“A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.”
“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.
This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.
It's a pretty typical result from social science. 1500 respondents is a fairly large sample size--I've seen papers where you're talking closer to ~50.
Going from 22% to 32% is a 10 percentage point difference, but a 46% increase. I agree that the conclusion at the end is flimsy, and there are undoubtedly confounding factors--but the statistics are pretty well in line with what you'd expect in social sciences.
Yeah, but think about the error bars there. You’re looking at an MoE of around 3% for the entire sample, and more for these subgroups. The real difference could be just a couple percentage points and still be within the confidence interval.
I completely agree--many times, papers from the social sciences appear as exercises in "wringing signal from a sea of noise." They're not always successful or convincing! But often there is wide latitude because of the inherent noise...don't ask me why! I got out of economics for a reason!
Also notably the rural/urban divide is even wider, so even taking the data at face value it appears that it also be justified that high earners are more likely to be in urban areas, and that high-earner rural residents are more likely to spend time in urban areas, and that people more exposed to multiculturalism are more likely to espouse concern with policing.
If they they have a good confidence, there error could be around 3% up or down. So that's not bad.
And, yes, I think Defund the Police was primarily espoused and driven by people who would be little affected by the outcome of such performative stances.
The people who live in the places where the police got defunded suffer greater crime rates and disorder --which is why we see people at the grass roots asking for more police.
It's known that lawless places will suffer from lawlessness and then engender vigilantism --this is evident is most war-torn places where 'warlords'/gansters control neighborhoods.
Few cities reduced police budgets at all certainly nobody in any meaningful way defunded the police and even cities short of officers have funding for additional officers they lack people far more than money.
Also in case you didn't notice police don't do much to protect normal folks from crime. They'll be there 15 minutes after whatever happened happened to file a report if they aren't too busy screwing with law abiding citizens.
Personally Ive seen little help when needed and plenty of harassment.
> Yes, the police harass, sometimes I get harassed but that presence is what puts a lid on crime.
> I’ll put up with some harassment in exchange for fewer criminals running free.
Maybe you have a specific harassment:imprisonment ratio in mind, but to me this just says "bring on the police state".
> We can seek redress from the police, we cannot seek redress from criminals.
You can seek it, unless of course they kill you. But will you actually find it? Police departments are famous for investigating themselves and finding that they did nothing wrong.
I was harassed repeatedly made to stand with my hands on a patrol car for 15 minutes in case I had developed a record since last week when I was just walking home from my job at night. I was ultimately falsely arrested for using bad language whilst walking away, prepared a reasonable defense then a excellent appeal both of which were ignored. They showed it as dropped then re-raised it when I had left town.
If I was willing to spend 30 days in jail lose thousands of dollars income and spend thousands more I might be able to win it when appeals took it out of that fucked up state.
Realistically I can't do anything about it.
On the other hand they didnt really investigate the 2 attempts to burn down my apartment building attempted homicide x 50 x 2 nor arrest the ex co-worker who tried to murder one of his fellows in a walmart parking lot.
I was left to organize a neighborhood patrol of the premises in the one case and get a psycho to chase me to get him off a guy who can only run by pressing x.
We live in the worst of all possible worlds where police are available to shoot teens but aren't available to do their jobs. If you wonder why you can't hire enough cops wonder no more. It's not liberals pissing in their cornflakes a lot of good folks don't choose to be a part of an obvious shit show.
In closing it's been said those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither but more importantly they get neither. A police state isn't a particularly safe place.
Also, it's not quite clear how much of a material difference exists between the middle answer and the defund the police answer. The slogan has some optics issues, but diverting funds from overfunded surplus military gear filled police departments to social support networks is not likely to be controversial with the middle group either.
You’re making a huge false equivalence. We’re talking about anthropogenic climate change specifically. Implying that it is the same as ancient weather patterns from before the Industrial Revolution is comically dishonest.
I fell for this once when I was a newer developer. I bought a book on my Kindle about Ruby on Rails, thinking it might be more insightful or accessible than the Rails docs. But every chapter was literally just copy/pasted from the Rails docs (which are free).
Like 3/4 of Amazon's listings for classic books are Print on Demand scams that exist to trick people buying books as gifts, who don't know what they're looking at and don't know to watch out for this sort of thing. Just Project Gutenberg text automatically sent to the printer, no manual typesetting or clean-up or any actual care put into it. They're just garbage, literally. Pure waste.
A funny thing that made the rounds on social media over here a few years ago was somebody buying a translated copy of Moby Dick. Turned out it was evidently translated by Google translate or some similar service, and it was atrocious.
Literally the first sentence "Call me Ishmael" was translated as if the meaning was to tell Ishmael to call the story teller on the phone.
It’s a huge shame too because it shouldn’t be that hard for Amazon to filter it out. It’s not like there isn’t a database of these classic works, at least the ~2000 most popular ones that must account for 95+% of searches. If only they had the economic incentive to do so.
The trouble with arbitrary societal consensus is that it’s arbitrary. And not necessarily any wiser than an individual’s personal desires.
These monks aren’t impulsively killing themselves, they seem to be towards the end of their lives anyway and are choosing how they want to go out. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I might prefer to be in hospice hopped up on drugs when I pass, but I won’t claim to be morally superior for it.
The person you’re replying to said that the possibility of being shot at school is psychologically taxing. This would apply to all students at all schools, not just ones where a shooting literally happened. It is relevant because of how frequent school shootings are now, compared to say, 30 years ago. Columbine shook the country when it happened, now we’re at a couple Columbine-style incidents per year. You can say “well that’s still a low overall percentage of students who get shot” and be technically correct while ignoring the gravity of the situation and the fact that other first world countries don’t have this problem.
The fact that school shootings have been so normalized that we’re sitting here and discussing the math around whether they’re worse than social media is… so profoundly sad it’s hard to describe.
I agree shootings do large societal harm past the students at the school (though to be fair, I'd say the opposite side could correctly argue that TikTok makes lasting changes to children/society beyond just the ones that use it (and may be correlated with depression/suicide, which is also profoundly sad))
Surely you have to do some kind of math eventually, or else you'll end up prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter (consider people who are more afraid of sharks than drowning, even though shark deaths are 1 in 4,332,817 and drowning deaths are 1 in 1,134)
I acknowledge that the numbers I'm using are not, by any means, conclusive. And I'm not saying we should prioritize TikTok above shootings just because it's more common. But this seems like a reason to get better evidence about the way the world is, not refuse to touch numbers because some harms are too sacred to attempt to quantify.
> Surely you have to do some kind of math eventually, or else you'll end up prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter (consider people who are more afraid of sharks than drowning, even though shark deaths are 1 in 4,332,817 and drowning deaths are 1 in 1,134)
TSA? Or any other "but think of the children"-type bill? Or look at water-scarcity "solutions" in the south west for something different.
I'm serious, "prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter" is literally 90% of the politician's playbook.
I think we can safely say that social media hurts mental health worldwide, and school shootings are also really bad for people. It’s almost like they’re separate issues and we don’t have to pick one or the other to deal with. Does that sound reasonable?
Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc.
If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.
Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.
This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.