
Beyond fiction - ingve
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3903
======
jdoliner
The inability to see from anyone's perspective but his own is astonishing
here. Starting with the title "Beyond fiction," the only part of this account
that strikes me as fictional are Aaronson's explanation of why he did nothing
wrong. To any reasonable observer it appears that Aaronson has committed a
very petty crime that robs minimum wage workers of a tiny bit of extra income.
Actually it doesn't just appear that way... that's actually what he did.

He's then somehow pretending that he's been oppressed for this, as if the
officers hauled him off to an interrogation room.

> how do you live in a world where, again and again, you can choose the hard
> right path over the easy wrong one, and then see your choice gleefully
> wielded against you?

Nothing was really wielded against him, except for the fact that he absent-
mindedly committed a petty crime and had to deal with police officers
questioning him about that.

~~~
breck
Agreed. The title made me hope this post was going to be about some new
unbelievable quantum breakthrough.

Instead....he stole from a tip jar???!

That is one of the most despicable crimes one can commit. I am surprised the
police didn't use __more __force. Generally if you steal from a tip jar and
the staff sees you, you should pray the police show up to protect you.

I have also never in my life heard of someone accidentally stealing from a tip
jar. That is bad luck for him. My opinion is he should change this story from
a melodrama to a lighthearted comedy and count his blessings he still has all
his teeth.

~~~
cafard
I would say that he "took money" from a tip jar, rather than "stole" from a
tip jar, since by his account there was no intent to take what was not his.

"One of the most despicable crimes one can commit."? I do not respect persons
who steal tips, but on a scale of criminality, it strikes me as a long way
from the top of the despicability index.

~~~
breck
YMMV but my despicable ranking puts the crime of stealing from hard working
low-income workers at about a 9/10\. That's why this story could be so great
as comedy, since he committed a rare and evil crime __accidentally __. But the
way it 's told now I think is very off-putting.

------
aero142
What a strange view into the mind of someone who I assume is absolutely
brilliant in his field. He sees the world as defying the laws of probability
to oppress him but it reads the exact opposite to me. The surprising part to
me is that we have created a world that so successfully coddles us. That a
person who repeatedly fails to execute fairly simple tasks in an airport that
is specifically designed to make everything as strait forward as possible is
otherwise a very successful human. His ancestors survived warfare, hunting
food in the wild, traveling across thousands of miles with only the things on
their backs. Yet here he is, struggling to recover from the stress of being
delayed less than a single day while participating in the miracle of flight.
If his ancestors forgot their food pack at such a level of stress, or reached
down towards a snake in the same we he grabbed for money in front of him, he
would be dead.

I agree. The universe seems to defy the laws of probability. It's not to
oppress one absent minded professor. It's that the genetic ancestors of this
man all managed to not get eaten by a lion in order to build a world that
allows him and his family to survive while being incapable of functioning
under normal levels of adversity.

~~~
backpropaganda
> an airport that is specifically designed to make everything as strait
> forward as possible

You'll find that you're in a very very small minority of people who think
airports are designed to make everything as straightforward as possible.

------
jadbox
A weird amount of gaslighting and over/under victimization going on in this
thread. Everything is relative to the experience, but the one real truth is
how someone feels about the experience. He doesn't overly blame the offices or
the shop, but rather trying to understand how his situation applies to
something larger. We can have empathy for all the actors in the situation
without needing to cutdown or over rationalize more than one person telling
their story.

~~~
polotics
I have a serious issue with your statement: "the one real truth is how someone
feels about the experience". How is this not moral relativism?

Also can you explain what gaslighting you saw?

~~~
jadbox
Truth of what is known, not of what actually happened. No one else has written
about their view of the experience (or we're aware of), so the only knowledge
of the situation is one person's accounting. Not a statement of moral
relativism, although that's a complex subject in itself.

Gaslighting can be viewed as any statement here that either fabricates or
contrudes another's internal feelings. For example several comments mention
that the situation he felt wasn't traumatic. That term is an emotional
response and often doesn't require being a rational one. My grandmother had a
traumatic event when an egg she was cooking exploded. Sure it's silly, but to
tell someone that a feeling isn't real is being a bully. At other times, that
feeling can give us an insight into the experience that might just be too easy
to otherwise rationalize away.

------
jspiral
Story amazed me:

\- forgets method of payment within seconds

\- thinks it makes sense to get coinless change returned in a cup

\- doesn't think to tip himself

\- confronted by employee but can't understand the issue and doesn't bother to
reach understanding. I guess just walks away?

\- when confronted by police, acts out guilty person stereotype (IF I did it,
there's an excuse)

Taken together, it's almost beyond belief that someone could truly navigate
this chain of events with pure intentions.

Clearly, there are people who this could be true for. It makes me wonder if
there could be a different explanation like exhaustion -> low impulse control
in lizard brain -> "drunken blackout behavior"

I would be thanking my lucky stars to get away with this.

