I did not grow up in rationalist circles, and honestly some of that was intentional as it seemed like the adult version of that annoying kid in middle/high school who would "erm actually" vocally, rather than keep his thoughts to himself like a socially well adjusted individual who was smart enough to have recognized the teacher might not always be right.
But as part of it, I never really took the time to understand why *they* call themselves "rationalists". I assume (i still dont know for sure and dont care to) it is because they believe they are rational individuals who use logic and epistemic integrity to derive conclusions about the world.
But me personally, I always find it funny because, in layman's terms, if you say someone is "rationalizing something", it means theyre deluding themselves into affirming their preconceived notions by introducing selective evidence. And I think that is far more accurate for "rationalists" based on my observations.
From the philosophical view, they're the empiricists; the rationalists are the other guys, the continental philosophers.
I tend to have more suspicion of the socially well-adjusted people (they're much more likely to be selling me a bill of goods), but as we've seen above the Internet rationalists can make their own mistakes.
But it doesnt take knowing the orthodoxy or history of whatever your movement is to accurately criticize and assess your inability to reason and successfully conclude on the truth of issues.
> Lol. Okay bro. Yes, your movement "Yeah, I'll stick with Scott here" above.
As in I’ll take his side of the disagreement that the whole article is about?
Did you think I meant I’ll stick with him through thick and thin, and agree with him on everything he says and be a part of any group he identifies as? Lmao think better bro
> If you wonder why your worldview has no purchase broadly, which I am sure you dont wonder
I don’t wonder that, because it’s borderline nonsensical. What would it mean for my worldview to “have purchase”? My worldview is composed of a wide variety of values and beliefs, many of which are very widely or near unanimously held. You have already admitted (and demonstrated) that you don’t have any familiarity with the set of beliefs you are attributing to me, let alone my actual worldview, and you have no idea how much “purchase” any or all of them have.
You’re just saying stuff, presumably annoyed by my calling you out for your uninformed criticisms of an intellectual movement you clearly don’t have enough knowledge to speak about. What you take as personal defensiveness is just a general dislike of confidently asserted nonsense.
I am finished replying to you. My comments herein are sufficient to stand on their own for a rational observer to read and comprehend my positions and rebut and "pre-but" your initial and later responses. And, for what it is worth, at this point I actually think your responses are very funny.
You write that the Church of Graphs privileges doxa over episteme—I disagree. To me, you and Scott Alexander are not so different. You are both conducting epistemic analyses. The difference is that you use gnosis and doxa in your analyses whereas adherents to the Church of Graphs are apparently forbidden from using gnosis at all.
Maybe the Church of Graphs not only forbids gnosis—it actively attacks it. The institutions of science, medicine, law, governance, and philosophy, the entire name of the game is to prove that your very eyes are lying to you. You don’t get a tenure-track position by concluding that crime does, in fact, hurt economic development of poor areas—you get that cushy job by producing a seemingly-well-reasoned epistemic analysis that concludes that crime is actually good for economic development. Or that poisonous pesticides actually produce better health outcomes in comparison to countries that don't use them. Or that crime is at all time lows. Or that the U.S. actually didn’t play a big role in WWII. Or any number of ridiculous things.
I suppose I don’t understand why some intelligent people seem to go down this path. It’s like they shun their ability to come to their own conclusions about the world. Very odd.
Excellent essay. My childhood Church shuttered due to dwindling attendance. The local diocese is now letting the city use the land for "single occupancy social housing." The result of this charity is dozens of drug addicts and criminals now live across the street from a middle school, the only local skate park, the only local football field, and the baseball field where I played little league.
We aren't just experiencing the blast radius from crime, it is being imposed on us by church and state.
In my own Gnostic interpretation of things: I moved away from the USA 13 years ago. I visit my hometown roughly once a year. It is really truly true that I used to walk from my parents' house to the park with my childhood friends, and there was not litter, tents, and crazy people shouting at me. It is really truly true that the Walgreens did not have all the toothpaste and conditioner behind locked plexiglass three years ago, but does now. One of the things about just visiting a town you're really familiar with every year, but just once a year, is that the snapshots really highlight changes that might elide if you were there every day, experiencing a more gradual change.
