Arnold, I appreciate your thoughts on trust and the observation that institutions have failed to perform their function of sustaining trust, and being worthy to be trusted. The most basic, simplest measure of "expert opinion" is DOES IT WORK? Where expert opinion relates to complex systems mostly beyond our observation society must rely on experts. But even there the majority of humans have the intelligence to consider the simple question of DOES IT WORK?
Consider the two Space Shuttle failures, especially the 1986 incident. We all witnessed the failure. Many saw it in person. Millions saw it live on TV and hundreds of millions saw the failure on replay. We all are capable of forming an undeniably true observation: IT DID NOT WORK. Why did it not work? There we get experts and they go to work.
A huge problem in the 21st century is the experts don't want to acknowledge failure. They do not want to admit the thing DOES NOT WORK. Our elections do not work - the basic mechanics of receiving and counting ballots is fundamentally broken. Covid public health protocols did not work. Criminal justice reform does not work. Public education reforms do not work. The list goes on and on. We have failure everywhere! And yet the "Experts" refuse to acknowledge failure exists.
So the common person has every reason to distrust and discredit the "experts" and the institutions who give such experts a home and financial backing. The first step to the experts and institutions regaining trust is to respect common sense. Stop gaslighting the public and admit those things that are obviously broken are broken and the premises followed to build the broken system need to be examined.
I don't see it that way. None of what you lists works PERFECTLY but does it work? I'd say it mostly does. And the alternative of not doing those things at all would be far worse. We are human. We are imperfect. We make mistakes. But we mostly do things moderately well.
Voting in US presidential elections is a failure on multiple levels. The first level is that people don't trust it! And this skepticism includes both elite Democrats and Republicans who express concern on the integrity of US elections. The second level is US elections are demonstrably unsecure. US officials love to talk about security measures, but once one inquires into the process it is shown the security measures, such as signature audits and verifying voter eligibility ARE NOT DONE!!!! It is a joke. And yet this joke repeats itself every 4 years and every time we have an important Senate election.
American public education is a failure. Urban cities in particular spend crazy amount of money on education and testing shows the students do not learn to read or do math. We can only conclude the majority of students in public urban schools do not achieve any competency. Total fail.
American criminal justice is a failure. I invite you to drive the streets of Baltimore MD. Tremendous amounts of money are spent on American cities and the urban blight increases. Whatever the plan is, the plan is a failure.
stu, I thank you for demonstrating the blindness that exists in America - the deliberate refusal to acknowledge abject failure of public institutions and social programs. America is a great country but it fails to conduct elections with integrity. It fails to educate the urban poor and it fails to successfully address the problem of urban blight.
To quote Thomas Sowell: "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
I agree with all your details but not the conclusions they mean failure, except I most certainly agree socialism beyond very small groups has in practice has always been a failure and the chances of a different outcome are practically nil.
On the scale of success to failure, where do you put Venezuela, any country in Africa, Russia, or even China? When I look at those countries, US seems pretty good to me. Far from perfect but the failures seem pretty limited. For example, chicago has about 100 neighborhoods. Only a handful have a crime rate above the national average. Many had zero murders. Are you accounting for the successes? What about all the schools and students who accomplish what is needed to be successful? Isn't that the majority? Don't most people have pretty good opportunity, even if some fail to take advantage of those opportunities? Where do the successes factor in?
Balko's repeated use of "far-right" and other epithets against those who see things differently casts doubt on his purported objective analysis which includes a number of misstatements, including that Floyd died at the scene. He did not; it was later that evening in the hospital. Floyd had a greater than lethal dose of Fentanyl in his system, plus multiple other drugs. He was a huge dangerous man with a record of criminal violence who was uncooperative with police. To base a murder conviction on the facts of the case was unwarranted, and it was done in an atmosphere, including jury intimidation, that can in no way be described as fair. Balko obviously does not want the politically useful anti-white racist narrative of the case to be diminished, particularly in an election year in which many blacks are beginning to rethink their blind allegiance to the Democratic Party which is faced with possible loss of the presidency.
Justice emerges from respectful dialogue, and consideration of all the facts. How can we get enough people to discuss this case, looking each other eye to eye, using their real names. It’s much easier to say one side of the story when one is anonymous. Appreciate and sympathetic with your view, but I’d like to see the other side respond in a public forum.
"... we have no choice but to trust other people. ... Most of what I claim to know consists of propositions that I have never verified myself."
Yes and no. Every time you come across a proposition you face a choice of whether to trust the claimant, accept its validity, and incorporate it into an updated worldview. This is easy when the new proposition fits in with all the things you already believe, but hard when it is clearly inconsistent with the aggregate model consisting of the many others things you believe, some of which you have personally verified or have sufficient familiarity and expertise to be competent to make good assessments about. Just like there can be a chain of trust from someone you know you can trust to a stranger, there can be a chain of consistency or inference from propositions you can verify for yourself to new claims. When a purported 'expert' makes a claim that goes against what you already know, and argues for it in a manner that fails the smell test of the amount of rigor required to demonstrate the similar ideas you already believe, then you now have adequate standing to question an expert's claim without having to rely solely on institutions, credentials, or other forms of social proof.
1) Does anyone really and truly believe that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd more or less on purpose because he was black? And that his example is indicative of widespread police bias and misconduct on racial grounds throughout the country?
That seems to me the entire justification for everything that has happened since. That narrative is really what's on trial, not Chauvin.
2) Does anyone believe that someone like George Floyd would have been on the streets in Bukele's America?
Police tactics should be critiqued, especially after an encounter results in injury and death. But no matter the culpability of police in the death of Floyd, there is no justification for the mayhem, death and destruction that followed. Furthermore, it is demonstrable that the "corrective measures" to policing and criminal justice have been deleterious to black communities.
The George Floyd death unleashed a tidal wave of idiotic, suicidal, social reform. The correction isn't to relitigate the Chauvin trial - although Chauvin deserves better justice. The correction is for people to accept that without law and order, society crumbles and dies
The rookie officers had difficulty completing the arrest of George Floyd. Chauvin, a senior officer, then came in and took charge to subdue Floyd until an ambulance would arrive. Bystanders then implored Chauvin to desist from excessive force.
