/influence.

I thought the United States was a „free country?” Lol. I guess what that meant was no freedom for normal Europeans, but freedom for heretical cults who think alcohol is a sin to establish a tyranny, and freedom for the 3rd world to move in and loot, and of course freedom for progressives to establish a cultural tyranny.

I thought the United States was a „free country?”

Ideally, yes. Practically, as always, it's more complicated. In Europe, you can drink and smoke weed, but if you want to criticize the government policies, you go to jail. In America, you can criticize the government (unless Democrats are in power, of course) but in some places you can't smoke weed or buy hard alcohol outside specialized stores. Everybody has their own imperfections.

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It also matters what the stupid thing in fact is. Violent robbery is different from petty theft.

Not just recent studies, even one of the main guys behind the original studies that started the myth has no idea where the number 25 came from.

Steinberg is a giant in the field of adolescent development, well known for his four decades of research on adolescent and young adults. The passage YourTango quoted accurately describes the science, but it’s definitely a stretch to imply that it explains Leonardo DiCaprio’s dating history. When we spoke, I told Steinberg his work had been referenced in this way. “Oh no,” he said, laughing. I then asked whether he had insights about where the figure 25 came from, and he said roughly the same thing as Cohen: There’s consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there’s far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. “I honestly don’t know why people picked 25,” he said. “It’s a nice-sounding number? It’s divisible by five?”

Yes the brain continues development later into life (some suggesting it keeps on till the 30s at least if not even longer), but the whole idea of it actually stopping at 25 or that 18 year olds suddenly aren't mature enough to be doing the things they've been since the dawn of time or that such continued brain development even reflects maturity benchmarks just came out of nowhere.

but the whole idea of it actually stopping at 25 or that 18 year olds suddenly aren't mature enough to be doing the things they've been since the dawn of time or that such continued brain development even reflects maturity benchmarks just came out of nowhere.

The idea probably found fertile ground because people were staying in education longer than ever before and delaying marriage until later than ever before. When a lot of 18 year olds are married, provide for their families, and have babies, 25 as an age of adulthood will be received as silly. When almost all 18 year olds think they are too young for marriage, and almost of them are in school and most of them will consume several more years of broad education, people begin to be more receptive to the claim that they really become adults around the age they expect to get married and have a serious job, as opposed to them being late to those things.

Yeah I agree it's probably related to how much we coddle teenagers and young adults nowadays, that they can't feel like "real adults" and don't take on proper responsibility anymore.

I wouldn’t say he’s repudiating it. This is the same thing as puberty. It occurs in people at different ages. For me it was late and I had a growth spurt over 18. Others it occurs at 12.

The law though needs a specific age. Theoretically we could someday do brain scans that can declare “X process in brain development occurred” and thus he’s an adult. I don’t know if the tech is there yet but it’s probably expensive if it has. 25 is good enough for the law.

The law though needs a specific age. Theoretically we could someday do brain scans that can declare “X process in brain development occurred” and thus he’s an adult

I'm not sure why all of those are linked. Societies throughout all of time have shown us that the time between roughly 16-20 is good enough for maturity in a society that expects actual maturity. Often younger, midshipmen were often like 11-12 when they joined (David Farragut being a famous example of 9). They skewed so young that being over 18 made you an oldster. A young boy in the medieval period might begin working as an attendant as early as seven years old.

The idea that legal adulthood needs to be set at a point where brain development of all forms stopped, and that point is into the 20s-30s just doesn't match up with what society already knew, teenagers especially the older ones are mature enough to be accountable for their choices.

What exact age we pick for easy legal schelling point reasons doesn't matter too much, but it should generally be in the 16-20 range at most so we don't unnecessarily take away too many years of freedom from mature enough people.

Potentially true. I am not expert here.

But if we are basing adulthood on brain maturation the biological won’t occur at a specific age for everyone. Picking a legal age would just be an age where most people have done the thing biologically.

basing adulthood on brain maturation

Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

People think this process occurs magically, like some sort of "everyone's born black but they lighten gradually over time, and are granted rights at a specific shade of white", but people who maturity isn't expected of do not mature.

Set the age and expectations at X, and you'll see development delayed to match. The soft bigotry of low expectations is a thing.

