Beyond fiction
scottaaronson.com
scottaaronson.com
He's then somehow pretending that he's been oppressed for this, as if the officers hauled him off to an interrogation room.
> how do you live in a world where, again and again, you can choose the hard right path over the easy wrong one, and then see your choice gleefully wielded against you?
Nothing was really wielded against him, except for the fact that he absent-mindedly committed a petty crime and had to deal with police officers questioning him about that.
Talking to police officers for 5 minutes after you commit a crime is the cost of being part of society. It seems very reasonable to me and I wouldn't call it traumatic.
> maybe we should all be severely punished for our mistakes
This qualifies as severely punished?
> The world is a much better place if we can work together and be understanding of mistakes
Completely agree, that's why Aaronson complete inability to understand his mistake is so gross. Even after it's explained to him and he's back home writing a blog post about it, he still doesn't understand his mistake.
Did he commit a crime? What he did isn't a crime in England.
Theft in the US generally involves intent, not merely taking. There was certainly probable cause to arrest for petty theft, but a taking under an honest mistake of ownership is not theft, so, if one accepts Aaronson’s account, he did not, in fact, commit theft.
OTOH, whether a jury would believe it plausible that not only did he initially forget that he had paid by card and mistake the tip jar for change but, when told that the container from which he had just taken money was for tips, still did not realize that the money he had taken was tips and not his change is another question, so I wouldn't have been surprised if, if this had gone further, he had been convicted of theft even if his narrative of th facts external to his mental state were accepted as true.
I'm not sure what he did meets all of those tests. I'm not sure it meets "dishonest" - it sounds like it was a simple mistake.
Theft in the US afaik is also defined as "intent to deprive". That's why e.g. joyriding is different than grand theft auto.
There exists also strict liability crimes where intent is not considered but theft is not one of them.
Well, I'm glad we've got you here to tell us all that he didn't feel how he felt.
This probably is a poor assumption about living in a liberal democracy,
but it seems ironic that he was actually able to resolve this relatively on the spot (he doesn't have to appear in court, or use the services of a lawyer to resolve this)
Kafka this isn't
fwiw, its seems pretty likely to me that this isn't true, and that had he done that, this situation would have been more expensive to resolve
It seems surreal to me that you would have the cops called on you for 3 bucks.. what happened to human interaction (for real) ?
> After many more attempts to intimidate me, I was finally informed of the charge: “that smoothie place over there says you the stole cash from their tip jar.” Huh? How much? One of the officers returned from the smoothie bar, and said, a bit sheepishly: “they say it was $4.”
So the most likely scenario was a comedy of errors. All the cops know is that the manager of the smoothie place ran up to them and said "that guy just robbed our tip jar!" They interpret this to mean he emptied out the entire tip jar, which would be a pretty brazen thing to do, so they roll up on him hard out of disgust that anyone would do such a thing. Then they talk to him and discover that what actually happened is that he absent-mindedly took $4. That's a very different class of violation, but it's not like they can take back the aggressiveness of their initial approach. The damage was done.
In theory, the officers could have avoided the mistake by questioning the manager for more details before making the stop. Look at it from their perspective, though -- one of the people you're employed to protect is telling you that he's just been robbed, and if you futz around too long, the perpetrator gets on his plane and gets away with it. It's not surprising they would decide to stop the guy first and work out the details once they could be confident he wasn't going anywhere.
I feel bad for the author, but I feel bad for the officers too, who (by this account, anyway) were put into a pretty awkward position by the actions of the smoothie shop manager.
Also, apparently what he actually did: his story of mistaking the contents for his change don't make any sense unless it was the entire contents.
You mean, when the worker repeatedly told him that the thing he had just taken money from was the tip jar?
The resort to law enforcement happened after direct interaction failed.
He was presumed to be a petty criminal by police because they're required to do so when someone reports a petty crime. And in this case they were correct in their presumption.
> A few words of respectful human communication on the part of the cops could have saved everybody a lot of grief.
If Aaronson was capable of respectful communication then when the smoothie person got angry at him he would have considered the possibility that the anger was warranted and he had done something wrong. And probably would have pretty quickly realized: "oh wait I'm putting down money on this tray that I just picked up money from... that doesn't make any sense." But instead he immediately jumped to: "there's something wrong with this smoothie shop worker" Everyone would have been saved a ton of grief if Aaronson had any respect for the people around him or any self awareness. But he has neither.