An alternative conjecture about Chauvin's motivations, then, is that he persisted unduly (recklessly?) because of the sin of pride: (a) an illusion of control (i.e., a motivated belief), and (b) a blinding desire to establish authority.
The alternative conjecture is that Chauvin was blinded by two prideful desires:
— I'll show these rookies how it's done!
— How dare bystanders tell me how to do my job — in front of my rookies!
Readers might have still other conjectures.
To be clear, we (the public) can't walk around inside Chauvin's head in the moment. It comes down to conjectures about motivations. Which conjecture is most plausible? Racial animus? Pride? Something else? A mix of motives?
Addendum (9:58 a.m.): I hasten to clarify that my comment narrowly addressed the matter of motives, on the assumption that there was mens rea. See the later comments by Thucydides and Handle, which doubt the case that Chauvin had mens rea. Reasonable people may differ about whether the evidence indicates mens rea, and about what the motive might have been, if there was mens rea.
Has anybody here actually physically restrained people? People high on drugs? Chauvin is 5'9" and 140 pounds (welterweight). Floyd was ten inches taller (6'7") and 85 pounds heavier - 225 pounds is far into heavyweight territory and 60% greater than Chauvin's weight - that is *twelve* times more than the merely 5% which in boxing or wrestling is considered enough of an advantage to make the competition unfair and bump a guy up to the next class. Sad to say that Balko jumped the shark a long time ago, and he completely evades the inconvenient points that (1) whatever a training slide says, in actual physical reality, there is no way for a smaller man to maintain physical control in a volatile circumstance when facing such an overwhelming differential in size except to do as Chauvin did, evidence of which the defense presented at trial but which Balko ignores, and (2) the medical examiner originally ruled Floyd's death was a cardiac arrest caused by the large amount of fentanyl he took affecting his system, but, as is now public knowledge, he was leaned on to change this determination to the politically-desired one. Talk about "bias in forensics"!! Oh, but Balko is cool with it in this instance, which, face it, is obscene. Look, it's telling for a once-reliable and reasonable commentator on such matters to just drop all pretense of fairness and rigor and go off the rails with anti- police animus such that restraints on policing are not pursued as instrumental goals in the name of greater order, humanity, and justice, but as a dogmatic terminal goal and end in itself, even at the expense of all those other values and the ongoing collapse in public safety we are currently witnessing and experiencing.
This can all be true and probably is - but I still believe there's no one on this forum who, bystanding, wouldn't have yelled at the cop to get off - enough. And if the cop had said, he's going to run - the normal response would be, so what? He's not likely to get too far.
What the officer did that day was in no way productive of order.
I guess the only new thought on this old story that occurs to me is a genuine question, actually, prompted by your comment:
Is someone heavily motivated by racial animus likely to become a police officer - in Minneapolis?
It's possible I suppose, but I guess I incline to the view that such a person would avoid that line of work, in that place. Unless it was really so strong that he actively looked forward to inflicting harm on his unfavored group. However, the guy grew up near Minneapolis, according to Wikipedia so probably he just went to work there as a matter of course.
Then the question becomes did he become racist as a result of his interactions with people, or did he merely become callous and automaton-like? Do we know anything about his intelligence?
Long ago there was anger over a death-by-police in my former city, the details of which I don't remember except that the victim was definitely doing "bad guy" stuff in the course of his getting shot, or was it run over, well, anyway - and I remember Liberal Boomtown was sort of hung up on whether the cop could be racist because he was married to a black woman, or somehow - nevermind Loving - it showed he was racist, how he was married to a black woman.
Kind of shows the muddled thinking that goes on, for something that's pretty hard to define.
Those guys that chained and dragged the black guy, in Jasper, Texas - racist. Definitely. Also: white trash. There ya go. See whether that instance helps you to delimit the term further. I doubt it.
There's a case of someone being in a cop's home only to find out he is KKK. I think it was on 60 Minutes. Pretty sure the cop was in a big city. Regardless, what you say mostly makes sense.
Somewhat tangential to the Floyd/Chauvin discussion (every case has a different set of circumstances) but important context for understanding the state of the MPD prior to 2020 is Justine Damond, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2017. It received a fraction of the attention of the Floyd case outside of Minnesota and Australia. The Wikipedia summary seems essentially accurate:
On the Balko essay- no one knows how much pressure Chauvin was putting on Floyd's neck/shoulder except for Chauvin himself. This idea that the weight had to be evenly distributed through the two knees is false itself. Even Balko's claim that there is most of the weight on the foot in the training video can't be proven- the foot would look like that even without much weight at all if you had the toe aligned to the front and abducted in (you would do this for simple balance should the perp try to move).
However, none of this addresses the bigger problem- the defense wasn't allowed to present this training video and the judge's reason for doing so, that Chauvin couldn't prove he had seen it, doesn't seem reasonable to me and a lot of other people- it seems like a completely unreasonable method of hobbling the defense since there seems to be no doubt that the video was used to train MPD officers during Chauvin's time on the force. Additionally, if the video is as damning as Balko claims it is, why did the prosecution object to Chauvin's defense attorney using it? Why not just use the video itself to prove all these things Balko claims in his essay? In short, Balko is doing exactly what he claims the documentary doing- making a lot of questionable assumptions about what a video might be showing us.
Half weight seems rather inexact. I get you don't want to say 75lb or whatever but half is WAY different for a big guy and a small woman. Likewise, it would seem to make a big difference whether the person restrained was big or small.
Doesn't Balko kinda give away the game in his opening graph?
"For a few precious days after the death of George Floyd, there was at least a clear consensus across the political spectrum — there was near-unanimity that what Darnella Frazier captured on her cell phone was a crime. An outrage. A thing to be denounced."
So Balko laments that the consensus snap judgment based on a clip edited and released to elicit that snap judgment has been eroded? But the non-zealous advocate that he is, he will proceed to set the record straight?
Whatever the merits, I stopped reading after that.
I'd like to think that if I were Balko, I would see the Floyd incident as a giant missed opportunity, foiled by emotional over-reactions and then hijacked by grifters like Ibram Kendi. Instead, the quote you posted is just...regrettable.
" I think that it is wise to be skeptical of any documentary."
