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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Unbelievable how embedded this meme is in our community. The article has to call it out explicitly right at the top, admit it's a fallacy, and then just... plows ahead anyway:

> My biggest problem with SF was simply not feeling physically safe [...] SF has a pretty low violent crime rate [...] Instead, the problem was that SF [has] thousands of people wandering around who are suffering from untreated substance abuse and/or severe mental illness

So... I guess the idea is that this is leaning extremely hard on "feeling". Author admits they're not unsafe. Author admits that their real issue is that they don't like being near people with drug habits or mental illness. But they still express it in the lede as "physical safety" anyway! Because that's how they "feel"?

Come on folks. Aren't techies like us supposed to be rationalists? Why are we lying to ourselves (and, in this blog post, others) about what we really want?

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You're just arguing semantics at this point.

Sure, the author admits that violent crime rate is under control. But, implicit in his post, is the fact that this is only the case because residents adopt behavioral patterns that remove them from violent crime scenes.

Imagine you live in a neighborhood where walking on the right side of the street results in immediate decapitation. While it's true that you can simply always walk on the left side of the street and be 100% safe, most people would not call that a safe neighborhood.

> But, implicit in his post, is the fact that this is only the case because residents adopt behavioral patterns that remove them from violent crime scenes.

But the same is true everywhere though. You think that Houston or St. Louis or wherever don't "adopt behavioral patterns" to make themselves feel safer too? Only SF residents are smart enough to make life in the wasteland possible?

No, that's silly. SF isn't unsafe, period. SF residents (specifically ones right here[1]) "feel" unsafe because of an out of control meme. And now it's leading this formerly rationalist and clear-thinking demographic into these ridiculous rhetorical holes.

Cities are cities. They've always been like this. If you don't like it that's fine, but please stop pretending that anything happening in SF is new, or unique, or special in any way. It's just what your microcommunity has decided to yell about this year.

[1] Which doesn't include me. I'm in Portland, having lived in SF previously and grown up in the urban northeast. Cities, again, are cities.

I don't think Houston residents spend much if any time thinking about how to walk home from work to avoid a homeless encampment.

Cities don't have to be like this: by any standard, US cities are much less safe than those in the rest of the developed world. Where it comes to a head in San Francisco in particular is that everything is very heavily mixed together in close proximity, so commuting from a $2M townhouse to work a $300kpa job means you also pass through areas where people are literally dying in the street.

> You think that Houston or St. Louis or wherever don't "adopt behavioral patterns" to make themselves feel safer too?

No, not nearly to the same extent.

Whether that's the case or not is actually besides my point.

My point is that OP isn't simply claiming that he "feels unsafe". He's likely claiming that he IS unsafe. And, the only reason his unsafe environment hasn't resulted in physical harm is due to his altered behavior.

That line of reasoning is cogent and rational, and therefore, your claims of emotionalism are largely uncalled for.

Also, in my learning 'street smarts' as an adult , one lesson tougher people including my wife have taught me , is to trust your gut instincts if you are in a neighborhood or situation and you feel unsafe.

Don’t have such high expectations from someone who stayed in SF for so long

Hook up a heart rate monitor to someone walking down the street on University Ave. in Palo Alto, then hook it up walking down Market Street. Those feelings are real.

But they're not about safety! And the author (and presumably you too?) admit as much. Again, aren't we supposed to be better than arguing about policy issues via reference to our personal emotions? Isn't that what the woke hippies on the school board are doing?

That's a pretty big stretch to claim that everything related to emotion is equally suspect. Safety is something which naturally has a very strong perception element to it. A lack of a feeling of safety causes people to change their behavior in ways which tend to destroy a community (by moving away, avoiding public spaces, not shopping in certain areas, etc). Those harms to the community are tangible. Dismissing them because they don't show up in violent crime statistics is choosing to ignore reality.

> That's a pretty big stretch to claim that everything related to emotion is equally suspect.

The context is an emotional argument that is directly and explicitly contradicted by data. Yeah, I'd say that's suspect. Do you really disagree? "Facts don't care about your feelings", as it were.

Instead, what we're seeing in this subthread is a bunch of pontification about how the data is measuring the wrong thing or how feelings are important all by themselves. Which is fine. But none of that makes living in SF dangerous when it isn't, so an argument about SF based on safety problems is... just plain wrong.

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