"there's actually a huge amount of formal academic evidence...I'm not linking any of the evidence here because right now I'm going off scattered memories of having seen this kind of stuff."

u/Kingofkings1233 67 points at 1620836254.000000

Source: just trust me dude, I read it somewhere

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u/finfinfin 15 points at 1620843980.000000

\*nods Jirtily* It's in the Appendices.

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u/orincoro 10 points at 1620932430.000000

“Many people say.”

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u/ProfColdheart 56 points at 1620840968.000000

the alternatives to policing that CHAZ etc propose

Tell me he has a better sense of the police abolitionist / prison abolitionist literature than one sensational event over a long weekend in Seattle from less than a year ago. Tell me he at least knows that Ruth Wilson Gilmore exists. No, I will not click through to read the post; you tell me.

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u/finfinfin 58 points at 1620843748.000000

Yes, he does, and the quote above and every other thing of his you've ever read was taken out of context. He's actually smart and wise and empathetic and cool. He made some mistakes and had a few misunderstandings, but he applied himself to fixing them and doing better. Everyone who posted bad things in the Motte died of natural causes last night, too. Now, remember, you said you wouldn't check.

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u/ProfColdheart 31 points at 1620848699.000000

*encasing myself in Don Cheadle's power armor for the most epic steelmanning of all time*

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u/orincoro 4 points at 1620932643.000000

Boom. You lookin for this?

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u/SpillTheCheerwine 16 points at 1620847423.000000

Lighting a tiki torch for Southkraut and The_Nybbler. In my heart they'll never be displaced.

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u/finfinfin 22 points at 1620847519.000000

They will not replace them, is that what you're saying? *mods*

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u/DELETED 49 points at 1620836489.000000

[deleted]

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u/CugelsHat 44 points at 1620838593.000000

>If anything, Siskind is just boring at this point I agree. What he thinks is standard conservative crap, why he thinks it is fairly obvious. It's why I find the Meaningness guy interesting, because I haven't the faintest idea how he could reach the conclusions he does or maintain them in the face of the evidence.

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u/eaton 20 points at 1620870420.000000

I remember getting into a discussion with him a while back without knowing what circles he ran in — he casually mentioned that the Christian Right had "faded away" by 2000 or so and it was mind-bogglingly difficult to keep a straight face. Best as I can tell from subsequent conversations, he had read a book about the rise of Evangelical Fundamentalism and conflated the "Moral Majority" as a specific organization/institution (it was, in fact, disbanded) with the broader cluster of Religious Right movements and ideologies. It's an area I've spent a lot of time with and it did permanent damage to my ability to trust his pronouncements and explanations of anything outside \*my own\* areas of expertise. How am I to know people who know about \_those\_ domains aren't boggling at the wrongness, too?

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u/nodying 21 points at 1620884277.000000

> he casually mentioned that the Christian Right had "faded away" by 2000 or so As we well know, Bush twice coasted to the top on a groundswell of atheist support and the divide between church and state remained thoroughly inviolate. But seriously Siskind REALLY sounds like he's just a liar with stuff like that.

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u/Soyweiser 9 points at 1621057795.000000

I think this wasnt about scott but the other Meaningness guy.

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u/DELETED 5 points at 1620939610.000000

I suspect he views himself as a post-academic expert (he worked in AI at some point iirc) so he makes up his own takes at this point, having viewed himself as jumped through the hoops Here is an archived page about his religious history for those interested: [https://web.archive.org/web/20081118201553/http://approachingaro.org/my-story](https://web.archive.org/web/20081118201553/http://approachingaro.org/my-story) His views of anti-Aroists: https://web.archive.org/web/20090201204806/http://approachingaro.org/aro-controversy-faq

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 14 points at 1620843137.000000

I guess you’ve never been to a hippy week/end camping or whateverthefuck for the well-heeled middle-classes?

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u/CugelsHat 23 points at 1620843722.000000

I don't think I have. What I'm talking about is a pervasive wrongness about basic facts that doesn't map onto any single cause I'm aware of. It looks weirdest in his most trivial beliefs, if that makes sense. Drawing an example at random: I don't know how a person could think that subcultures don't influence mainstream culture anymore when every medium draws **heavily** from them, but he's said that many times. I don't think that's a well-off thing, or a New Age thing.

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u/blakestaceyprime 27 points at 1620847194.000000

Ah, but if we said that subcultures can [influence mainstream culture](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3059975681/), then we might have to admit that a definition of "nerd" based on '80s movies could require revision. What's next, women playing video games?!