Of all media, the documentary is the least trustworthy. All a documentary can tell you is the appearance of things, and AI has now removed the reliability of that function. Every documentary lies in fundamental ways. The goal of a documentary is to use the strength of images to overpower your reason. And have you ever noticed how much of any documentary is simply visual padding? Watching documentaries to acquire information outside of appearances is not an efficient use of time.
Regarding the Friedman-Huemer debate—this seems like a clear win for Friedman. And Substack will likely play a much bigger role in the future—allowing people to figure out for themselves the truth. A big hole in Huemer’s reasoning is the bias caused by state funding of research and education. Experts are often very biased. Direct payment between learners and teachers (as is the case on Substack) will greatly help incentives to pursue truth
I'm not sure what you really meant when referring to truth but I think it's important to note none of us has it. The goal is to pick how to get as close as possible.
Experts. One thing to consider is are they actually expert in the area they are talking about? PH people presumable know what promotes/hinders spread of disease. They cannot know the tradeoffs of applying those measures, so recommendations about what to DO are ipso facto not their area of expertise.
Making unconditional predictions or with ambiguous conditions is also a tip off.
Thanks for posting a link to the Balko comments on Chauvin and the MPD. I was swayed by TFP and Coleman Hughes on the topic, but Balko’s essay looks like a very strong debunking. I feel like Hughes and TFP really messed up in promoting the Alpha News piece.
Balko vs TFOM is an excellent case to look at Friedman-Huemer issues. Was Floyd’s death murder?
Insofar as murder requires the intent to kill, I’d say neither Balko nor my memory of the trial alleviate my doubts about the truth of the charge: “Chauvin intended to kill”
If he didn’t intend to kill, yet his actions caused the death, it’s criminal manslaughter—the trial was unjust, T1 error false positive. TFOM better than Balko.
“Chauvin’s 9 min knee on neck/ back caused the death”
“Floyd’s body had fatal amount of fentanyl, and some other illegal drugs.”
“Floyd was COVID positive” * not mentioned by Balko, nor Loury on his rethinking of prior promotion of TFOM. I’d be surprised if this fact wasn’t in the doc, but don’t know. Neo did lots of research on it.
“Prior arrestees had become unconscious yet didn’t die, in Minneapolis.”
“Floyd couldn’t breathe while officers tried to put him in the car, before the MRT knee”
I believe there’s a high, 60-80% chance that Floyd would have died within a few hours because of his drugs combined with COVID. Similarly, without either drugs or COVID, the knee wouldn’t have killed him (tho 30% it might). There’s no Law of Large Numbers of repeated experiments on Floyd possible, such probabilities are purely Bayesian, and individually subjective.
The knee was mostly responsible (>90%? >50? What does this mean?). Manslaughter.
The knee was a major cause (>30? >20? >10%) some lesser manslaughter.
The knee was a minor cause - possibly not even criminal.
The knee was not a cause - no charges.
The coroner’s report, or reports, become the most expert document.
The political push to change the first coroner report is a huge red flag on injustice, yet also relevant to the “trust the expert” problems.
Balko says there were some 150 cases of asphyxiation, including one in Minn. for which the city paid $3 million. Chauvin’s knee became police brutality at around 6 minutes, and arguably much sooner if they could have use a hobble and chose not to. Looks like gross, criminal negligence on Chauvin’s part.
People can agree on visible facts, like 9 minutes of knee with life still at the end before the hospital, and COVID and drugs, yet still disagree on assigning blame and responsibility. For most multi causal events, there is some real blame to spread, but no way of knowing truth about actual proportions.
Not mentioned by Balko, nor Loury, is how much crime and murders, especially of Blacks, has gone up since then. Steve Sailer has often noticed, with graphs of Black Lives Murdered. His noticing that Blacks also are dying at increasing rates in autos has started to be noticed by others (no credit to Steve).
A justice system which results in more murders is worse than one with fewer murders, like what El Salvador has achieved by locking up all gang members, likely incurring many T1 errors but hugely reducing the T2 errors of not locking up the guilty.
In judging the justice system of handling Chauvin, the increased murders indicate an error different than T1 or T2.
I want to add to the excellent pushback on the Balko piece from Thucydides, forumposter, Handle, and Invisible Sun, among others (I'll take Handle's word for it on Balko). First, on the consequences of the Floyd incident. Let's return to the scene of the crime in Monday's post, MoCo, as locals call it. I compared contemporary MoCo to Berkeley decades ago, but as best I can recall, it was only in the wake of Floyd that living in MoCo started to have the same feel for residents as living in Berkeley, i.e. like prey. A local MoCo blog that posts on events, store openings and closings, and crime began posting on car theft rings, with at least one post including perps captured on video. More recently, a MoCo Nike store was 'swarmed,' and the blog posted a photo taken with a smartphone of the perps running down the street with their loot in broad daylight, showing no signs of being worried about getting caught. I could cite other examples, including armed carjackings with perp descriptions, but you get the point. I've never been involved in organized crime, but if I wanted to organize theft rings and reduce the risk of getting prosecuted, who would I hire to do the dirty work?
Continuing with my comment, at the risk of being accused of 'whataboutism,' I wanted to draw a comparison between the Floyd incident and 2 of the most egregious 'opposite' examples, involving unarmed white women being shot dead by black police officers. The first is J6er Ashley Babbitt, where the officer was not only not prosecuted, but was treated as a hero. The 2nd is the Somali police officer in Minneapolis who served around 3 years in prison for fatally shooting an Australian woman who had called 911 for police assistance. There were no riots in response to these shootings. One more comment about Ashley Babbitt. There is a lot of commentary today following the reported death in prison of Putin critic Navalny, including from the usual conservative suspects. In his morning video, Scott Adams argued that the US no longer has the 'moral authority' to judge Putin's treatment of Navalny given the harsh treatment of those who participated in the events of J6 (at least one of whom committed suicide) and also the lawfare against Trump. This echoes Russian libertarian Mikhail Svetov's point in a Triggernometry interview several years ago about the US losing 'the moral high ground.' I concur with Scott Adams and Svetov.
Balko leaves little doubt the documentary has many faults but that in no way falsifies the general opinion of whether the cops were properly judged. Likewise, Balko holds some positions I'm skeptical about but that doesn't mean his general opinion is wrong either.
