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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Things like general statistics, trends that can be gained from a large volume/scale of evidence, while being able to sort for other factors that are justice adjacent.

This seems to me to be a good-faith question, but do you think this sort of thing is possible to do, in some general sense?

From 2014 through 2020, Blue Tribe collectively made a large-scale push for reform of our criminal justice and policing systems. How should we assess that movement and its consequences?

This graph is probably my favorite single piece of data from the last decade or two. It seems obvious to me that "how many unarmed black men are shot by the Police per year" is a question of direct and very significant relevance to our recent politics, and that this question is a reasonable proxy for tribal views on law enforcement policy. It's also obvious to me, from looking at the statistics, that the correct answer is "about ten".

This graph is probably my second-favorite piece of of data. It shows a recent dramatic increase in violent crime, with a clear inflection point coinciding with Ferguson and the founding of the BLM movement and another massive inflection point coinciding with the Floyd riots (and with COVID and the attendant lockdowns, to be fair, but that doesn't really change the calculus much given the tribal salience of lockdown policy).

What I get from these two graphs is that Blue Tribe was catastrophically misinformed about at least one of the most salient details of the policing/criminal justice question, and that their efforts at revolutionary change of the criminal justice system resulted in a massive and incredibly destructive crime wave. I'll readily admit that other conclusions might be drawn, but it seems to me that to the extent that data drives discussion in any meaningful sense, this thesis ought to be, at a minimum, a major part of that discussion. I do not think it's possible to name a more significant intervention in the criminal justice system in living memory, and that intervention neatly coincided with the worst increase in violent crime rates ever recorded.

Instead, what I observe is that this thesis is entirely absent from most intertribal discussions on the topic, and attempts to introduce it are generally fruitless. And maybe this is reasonable; maybe the evidence really isn't strong enough. But if this evidence isn't strong enough, where's the stronger evidence that's supposed to be driving the discussion? These graphs are my favorites because they are unusually clear and unusually strong, and because they demonstrate a result I could and did predict in advance based on historical precedent. What does better evidence look like, and what precisely makes it "better"?

The question generalizes. For example, take the debate over racism generally: if we accept the Blue Tribe idea that racism causes bad outcomes for black people, then in a nation of 50 states and 300 million people and across, say, the last three decades, we ought to be able to detect a "racism gradient" in the outcomes of local Black populations. That is to say, heavily Progressive areas with strongly progressive policies ought to deliver superior outcomes for Blacks to strongly conservative policies in heavily conservative areas. The existence of such a gradient is an axiom in much Progressive discourse. Yet, near as I can tell, such a gradient does not exist to any significant extent, and this fact has no measurable impact on the national conversation.

Or take gun control. Between the 80s and now, we've seen massive changes in firearms policy nationwide, with plenty of local divergence for purposes of comparison. Over that time the average rifle changed from a bolt-action deer rifle to a high-capacity semi-auto AR15, and the average pistol went from a .38 revolver to a high-capacity 9mm semi-auto. Over that time, concealed carry went from vanishingly rare to legal in a majority of states with millions carrying daily. And over that time, violent crime dropped precipitously and then bottomed out at a level much, much lower than in the hieghts of the 70s and 80s, despite uniform progressive predictions that failure to implement stringent gun control would result in a massive increase in violent crime. Again, this split between predictions and observed results has no appreciable impact on the national conversation.

Nor are other fields better. I've more or less given up on the field of economics, given my experience with the predictions of the field. Ditto for environmentalism and Climate Change, ditto for educational policy, and so on and on. COVID was a recent example where, if data could drive a debate, the debate should have been driven by data. My assessment is that it was not.

I'm entirely open to being wrong, for what it's worth. Where do you see conversations being driven by data? What's the model we should be following?

Did you read the ACX article On Prison and Crime?

Presumably [this article?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you

  • I have not; I stopped reading Scott some years ago. I'll give this one a try though.

Yeah, that's the article I meant. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for the links. I agree that that is compelling evidence, and I wish there was more stuff like that at the centre of discussions from both sides. My impression is that the left tends to supply evidence of social problems but comes up with a lot of counterproductive solutions to make people feel better without much material change - dealing with the most outrageous problems instead of the ones that are at the root of the matter (which are much harder to address). And you are right, a lot of people are not willing to address evidence if it is not in their side's favour. But that kind of loses sight of the goal, which should be to figure out what works and what doesn't (or at least, I would think so).

What does better evidence look like, and what precisely makes it "better"?

Well, things like having a wide scope, multiple data points, being able to compare multiple sets of data, considering context (what policies changed? Funding? Cultural/demographic changes?). And going beyond that, making hypotheses about how changes in those factors and context would change outcomes, which allows for the development of constructive changes for the future. Of course, all of these things aren't always available, but I think considering how much information exists in the world now, we should be placing value on analysis and data collection to actually better social conditions (rather than data collection that furthers more selfish end games, or flyong blind). It's ironic to me that now that so much data is (potentially) available, people are more interested in the highest profile/heated things that divert attention from basic government functioning.

My government, for example, just stopped tracking the number of people who die while waiting for a medical procedure. That seems easy to collect, and also really useful when trying to gauge how successful your healthcare system is! This inspires a lot of cynisism in me, and very little confidence in what they are doing, even if they end up doing a good job - it's what a deceitful government would do if they wanted to cover up poor health care management.

The opposite is taking measures to promote transparency, which is exactly what people who are serving the public should do, in my opinion. Transparency is not a partisan issue, but when people, whether they are politicians or their supporters, act unscrupulously then it is clearly in their best interest to be as opaque as possible. The issue is that opacity is seen as a good thing when it is on the good side, and bad when it's on the other side. But there is no way to tell which side is good when they are both opaque.