> What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?
> When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.
I find it very malicious to just drop numbers like this. It gives the impression that you state a simple fact, while the reality is much more complicated than that.
The studies on the subject require much more subtlety and statistical understanding when interpreting the results that a 2 line quotation to make a point.
There are a number of factors to take into account when giving credit to such studies:
- Is there enough observations to have statistically significant results? (i.e. do we have enough occurences of police strikes to really have meaningful results? can we have overwelmingly influencing factors not present in the studied samples: I guess it would likely highly depend on the city where the strike happens also)
- Did the sample properly allowed the isolation of the variable being studied against other influencing factors?
- What is the collinearity between the variables used for the regression? (i.e. if violence complaints are made on the spot, then less police means harder to fill complaints, it doesn't necessarily mean less violence)
"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" has a good introduction to the challenges of such studies, and discusses a bit the particular case of police.
Please don't introduce personal swipes like "malicious" into what's otherwise a fine HN comment. It usually provokes the person you're talking to into replying with worse; or if that doesn't happen, it causes other people to take your comment the wrong way (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20960084). It also breaks the site guideline against calling names in arguments:
But it can be equally malicious to just drop generic potential shortcomings of scientific studies, without any attempt to figure out whether they apply to the specific study under discussion.
I don't agree with this comment at all. Skepticism isn't denying the claim or advocating an alternative one, it is promoting thoroughness and responsibility. The uninspected claim is quite a bit more dangerous.
This particular flavor of skepticism does not promote thoroughness and responsibility, in fact it promotes laziness: "Why read (or even skim) through the article when I can just state these five ways in which the article might be bad and therefore its argument void?"
If you think broad skepticism or criticism of a scientific study based on class characteristics is admissible (some statistical investigations are poorly conducted, so this one might be poor too), why not trust based on class characteristics (scientific articles in Nature tend to be really good, so this one might be good too)?
You're right, I don't think either of these options is better than the other.
>I find it very malicious to just drop numbers like this. It gives the impression that you state a simple fact, while the reality is much more complicated than that. The studies on the subject require much more subtlety and statistical understanding when interpreting the results that a 2 line quotation to make a point.
And yet such numbers are dropped all the time. I also do not see callouts for number drops being consistently applied. For example in political subreddits sees number drops without callouts when it supports the lean of the subreddit and number drops with callouts when it does not.
Criticism of science seems to be unequally applied, and given how important equal application of criticism is to science being reliable, it creates a reliability problem.
As an outsider reading this thread I couldn't help but laugh at this.
Galanwe said phry was "very malicious", which is actually and not just tenuously a personal attack. Do you plan to delete their comment as well? Interesting standards on HN.
Please don't interpret as "standards" what is typically a simple case of us seeing one comment and not the other. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. If you run across something that didn't get moderated when it should have, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it.
Edit: I've tracked down the comment you're referring to and indeed, no moderator saw it. I've replied to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20964408. In the future, if there's a comment you're concerned about, you should either flag it or email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
If you haven't checked specifically with us about a post, please don't draw conclusions about HN moderation—those are almost always non sequiturs. People usually jump to the idea that we secretly support the one side (where they didn't see us moderate) over the other side (where they did). That is reading patterns into randomness.
Edit: Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
"It lets everyone know it's safe to ignore you" is a personal attack. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd really appreciate it.
Ok, I believe you that that was your intent. But "you" is a personal pronoun. If you use that pronoun and sling pejoratives, people are naturally going to interpret it as a personal attack, as I did. If you don't want to be read that way, the burden is on you to disambiguate that.
> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"),[1] short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
You failed at the "genuine discussion" part by citing pop econ horseshit.
It occurred to me that the result is not necessarily unexpected if it were due to under reporting (i.e. during the slowdown there was less opportunity to report major crime and therefore reports fell). The researchers discuss that in the paper. I don't have time to read the paper in detail and come to a conclusion one way or another, but I thought it might be of interest to people who might not otherwise click on an La Times link.