But what do I know. I'm a Catholic, not a Graphist.
If it so pleases the comment section, I would like to present a case study on the difference between episteme and doxa. This one comes from the slightly less topical case of Somalis in Minnesota defrauding the state.
In 2018, an investigator employed by the state’s childcare program wrote a ten-page email alerting state officials of the extensive fraud he was seeing in the subsidized childcare program. Based on the size of the overall program, a cursory analysis of grant recipients similar to those he had successfully investigated, and the nature of the fraud, the investigator estimated that the true extent of the fraud reached $100M. He admits that this is a WAG (wild-ass guess) because the program requires insufficient documentation to thoroughly audit the recipients and his office lacked the manpower to investigate the daycares they suspected of defrauding the system.
The Minnesota Legislature’s Office of the Auditor wrote a report on the email. It’s relatively short, at about 30 pages. The conclusion? Far short of $100M, the fraud in the program is really only about $4M and the investigator has no support for his claim of two orders of magnitude higher. However, reading past the headline will give you the exact opposite impression, especially when one reads the summaries of the cases prosecuted.
The $4M figure comes from tallying up the amounts prosecuted in a court of law across about a dozen or so cases. The evidence in these prosecutions comes from videotaping the entrances to the daycares for a week or two and then comparing the headcount to the handwritten sign-in sheets the daycare provides for reimbursements. In these cases, investigators would find an average of 56 children show up daily vs. claimed figures of over 100, all of which were reimbursed. And so the daycare operator would be prosecuted for the $150k that the state could prove during the recorded two-weeks.
Did the daycare only defraud the state during the two weeks investigators happened to be watching? Of course not! The $150k prosecuted in that case is a fraction of what the daycare has stolen. $150k is all that the state could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. The legislator’s auditor used this strict, formal definition to arrive at and debunk the investigator’s informal estimate. But the layperson will almost certainly agree that the investigator’s estimate is much closer to the truth than the auditor’s.
It was Scott Alexander's review of _Seeing Like A State_ that introduced me to the concept of _legibility_. It seems dreadfully ironic that he is falling into such a clear legibility trap here.
I was a victim of crime in SF. I was visiting abd foolishly left my wetsuit and roadtrip compilation cd's and some other stuff in the car. Overnite it was broken into and the gear stolen. I was told there was no point in reporting it. That my recouse was to look for it at flea markets
I've had this same experience when reading Lyman Stone. Great writer, but an unabashed graph-head.
My cousin is a sociologist with a specialty on how survey questions and reporting mechanisms impact study outputs. Even in seemingly politically unbiased scenarios, there are all sorts of weird confounding factors that can give you an inaccurate picture. Like you said, they are useful, but not holy writ.
If the national statistics show a decrease in crime, but one’s own lived experience shows an increase in crime, then either your life is a large outlier, or there’s something wrong with the statistics.
I can’t really compare as I don’t know what public order was like 30 years ago. In NYC, depictions in media and movies suggest it was much worse in the past? Entire areas of the city you wouldn’t go to for fear of being attacked. There are still places like that today, but quite a lot of the city is safe, albeit with a low hum of insane bums bumping around.
I've been reading Scott since 2015, and the last few months have seen a dramatic decline in the quality of his writing. Having kids slowed his output, which I understood, but he's also clearly developed some pretty bad AI Psychosis (he's even joked about it in some of his recent posts). Now he's regularly citing ChatGPT itself as a source for complex analyses and data.
I wonder how much of the crime post stuff was just him getting sucked into a little bubble by spending (in his words) 30 minutes per day chatting with LLMs. This sort of thing was always his failure mode, but possibly it used to be mitigated by the fact that he had to contact actual humans (and could trust that research he found online, if potentially horribly biased and full of methodological flaws, at least originated in a human brain).
The people who think crime is up are overwhelmingly people from lily white rural and suburban areas who watch FoxNews all day and are convinced crime is way up in THOSE far away big cities and especially because of all the immigrants and the black people there.
