Most important thing: This was a study of the Swedish population!
For the US population:
Convictions include innocent people who follow advice to plea guilty [1], or who are wrongfully convicted [2], and don't include guilty people who got off, or who were never found [3].
> “African Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated,” the researchers write. “They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in ‘group exonerations.’”
> Federal government data from 2018 show that just 46% of all violent crimes reported to police were "cleared" with an arrest, and 18% of property crimes were cleared. Beyond that, only an estimated 43% of people who were the victims of violent crimes reported the incidents to police.
1) Foremost how most of the commenters are reacting to it seems to demonstrate that many of them didn't bother reading that it's about Sweden, and are acting as if it's about the US. The discussions really aren't about the article, or prompted by the article, but about assumptions and preexisting ideas. The submitter should have indicated in the submission title that this was about Sweden.
2) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
There's nothing particularly "interesting new phenomenon" about the majority of crimes being by a minority of people, even in Sweden. The specifics are important for social policy, but don't really cross this threshold.
I am not a statistician, but I don't know if this figure is very interesting. The article says that "3.9% had at least one violent conviction", so it is kind of expected that 1% (i.e. 25.6% of that 3.9%) to have multiple convictions. Yeah, it's a bit skewed (63%) but still doesn't sound totally unexpected to me.
The Odds Ratio of 2.5 for male offenders is actually more interesting.
A less misleading title: "25% of all convicted violent offenders are accountable for 63% of all violent convictions", but those numbers aren't big enough to be interesting.
The article is mostly about demographic analysis of violent criminals, comparing groups of population by number of violent convictions they have: high (> 10 convictions), medium (3-10), low (1-2), or none. The title here is... not really what the article is about, but it feels like someone tried for a punchier title than "demographic analysis of violent criminals" and missed the mark completely. I'm not sure I can even call it clickbait, since the main reason why the 1% = 63% is brought up at all is a half-baked "why we should care about this demographic analysis" and not really explored any further.
This is quite apparent if you have experience with the criminal justice system. When there is a conviction in federal court, the Bureau of Prisons creates a pre-sentence report (PSR) listing the convictions, arrests, etc. These are incredible to read. Not only are there usually prior convictions. But in many cases, there are outstanding arrest warrants for crimes other jurisdictions won’t even bother prosecuting as a result of the conviction.
In seattle, people are released with outstanding arrests warrants that the police clearly know about. It’s like, ya, we know this guy already has 3 outstanding warrants for car theft (usually just jumping non-bail), they get caught stealing a car again and are simply released with no or some small bond that is paid by a non-profit.
Naive do-gooders, who do not care about the non profits losing the bond money, because they never learn about it. Non profits don’t care either, as they get their cut anyway, and get good feelings too.
The non profits actually argue that they should get the bond money back even when the assailants skip bond, and they actually often do. So it’s like they suffer no consequences (the non profit or the assailants).
This means nearly half of these people getting thrown in jail and/or having to post bond will never get convicted of the "high risk bond" crime they're accused of doing.
A lot of that is just bargaining down to a misdemeanor or prosecutors not wanting to fill up jails and prisons too much. Going with the revolving door in king county, our prosecutors simply don’t want to put people in jail anymore, even for major property crimes, unless violence is involved.
> or prosecutors not wanting to fill up jails and prisons too much
this is laughably not the case, and as of March they were looking at continuing to put more people in jail to the extent of shipping them out to other jails in the region to make room:
The only real reason prosecutors would choose to not prosecute is because they know they don't have the resources to get convictions (or because of outside political pressure)
Summary for those who don't want to click: "The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality."
So in theory if we purge the bottom 1% of the population every decade or so, there will be at least 63% less crime?
I think better would be figuring out how to incentivize fathers to remain the fathers to their children, as fatherless men are drastically more prone to crime and risky behavior.
Not really. That purges people through all layers of society.
I think the commenter means to purge the literal socioeconomic bottom. Not, for instance, middle class people who kill their spouse or betray the country by spilling secrets.
the comments here honestly scare me. you're not going to take the stance that literal state sanctioned murder is a bad idea for people who commit regular crimes?
I think that your problem is that using the word “murder” implies “unjust.”
Funny enough, you actually accept “state-sanctioned murder” right now, like it or not. Any soldier who attempts to invade Ukraine may be shot without a trial or a hearing. If “state-sanctioned murder” is always immoral, Ukraine should let them in peacefully, and appeal to higher authorities to diplomatically come to a solution to the “illegal immigration of young Russian men with guns” problem. I don’t think that’s a good idea and I don’t believe you do either.
That’s fine. Invading a country is enough to be threatened with death. Attacking someone’s daughter for the fourth time isn’t.
