Links to Consider, 12/3/2024

Freya India and Paul Kingsnorth; Heather Heying on K-12 education; Michael Magoon on radical ideologies and personality disorders; Scott Alexander on incarceration

In an interview with Freya India, Paul Kingsnorth says,

We all pretended to believe, then as now, that ‘shaming’ people in order to keep society within those limits was bad, and that we should not judge or condemn any behaviour at all, however socially damaging. But no culture in history has ever believed that. And in fact, in the age of ‘cancel culture’ we don’t believe that either. We still shame people for all sorts of things - racism, sexism, homophobia and a host of ‘isms’ real or imagined. What we don’t shame is personal vanity, sexual licence, anti-social behaviour or any expression of sexuality, no matter how niche or damaging.

The two of them blame the Internet and smart phones. But if you go back and re-read my review of Bobos in Paradise, you will see that this cultural problem pre-dates the Internet.

Heather Heying proposes a complete set of reforms for K-12 education, including

1. Hire young people with degrees in science to teach science; degrees in math to teach math; degrees in history to teach history, etc.

   1. Allow exceptions for the talented and creative who have no degrees, especially until the universities right themselves and the degrees once more have meaning.

   2. Remove or substantively revise barriers to teaching such as teacher certifications and credential programs.

   3. Hire only those with curiosity about the world. No petty tyrants; no ideologues.

When I was in 4th grade, one of my teachers died mid-year. The principal had the creativity (and the freedom!) to hire a young man who had guided us on a field trip at the Natural History Museum. He was generally acknowledged to be the best and most popular teacher in the school.

Here is something Michael Magoon posted in April.

Radical ideologies are world views invented by those with severe mental disorders to further their interests.

They are like magicians who wave their hands and talk flamboyantly to distract the audience from what is really happening. The stated goal of ideologues is not their actual goal. The stated goal is the excuse to do harm to others and not get punished for it….

I believe that Critical theory, like all radical ideologies, feasts on mental disorders. Material progress has solved, or at least lessened the severity of so many problems. But it has done little to treat mental disorders and personality disorders.

That is an excerpt from a long essay.

Scott Alexander writes,

a real Three Strikes law would require increasing the incarceration rate from its current 0.75% up to 4%, ie quintupling it. We’d need to build 6,000 new prisons and 10,000 new jails, locking up an additional 5-10 million people, and spending somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion per year (ie around the same as the entire military budget) on prison-related costs. This is light-years outside the Overton Window and I’ve never heard anyone seriously propose it.

Still, it would decrease crime by 83%.

But later he argues that prison is not relatively cost-effective at reducing crime.

prison prevents one crime per $8,500 spent, and police prevent one crime per $3,000 spent. This looks even better once we adjust for the moral cost of prison: the cop is three times as cost-effective without locking someone in a cage for a year!

So instead of building more prisons, you could hire more police. Of course, you could do both.

But it seems that there are many impediments to arresting and convicting criminals, not just a lack of police officers and/or prison space.

It would be good if we could think in terms of type I and type II errors, and marginal analysis. A type I error is punishing a mostly-innocent person. A type II error is failing to imprison an incorrigible repeat offender. My guess is that there are policies and procedures that have low marginal effects on reducing type I errors but very large effects on increasing type II errors. If you could get rid of those dysfunctional policies and procedures, you could reduce crime by a lot.

substacks referenced above: @

Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

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Radical ideologies feast on mental disorders

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Improving K-12 Education in America

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Rejecting The Machine