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NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality Quotes December 2012 - Less Wrong
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Robert Peele
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
Perhaps he should have said "conspicuous absence". An absence of tigers is only conspicuous if you would otherwise expect tigers everywhere.
In principle, yes. In practice, it would be very hard to tell how many more crimes per year, divided per X, there would be if counterfactually the police's budget was reduced by $X/year all other things being equal (looking at how other countries are doing will have huuuge confounding effects), and I suspect most people would overestimate that.
Specious, not spacious.
Fixed.
Ok, now, which character from the Simpsons would be capable of reading the causality sequence, understand the math and reliably evaluate the evidence actually given about police efficiency by absence of crime and disorder? Because if Lisa said directly or herself intended the above story to be analogous then I'd call her naive and confused. Given what is known about the relevance of law enforcement, not considering low crime to be---all else even remotely approximating equal---strong evidence about the effectiveness of the police would be utterly absurd.
By my count, three: Lisa, Professor Frink, and "Stephen Hawking" (the caricatured version of himself that Hawking played on the several occasions he guest-starred on the show).
Jumping to Lisa's defense here, as the quoted dialogue was about the Bear Patrol, a costly government initiative to keep the town safe from bears, launched in response to the only bear sighting in decades. It was army1987 who applied it to regular (human) crime.
Agreed. It's also not the lack of police visibly dealing with crime.
Why the British police are still almost entirely unarmed
Wow! I had no idea (and approve wholeheartedly, given that it does seem to work). Thanks Nancy.
I know this is meant to be an ideal for the police, but it could also be read as a descriptive claim about public favor, and it's worth noting that that claim is sometimes false: how often do people approve of police bashing the heads of $OUTGROUP?
This is true-- and it's also the case that sometimes the law supports abuse of an outgroup.
I don't know enough about Peele's era to have an opinion about how those issues played out for his police force.