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u/SpillTheCheerwine 16 points at 1620848231.000000

My assumption has always been that most of his stuff is disguised autobiography, and that he's talking about specific, very weird people and scenes he's been involved with.

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u/DELETED 5 points at 1621083249.000000

As much as I hate to say this, this is why normalcy matters. Being weird is okay, being *really* weird like whoever Chapman associates with or Sarah Perry is not.

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u/TheCandelabra 6 points at 1621003865.000000

> It's why I find the Meaningness guy interesting, because I haven't the faintest idea how he could reach the conclusions he does or maintain them in the face of the evidence. Are you talking about the Buddhism stuff or something else?

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u/Soyweiser 26 points at 1620840263.000000

I wonder if it is related to this now being his job, before he could do what he wants at whatever pace. But now he has to reliably put out content, that is always bad for creativity. (I have not read the article itself, only noticed the opening paragraph where he links current politics to the Salem witch trails and red scares etc, I do hope he mentions that compared to today's 'witchhunts' the witches/commies were innocent. A thing conservatives [cant say](https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744) when compared to the current climate).

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u/Epistaxis 24 points at 1620846411.000000

Since this is his day job now, he owes his subscribers the effort of sourcing his facts. If people are paying for this, the free market has failed.

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u/Lightwavers 29 points at 1620852747.000000

>the free market has failed. To be fair, Capitalism’s entire existence has been just this sentence repeated over and over again, so he’s not too special in that regard.

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u/SpillTheCheerwine 17 points at 1620848673.000000

I'd say he's doing well. He's written a lot about how rich he's getting for what seems like significantly less effort than he was putting in before at a loss, as have other Substack Pro writers whose takes are supposed to be utterly unacceptable and possibly life-threatening under the Cathedral regieme. For such a pathetic coward, he's proven pretty damned antifragile!

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 17 points at 1620851815.000000

You say this, but your tone almost seems to suggest that I’d be surprised to find that people who have opinions for money as their main source of income are vacuous amphoras for the devil

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u/orincoro 4 points at 1620932491.000000

Ever read the Friedman bot? Scarily accurate.

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u/bch8 36 points at 1620841119.000000

I just… dont get why this guy has a huge following. It’s just shitty writing.

Also:

Instead of thinking of ourselves in the middle of a new Salem Witch Hunt, we should think of ourselves as just coming out of a rare period of unusually high freedom of thought - a weird 1990s moment that gave us South Park, the phrase “if you don’t like it then don’t watch it”, and most of the early Internet

…

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u/blakestaceyprime 35 points at 1620843177.000000

unUSuaLlY hIGh FreEdoM oF thOUghT

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u/WT_Dore 40 points at 1620887519.000000

Whenever I see stuff like this I'm reminded of a Nathan J. Robinson piece from 2018: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/the-real-dangerous-ideas "I want to suggest a hypothesis that may sound outlandish: What if the whole narrative is backwards? What if people who think they are voicing suppressed dangerous ideas are actually the ones suppressing the truly dangerous ideas? What if this effort to condemn the irrational excesses of political correctness is in part a way of avoiding having to engage with its arguments and listen carefully to its advocates? What if people who seem to be “challenging” a dissent-stifling power structure are actually defending one? Now, I’m not saying this is the case; I’m just asking some questions. But let’s, for a moment, because we are rational and skeptical, consider the possibility that the conservative narrative is totally upside-down. Let’s picture a topsy-turvy world in which Donald Trump is the president and left ideas are actually marginal. Stretch your powers of imagination and consider the following hypotheticals:"

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u/orincoro 11 points at 1620932880.000000

Makes you wonder whether they’ve literally been writing books and doing podcasts for years about a picture of an angry redhead with glasses.