I don't like cops being criminally punished for trying to do their job, even when they do it badly. I lean towards Chauvin never being a cop again and maybe some kind of criminal punishment though I don't see the benefit of prison. I'm not even sure the others should be banned from being a cop. Definitely not prison. (Banning someone from being a cop is problematic. I'm not sure if a felony conviction without prison time would do it.)
I am heavily influenced in my opinion by the Tony Timpa case which doesn't have the race issue to raise emotions. Timpa made the phone call asking for help and was killed in more or less the same restraint. On top of that the police made jokes and were rather unprofessional in ways other than the restraint. It wasn't until years later they were even reprimanded.
If editors will only publish a paper that shows an effect that biases published papers relative, to the population of papers written and biases authors to not submit papers with weak results
I had high hopes for the Friedman piece, and I concur with many of his arguments, but finally was disabused at the end when it turns out that Huemer and Friedman apparently agree that “critical thinking” ought be reserved as the exclusive domain of a cognitively gifted class: “He agrees that we were writing for different people and that my view is correct for the sufficiently intelligent.” Friedman apparently also subscribes to the “trial-by-combat” approach to policy analysis:
“The same approach on easy mode is to find people, ideally smart people, arguing for each side, evaluate their arguments as best you can, and base your conclusion accordingly. This requires much less expertise both because partisans of both sides will have done much of the work for you and because you can often evaluate arguments on grounds that do not require technical knowledge of the subject being argued about.”
Both seem to be in a Manichaean mode of policy analysis in which only truth and falsehood exist are the only alternatives on every policy question from abortion to gun control. This sort of approach seems rooted in and well-suited to our winner-take-all, two party electoral system. In marked contrast to this approach, one might consider the consensus model of democracy endemic to northern Europe and other jurisdictions that have adopted proportional representation in parliamentary systems of governance.
I am much reminded of Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages in which he writes:
“—long after nobility and feudalism had ceased to be really essential factors in the state and in society, they continued to impress the mind as dominant forms of life. The men of the fifteenth century could not understand that the real moving powers of political and social evolution might be looked for anywhere else than in the doings of a warlike or courtly nobility. They persisted in regarding the nobility as the foremost of social forces and attributed a very exaggerated importance to it, undervaluing altogether the social significance of the lower classes.”
Engels further develops this theme in his The German Revolutions. The Puritan Revolution in England however the major instance in which the lower classes successfully assert a claim to political participation on more equal terms with their betters. This failed, initially with Laud driving many Puritans out of England and then later with The Restoration and religious governance the Act of Uniformity 1662 with the whole of the Puritan clergy decamping for the colonies. Nevertheless, the supremacy of Parliament was established and this proved to have tremendous impact on the evolution of governance on the continent.
The Puritans in the colonies carried on their independent streak and the tradition of critical thinking that this entailed. As Grover Cleveland wrote in his essay on The Principles of the American Revolution:
“Another fact that must be noted is the character of the colonists, and especially those of Massachusetts. These were the Puritans, who had fought the wars of liberty in England. Then, because they were not satisfied with church ordinances, they were driven by Archbishop Laud to seek religious freedom across the sea.
Of all the race they were the most tenacious of their rights and the most jealous of their liberties. The American Revolution was not, then, any struggle for emancipation from slavery; and the colonists were free men. Nor was it at first so much for gaining new liberties as for preserving the old.
Nor can it, as is often thought, be called a war between different nations. Both sides were Englishmen who gloried in the name of England. William and Mary had, moreover, given the colonists a full share of the rights of British subjects. Another fact showing the same thing is that almost the ablest advocates of the colonial cause were members of the British House of Parliament, while the most ardent adherents of the King were colonists.
The real object of resistance was to gain security from Parliamentary encroachments. This was the chief cause for which the Revolutionists contended, but by no means all they obtained. The war was finally fought out on principles as far-reaching as the history of nations. It was a struggle for the retention of those great institutions that check oppression and violence.
The colonists were contending for the principle of a representative government of chartered rights and constitutional liberties. They were defending themselves against the military despotism of George III and struggling to change the foundation of government from force to equality.”
The tragedy of the Philadelphia convention, of course, put a full stop to the principles of the American Revolution, and restored centralized subjugation by an entitled establishment class that had nothing but disdain for the lower classes. Following a short-lived burst of PR adoption in many US cities soon cushed by party machines, the class system in the US has ossified into our present sorry condition.
In Europe, however, beginning with Switzerland, winner-take-all was gradually displaced
by PR and a more egalitarian, and successful, mode of democracy known as “consensus democracy” evolved. Wikipedia:
“Consensus democracy is the application of consensus decision-making to the process of legislation in a democracy. It is characterized by a decision-making structure that involves and takes into account as broad a range of opinions as possible, as opposed to majoritarian democracy systems where minority opinions can potentially be ignored by vote-winning majorities. A consensus government is a national unity government with representation across the whole political spectrum. A concordance democracy is a type of consensus democracy where majority rule does not play a central role. Optional referendums and popular initiatives correspond to consensus democracy.”
Thus the knowledge and insights of the less intellectually gifted can be incorporated and used to improve the outcomes of policy analysis and decision making. When PR is combined with a parliamentary system in which the prime minister can be voted out before the end of a term of office, the feedback loops of governance are even more resilient and effective. As Karl Popper observed, “If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.” One suspects that this is especially true of those who would discard out of hand the information and knowledge held by the ”ignorant masses.”
To test this theory, one might scan a few substacks by Scandinavian authors and test whether they are more or less more Manichean than the typical US substack. Three quick examples that may or may not be representative but do seem to have a subtler approach to truth-telling:
If nothing else, I suspect Substack could increase its readership in the United States by giving greater play and attention to writers outside of the United States. Especially in an election year when reading the US offerings is likely to be more punishment than reward.
Arnold, I appreciate your thoughts on trust and the observation that institutions have failed to perform their function of sustaining trust, and being worthy to be trusted. The most basic, simplest measure of "expert opinion" is DOES IT WORK? Where expert opinion relates to complex systems mostly beyond our observation society must rely on experts. But even there the majority of humans have the intelligence to consider the simple question of DOES IT WORK?
