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toadworrier  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   1808 thread views

Mary's Motte and the case against progress

I have a subsblog. And my [first post][mm] is against those who say there's "no such thing as progress"

https://www.amphobian.info/p/marys-motte-and-the-case-against.

I'm basing this off Mary Harrington's recent podcast with Bret Weinstein. But more likely I'm picking a fight with some y'all here, so I hope you enjoy it.

It is one thing when someone is merely wrong. But when someone denies what is starkly before everyone's eyes, then bullshit is in the air. And that is what I smell whenever I hear the dogma that "there is no such thing as progress".

I these dogmatists of of a motte-and-bailey trick

... progress-skeptics retreat back to the safety of Mary's Motte and acknowledge the growth of knowledge, productivity social complexity and human health but deny that this is called progress.

Their motte is a Reasonable But Wrong claim that these sorts of growth aren't morally valuable. Their bailey extends to denying history and also accusing optimists of teleological magical thinking. But really progress has a simple cause: useful knowledge increases.

Civilised humans took millennia to discover writing, bronze and electricity. But we have not since undiscovered them. Useful knowledge is easier to retain than win and easier to win than destroy. On the scale of history, it is quickly disseminated, replicated and used. It gets encoded redundantly in books, technologies, social practices and the genes of domesticated species. Every generation inherits a vast and waxing store of ancestral knowledge both explicit and tacit.

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the go-to political claim by the respectable institutions is that crime is caused by poverty.

Put scare quotes around "respectable" next time. And yeah, poverty only even correlates with a fraction of the problem.

We have a homicide rate that's increased or kept the same

And you say "since 1930s"? No. The 2020 jump leaves us worse than 1937-1939, but it's still below the start of the 30s and nearly 20% below the peak. The first big jump in homicide was over the 1900s through 1920s (following a long secular decline), and then the mid 30s through mid 50s was a decline again.

But though since the 1930s the US homicide rate fell a little again on net, the "huge jump from 1960 to 1980 then decline again from 1980 to 2000 then sudden more moderate jump in 2020" pattern is more complicated than that. This roller coaster is an interesting phenomenon but you have to pay attention to the details, not oversimplify. "We screwed up something horribly between 1930 and today" would have us looking in the wrong places, if the problem is really that we screwed up something super horribly between 1910 and 1930 and then again between 1960 and 1980 (or between 1890 and 1910 and then again between 1940 and 1960, if the "childhood lead exposure" theories are right) and we've fixed something between 1990 and 2010 but only part way.

If anything, we still could use way more details. E.g. I'd love to see that "murder correlates astonishingly well with single parenthood rates" graph extended in time instead of just space; looking at just national data they did increase together but then when the homicide rate fell the single parenthood rate didn't.

Why, on the basis of this data would we conclude there's less violence ?

As another comment here just paraphrased today: "if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?"" This is not a straight path to truth.

The other data I've brought directly concerns the violent crime rate rather than trying to extrapolate from a biased subcategory of it. Ceteris paribus, far fewer people admitting to having been victimized is evidence of fewer victims! You've come up with the possibility that the ratio of crime to reported crime (and the ratio of crime to surveyed crime!? the ratios of surveyed to reported crime haven't changed too much) both increased a lot, not because you've brought evidence of that but because that would let you answer "CAN I believe this is wrong" in the affirmative. You're simultaneously neglecting the possibility that the ratio of (attempted) homicide to other violent crime increased slightly, because that is necessary to let you answer "MUST I believe this is right" in the negative. If now 4% of violence ends in death instead of 2%, like the data seems to show, that would have interesting implications ... but if your priors are "violence is simply proportional to homicide" then "true" is no longer a conclusion you can reach, it's in a blind spot that gets filled in from assumptions instead of evidence.

Put scare quotes around "respectable" next time. And yeah, poverty only even correlates with a fraction of the problem.

I'm giving you a downvote because that's really what people at Harvard profess to believe and what polite society seems to believe and pretending it's not so is rather odd.

And you say "since 1930s"? No. The 2020 jump leaves us worse than 1937-1939, but it's still below the start of the 30s and nearly 20% below the peak. The first big jump in homicide was over the 1900s through 1920s (following a long secular decline), and then the mid 30s through mid 50s was a decline again.

We've gone over this. Homicide isn't nearly as lethal now as then. Thus having the same rate now implies perhaps 50-100% higher rate of violence, or more.

Ceteris paribus, far fewer people admitting to having been victimized is evidence of fewer victims!

Has the survey wording stayed the same ? Then yes. But we all know how is it with politicised measures.

Scare quotes are for things which are believed to be true but which are not true.

It was bad enough when I was getting downvotes for disagreeing with you; if you're now also downvoting me for paragraphs where I agree with you then I think I'm out of options for replies you'll be able to appreciate.

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