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u/SpillTheCheerwine 27 points at 1620862249.000000

Ah, yes, the time of Bloodhound Gang and Girls Gone Wild.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 17 points at 1620887132.000000

I’ve always been cynical about opinion-media (which especially if you’re British you should be subscribing to Mic Wright’s/@brokenbottleboy’s newsletter) in no small part because when I was in secondary school I had some great teachers who taught media studies as it should be taught i.e. with an eye to the fact that having opinions for money on a regular basis is not the same thing as investigative journalism - and investigative journalism is already a mine-field of its own I recall the specific moment when I realised how bad SSC’s reach had got when some economist I think I grudgingly respected at the time (I forget who) referred to him as like this super interesting young up-and-coming public intellectual or whateverthefuck, and the piece was Meditations on Moloch or some garbage like that Never underestimate how fucking dumb and starry-eyed people can get faced with a wall of text and a vaguely effective use of a metaphor: actual thinking about shit goes right out the window

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u/DELETED 13 points at 1620913105.000000

[removed]

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 16 points at 1620915974.000000

I personally think it’s very indicative of where things are right now in the anglosphere that Yglesias, Friedersdorff, Weiss, (Janice) Turner, Cohen, blah blah blah the list goes on, all got to where they are by having opinions, and writing them down And I mean that’s literally it, and we’re supposed to hold them up as pillars of the 4th Estate for some reason It’s a bizarre inversion of McLuhan where the medium isn’t just the message, it’s only the message *if* it’s in the appropriate medium Jesus wept, anyway...

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u/Bradley271 76 points at 1620836482.000000

“There’s tons of sources for my claims, I just won’t bother link any of them but there’s totally a lot out there.”

Are you kidding me? I’ve been on forums dedicated to determining the outcome of hypothetical fights between fictional characters which demanded a higher standard of evidence than this. How does anyone take this goddamn idiot seriously?

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u/blakestaceyprime 35 points at 1620841197.000000

Fifteen bloody minutes ago, I was over on Mastodon and provided a source quotation for a discussion of cyberpunk anime. Siskind's standards for literature review are somewhere below those of TV Tropes.

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u/foobanana 2 points at 1622349261.000000

wait link pls (if it's public)

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u/Subrosian_Smithy 21 points at 1620854828.000000

"Capitalism lifts 7 billion people out of poverty!" feat actually an erroneous fancalc; VS Battles Wiki believes in neoliberalism and dimensional tiering and should be discounted.

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u/finfinfin 11 points at 1620884679.000000

one anprim at sufficient velocity

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u/JohnPaulJonesSoda 33 points at 1620851276.000000

It just needs a little tweaking:

For example, there’s actually a huge amount of formal academic evidence showing that policing decreases crime a lot, that decreasing policing increases crime, that the alternatives to policing that CHAZ etc propose don’t work very well, that increasing crime hurts minorities the most, and that minorities are generally against this kind of thing. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this 2500 word article is too narrow to contain.

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u/Soyweiser 29 points at 1620840168.000000

I wouldnt be suprised if all those sources he read (blogs and comments) all refer to single paper made by some dubious rightwing thinktank. (See also gay rights and that one pedagogy group (no not that one that is the main big one all pedagogy researchers are a member off, the other one with a similar name but only 1k members and a focus on producing anti lgbt content ;) ).

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 9 points at 1620996267.000000

Not enough people know about the think-tank (re-)cycle, and I say that as somebody who almost ended up working at one once (fuck you Los Angeles and fuck you IPPR for my jet-lag, but hey I at least got to meet Gryff Rhys into the bargain). I am constantly shocked by the fact that people elide academic research as done in universities with studies produced by - especially but not exclusively - right-wing think tanks, just because they’re not aware of how the political economy of publishing works. I’ve been writing less about this stuff because honestly it gets depressing saying the same fucking thing over and over again: there is not pure objectivity in a citation, everybody has an angle and that’s that.

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u/sue_me_please 24 points at 1620843030.000000

“My priors are my feelings” strikes again.

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u/Epistaxis 26 points at 1620846079.000000

Even assuming gOoD fAiTh, the problem is if he did link to any of his sources, it would invite critics to check the sources and dispute their validity or his interpretation of them. That’s just his MO: with enough vagueness or circumlocution or abstraction or beigeness, you can talk suggestively about all kinds of difficult topics without being called out for your actual position on any of them.

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u/dgerard 26 points at 1620852842.000000

I foolishly looked at the comments for mention of the uncited cites, but I did find Marxbro doing his thing and it warmed my heart.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 6 points at 1620996362.000000

/u/marxbroshevik, yourself, and I (the notorious P.O.P.) should do a self-published book about I don’t know what, but I bet it’d be a riot.

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u/MarxBroshevik 5 points at 1621178288.000000

Thank you for the interest, but I have no real compulsion towards writing long-form pieces.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1621179292.000000

You can do the cartoons

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u/MarxBroshevik 7 points at 1621178267.000000

Thank you for the kind words.