Consider the two Space Shuttle failures, especially the 1986 incident. We all witnessed the failure. Many saw it in person. Millions saw it live on TV and hundreds of millions saw the failure on replay. We all are capable of forming an undeniably true observation: IT DID NOT WORK. Why did it not work? There we get experts and they go to work.
A huge problem in the 21st century is the experts don't want to acknowledge failure. They do not want to admit the thing DOES NOT WORK. Our elections do not work - the basic mechanics of receiving and counting ballots is fundamentally broken. Covid public health protocols did not work. Criminal justice reform does not work. Public education reforms do not work. The list goes on and on. We have failure everywhere! And yet the "Experts" refuse to acknowledge failure exists.
So the common person has every reason to distrust and discredit the "experts" and the institutions who give such experts a home and financial backing. The first step to the experts and institutions regaining trust is to respect common sense. Stop gaslighting the public and admit those things that are obviously broken are broken and the premises followed to build the broken system need to be examined.
I don't see it that way. None of what you lists works PERFECTLY but does it work? I'd say it mostly does. And the alternative of not doing those things at all would be far worse. We are human. We are imperfect. We make mistakes. But we mostly do things moderately well.
Voting in US presidential elections is a failure on multiple levels. The first level is that people don't trust it! And this skepticism includes both elite Democrats and Republicans who express concern on the integrity of US elections. The second level is US elections are demonstrably unsecure. US officials love to talk about security measures, but once one inquires into the process it is shown the security measures, such as signature audits and verifying voter eligibility ARE NOT DONE!!!! It is a joke. And yet this joke repeats itself every 4 years and every time we have an important Senate election.
American public education is a failure. Urban cities in particular spend crazy amount of money on education and testing shows the students do not learn to read or do math. We can only conclude the majority of students in public urban schools do not achieve any competency. Total fail.
American criminal justice is a failure. I invite you to drive the streets of Baltimore MD. Tremendous amounts of money are spent on American cities and the urban blight increases. Whatever the plan is, the plan is a failure.
stu, I thank you for demonstrating the blindness that exists in America - the deliberate refusal to acknowledge abject failure of public institutions and social programs. America is a great country but it fails to conduct elections with integrity. It fails to educate the urban poor and it fails to successfully address the problem of urban blight.
To quote Thomas Sowell: "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
I agree with all your details but not the conclusions they mean failure, except I most certainly agree socialism beyond very small groups has in practice has always been a failure and the chances of a different outcome are practically nil.
On the scale of success to failure, where do you put Venezuela, any country in Africa, Russia, or even China? When I look at those countries, US seems pretty good to me. Far from perfect but the failures seem pretty limited. For example, chicago has about 100 neighborhoods. Only a handful have a crime rate above the national average. Many had zero murders. Are you accounting for the successes? What about all the schools and students who accomplish what is needed to be successful? Isn't that the majority? Don't most people have pretty good opportunity, even if some fail to take advantage of those opportunities? Where do the successes factor in?
Balko's repeated use of "far-right" and other epithets against those who see things differently casts doubt on his purported objective analysis which includes a number of misstatements, including that Floyd died at the scene. He did not; it was later that evening in the hospital. Floyd had a greater than lethal dose of Fentanyl in his system, plus multiple other drugs. He was a huge dangerous man with a record of criminal violence who was uncooperative with police. To base a murder conviction on the facts of the case was unwarranted, and it was done in an atmosphere, including jury intimidation, that can in no way be described as fair. Balko obviously does not want the politically useful anti-white racist narrative of the case to be diminished, particularly in an election year in which many blacks are beginning to rethink their blind allegiance to the Democratic Party which is faced with possible loss of the presidency.
Justice emerges from respectful dialogue, and consideration of all the facts. How can we get enough people to discuss this case, looking each other eye to eye, using their real names. It’s much easier to say one side of the story when one is anonymous. Appreciate and sympathetic with your view, but I’d like to see the other side respond in a public forum.
"... we have no choice but to trust other people. ... Most of what I claim to know consists of propositions that I have never verified myself."
Yes and no. Every time you come across a proposition you face a choice of whether to trust the claimant, accept its validity, and incorporate it into an updated worldview. This is easy when the new proposition fits in with all the things you already believe, but hard when it is clearly inconsistent with the aggregate model consisting of the many others things you believe, some of which you have personally verified or have sufficient familiarity and expertise to be competent to make good assessments about. Just like there can be a chain of trust from someone you know you can trust to a stranger, there can be a chain of consistency or inference from propositions you can verify for yourself to new claims. When a purported 'expert' makes a claim that goes against what you already know, and argues for it in a manner that fails the smell test of the amount of rigor required to demonstrate the similar ideas you already believe, then you now have adequate standing to question an expert's claim without having to rely solely on institutions, credentials, or other forms of social proof.
1) Does anyone really and truly believe that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd more or less on purpose because he was black? And that his example is indicative of widespread police bias and misconduct on racial grounds throughout the country?
That seems to me the entire justification for everything that has happened since. That narrative is really what's on trial, not Chauvin.
2) Does anyone believe that someone like George Floyd would have been on the streets in Bukele's America?
Police tactics should be critiqued, especially after an encounter results in injury and death. But no matter the culpability of police in the death of Floyd, there is no justification for the mayhem, death and destruction that followed. Furthermore, it is demonstrable that the "corrective measures" to policing and criminal justice have been deleterious to black communities.
The George Floyd death unleashed a tidal wave of idiotic, suicidal, social reform. The correction isn't to relitigate the Chauvin trial - although Chauvin deserves better justice. The correction is for people to accept that without law and order, society crumbles and dies
The rookie officers had difficulty completing the arrest of George Floyd. Chauvin, a senior officer, then came in and took charge to subdue Floyd until an ambulance would arrive. Bystanders then implored Chauvin to desist from excessive force.
An alternative conjecture about Chauvin's motivations, then, is that he persisted unduly (recklessly?) because of the sin of pride: (a) an illusion of control (i.e., a motivated belief), and (b) a blinding desire to establish authority.
The alternative conjecture is that Chauvin was blinded by two prideful desires:
— I'll show these rookies how it's done!
— How dare bystanders tell me how to do my job — in front of my rookies!
Readers might have still other conjectures.
