[d-us-vb]

No, the issue, as outlined in the post, is real problematic behavior of real people on the internet who are inclined to tell anyone who is skeptical regarding the data (whatever it may be) that they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.

The post is about the author, not crime. The critique of Scott. A's posts is an example of the kind of online content that led the author to become "apostate to the Church of Graphs".

[refulgentis]

  I'm now in LA. There are illegal food stalls over over the place. 
  Some people like them but irrelevant, a crime is being committed, nothing is being done. 
  So every day I see these crimes. They weren’t here 10 years ago. 
  Hence, my experience is crime is up since I visibly see it every time I go out.

This is the first example provided. It is not new, and it is legal.

Don't mean to be curt, just, puzzled me to read to say the least. Googled it myself 2 months ago. [1]

In general, the problem is that the strong arguments in the essay are epistemically local - they say specific things about specific measurement gaps - but they're translated into a general license to privilege vibes over data. And that move is where the essay falls apart for me.

[1] https://la.streetsblog.org/2024/07/22/l-a-street-vendors-cel... (note: this just removed the last barriers, temporary events (i.e. sports), farmers markets, schools)

[BrenBarn]

> It is not new, and it is legal.

I think this is an important point lurking behind a lot of disagreements about these kinds of issues: basically, there are a fair number of things that are legal that people don't want to be legal, and there are a fair number of things that are not legal that people do want to be legal. The first category likely includes, for instance, all manner of tax trickery practiced by the wealthy; the latter category includes things like going 75 mph on the freeway.

There are also cases where it's not entirely clear what most people want, but where (I would say) the legality should be based on what most people want, but it is instead based on a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people. I would put the food stalls in this category. If more people want the food stalls in LA than do not, then they should be legal; if more people do not want them, then they should be illegal. But their legality should not depend on which advocacy group was able to muster a bigger war chest to fund their legal fees and win a court judgment one way or the other.

I believe this is a symptom of fundamental failures in our system of law and government that have caused it to be quite unresponsive to the actual desires of the citizenry. This causes us to waste a lot of time and energy fighting over things like "crime" without making much progress because we are working against the grain of the social/legal apparatus that some people put in place over a long period of time.

[refulgentis]

This is very fair and I generally agree.

Don't read following as a caricature/driveby, really appreciated the thought and framing and it wins out over what I'm about to say, I'm just putting my thoughts after 2 minutes musing as concisely as possible:

There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.

i.e. "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things" - if it was popular to get rid of food stalls in LA*, should be pretty easy, people are pretty plugged in these days

There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.

* it wouldn't be, they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event. If someone said something like they did in real life, you'd ignore it because it's fringe, or, tell them to move to Newport Beach (ritzy suburb). Even just ~15 years ago, in Buffalo, it was perfectly polite to say "sounds like you should move to the suburbs."

[BrenBarn]

> There is something to be said for that's how stuff works today.

I think there's much less to be said for that than we currently are trying to say for it. :-)

> "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things"

Maybe to some extent, but overall I think not really. The thing is that the people working to change things are not, as far as I can see, actually working to find out what people want and then do that. Instead there are different groups each working to implement what they want, and it is a matter of who shouts the loudest and fights the hardest.

> There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.

Yeah that's a direction I think we should move in. I mean not exactly live poll, but the point is I think policy decisions should be structurally much more anchored to people's desires on individual issues. Right now our political system is mostly "vote for someone and then live with whatever they decide for two years". Representative democracy makes sense but increasingly it seems the perspectives and incentives of the representatives are out of sync with those of the citizenry. I think there should be a healthy role for direct democracy, a way for people to override or modify the representatives' decisions, basically saying "I may still be okay with you representing me, but you were wrong on this issue so we're going to change that one."

> they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event.

Well, maybe, but that too is a decision that should be based on what people actually want. Like maybe people are okay with the stands in certain locations, certain types of foods (e.g., meat vs. fruit), certain numbers of stands, whatever, but not others. And if that's the case it is those preferences of the population that should be aggregated to arrive at a decision.

[nine_k]

> they should more or less discount their personal observations, reasoning, and experience when it goes counter to the data.

OK, I look at two objects [1] and posit that object B is larger than object A. I see it with my very eyes, I directly experience this feeling of largeness and smallness. How dare any data, any calipers or rulers (must be oppressive rulers!) tell me that my perception is wrong, and the sizes are equal?

The whole thing is based on the idea that seeing with one's own eyes is somehow not interpretation, but unadulterated truth. This is, unfortunately, not exactly so. No matter who you ask, Buddhist practitioners or cognitive scientists, anyone who paid attention to the problem know that "direct experience" is not very direct.

Tools to rectify biases in perception exist, and statistics (when properly implemented) are one such tool. But accepting one's own bias is psychologically hard; it's much easier to think that all these other people have a bias, or several. (It's an important part of growing up though.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebbinghaus_illusion

[array_key_first]

Part of the problem is that a lot of people are legitimately delusional, and the correct answer for them in their lives is, in fact, "discount your personal observations (they're not real)".

Like, if Fox news tells some people that San Fran has a ton of crime, then they will start seeing that crime. They will observe it. But that doesn't mean that crime has actually went up. It means they were primed and that they are biased.

When your political opinion relies on some set of facts being true, then you will just believe those facts to be true, ala 1984. And then to you, they are true. Your eyes can most definitely deceive you.