If you accept his story, they were probably not correct, though only by his lacking the required mental state. OTOH, if there is probable cause (which there was) and the victim prefers charges (which initially it seemed they would, since they requested the intervention), that's an issue for prosecutors and the courts to figure out, from the perspective of the police.
> Everyone would have been saved a ton of grief if Aaronson had any respect for the people around him or any self awareness. But he has neither.
This, OTOH, is clearly true, even if you accept his narrative completely.
Instead....he stole from a tip jar???!
That is one of the most despicable crimes one can commit. I am surprised the police didn't use more force. Generally if you steal from a tip jar and the staff sees you, you should pray the police show up to protect you.
I have also never in my life heard of someone accidentally stealing from a tip jar. That is bad luck for him. My opinion is he should change this story from a melodrama to a lighthearted comedy and count his blessings he still has all his teeth.
It was $4. Is that really worth physical violence?
"One of the most despicable crimes one can commit."? I do not respect persons who steal tips, but on a scale of criminality, it strikes me as a long way from the top of the despicability index.
Maybe you never get absentminded, but, well, what can I tell you? Other people do.
And in none of those times was violence close to being an option - I was usually just made aware of what I'd almost done, and fixed it.
The explanation also loses sympathy with me when I pay close attention to his words: how many times have you seen a tip "tray" and a change "cup"? I've had thousands of restaurants experiences and have seen that zero times. It's change tray, tip jar/cup. They never vary. He's trying to make it sounds like it was an easy mistake to make instead of just owning up to extreme absentmindedness.
Anyway, I think this has potential as a hilarious tale, but in its current form is tone-deaf.
And if they had done that—well, he did accidentally steal $3, didn't he? And then you'd be right here saying "...as if the officers locked him up for the night". And if they had done that too—well, he did accidentally steal $3, didn't he? I wonder what you'd be saying here then.
Maybe you can't imagine how someone could be so absent-minded. I certainly can, since I've been close to this absent-minded before - especially in the middle of a long flight with a child, which tends to make people espcially unfocused.
Seriously, it seems like you're giving him 0 benefit of the doubt. If a friend was telling you about this crazy thing that happened to him where he was placed in handcuffs because he accidentally took 4 dollars from a tip jar thinking it was change, would you really be acting this way?
If a friend told me this story I'd tell him that yes, it was a bit crazy, but that he also had done several things to bring this upon himself and that he should learn from this rather than blaming everyone else.
I mean, you could characterize it this way. Or you could just say "some people aren't paying full attention to cashiers, especially when they're tired/stressed/traveling with children.
Really, I'm not saying he was OK to "steal" something, but are you really so shocked at someone not paying the most attention to a routine encounter like paying money? That part is completely standard behavior.
I agree. The universe seems to defy the laws of probability. It's not to oppress one absent minded professor. It's that the genetic ancestors of this man all managed to not get eaten by a lion in order to build a world that allows him and his family to survive while being incapable of functioning under normal levels of adversity.
You'll find that you're in a very very small minority of people who think airports are designed to make everything as straightforward as possible.
Also can you explain what gaslighting you saw?
Gaslighting can be viewed as any statement here that either fabricates or contrudes another's internal feelings. For example several comments mention that the situation he felt wasn't traumatic. That term is an emotional response and often doesn't require being a rational one. My grandmother had a traumatic event when an egg she was cooking exploded. Sure it's silly, but to tell someone that a feeling isn't real is being a bully. At other times, that feeling can give us an insight into the experience that might just be too easy to otherwise rationalize away.
- forgets method of payment within seconds
- thinks it makes sense to get coinless change returned in a cup
- doesn't think to tip himself
- confronted by employee but can't understand the issue and doesn't bother to reach understanding. I guess just walks away?
- when confronted by police, acts out guilty person stereotype (IF I did it, there's an excuse)
Taken together, it's almost beyond belief that someone could truly navigate this chain of events with pure intentions.
Clearly, there are people who this could be true for. It makes me wonder if there could be a different explanation like exhaustion -> low impulse control in lizard brain -> "drunken blackout behavior"
I would be thanking my lucky stars to get away with this.
Thinking of writing Scott to demand compensation for my eyes rolling out of my head.
But yeah, the cops were a little rude to him I guess...