NYC is absolutely a triumphant example of hyper extreme reductions in crime that have continued for decades now, even as the city has reached unbelievable levels of diversity. And the people who perceive lots of crime also perceive NYC (which most will never visit) as if it is a worse version of 1970s bankrupt gritty New Hollywood NYC.
I only have to walk down the street in my small East Coast City to note that public intoxication, defecation, littering needles, disorderly conduct, and assault are far more common than they were even 5 years ago. Stores which have been a staple of our downtown have closed (RIP Reny's Congress St. location) explicitly because of theft and trespassing. Several other nearby stores now employ two security guards where they never had any. Your weird race-baiting and speculative ad hominem doesn't bring anything to the conversation and you should consider discarding it in the future.
I think crime is up. Living in NYC in 2019 was far superior to today. The pre covid NYC was not only safer, but trending even more so. The post covid NYC is less safe, and trending worse (I have recently moved to the suburbs to escape).
Im happy to accept your arguments that "its not nearly as bad as the 70s/80s". Sure. I concede that point. But thats not the point of issue.
I did not grow up in rationalist circles, and honestly some of that was intentional as it seemed like the adult version of that annoying kid in middle/high school who would "erm actually" vocally, rather than keep his thoughts to himself like a socially well adjusted individual who was smart enough to have recognized the teacher might not always be right.
But as part of it, I never really took the time to understand why *they* call themselves "rationalists". I assume (i still dont know for sure and dont care to) it is because they believe they are rational individuals who use logic and epistemic integrity to derive conclusions about the world.
But me personally, I always find it funny because, in layman's terms, if you say someone is "rationalizing something", it means theyre deluding themselves into affirming their preconceived notions by introducing selective evidence. And I think that is far more accurate for "rationalists" based on my observations.
It's very simple to understand: we call ourselves the Correctists, because we are the ones who are correct about everything
From the philosophical view, they're the empiricists; the rationalists are the other guys, the continental philosophers.
I tend to have more suspicion of the socially well-adjusted people (they're much more likely to be selling me a bill of goods), but as we've seen above the Internet rationalists can make their own mistakes.
Yeah, it’s very clear that you’re not familiar.
Thats correct!
But it doesnt take knowing the orthodoxy or history of whatever your movement is to accurately criticize and assess your inability to reason and successfully conclude on the truth of issues.
My movement?
Yes, it does take familiarity to accurately criticise, as your example demonstrates by contrast.
Lol. Okay bro. Yes, your movement "Yeah, I'll stick with Scott here" above.
If you wonder why your worldview has no purchase broadly, which I am sure you dont wonder, this comment section would be relatively reflective!
> Lol. Okay bro. Yes, your movement "Yeah, I'll stick with Scott here" above.
As in I’ll take his side of the disagreement that the whole article is about?
Did you think I meant I’ll stick with him through thick and thin, and agree with him on everything he says and be a part of any group he identifies as? Lmao think better bro
> If you wonder why your worldview has no purchase broadly, which I am sure you dont wonder
I don’t wonder that, because it’s borderline nonsensical. What would it mean for my worldview to “have purchase”? My worldview is composed of a wide variety of values and beliefs, many of which are very widely or near unanimously held. You have already admitted (and demonstrated) that you don’t have any familiarity with the set of beliefs you are attributing to me, let alone my actual worldview, and you have no idea how much “purchase” any or all of them have.
You’re just saying stuff, presumably annoyed by my calling you out for your uninformed criticisms of an intellectual movement you clearly don’t have enough knowledge to speak about. What you take as personal defensiveness is just a general dislike of confidently asserted nonsense.
I am finished replying to you. My comments herein are sufficient to stand on their own for a rational observer to read and comprehend my positions and rebut and "pre-but" your initial and later responses. And, for what it is worth, at this point I actually think your responses are very funny.
Man, another great piece. Thanks for sharing.
You write that the Church of Graphs privileges doxa over episteme—I disagree. To me, you and Scott Alexander are not so different. You are both conducting epistemic analyses. The difference is that you use gnosis and doxa in your analyses whereas adherents to the Church of Graphs are apparently forbidden from using gnosis at all.