New Zealand raised the minimum age for driver's licenses to 16 recently at some point, since studies showed that 15yos are involved in the most accidents. Good thing now we can just skip that entire first year of novices drivers!

I 100% think there is a cultural component to behavior.

You would agree right that if expected me to be full height earlier it would not have made me grow at a younger age? I hit my growth spurt at age 17-19?

I think there is almost certainly a biological component with the mind too.

Would you agree that assuming you want to play basketball, it would be better to teach you how to play basketball before your growth spurt hit, rather than wait until you're the tallest you'll ever be?

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Well yeah, the point of the legal age isn't to pinpoint for everyone it's just to make our lives easier.

How many other studies have been repudiated and yet live on in the public mind? There's certainly no shortage.

But sure, the problem with gun violence in the US is that Billy Bob put a giggle trigger on his PSA.

And regardless of how often stories like you describe keep happening, the majority of people in the United States will continue to believe this unironically. You can't fight the propaganda machine.

I wonder where these retarded 'youth criminal diversion programs' originate from.

People watch The Shawshank redemption and then Dangerous Minds and then set off to make a difference (TM).

This completely unironically. The United States federal unauthorized computer access law, considered one of the dumbest and most ham-fisted, tyrannical, and unjust in the world, comes from stupid congressmen who watched a 1983 movie called WarGames where a teenager launches some nuclear weapons through internet hacking.

The median American congressmen is just a TV from 1989 playing all of its programs on repeat strapped to a middle aged or elderly locomotion appendix. This is no reasoning with the TV, there is no updating the TV. Thence derives American stupidities like racial justice („Mohammed ali” is a HERO in 1989 United States), patriotic narcissism (the UNITED STATES is the MOST FREE and RICH nation on the Earth in 1989), „Epstein” hysteria (teen pregnancy is a CRISIS in 1989 United States), alcohol rules („BLOOD BORDERS” are MURDERING our CHILDREN in 1989 United States), drug hysteria (your brain will turn into a fried egg), and so on.

Once these boomers are gone, I think these silly views will fade away. Americans will be free of the spell of late 20th century Hollywood, and they will have to come to terms with the mediocrity of what remains of their country, and all of its insane contradictions.

Once these boomers are gone, I think these silly views will fade away.

I don't believe so. It's just that these silly views will be yours, so you won't see them as silly, and you'll start worshiping Your Experience and insisting others do as well because that'll be the only value you'll have left.

Death of the monoculture and an increased fracturing in media consumption might mean the dynamic works a bit differently, but I also broadly agree.

They will, at least, be different silly views.

I wasn't even completely joking like a ton of views on these topics in broader society are likely the product of a couple famous pieces of media, some garbled social media posts and a high school civics lesson

I'm about to sleep, or was, and now reading this I'm also angry, possibly not that irrationally. Almost as angry as I was at the Chicago area "teen takeover" stories I unfortunately read about today, which seemed very different as presented on X compared with stories in mainstream media.

teen takeover

Hey you Americans, make sure you implement „teen” curfews for these „teens” and raise a bunch of age restrictions to 21, I'm sure that will finally help you remedy all of the humongous costs of your United States Civil Rights Act wherein you gave these „teens” equality. Maybe you can take some of that equality back until they turn 21, at the cost of your own native population of course, because these „teens” never commit crimes after 21, as we all know.

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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery.

Your hot take is not hot or unique, but it is sneering and low effort. We're here to discuss culture war, not wage it.

Dealt with one of those in Florida beach yesterday. The thing is even if violence was not associated with these things I would still find them annoying. They are loud and obnoxious. It’s chaotic. White Flight basically happened for a reason.

The same thing would occur if 20k people like me moved to Tokyo. The Japanese would find me loud and annoying.

As someone who has witnessed such an event, what can you tell me about the purported purpose? Is it just young people acting like idiots en masse? Or more of a concerted act of intimidation towards grups? Bonk bonk on the head. Or is it, as I suspect, more a racial-coded black event? Even then, what's the stated point? (As opposed to what people imagine the point is)

I think most were just having fun in their own way. One of the cops did say people have guns here and the police had their weapons in a ready position with swat. Someone drove very closely to me on an ebike from behind.

For my taste it was louder and more chaotic than I would choose. Different culture.

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