------
3stripe
If your explanation to the officers was even 50% as longwinded as your blog
post, I'm not surprised you nearly got yourself in trouble... (I think you
admit as much when you talk about a "central mistake").

~~~
cure
Or why some people say never talk to the police:
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvkgnp/law-professor-
poli...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvkgnp/law-professor-police-
interrogation-law-constitution-survival)

------
jasonmp85
> If you doubt this, simply imagine Arthur Chu or Amanda Marcotte in place of
> the police officers.

Thinking of writing Scott to demand compensation for my eyes rolling out of my
head.

------
petermcneeley
I think Scott just expected a different kind of interaction from a civil
society. But he isnt living in a civil society, his is living in a place where
the only connection between people is the free market. Even the smallest break
in the only code they have must be met with extreme measures. Its the only
thing keeping it together.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I think Scott just expected a different kind of interaction from a civil
> society.

Did he?

Seems to me that he outright admits that both the actual encounter and his
mental picture of it are shaped by strongly by his strong internal expectation
of persecution based on his “nerdy outsider” status, and saw everyone—starting
with the smoothie worker trying to inform him that the money he had just
picked up was from the tip jar—as being aligned against him because of this
status.

It seems like he got what he expected, largely because he expected it so much
that it blinded him to what was actually happening.

~~~
petermcneeley
I consider this to be his conclusion:

"Again and again, I screwed up. Again and again, though, the airport personnel
responded to my honest mistakes with a maximum of cold bureaucracy rather than
commonsense discussion: the booting from the flight, the bomb squad, the
handcuffs."

------
pdabbadabba
Wow. This blog post itself is the only thing "beyond fiction" here. As I read
it, Aaronson:

1\. Stole money out of the tip jar due to some sort of incomprehensible error,
presented as though it is a normal human foible;

2\. Was confronted by employees, whereupon he continued to somehow not
understand that he had just taken money out of the tip jar. He put a dollar
back in and walked away. Aaronson paints the employees' protestations that
"this here is for tips" (a bit of dialect that tells us more, I suspect, about
Aaronson's regard for smoothie bar employees than about what those employees
actually said) as somehow not sufficiently clear, under the circumstances.
Those circumstances being: he just took $4 from an unmarked plastic cup
sitting on a tray thinking (for some reason) this was his change, only to have
the employee point towards the vicinity of the cup and say something like
"that's for tips." The employee continues to shout even after he has put a
"tip" in the cup and begun to walk away.

3\. Chalks this all up to his being a "nerdy outsider" (as though the smoothie
place employees are all "insiders" on top of the world)

4\. Is eventually confronted by police officers who, through dialogue that, as
Aaronson has rendered it here, again probably tells us more about his own
conceptions than about what was actually said, demand that he confess. Not
surprisingly, the cops are pretty gruff with him. Among other things, they
think that he's some jerk that just stole $4 in tips. (Which, of course, is at
least partially true!)

5\. Paints this interaction as yet another instance in which he was victimized
because he is some sort of outsider.

6\. Is eventually released by the police after, among other things, it is
revealed that the smoothie bar employees people refused his offer of $40 and
did not want the police involved in the first place. This is nice human
behavior, which Aaronson continues to paint as somehow absurd. Aaronson
describes this as being released because the cops "have no case." Actually, it
sounds like they had him dead to rights, but it was a minor misunderstanding,
so everyone decided to let it go--as they should have.

7\. Draws from this the major lesson that he is always the victim of some
"hostile theory" or other. If that's true, this is a particularly poor
example, since he did actually still the tip money, under circumstances that,
even as he described them, and with all the charity that this implies, defy
reason.

8\. Concludes that "the airport personnel responded to my honest mistakes with
a maximum of cold bureaucracy rather than commonsense discussion." At least
when it comes to the tip theft, this is manifestly false. The workers did not
want the police involved, attempted to correct his error themselves through
ordinary human interaction (which he somehow did not understand), generously
rejected his offer of $40, and he was eventually released by the cops despite
having committed a (very petty) crime.

9\. Insight fully observes that "my belief in the universe’s grotesque
awfulness clearly played a role in the events." This is an admirable humble
insight. But he would be well served by isolating the part of his psyche that
came up with this thought and give it a big promotion. It's not getting enough
airtime as it is.

I feel like I may be too harsh here but...what am I missing?

Edit: Here's one thing I missed: I don't think Aaronson is a bad person
because he somehow got confused at a smoothie counter. It sounds like he just
had an off day, and I sympathize. It's his inclination to paint himself as the
victim here, even after extended reflection, that strikes me as the real
problem.

~~~
backpropaganda
You're missing the part where this could happen to anyone including you on any
regular day. The way we've set our systems and laws of probability up, you
might see yourself handcuffed a random day of your life and go through a
significant amount of stress imagining yourself locked up in jail. While
you've correctly described the theory in terms of the facts, you're missing
the subjective first-person experience of the character in the story.

~~~
pdabbadabba
All true. But I think what you're missing is my last paragraph. :)

I agree that it sounds like a genuinely miserable experience that could,
conceivably, happen to anyone. (Though perhaps not in that exact way...) My
gripe is with his analysis of the situation now that he's had time to reflect,
not with the fact that he did what he did, or that he found it stressful.