> In our analyses, we examine how crime under-reporting may bias the results. We employ precinct fixed-effects to address time-invariant sources of under-reporting, such as communities’ varying histories of police distrust. We then model time-variant sources of under-reporting biases, such as those caused by the killing of Eric Garner and/or the heightened conflict between protesters and police. Model (5) in Fig. 3 controls for the number of community complaints reported in each precinct-week for misdemeanours
and criminal violations. Assuming that time-variant sources of under-reporting are correlated across crime types, this model is robust to slowdown-induced under-reporting bias. While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting, our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during
a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory. Additional tests show the results are robust to specifications including controls for long-term trends in crime (Fig. 3 model (6)), lagged
‘Major crime arrests’ (Fig. 3 model (7)) and lagged ‘Major crime complaints’ (Fig. 3 model (8)).
That’s not the same as going completely on strike. It’s possible that police wouldn’t go completely on strike, but it’s also possible that the work stoppages or disruptions would affect something more essential than the “broken windows” policy. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what might go wrong even inside prisons.
There is a non-trivial risk of violent, even armed conflict if there really was a police strike and the National Guard was called in to restore order. That’s not something a state governor wants on their record.
> Literally, global warming activists, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, are saying we have 11 years or less left of Earth,
They literally are not, conservatives & CC deniers like you just keep parroting this misrepresentation for the purposes of easy dismissal. The 11-12 years is a time period for REDUCING EMISSIONS to keep warming UNDER A CERTAIN LEVEL. but of course you know this and are simply lying about it.
you're completely deranged. socialism/communism is barely mentioned at all in the public school system, and never in a positive light. the genocide of native americans was not discussed outside of a cursory mention of the Trail of Tears. watching 'Roots' was about the depth of instruction on slavery. I never heard a single critical word about the US from any teacher, and I was in the public school system all the way through college. I never even had to read Howard Zinn, the classic conservative boogeyman, a single time for any class.
the far-right in Europe is resurgent largely on the back of anti-migrant racism and hysteria, and that's with a crisis involving 5-6 million people. now imagine things with 25 million people, or more, and not just focused in Europe. it's going to be very bad.
literally all of them? toxic masculinity is not about the traits themselves being inherently bad, it's about them being elevated to the point of excluding other things, and the unhealthy ways this manifests in society.
> toxic masculinity is not about the traits themselves being inherently bad, it's about them being elevated to the point of excluding other things, and the unhealthy ways this manifests in society.
To me it seems as simplistic as speaking about female hysteria (which was the case in the medical profession for centuries, ever since the Greeks).
Thinking in terms of “female traits” that are taken to an extreme. That kind of thinking itself says women should be afraid to give in too much into “their nature”, because it’s just a societal construct where they are encouraged to be, say, irrational, catty, moody, whatever. (They have to question who they act and “be more logical like men” — a social conservative like Jesse Peterson would still advocate that today.)
(And frankly I believe that ADD is the new Hysteria, but for kids.)
Does that sound like a productive way to conduct public discourse and discuss issues among adults?
The concept "toxic masculinity" is just the opposite of "female hysteria", actually. Hysteria historically was basically always been used as a crutch by the medical profession as "there's something wrong with this woman due to their inherent female-ness". Literally, "women are crazy because they have uteruses".
Contrast with toxic masculinity, which focuses on external, societal pressures which force/encourage men to behave in ways that are harmful to themselves and others, rejecting the idea that men are "just like that".
(As for ADD being the hysteria being the new hysteria, I can totally see the resemblance)
Also, the website for your source is run by a fundamentalist, anti-LGBT hate group [1], so you might want to consider picking a different one.
Right, that was lazy, I try to pick less biased websites in general to illustrate points. Although to be honest, I myself prefer to read both sides of an issue from biases sources, as they are more diligent. See my reply to the sibling comment for that.
Yeah, ADD is the new hysteria in my opinion, although you can also split hairs and say it’s different because kids really DO bounce around and have more energy, vs saying all women have anxiety or whatever. It’s close enough, in my mind, to discuss the general attitude by analogy.
Whether it’s something intrinsic to the person, or something that society makes them do, is an interesting question. But every time I object, it is because is framed in words that evoke the former, that something is “inherent” in kids and women and men, such as “masculinity”, and it can go too far.
That is not so much a critique of society, at least because of the choice of words, as say if we said:
Schools are the reason more kids experience ADD (sit down and shut up for 10 hours a day, learn to work for corporations)
Conditions women were kept in were the reason for their anxiety (eg yellow wallpaper short story)
How society uses men to do physically demanding and risky jobs / go to war / make the first move leads them to act the way they act.
