The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)

I dearly miss the offline mail readers from the dial up BBS days. TLDR: most of the features (eg whitelists, blacklists, fetch behavior), were client side. I have a deep hunch that moving all these features to server side, aka social networks, contributed to our current mess.

The recent rehash (front paged) about newsgroups (NNTP protocol) made me wish I had more gumption and just did something about it.

This is about how humans first discovered that, given an infinite amount of reading material, we choose to read things that give us an emotional reaction. Any emotional reaction.

In a real scenario the officer would be pressing much more force on the suspects neck than what is presented in the video. The placement of the knee is another important factor. Because we see in the video that the training partner is lying completely still and not giving up much of a fight. Why aren't they demonstrating a scenario where the suspect is trying to break the restraint?

The upload date and content is also a direct response to the killing of George Floyd. It was uploaded not too long after his death. They even make a passing mention of it in the video too. This is clearly a video meant to push a narrative of policing techniques that don't actually work.

I did find this

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=84

and this

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/176330.pdf

while attempting to research this, they are certainly interesting reads.

Fear of reprisals from other officers? (This has happened in a few cases.)

Let's say if in the case of Mr. Floyd another one of the officers had said, "get off him, this submission hold is not in line with department policy" and the officer got off Mr. Floyd and Mr. Floyd had not died. What then? One might realistically imagine that the above negative concepts would be applied to the officer who said something. Maybe by hearing those words Mr. Floyd could pursue a complaint against the officer.

There are probably lots of reasons why an officer and probably most people in that situation would feel pressure to avoid speaking out in that moment.

There's a word for this: solidarity.

This is what it looks like from the outside.

Well, as a programmer, I know from experience that there's a lot about programming computers that isn't obvious unless you actually spend time doing it - and that when you have a group of people (i.e. project managers) who seem bound and determined to portray programmers as lazy, time-wasting, obstinate, overpaid, wastes of space who should be offshored anyway, it's very easy for them to play armchair quarterback and insist that every programming problem was trivial in hindsight and confirm their hypothesis.

Now, apply that to police work. Police are routinely put into situations where their lives and the lives of other police officers are in danger, and they have to make split-second decisions or an innocent person can end up dying. I don't know anything about police work, but I'm willing to gamble that getting that right is even harder than getting programming right, and if somebody's bound and determined to make you look bad, they can do so more easily than project managers routinely do to programmers. If even 90% of the police have good intentions (and I believe that number is much, much higher), it stands to reason that they'd usually be willing to give other officers the benefit of the doubt: this or that may look bad if you put effort into making it look bad, but at least give the officer a chance to defend himself rather than jump to conclusions.

Now combine that already low number with the fact that there is strong belief among cops that doing so will negatively affect their career trajectory.

As far as cops coming to defense of other cops, every single officer I know has had false allegations against him, including one with a rape allegation that was only proven false because he had his body camera on the entire time he was with the suspect. So anything that's even slightly grey will get the benefit of the doubt as far as cops are concerned.

I've experienced the same thing as a foster parent. I'm not actually sure how many allegations have been made against my wife and I, so I tend to immediately dismiss any news of such against other foster parents (then occasionally it will be be "oh shit they were keeping kids in dog kennels?" and I'll have to backtrack). I'm almost certainly dismissing some actual misdeeds in there, but I also feel fairly secure that the signal to noise of allegations against foster parents is very low.

You gotta go back to the original article, this is exactly what it's about. Everybody agrees that good cops calling out bad cops is a good thing. Therefore, it doesn't spread, and you don't hear about it unless you pay deep attention to specific goings-on in specific police departments. It's also particularly likely not to spread because the details of such cases are usually kept quiet, and the cop just gets quietly let go.

The only thing most people who are only sort of paying attention hear is, cop does something kind of dubious, activists scream at the top of their lungs about how outrageous it is. They double down way past "this particular bad cop should be fired and charged" to "All cops are bastards" and "Defund the Police". Which then kind of forces cops and people who appreciate law and order to push back, find ways to excuse the action and defend the police.

I've seen a bunch of pics of cops kneeling with protestors. They didn't spread far, and they didn't change anyone's mind. They didn't contribute to the outrage, and so they can't spread among a media class that is highly incentivized to spread only the most outrageous things.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-americans-feel-abou...

He is the best writer on police brutality, AFAIK.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko/

https://twitter.com/radleybalko

But that's the choice, isn't it; faced with a choice between property damage, however minor or even theoretical, and human life (or the serious injuries incurred by protestors and journalists who had rubber bullets fired at their eyes), conservatives immediately turn around and defend the police.

The police can read between the lines as well as anyone else, so they interpret that as the voters ordering them to go out and injure as many protestors as necessary until the protests stop. Which, of course, escalates the protests.