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u/OisforOwesome 18 points at 1620878731.000000

As someone who also Argues A Lot on the Internet I too have a bad habit of forgetting to bookmark interesting sources so I can refer to them later, and my Google fu is weak enough that I can’t always find them.

The thing is I’m not holding myself as some kind of Titan of Intellect and demanding financial tribute for my greatness.

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u/repe_sorsa 10 points at 1620895406.000000

Lately if I’ve somehow decided to click on a Scott Codex post my hobby has been fishing out some of the conspicuosly placed references that are actually trash that doesn’t support his claims at all, and this new development leaves me at a loss to how I should feel about it.

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u/asasealion 5 points at 1620846884.000000

The idea that police decrease crime isn’t that nuts (here’s some discussion of sources), even if some big reforms are needed and sentencing is way too harsh.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 22 points at 1620888969.000000

This article is fucking garbage. And I’m not just saying that because I’m biased towards assuming that any one Marginal Revolution blog piece is garbage, I’m saying that because I just read it twice, followed up a few of the links, and found it to be garbage. It’s a classic example of the hifalutin technique beloved of econ bloggers where you take a handful of disparate results, smash them together with a bunch of weasel words, and land on a “surprising” conclusion that’s guaranteed to make good copy. Just look at this (all in a single sentence!): >Any one of these papers is subject to criticism **but**[1] as group the results have been **remarkably consistent**[2]: police reduce crime with a **10% increase in police reducing property crime by about 3-4%**[3] **and**[4] violent crime a little bit more perhaps by 4-5% (**average elasticities of .35 and .48**[5] from **my review paper**). 1. Criticism from where? We’re led to believe it exists and that acknowledging that criticism is good. Acknowledging that criticism without actually linking to it is an obvious bullshit move. 2. Remarkable as compared to what? Why “remarkably”? Why not just consistent? 3. Synchronic result applied to a diachronic conclusion without expanding on how the former applies to the latter. 4. Crucial elision ignored. 5. Mostly irrelevant numbers, but still a significant gap going unanalysed. 6. Links to a google books anthology of papers on the economics of crime, not to the actual paper. The rest follows a standard pattern of being an advertisement of wht Tabarrok *really* wants to do, which is advertise his paper arguing that there aren’t *enough* police. He could have just put that at the top but it wouldn’t have generated as many clicks if he hadn’t hung his thesis on contrarianism. This isn’t a discussion of (then) contemporary sources so much as it is a polemic for a particular view of what policing is and does that quite deliberately ignores the arguments for the proposition it attempts to attack (namely that policing is ineffective) in anything like the parsimoniously generalisable context it aspires to. Nothing wrong with citing sources and developing new methods of gaining insight as an extension of doing micro-econ, but this is not a review of the literature, it’s a blog post.

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u/asasealion 3 points at 1620932372.000000

That's fair - I didn't dig into his sources. In any case, I'm not sure that "policing decreases crime" is some crazy idea that can be dismissed out of hand (though both Scott and I should've given better sources if we wanted to defend the idea).

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 10 points at 1620934752.000000

I was definitely very harsh in how I framed it, so sorry if it came off that I was having a go at you. I was in a bit of a bad mood and wrote up my critique from that perspective. For what it’s worth, at least there’s a conversation going on about whether policing is an effective tool of any kind and whether it’s worth holding so tightly onto it as a concept.

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u/asasealion 3 points at 1620935378.000000

No worries at all - you attacked the blog post and not me so I don't see why I'd take it personally, even if perhaps I should've been more diligent with checking what I link.

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u/BlueTemplar85 1 points at 1621601459.000000

My hat is off to you, Dr. ! Might you have a substack that I could subscribe to ? (j/k, the above is serious.)

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 1 points at 1621602000.000000

I haven’t done anything very serious on there for a while but I have a wordpress I occasionally update https://irrationallyspeaking.home.blog/2019/10/22/dominics-basilisk-part-1/ That piece is the most successful I’ve had

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 1 points at 1621602453.000000

If you want to a substack and/or stream and/or twitter account, btw, I recommend Mic Wright, in that he does the same sort of line by line media analysis (of the British press) as I did above in the comment you enjoyed.

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u/nodying 22 points at 1620847495.000000

It's kind of a lateral move when the police can be almost indistinguishable from having organized crime in charge.

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u/DevestatingAttack -1 points at 1620882728.000000

Yes. Also, taxation is theft.

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u/nodying 7 points at 1620884063.000000

Don't curl on me now, loshk.

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