Murder to me means taking a life without being prompted to do so out of self defense. There is no reason to kill someone locked behind bars where they are physically incapable of doing anyone harm. I am against the death penalty in any form for any reason. This is murder, and it's done out of a sense of justice, which is a childish excuse to make people feel better.
A Ukrainian soldier defending an invasion is just that - defense. I have more nuanced thoughts about pacifism and how it applies to this situation, but it isn't worth getting into because no one here would discuss it in good faith and it's also off topic.
> Just sharing my thoughts, but prisons are only as safe as the local power supply. When things go south, you end up with the Camp Hill Prison Riots.
Having worked inside prisons (in a volunteer capacity) I can confidently say that they maintain safety even without power and that the ability for people to riot in the manner that happened at Camp Hill was the result of procedural problems that mostly don't exist at prisons anymore.
Why is it a bad idea? Abstractly, if I had a 100% reliable way to execute all violent criminals, I'd absolutely do it. The only problem I see are false convictions. Taking people with repeated convictions for separate offenses (3 strikes, and such) would reduce that dramatically. Then you have to weight the remaining potential false convictions against actual victims of violent crime that could be prevented, and maybe indirect damage to society. Violent criminals themselves have no moral value in my book.
People like you scare me more than anyone who's in prison for something violent. You want to universally kill people by the millions for making mistakes. This is a perspective completely lacking any empathy and compassion. These are human beings with lives, families, experiences, and have the opportunity for growth and improvement to become a person who can peacefully integrate with society. Giving up on them and murdering them is ridiculous and I really hope you reevaluate your perspective and learn some compassion.
> You want to universally kill people by the millions for making mistakes.
"Making mistakes"? Really? We are talking about repeat violent crime here. This euphemism combined with below frankly makes me more scared of people like /you/ vs someone in prison for something violent. Unreserved, irrational compassion is really no better than irrational, unreserved tribalism - both are evolutionary baggage making the world a worse place.
> This is a perspective completely lacking any empathy and compassion.
1) I don't really see that as a bad thing. This is a policy decision and as such needs to be based on a rational calculation and values, not the feelings known to be hopelessly biased and generally unreliable.
2) Even so, does your perspective have no compassion for future victims of the non-eliminated, non-reformed criminals?
> These are human beings with lives, families, experiences, and have the opportunity for growth and improvement to become a person who can peacefully integrate with society. Giving up on them and murdering them is ridiculous and I really hope you reevaluate your perspective and learn some compassion.
So I take it you are extremely pro-life on abortion (disclaimer, I am very pro-choice), like no abortion even if there's a risk of mother's death?
Cause aside from experiences, fetus has all the same things; in fact its chance of growth an improvement is much higher, if you compare a probabilistic range of outcomes of a new baby vs an existing criminal. That baby could be the guy who cures cancer! Sure, there's health risks for the mother and potential economic burden on society, but given the typical outcomes for criminals (as per original article), there's also a health risk for others and burden on society from keeping them alive. The only difference is criminals already have past experiences. I think for both cases their "future" is a nonsense argument, and experiences don't make any difference.
> I don't really see that as a bad thing. This is a policy decision and as such needs to be based on a rational calculation and values, not the feelings known to be hopelessly biased and generally unreliable.
I hope future AGI doesn't behave this way or we're all fucked.
> So I take it you are extremely pro-life on abortion
Abortion has way more nuance, there isn't a 100% "right" side, ideally there is never a need for abortion, and as someone without a uterus (and has never had one) I shut my mouth on taking sides because it isn't my place to do so. I support uterus owners protecting their own lives and making this decision amongst themselves.
Anyway this is exhausting. I'm not going to convince you. I hope you decide one day that killing people by the millions, which would largely be disadvantages groups, is not a good decision for humanity.
>> I don't really see that as a bad thing. This is a policy decision and as such needs to be based on a rational calculation and values, not the feelings known to be hopelessly biased and generally unreliable.
> I hope future AGI doesn't behave this way or we're all fucked.
So, given what you're responding to, you prefer AGI to not use some values (e.g. DALYs or whatever) and rational tradeoffs, but instead to be based on fuzzy, biased, unreliable heuristics?
I agree this argument is generally not going anywhere, but this kind of response in particular makes me wonder, because I have hard time finding a a charitable interpretation I could respond to - it just sounds like vacuous platitudes nearly without context. Is there a good argument for empathy that isn't?
Because institutionalizing killing as a response to violating expectations normalizes killing as a response to violating expectations, and does not do anything to assure that people in whom that value is reinforced also have faith in society’s system of assessing violations.
How is it related? That doesn't seem obvious to me. For a different example, does it mean tax law enforcement normalizes taking money from people thus and increases property crime?
People usually have separate magisteria for this kind of thing... it's quite obvious when you see how libertarian try and fail to break thru the latter one, trying to make people think of taxes as extortion. I think it's even more disconnected for death penalty vs murder...