To be clear, we (the public) can't walk around inside Chauvin's head in the moment. It comes down to conjectures about motivations. Which conjecture is most plausible? Racial animus? Pride? Something else? A mix of motives?
Addendum (9:58 a.m.): I hasten to clarify that my comment narrowly addressed the matter of motives, on the assumption that there was mens rea. See the later comments by Thucydides and Handle, which doubt the case that Chauvin had mens rea. Reasonable people may differ about whether the evidence indicates mens rea, and about what the motive might have been, if there was mens rea.
Has anybody here actually physically restrained people? People high on drugs? Chauvin is 5'9" and 140 pounds (welterweight). Floyd was ten inches taller (6'7") and 85 pounds heavier - 225 pounds is far into heavyweight territory and 60% greater than Chauvin's weight - that is *twelve* times more than the merely 5% which in boxing or wrestling is considered enough of an advantage to make the competition unfair and bump a guy up to the next class. Sad to say that Balko jumped the shark a long time ago, and he completely evades the inconvenient points that (1) whatever a training slide says, in actual physical reality, there is no way for a smaller man to maintain physical control in a volatile circumstance when facing such an overwhelming differential in size except to do as Chauvin did, evidence of which the defense presented at trial but which Balko ignores, and (2) the medical examiner originally ruled Floyd's death was a cardiac arrest caused by the large amount of fentanyl he took affecting his system, but, as is now public knowledge, he was leaned on to change this determination to the politically-desired one. Talk about "bias in forensics"!! Oh, but Balko is cool with it in this instance, which, face it, is obscene. Look, it's telling for a once-reliable and reasonable commentator on such matters to just drop all pretense of fairness and rigor and go off the rails with anti- police animus such that restraints on policing are not pursued as instrumental goals in the name of greater order, humanity, and justice, but as a dogmatic terminal goal and end in itself, even at the expense of all those other values and the ongoing collapse in public safety we are currently witnessing and experiencing.
This can all be true and probably is - but I still believe there's no one on this forum who, bystanding, wouldn't have yelled at the cop to get off - enough. And if the cop had said, he's going to run - the normal response would be, so what? He's not likely to get too far.
What the officer did that day was in no way productive of order.
I guess the only new thought on this old story that occurs to me is a genuine question, actually, prompted by your comment:
Is someone heavily motivated by racial animus likely to become a police officer - in Minneapolis?
It's possible I suppose, but I guess I incline to the view that such a person would avoid that line of work, in that place. Unless it was really so strong that he actively looked forward to inflicting harm on his unfavored group. However, the guy grew up near Minneapolis, according to Wikipedia so probably he just went to work there as a matter of course.
Then the question becomes did he become racist as a result of his interactions with people, or did he merely become callous and automaton-like? Do we know anything about his intelligence?
Long ago there was anger over a death-by-police in my former city, the details of which I don't remember except that the victim was definitely doing "bad guy" stuff in the course of his getting shot, or was it run over, well, anyway - and I remember Liberal Boomtown was sort of hung up on whether the cop could be racist because he was married to a black woman, or somehow - nevermind Loving - it showed he was racist, how he was married to a black woman.
Kind of shows the muddled thinking that goes on, for something that's pretty hard to define.
Those guys that chained and dragged the black guy, in Jasper, Texas - racist. Definitely. Also: white trash. There ya go. See whether that instance helps you to delimit the term further. I doubt it.
There's a case of someone being in a cop's home only to find out he is KKK. I think it was on 60 Minutes. Pretty sure the cop was in a big city. Regardless, what you say mostly makes sense.
Somewhat tangential to the Floyd/Chauvin discussion (every case has a different set of circumstances) but important context for understanding the state of the MPD prior to 2020 is Justine Damond, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2017. It received a fraction of the attention of the Floyd case outside of Minnesota and Australia. The Wikipedia summary seems essentially accurate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Justine_Damond
On the Balko essay- no one knows how much pressure Chauvin was putting on Floyd's neck/shoulder except for Chauvin himself. This idea that the weight had to be evenly distributed through the two knees is false itself. Even Balko's claim that there is most of the weight on the foot in the training video can't be proven- the foot would look like that even without much weight at all if you had the toe aligned to the front and abducted in (you would do this for simple balance should the perp try to move).
However, none of this addresses the bigger problem- the defense wasn't allowed to present this training video and the judge's reason for doing so, that Chauvin couldn't prove he had seen it, doesn't seem reasonable to me and a lot of other people- it seems like a completely unreasonable method of hobbling the defense since there seems to be no doubt that the video was used to train MPD officers during Chauvin's time on the force. Additionally, if the video is as damning as Balko claims it is, why did the prosecution object to Chauvin's defense attorney using it? Why not just use the video itself to prove all these things Balko claims in his essay? In short, Balko is doing exactly what he claims the documentary doing- making a lot of questionable assumptions about what a video might be showing us.
Half weight seems rather inexact. I get you don't want to say 75lb or whatever but half is WAY different for a big guy and a small woman. Likewise, it would seem to make a big difference whether the person restrained was big or small.
Doesn't Balko kinda give away the game in his opening graph?
"For a few precious days after the death of George Floyd, there was at least a clear consensus across the political spectrum — there was near-unanimity that what Darnella Frazier captured on her cell phone was a crime. An outrage. A thing to be denounced."
So Balko laments that the consensus snap judgment based on a clip edited and released to elicit that snap judgment has been eroded? But the non-zealous advocate that he is, he will proceed to set the record straight?
Whatever the merits, I stopped reading after that.
I'd like to think that if I were Balko, I would see the Floyd incident as a giant missed opportunity, foiled by emotional over-reactions and then hijacked by grifters like Ibram Kendi. Instead, the quote you posted is just...regrettable.
" I think that it is wise to be skeptical of any documentary."
Of all media, the documentary is the least trustworthy. All a documentary can tell you is the appearance of things, and AI has now removed the reliability of that function. Every documentary lies in fundamental ways. The goal of a documentary is to use the strength of images to overpower your reason. And have you ever noticed how much of any documentary is simply visual padding? Watching documentaries to acquire information outside of appearances is not an efficient use of time.
Netflix is now full of propaganda """documentaries""".