Maybe the Church of Graphs not only forbids gnosis—it actively attacks it. The institutions of science, medicine, law, governance, and philosophy, the entire name of the game is to prove that your very eyes are lying to you. You don’t get a tenure-track position by concluding that crime does, in fact, hurt economic development of poor areas—you get that cushy job by producing a seemingly-well-reasoned epistemic analysis that concludes that crime is actually good for economic development. Or that poisonous pesticides actually produce better health outcomes in comparison to countries that don't use them. Or that crime is at all time lows. Or that the U.S. actually didn’t play a big role in WWII. Or any number of ridiculous things.
I suppose I don’t understand why some intelligent people seem to go down this path. It’s like they shun their ability to come to their own conclusions about the world. Very odd.
Excellent essay. My childhood Church shuttered due to dwindling attendance. The local diocese is now letting the city use the land for "single occupancy social housing." The result of this charity is dozens of drug addicts and criminals now live across the street from a middle school, the only local skate park, the only local football field, and the baseball field where I played little league.
We aren't just experiencing the blast radius from crime, it is being imposed on us by church and state.
Great essay. I really like how you framed this.
In my own Gnostic interpretation of things: I moved away from the USA 13 years ago. I visit my hometown roughly once a year. It is really truly true that I used to walk from my parents' house to the park with my childhood friends, and there was not litter, tents, and crazy people shouting at me. It is really truly true that the Walgreens did not have all the toothpaste and conditioner behind locked plexiglass three years ago, but does now. One of the things about just visiting a town you're really familiar with every year, but just once a year, is that the snapshots really highlight changes that might elide if you were there every day, experiencing a more gradual change.
But what do I know. I'm a Catholic, not a Graphist.
If it so pleases the comment section, I would like to present a case study on the difference between episteme and doxa. This one comes from the slightly less topical case of Somalis in Minnesota defrauding the state.
In 2018, an investigator employed by the state’s childcare program wrote a ten-page email alerting state officials of the extensive fraud he was seeing in the subsidized childcare program. Based on the size of the overall program, a cursory analysis of grant recipients similar to those he had successfully investigated, and the nature of the fraud, the investigator estimated that the true extent of the fraud reached $100M. He admits that this is a WAG (wild-ass guess) because the program requires insufficient documentation to thoroughly audit the recipients and his office lacked the manpower to investigate the daycares they suspected of defrauding the system.
The Minnesota Legislature’s Office of the Auditor wrote a report on the email. It’s relatively short, at about 30 pages. The conclusion? Far short of $100M, the fraud in the program is really only about $4M and the investigator has no support for his claim of two orders of magnitude higher. However, reading past the headline will give you the exact opposite impression, especially when one reads the summaries of the cases prosecuted.
The $4M figure comes from tallying up the amounts prosecuted in a court of law across about a dozen or so cases. The evidence in these prosecutions comes from videotaping the entrances to the daycares for a week or two and then comparing the headcount to the handwritten sign-in sheets the daycare provides for reimbursements. In these cases, investigators would find an average of 56 children show up daily vs. claimed figures of over 100, all of which were reimbursed. And so the daycare operator would be prosecuted for the $150k that the state could prove during the recorded two-weeks.
Did the daycare only defraud the state during the two weeks investigators happened to be watching? Of course not! The $150k prosecuted in that case is a fraction of what the daycare has stolen. $150k is all that the state could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. The legislator’s auditor used this strict, formal definition to arrive at and debunk the investigator’s informal estimate. But the layperson will almost certainly agree that the investigator’s estimate is much closer to the truth than the auditor’s.
It was Scott Alexander's review of _Seeing Like A State_ that introduced me to the concept of _legibility_. It seems dreadfully ironic that he is falling into such a clear legibility trap here.
I was a victim of crime in SF. I was visiting abd foolishly left my wetsuit and roadtrip compilation cd's and some other stuff in the car. Overnite it was broken into and the gear stolen. I was told there was no point in reporting it. That my recouse was to look for it at flea markets
Told by whom?
The people i was visiting who had lived there for years. A lawyer and a neuroscientist.
I left my walkable neighborhood and 3% mortgage due to crime being up.