(How is Radley Balko conservative? It's very hard to tell from that twitter feed)

I think you should dig into this a little deeper, because I think it is disingenuous to portray their take as just being somewhat suspicious of the case. When I dug deeper with my conservative friends, they think that Floyd is a "thug" and drug addict, and fall short of saying that he definitely had what happened to him coming, but that's the implication.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/opcw-leaks-syria/

The leaks’ key revelations include:

    Senior OPCW officials reedited the Douma investigators’ initial report to produce a version that sharply deviated from the original. Key facts were removed or misrepresented and conclusions were rewritten to support the allegation that a chlorine gas attack had occurred in Douma. Yet the team’s initial report did not conclude that a chemical attack occurred, and left open the possibility that victims were killed in a “non-chemical related” incident.
    Four experts from a OPCW and NATO-member state conducted a toxicology review at the OPCW team’s request. They concluded that observed symptoms of the civilians in Douma, particularly the rapid onset of excessive frothing, as well as the concentration of victims filmed in the apartment building so close to fresh air, “were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine, and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.”
    Chemical tests of the samples collected in Douma showed that chlorine compounds were, in most cases, detected at what amounted to trace quantities in the parts-per-billion range. Yet this finding was not disclosed publicly. Furthermore, it later emerged that the chemicals themselves did not stand out as unique: According to the author of the initial report, the OPCW’s top expert in chemical weapons chemistry, they could have resulted from contact with household products such as bleach or come from chlorinated water or wood preservatives.
    The author of the initial report protested the revisions in an e-mail expressing his “gravest concern.” The altered version “misrepresents the facts,” he wrote, thereby “undermining its credibility.”
    Following the e-mail of protest over the manipulation of the team’s findings, the OPCW published a watered-down interim report in July 2018. Around that time, OPCW executives decreed that the probe would be handled by a so-called “core team,” which excluded all of the Douma investigators who had traveled to Syria, except for one paramedic. It was this core team—not the inspectors who had been deployed to Douma and signed off on the original document—that produced the final report of March 2019.
    After the e-mail of protest, and just days before the interim report was published on July 6, a US government delegation met with members of the investigation team to try to convince them that the Syrian government had committed a chemical attack with chlorine. According to veteran reporter Jonathan Steele, who interviewed one of the whistle-blowers, the Douma team saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.” Interference by state parties is explicitly prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
    The inference drawn from the OPCW’s final report—widely disseminated, including by the Trump administration—was that gas cylinders found in Douma likely came from Syrian military aircraft. An unpublished engineering study reached the opposite conclusion. The study evaluated competing hypotheses: Either the cylinders were dropped from the sky or they were manually placed. There is “a higher probability,” it concluded, “that both cylinders were manually placed…rather than being delivered from aircraft.” At “Location 4,” where a cylinder was found on a bed, the study determined that the cylinder was too large to have penetrated the hole in the roof above; at the other site, “Location 2,” the observed damage to the cylinder and to the roof it allegedly penetrated were incompatible with an aircraft bombing. Ballistics experts also said it was more likely that the crater had been made by an explosion, probably from an artillery round, a rocket, or a mortar. With both cylinders, the study concluded, “the alternative hypothesis”—that the cylinders were manually placed and that the craters were caused by other means—”produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.”

You are giving OP the benefit of the doubt, which is a nice thing to do, but what if it isn't actually true? One isolated case is no big deal of course, but what if this (people accidentally mistaking opinions for facts) was actually a very common phenomenon? And when combined with the power of the internet to propagate ideas (opinions perceived as facts), brought about a scenario where people's beliefs about reality are highly divergent from actual reality...in a complex system, might this possibly result in a kind of self-reinforcing negative feedback loop?

If one looked carefully, I wonder if some signs of this phenomenon could be identified within the system we find ourselves living in.

sundarurfriend: > Correction: you would prefer it much more as five much smaller articles.

dllthomas: > Maybe "I'd rather phrase that..." or "More precisely..."

You seem to have struck a loop, you are asking that the correction "Correction: That should say it's your opinion" should be "In my opinion, you should say it's your opinion".

Your issue is that they claimed objectivity when they called the poster subjective, which seems like an endless rabbithole to go down, since it is only your subjective opinion that they should do so.

5. That isn't what was claimed, that's a book that included him, not a book he published (as far as I am able to tell). It seems to be _very_ different given that he did not make the effort to publish and the book even fails to call him "Scott Alexander", making it hard to link them together.

2. As point above says, the argument has become incongruent now that it becomes clear he did not publish the book. And, again, there is much value to not publishing a piece on how you are tied to fringe groups online even if your full name was once connected to them in a print book.

3. This isn't a very fair assumption. You, and others, are calling what he did bad because he knew what would happen, but aren't showing he knew ahead of time. It is very easy to say you would have realized WWII would have started, but even something that large would be outside the reach of most people's predictors in the moment.

1. I think _you_ are the one with a different definition, and I would also note that the lack of the other side being published should speak to some extent too. He showed his side, but you are taking the lack of evidence against him as proof he did something wrong, which is not very sound.

4. This attempt at universalization doesn't hold very well given that this was not a reporter trying to cover the story with full honesty; his name was a largely irrelevant detail. They could have named him "Big Bird" and the story would have been the same but with no chance of controversy, since his identity in his private life is not important to the story.

Thanks for the well-organized points, it makes replying a lot more sane.