Regarding the Friedman-Huemer debate—this seems like a clear win for Friedman. And Substack will likely play a much bigger role in the future—allowing people to figure out for themselves the truth. A big hole in Huemer’s reasoning is the bias caused by state funding of research and education. Experts are often very biased. Direct payment between learners and teachers (as is the case on Substack) will greatly help incentives to pursue truth
Maybe a win for smart folk doing Critical Thinking, but most folk, most of the time, will believe experts, and have to, if they want truth.
Why not tribal leaders?, who choose the experts to believe based on … what’s best for the tribe combined with what’s best for them as individuals.
I'm not sure what you really meant when referring to truth but I think it's important to note none of us has it. The goal is to pick how to get as close as possible.
It seems that I’m more optimistic about humanity than you.
Experts. One thing to consider is are they actually expert in the area they are talking about? PH people presumable know what promotes/hinders spread of disease. They cannot know the tradeoffs of applying those measures, so recommendations about what to DO are ipso facto not their area of expertise.
Making unconditional predictions or with ambiguous conditions is also a tip off.
Thanks for posting a link to the Balko comments on Chauvin and the MPD. I was swayed by TFP and Coleman Hughes on the topic, but Balko’s essay looks like a very strong debunking. I feel like Hughes and TFP really messed up in promoting the Alpha News piece.
Balko vs TFOM is an excellent case to look at Friedman-Huemer issues. Was Floyd’s death murder?
Insofar as murder requires the intent to kill, I’d say neither Balko nor my memory of the trial alleviate my doubts about the truth of the charge: “Chauvin intended to kill”
If he didn’t intend to kill, yet his actions caused the death, it’s criminal manslaughter—the trial was unjust, T1 error false positive. TFOM better than Balko.
“Chauvin’s 9 min knee on neck/ back caused the death”
“Floyd’s body had fatal amount of fentanyl, and some other illegal drugs.”
“Floyd was COVID positive” * not mentioned by Balko, nor Loury on his rethinking of prior promotion of TFOM. I’d be surprised if this fact wasn’t in the doc, but don’t know. Neo did lots of research on it.
“Prior arrestees had become unconscious yet didn’t die, in Minneapolis.”
“Floyd couldn’t breathe while officers tried to put him in the car, before the MRT knee”
I believe there’s a high, 60-80% chance that Floyd would have died within a few hours because of his drugs combined with COVID. Similarly, without either drugs or COVID, the knee wouldn’t have killed him (tho 30% it might). There’s no Law of Large Numbers of repeated experiments on Floyd possible, such probabilities are purely Bayesian, and individually subjective.
The knee was mostly responsible (>90%? >50? What does this mean?). Manslaughter.
The knee was a major cause (>30? >20? >10%) some lesser manslaughter.
The knee was a minor cause - possibly not even criminal.
The knee was not a cause - no charges.
The coroner’s report, or reports, become the most expert document.
The political push to change the first coroner report is a huge red flag on injustice, yet also relevant to the “trust the expert” problems.
Balko says there were some 150 cases of asphyxiation, including one in Minn. for which the city paid $3 million. Chauvin’s knee became police brutality at around 6 minutes, and arguably much sooner if they could have use a hobble and chose not to. Looks like gross, criminal negligence on Chauvin’s part.
People can agree on visible facts, like 9 minutes of knee with life still at the end before the hospital, and COVID and drugs, yet still disagree on assigning blame and responsibility. For most multi causal events, there is some real blame to spread, but no way of knowing truth about actual proportions.
Not mentioned by Balko, nor Loury, is how much crime and murders, especially of Blacks, has gone up since then. Steve Sailer has often noticed, with graphs of Black Lives Murdered. His noticing that Blacks also are dying at increasing rates in autos has started to be noticed by others (no credit to Steve).
A justice system which results in more murders is worse than one with fewer murders, like what El Salvador has achieved by locking up all gang members, likely incurring many T1 errors but hugely reducing the T2 errors of not locking up the guilty.
In judging the justice system of handling Chauvin, the increased murders indicate an error different than T1 or T2.
I want to add to the excellent pushback on the Balko piece from Thucydides, forumposter, Handle, and Invisible Sun, among others (I'll take Handle's word for it on Balko). First, on the consequences of the Floyd incident. Let's return to the scene of the crime in Monday's post, MoCo, as locals call it. I compared contemporary MoCo to Berkeley decades ago, but as best I can recall, it was only in the wake of Floyd that living in MoCo started to have the same feel for residents as living in Berkeley, i.e. like prey. A local MoCo blog that posts on events, store openings and closings, and crime began posting on car theft rings, with at least one post including perps captured on video. More recently, a MoCo Nike store was 'swarmed,' and the blog posted a photo taken with a smartphone of the perps running down the street with their loot in broad daylight, showing no signs of being worried about getting caught. I could cite other examples, including armed carjackings with perp descriptions, but you get the point. I've never been involved in organized crime, but if I wanted to organize theft rings and reduce the risk of getting prosecuted, who would I hire to do the dirty work?
Continuing with my comment, at the risk of being accused of 'whataboutism,' I wanted to draw a comparison between the Floyd incident and 2 of the most egregious 'opposite' examples, involving unarmed white women being shot dead by black police officers. The first is J6er Ashley Babbitt, where the officer was not only not prosecuted, but was treated as a hero. The 2nd is the Somali police officer in Minneapolis who served around 3 years in prison for fatally shooting an Australian woman who had called 911 for police assistance. There were no riots in response to these shootings. One more comment about Ashley Babbitt. There is a lot of commentary today following the reported death in prison of Putin critic Navalny, including from the usual conservative suspects. In his morning video, Scott Adams argued that the US no longer has the 'moral authority' to judge Putin's treatment of Navalny given the harsh treatment of those who participated in the events of J6 (at least one of whom committed suicide) and also the lawfare against Trump. This echoes Russian libertarian Mikhail Svetov's point in a Triggernometry interview several years ago about the US losing 'the moral high ground.' I concur with Scott Adams and Svetov.
Balko leaves little doubt the documentary has many faults but that in no way falsifies the general opinion of whether the cops were properly judged. Likewise, Balko holds some positions I'm skeptical about but that doesn't mean his general opinion is wrong either.