A quick Google is basically your article.
The news reports
1.) bars and restaurants are closing and the ones that are left close earlier
2.) this is because crime
...but
The area has faced a "bad rap" due to sporadic, intense, late-night incidents.
Crime is actually down!
There’s a Turing test for BS. It’s imperfect, but it can be honed. It’s called the sniff test. Intuition is underrated.
I've had this same experience when reading Lyman Stone. Great writer, but an unabashed graph-head.
My cousin is a sociologist with a specialty on how survey questions and reporting mechanisms impact study outputs. Even in seemingly politically unbiased scenarios, there are all sorts of weird confounding factors that can give you an inaccurate picture. Like you said, they are useful, but not holy writ.
I also like the term spreadsheet-brained but it's practically a slur
If the national statistics show a decrease in crime, but one’s own lived experience shows an increase in crime, then either your life is a large outlier, or there’s something wrong with the statistics.
I can’t really compare as I don’t know what public order was like 30 years ago. In NYC, depictions in media and movies suggest it was much worse in the past? Entire areas of the city you wouldn’t go to for fear of being attacked. There are still places like that today, but quite a lot of the city is safe, albeit with a low hum of insane bums bumping around.
I am pretty comfortable with the conclusion that things have been much worse in living memory.
I've been reading Scott since 2015, and the last few months have seen a dramatic decline in the quality of his writing. Having kids slowed his output, which I understood, but he's also clearly developed some pretty bad AI Psychosis (he's even joked about it in some of his recent posts). Now he's regularly citing ChatGPT itself as a source for complex analyses and data.
I wonder how much of the crime post stuff was just him getting sucked into a little bubble by spending (in his words) 30 minutes per day chatting with LLMs. This sort of thing was always his failure mode, but possibly it used to be mitigated by the fact that he had to contact actual humans (and could trust that research he found online, if potentially horribly biased and full of methodological flaws, at least originated in a human brain).
LLMs are perfect members of the Church of Graphs: trained to favour doxa, and fundamentally incapable of gnosis.
Shrimp welfare man. I mean, come on. At the end of the day they're autistic bad faith actors.
That one Target store story is really funny.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics, data science, and left-wing talking points.
https://principlesvstribes.substack.com/p/behind-the-glass-lies-damned-lies?utm_source=publication-search
This was a very good essay.
Not being on Twitter (“X”) agrees with you.
100 shit posts are much more fun to write than one 5,000 word essay though
That is the problem.
The 5,000-word essay is of more value than the 100 sh*t posts.
We are not Benthamites.
There was a Compact magazine essay about this. At some point, perceptions of crime matter as well.
Got a link?
Democrats Are Kidding Themselves on Crime | Compact https://share.google/qEgMYNmoIcwM2XWCX
The people who think crime is up are overwhelmingly people from lily white rural and suburban areas who watch FoxNews all day and are convinced crime is way up in THOSE far away big cities and especially because of all the immigrants and the black people there.
NYC is absolutely a triumphant example of hyper extreme reductions in crime that have continued for decades now, even as the city has reached unbelievable levels of diversity. And the people who perceive lots of crime also perceive NYC (which most will never visit) as if it is a worse version of 1970s bankrupt gritty New Hollywood NYC.
I only have to walk down the street in my small East Coast City to note that public intoxication, defecation, littering needles, disorderly conduct, and assault are far more common than they were even 5 years ago. Stores which have been a staple of our downtown have closed (RIP Reny's Congress St. location) explicitly because of theft and trespassing. Several other nearby stores now employ two security guards where they never had any. Your weird race-baiting and speculative ad hominem doesn't bring anything to the conversation and you should consider discarding it in the future.
I was raised in the suburbs but I've lived in the same city for over 20 years.
I think crime is up. Living in NYC in 2019 was far superior to today. The pre covid NYC was not only safer, but trending even more so. The post covid NYC is less safe, and trending worse (I have recently moved to the suburbs to escape).
Im happy to accept your arguments that "its not nearly as bad as the 70s/80s". Sure. I concede that point. But thats not the point of issue.
Are you claiming non white people are incapable of noticing the increase in crime?