The inability to see from anyone's perspective but his own is astonishing here. Starting with the title "Beyond fiction," the only part of this account that strikes me as fictional are Aaronson's explanation of why he did nothing wrong. To any reasonable observer it appears that Aaronson has committed a very petty crime that robs minimum wage workers of a tiny bit of extra income. Actually it doesn't just appear that way... that's actually what he did.
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.
He went through a traumatic experience with aggressive, armed officers not knowing why. He wasn't trying to rob anybody. Have you ever accidently almost crashed into another car - but because the other person was paying attention, you both were spared? - or maybe we should all be severely punished for our mistakes. The world is a much better place if we can work together and be understanding of mistakes (especially petty ones like this) - we all make them.
> He went through a traumatic experience with aggressive, armed officers not knowing why.
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.
Being told to confess (confess! confess!) sounds downright medieval. [Redacted some stuff comparing American police to police in some other countries, accusing them of being especially aggressive.] I don't know why anybody would accept being treated like that, without being told what they're being accused of. I would complain in his shoes.
Keep in mind that, in the U.S., the benchmark for bad treatment by police is being shot while complying as fully as possible with their instructions (for which the involved officers are virtually never punished).
> 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.
Did he commit a crime? What he did isn't a crime in England.
Yes... stealing money is a crime in the US.
You're allowed to take from tip jars in England? That doesn't sound right to me. But I don't know much about English law.
I think the amount stolen here probably precludes prosecution in most jurisdictions. But I have trouble believing that if it was a larger amount he'd be able to just say: "I was mistaken, I thought their money was my money." I'm not a lawyer but that seems like far too abusable of a defense.
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 mean, I think most people can (and should!) reasonably expect to go through life without being placed in handcuffs. I think it's a fairly extraordinary circumstance that found a geeky CS professor in handcuffs. Over accidentally "stealing" $4.
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?
I have no problem imagining absentmindedness of this sort. It's the deafness to the people around him that I find astonishing. Throughout the story anytime Aaronson was presented with a social interaction that would have allowed him to realize his mistake, he didn't pick up on it, and I feel that's because he can't respect the people around them or their point-of-view for long enough to get out of his own bubble and realize they might not be completely crazy.
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.
> It's the deafness to the people around him that I find astonishing.
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 think you missed his whole point. He admits he absent-mindedly committed a petty crime and failed to communicate with a minimum-wage worker. For these mistakes, he was presumed to be a hardened criminal and no attempt was made to see if maybe--just maybe--this nebbishy-looking guy with his family might merely be an ordinary person having a bad day in an airport who made a simple mistake because he was stressed-out. A few words of respectful human communication on the part of the cops could have saved everybody a lot of grief. But that option never occurred to them.
> he was presumed to be a hardened criminal and no attempt
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.
> And in this case they were correct in their presumption
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.
Not the GP, but this blog post is basically the only thing I know about Aaronson, and I had exactly the same reaction. The core of the problem here to me sounds like it was Aaronson's, perhaps isolated, inability to respectfully interact with the smoothie bar workers.
Of course he was in the wrong, but in other countries, you would have the manager come to you and tell you you mistakenly took some cash of the tip jars.
It seems surreal to me that you would have the cops called on you for 3 bucks.. what happened to human interaction (for real) ?
It sounds like the officers didn't know that the amount taken was so small. From the post:
> 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.
> 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
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.
He had precisely the interaction you describe, though with a non-manager smoothie bar employee. Things escalated when, somehow not understanding what he had been told, he simply walked away.
"in a liberal democracy, as long you know you did nothing wrong, even if you got arrested, frisked, detained, there’d probably be no real need to panic. All you’d need to do is calmly clear up the misunderstanding and be back on your merry way."
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)
fwiw - 'In Dana’s view, what I saw as an earnest desire to get to the bottom of things, came across to grizzled cops only as evasiveness and guilt. She says it would’ve been far better if I’d categorically denied: “no, I did not steal. That’s completely absurd. Please release me immediately.”'
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
In most jurisdictions, the crime of theft requires intent to deprive the owner of the thing being stolen. According to Aaronson's report, this was not the case.
> as if the officers hauled him off to an interrogation room
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.
Agreed. The title made me hope this post was going to be about some new unbelievable quantum breakthrough.
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.
I don't understand this attitude. You really believe that a person causing another person bodily injury over the loss of a few dollars is justifiable? I find that absurd. And it's particularly absurd in a world where investment bankers cause billions of dollars of damage to the economy in various white collar crimes without facing almost any penalties.