I don't like cops being criminally punished for trying to do their job, even when they do it badly. I lean towards Chauvin never being a cop again and maybe some kind of criminal punishment though I don't see the benefit of prison. I'm not even sure the others should be banned from being a cop. Definitely not prison. (Banning someone from being a cop is problematic. I'm not sure if a felony conviction without prison time would do it.)
I am heavily influenced in my opinion by the Tony Timpa case which doesn't have the race issue to raise emotions. Timpa made the phone call asking for help and was killed in more or less the same restraint. On top of that the police made jokes and were rather unprofessional in ways other than the restraint. It wasn't until years later they were even reprimanded.
"After adjusting for publication selection bias, the median probability of the presence of an effect decreased from ..."
Can someone explain this? The linked abstract doesn't help.
What bias?
How is it determined?
What "effect" is measured and how?
If editors will only publish a paper that shows an effect that biases published papers relative, to the population of papers written and biases authors to not submit papers with weak results
I've tried to parse this statement and failed. Put it aside, come back and failed.
I had high hopes for the Friedman piece, and I concur with many of his arguments, but finally was disabused at the end when it turns out that Huemer and Friedman apparently agree that “critical thinking” ought be reserved as the exclusive domain of a cognitively gifted class: “He agrees that we were writing for different people and that my view is correct for the sufficiently intelligent.” Friedman apparently also subscribes to the “trial-by-combat” approach to policy analysis:
“The same approach on easy mode is to find people, ideally smart people, arguing for each side, evaluate their arguments as best you can, and base your conclusion accordingly. This requires much less expertise both because partisans of both sides will have done much of the work for you and because you can often evaluate arguments on grounds that do not require technical knowledge of the subject being argued about.”
Both seem to be in a Manichaean mode of policy analysis in which only truth and falsehood exist are the only alternatives on every policy question from abortion to gun control. This sort of approach seems rooted in and well-suited to our winner-take-all, two party electoral system. In marked contrast to this approach, one might consider the consensus model of democracy endemic to northern Europe and other jurisdictions that have adopted proportional representation in parliamentary systems of governance.
I am much reminded of Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages in which he writes:
“—long after nobility and feudalism had ceased to be really essential factors in the state and in society, they continued to impress the mind as dominant forms of life. The men of the fifteenth century could not understand that the real moving powers of political and social evolution might be looked for anywhere else than in the doings of a warlike or courtly nobility. They persisted in regarding the nobility as the foremost of social forces and attributed a very exaggerated importance to it, undervaluing altogether the social significance of the lower classes.”
Engels further develops this theme in his The German Revolutions. The Puritan Revolution in England however the major instance in which the lower classes successfully assert a claim to political participation on more equal terms with their betters. This failed, initially with Laud driving many Puritans out of England and then later with The Restoration and religious governance the Act of Uniformity 1662 with the whole of the Puritan clergy decamping for the colonies. Nevertheless, the supremacy of Parliament was established and this proved to have tremendous impact on the evolution of governance on the continent.
The Puritans in the colonies carried on their independent streak and the tradition of critical thinking that this entailed. As Grover Cleveland wrote in his essay on The Principles of the American Revolution:
“Another fact that must be noted is the character of the colonists, and especially those of Massachusetts. These were the Puritans, who had fought the wars of liberty in England. Then, because they were not satisfied with church ordinances, they were driven by Archbishop Laud to seek religious freedom across the sea.
Of all the race they were the most tenacious of their rights and the most jealous of their liberties. The American Revolution was not, then, any struggle for emancipation from slavery; and the colonists were free men. Nor was it at first so much for gaining new liberties as for preserving the old.
Nor can it, as is often thought, be called a war between different nations. Both sides were Englishmen who gloried in the name of England. William and Mary had, moreover, given the colonists a full share of the rights of British subjects. Another fact showing the same thing is that almost the ablest advocates of the colonial cause were members of the British House of Parliament, while the most ardent adherents of the King were colonists.
The real object of resistance was to gain security from Parliamentary encroachments. This was the chief cause for which the Revolutionists contended, but by no means all they obtained. The war was finally fought out on principles as far-reaching as the history of nations. It was a struggle for the retention of those great institutions that check oppression and violence.
The colonists were contending for the principle of a representative government of chartered rights and constitutional liberties. They were defending themselves against the military despotism of George III and struggling to change the foundation of government from force to equality.”
The tragedy of the Philadelphia convention, of course, put a full stop to the principles of the American Revolution, and restored centralized subjugation by an entitled establishment class that had nothing but disdain for the lower classes. Following a short-lived burst of PR adoption in many US cities soon cushed by party machines, the class system in the US has ossified into our present sorry condition.
In Europe, however, beginning with Switzerland, winner-take-all was gradually displaced
by PR and a more egalitarian, and successful, mode of democracy known as “consensus democracy” evolved. Wikipedia:
“Consensus democracy is the application of consensus decision-making to the process of legislation in a democracy. It is characterized by a decision-making structure that involves and takes into account as broad a range of opinions as possible, as opposed to majoritarian democracy systems where minority opinions can potentially be ignored by vote-winning majorities. A consensus government is a national unity government with representation across the whole political spectrum. A concordance democracy is a type of consensus democracy where majority rule does not play a central role. Optional referendums and popular initiatives correspond to consensus democracy.”
Thus the knowledge and insights of the less intellectually gifted can be incorporated and used to improve the outcomes of policy analysis and decision making. When PR is combined with a parliamentary system in which the prime minister can be voted out before the end of a term of office, the feedback loops of governance are even more resilient and effective. As Karl Popper observed, “If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.” One suspects that this is especially true of those who would discard out of hand the information and knowledge held by the ”ignorant masses.”
To test this theory, one might scan a few substacks by Scandinavian authors and test whether they are more or less more Manichean than the typical US substack. Three quick examples that may or may not be representative but do seem to have a subtler approach to truth-telling:
https://donaldnordberg.substack.com/p/showmanship-has-eclipsed-even-simple
https://jordygeerlings.substack.com/p/why-the-netherlands-still-doesnt
https://remybazerque.substack.com/p/are-we-humans-prime-galactic-real
If nothing else, I suspect Substack could increase its readership in the United States by giving greater play and attention to writers outside of the United States. Especially in an election year when reading the US offerings is likely to be more punishment than reward.