Instead, it says “boys were taught masculine trait X, and that leads to wife battering” but that’s a short hop skip and jump from that to “it leads to sexist behavior” to “it leads to microaggressions” and “it leads to unwanted advances in the form of a compliment or asking someone out who you barely know based on their beauty alone”. In short, it can be weaponized to further eliminate what has until now been considered “normal masculine” behavior, because gender dymorphism does actually exist, etc. So many men are threatened and many women feel also that “all the real men” have disappeared. But really, it’s because of all the uncertainty about whether traditional gender roles (I’m talking about a man making the first move or holding open a door or planning a date, say) are desirable or not.
Anyway, I just feel when it comes to ADD, Autism, Depression, Hysteria, Toxic Masculinity etc. I’d rather focus 90% of my efforts on what society is doing NOW, and not use words like “bitchy woman” or “toxic masculinity” and excuse it by saying you’re just talking about what was done to boys in the past, because a lot of time the solutions lie in the present. And society can make it a LOT easier for people without putting them in these situations NOW. With changing society, NOT just medicating or doing psychiatric interventions.
Obese? Consider what society is doing, systemically, subsidizing sugar, putting antibiotics in factory farm animals.
Depressed? Consider the family structure, living alone, social ties, physically meeting, exercise regimen and societal expectations.
ADHD? Consider whether the public school system has become a glorified daycare because BOTH parents have to work full days at corporations just to pay the rent.
And so on. The answer is to change society, not blame the individual. I am a progressive in the sense of technology! But I am more of a social conservative in that I think the individual is constantly being blamed to keep up with the latest plan for normal behavior, when in reality society can improve. I would even be so bold as to take it to race as well:
Black targeted more by police?
Blaming individuals: “Recognize your white privilege”
Blaming society: “Useless drug war incarcerates Blacks disproportionately, Contraception availability leads to premarital sex instead of early marriages and more single parent homes, Failing schools face no market discipline because parents have no vouchers or choice, police are unaccountable”
Solutions: School vouchers, UBI, abolish minimum wage, end drug war, body cameras for all cops
Notice that all these solutions are race/gender neutral and may work far better!! But we suck all the political capital out of the room when we start talking about this new kind of bashing the individual, which is sometimes derogatorily referred to as “the regressive left” or “cultural marxism”.
I wouldn't necessarily ascribe too much journalistic merit regarding your source link; it's quite clearly a biased source by design.
A cursory glance at their home page reveals as much, and they spell it out clearly themselves.
From their FAQ [1]:
>What is OneNewsNow.com and who operates this site?OneNewsNow.com is the website of the American Family News Network (AFN), a national Christian news service. Our goal is to present the day's news from a biblical perspective. We not only feature the latest breaking stories from across the United States and around the world, but also news of the challenges facing Christians in today's society.
Sure, I just grabbed the first link I found about this fact that Gillette lost billions. Here are some more links about the same thing, with their CEO addressing it:
To be sure, there is no way to prove causation from correlation. Perhaps it was a giant coincidence in timing. But I wouldn’t say there is “NO” evidence to support the thesis that men got offended:
There is no evidence that the "best a man can get" ads pushing back against sexism and bullying contributed to the $8 billion figure.
It's a little more subtle than that. What they want is more people who assimilate.
The issue with immigration from Latin America is that the volume has been high enough that their original communities and cultures survive in tact, and those cultures involve a lot of socialist policies. It's Republicans not wanting to import people who vote for Democrats.
That's not really the case for immigration from places like Vietnam who assimilate much faster, but if they treat people differently like that then they get accused of racism and sued over it. So if they want to stymie net-Democrat-voter overall immigration by being pedantic about old forms then they have to do it uniformly.
Gandhi was hardly the sole arbiter of Indian resistance. In fact their success in fighting colonial rule was dependent on the reality that there were people like Bhagat Singh who were willing to and did use militant tactics.
OTM. The history of the Indian independence movement is a lot more complicated than the simple image of Ghandi and non-violence that most people receive through popular culture.
This thread is fun. The problems are X, Y, Z but not A (even though A results in X, Y, Z). Do people think lobbiests and corporations are somehow operating outside of capitalism?
> When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...