I would say that he "took money" from a tip jar, rather than "stole" from a tip jar, since by his account there was no intent to take what was not his.
"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.
YMMV but my despicable ranking puts the crime of stealing from hard working low-income workers at about a 9/10. That's why this story could be so great as comedy, since he committed a rare and evil crime accidentally. But the way it's told now I think is very off-putting.
Well I'm not necessarily serious about losing teeth. It could be a torn collar or a bloody nose. My point is OP got off lucky and I'd advocate for a little more contrition in this post.
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.
Probably not for $4--except maybe if you weigh deterrence--but whether or not it's worth it's the natural reaction I'd expect (depending on where you live, IME two decades ago in Boston, anyway).
What a strange view into the mind of someone who I assume is absolutely brilliant in his field. He sees the world as defying the laws of probability to oppress him but it reads the exact opposite to me. The surprising part to me is that we have created a world that so successfully coddles us. That a person who repeatedly fails to execute fairly simple tasks in an airport that is specifically designed to make everything as strait forward as possible is otherwise a very successful human. His ancestors survived warfare, hunting food in the wild, traveling across thousands of miles with only the things on their backs. Yet here he is, struggling to recover from the stress of being delayed less than a single day while participating in the miracle of flight. If his ancestors forgot their food pack at such a level of stress, or reached down towards a snake in the same we he grabbed for money in front of him, he would be dead.
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.
A weird amount of gaslighting and over/under victimization going on in this thread. Everything is relative to the experience, but the one real truth is how someone feels about the experience. He doesn't overly blame the offices or the shop, but rather trying to understand how his situation applies to something larger. We can have empathy for all the actors in the situation without needing to cutdown or over rationalize more than one person telling their story.
Truth of what is known, not of what actually happened. No one else has written about their view of the experience (or we're aware of), so the only knowledge of the situation is one person's accounting. Not a statement of moral relativism, although that's a complex subject in itself.
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.
- 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.
If your explanation to the officers was even 50% as longwinded as your blog post, I'm not surprised you nearly got yourself in trouble... (I think you admit as much when you talk about a "central mistake").
I think Scott just expected a different kind of interaction from a civil society. But he isnt living in a civil society, his is living in a place where the only connection between people is the free market. Even the smallest break in the only code they have must be met with extreme measures. Its the only thing keeping it together.
> I think Scott just expected a different kind of interaction from a civil society.
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."
Huh? This is a story where Aaronson (accidentally) stole someone's tips but was nonetheless not arrested due to the employees' reluctance to press charges. These same employees also graciously refused to accept the $40 he offered them as some sort of recompense.
But yeah, the cops were a little rude to him I guess...
Look, it's clearly a minor offense at most. And maybe his actions were sufficiently reasonable that he could have defended himself in court, if it had absurdly come to that.
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."
He didnt actually break the code. It only looked like he did. So cops were summoned and he was placed in handcuffs all over $3 dollars. Had he actually stole the money (in the criminal sense) he might have faced the full force of the law. To me the word "extreme" fits when a reaction to an event is in significant excess of the infraction.
I see. I have some sympathy for the view that this sort of intimidating interaction with the police and possible arrest is disproportionate when the offense is the theft of a mere $3. Then again:
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).
I think thats kinda the point, law enforcement likely wouldnt be involved in this situation in a civil society. The manager might have taken the loss or he might have spoken to scott directly. Living in a civil society is about deescalation and assuming good intentions of those around you. Again the main mistake Scott is making is not his absent minded stumblings (note his bomb squad story) BUT his lack of recognition that he is living in a society where many minor errors are considered criminally hostile behavior.
Does it make a difference to you if (as seems like might be the case) smoothie bar employees did attempt to speak to him directly (though not in especially calm or lucid ways, as Aaronson describes it) but, at least from their perspective, he just walked away mid-interaction?
Yes it does improve the situation and maybe if scott was less absent minded he would have snapped out of it and realized wtf was happening. However at the end of the day you have scott misunderstanding this as demanding a tip and the employee then misunderstanding this as brazen petty theft. Both reach these rather hostile assumptions quite quickly which causes escalation of a rather ridiculously silly situation.
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.
Wow. This blog post itself is the only thing "beyond fiction" here. As I read it, Aaronson:
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.
You're missing the part where this could happen to anyone including you on any regular day. The way we've set our systems and laws of probability up, you might see yourself handcuffed a random day of your life and go through a significant amount of stress imagining yourself locked up in jail. While you've correctly described the theory in terms of the facts, you're missing the subjective first-person experience of the character in the story.
All true. But I think what you're missing is my last paragraph. :)
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.
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.