The point is, he took someone else's money, and all that ultimately happened was that he received a stern talking to. Seems pretty contrary to your narrative that "Even the smallest break in the only code they have must be met with extreme measures."
1. It's not my $3. For some, the theft of $3 would be significant. How should law enforcement handle this?
2. I wonder if it really is true that if you steal $3, you're likely to face the "full force of the law." I would think that many people would just look the other way rather than involving the police. A lot would depend, I suspect, on their prior disposition towards you (which, of course, can be problematic insofar as it provides a vector for racism, etc. to influence policing).
There are both crimes with lesser mental states than intent, and crimes of strict liability. So let's not engage in inaccurate unnecessary generalizations.
But the usual required intent for theft was not present if you accept Aaronson’s account, though the external evidence was certainly enough to provide an external observer a reasonable basis for believing that intent was present.
Did he?
Seems to me that he outright admits that both the actual encounter and his mental picture of it are shaped by strongly by his strong internal expectation of persecution based on his “nerdy outsider” status, and saw everyone—starting with the smoothie worker trying to inform him that the money he had just picked up was from the tip jar—as being aligned against him because of this status.
It seems like he got what he expected, largely because he expected it so much that it blinded him to what was actually happening.
"Again and again, I screwed up. Again and again, though, the airport personnel responded to my honest mistakes with a maximum of cold bureaucracy rather than commonsense discussion: the booting from the flight, the bomb squad, the handcuffs."
1. Stole money out of the tip jar due to some sort of incomprehensible error, presented as though it is a normal human foible;
2. Was confronted by employees, whereupon he continued to somehow not understand that he had just taken money out of the tip jar. He put a dollar back in and walked away. Aaronson paints the employees' protestations that "this here is for tips" (a bit of dialect that tells us more, I suspect, about Aaronson's regard for smoothie bar employees than about what those employees actually said) as somehow not sufficiently clear, under the circumstances. Those circumstances being: he just took $4 from an unmarked plastic cup sitting on a tray thinking (for some reason) this was his change, only to have the employee point towards the vicinity of the cup and say something like "that's for tips." The employee continues to shout even after he has put a "tip" in the cup and begun to walk away.
3. Chalks this all up to his being a "nerdy outsider" (as though the smoothie place employees are all "insiders" on top of the world)
4. Is eventually confronted by police officers who, through dialogue that, as Aaronson has rendered it here, again probably tells us more about his own conceptions than about what was actually said, demand that he confess. Not surprisingly, the cops are pretty gruff with him. Among other things, they think that he's some jerk that just stole $4 in tips. (Which, of course, is at least partially true!)
5. Paints this interaction as yet another instance in which he was victimized because he is some sort of outsider.
6. Is eventually released by the police after, among other things, it is revealed that the smoothie bar employees people refused his offer of $40 and did not want the police involved in the first place. This is nice human behavior, which Aaronson continues to paint as somehow absurd. Aaronson describes this as being released because the cops "have no case." Actually, it sounds like they had him dead to rights, but it was a minor misunderstanding, so everyone decided to let it go--as they should have.
7. Draws from this the major lesson that he is always the victim of some "hostile theory" or other. If that's true, this is a particularly poor example, since he did actually still the tip money, under circumstances that, even as he described them, and with all the charity that this implies, defy reason.
8. Concludes that "the airport personnel responded to my honest mistakes with a maximum of cold bureaucracy rather than commonsense discussion." At least when it comes to the tip theft, this is manifestly false. The workers did not want the police involved, attempted to correct his error themselves through ordinary human interaction (which he somehow did not understand), generously rejected his offer of $40, and he was eventually released by the cops despite having committed a (very petty) crime.
9. Insight fully observes that "my belief in the universe’s grotesque awfulness clearly played a role in the events." This is an admirable humble insight. But he would be well served by isolating the part of his psyche that came up with this thought and give it a big promotion. It's not getting enough airtime as it is.
I feel like I may be too harsh here but...what am I missing?
Edit: Here's one thing I missed: I don't think Aaronson is a bad person because he somehow got confused at a smoothie counter. It sounds like he just had an off day, and I sympathize. It's his inclination to paint himself as the victim here, even after extended reflection, that strikes me as the real problem.
I agree that it sounds like a genuinely miserable experience that could, conceivably, happen to anyone. (Though perhaps not in that exact way...) My gripe is with his analysis of the situation now that he's had time to reflect, not with the fact that he did what he did, or that he found it stressful.