It's always poor people, people like to make it about race because then you can blame something other than your society.
E.g., in my country, the concept of the "warrior gene" proved popular with people who like to think that the reason Māori are overrepresented in crime statistics is their fault. When they're overrepresented in every negative social measure, especially poverty. Nothing to do with colonisation, land theft and a century of deliberate destruction of their culture and social structure, nope, it's all them.
(And Sweden's issues with refugees are Sweden's fault, not that of the refugees)
my point is if you pick a time-slider window of 150 years, Europeans have started two world wars. Sweden collaborated with Nazis and i wonder how much violence resulted from that.
From one of the tweets: "If one assumes that incarceration rates reflect rates of felony perpetration...". It's not like the justice system can disproportionately target and punish one race compared to the others. No, that cannot be true!
The sources they cite are clearly visible. The graphs are easier to grok at a glance than big tables. Do you have any response to the substance of my comment?
The most obvious solution to this problem is to direct prosecutors and police to focus all their efforts on violent crime prevention.
However, this avoids the problems associated with harmful nonviolent crime, such as the fraud scams targeting the elderly and other vulnerable populations that you've probably seen on your social media feeds, messaging apps, etc., let alone things like crypto coin scams and subprime loans and on and on.
Of course, eliminating all nonviolent drug abuse issues from the criminal docket and passing them on to the public health infrastructure (see Portugal) might free up resources to deal with both violent crime and property fraud.
However, this avoids the problems associated with harmful nonviolent crime, such as the fraud scams targeting the elderly and other vulnerable populations that you've probably seen on your social media feeds, messaging apps, etc., let alone things like crypto coin scams and subprime loans and on and on.
Yes, this times 2x. Too much focus on social media, like twitter, on violent crime. that is a problem, but non-violent crime, such as fraud, tends to have way more victims per perpetrator. it's not uncommon for a single fraudster, such as credit card theft, id theft, or call center theft, to have many, many victims for considerable sums of money before being caught. The collapse of FTX, for example, had thousands of claimants/victims for combined billions, all perpetrated by one guy and his handful of accomplices.
While that's not untrue, these kind of systems just lead to their particular type of witch hunts, where the people in power game the system in a way that they make their opponents disappear. Combine your system with a bit of selective enforcement and imagine that lawmakers create a law that's trivial to cross, and you get a police state very quickly.
I'd be all for a safer society, but there are at least three big problems with change that you have to deal with. One is that often, these proposals are not accounting for humans. Like the one above. Second is that you have to get there somehow. Make a transition from a current state to the next. If the reform is too sudden, society will reject it. Third is that you have to convince the rest of the people, if you're not a dictator. And I doubt that a dictator could have a safe and stable society to begin with.
I suggest that you read up on utopias that people have tried to build. Even the Wiki article is quite interesting.
Yes. I am for spending on social services like food banks etc, to make sure people dont fall into a need to commit crimes for basics. But for any crime, if your still pulling that shit after the age of 30, no lock up, just straight death.
Check out how many are wrongly convicted in the US (or anywhere, really). Now imagine what a bit of corruption in the law enforcement could do - for a price or a bit of power, you could get a strike on someone, anyone.
Some related wisdom that has been more useful for me:
5% of the people out there are assholes - the unsafe drivers, the "can I speak to the manager" customers, the sociopathic case workers ... they're all in that 5%. You're bound to run into them, and they're bound to make an attempt to spoil your day. Learn to shake your head, shrug it off and go about your day knowing that 5% of all people are assholes.
One of the most interesting things to me is the racists that insist that we should examine all demographic factors when trying to identify who the criminals are, but they shy away from the pure fact that violent crime is almost exclusively perpetuated by men. And yet, there are no calls from them for a restriction on male immigration.
Racists shy away from the fact that men are more likely to commit murder than women? No, I assure you, roughly every racist on Earth would find any other view ridiculous. But it is very easy to find non-racists who take the equally absurd position of denying that African Americans are more likely to commit murder than White Americans
And you're wrong when you say there are no calls from racists to restrict male immigration. Of course, most racists want to restrict both male and female immigration. But one constantly sees complaints specifically about how many male immigrants are entering the USA. And I have seen it suggested (though only rarely) that immigration should be allowed for females only.
I might have been a bit uncharitable in my interpretation of your comment. I think your view is this:
Racists support immigration from white men and women, but if racists really care so much about demographics they should only support immigration from white women, since they're much less violent than men.
OK, this is a reasonable enough point and deserves a reasonable response, but I think the response is quite simple:
As long as both white men and white women are contributing positively to society, and improving the future demographics of the country, why wouldn't racists welcome both? If they limited immigration to only the less-violent female whites, they'd be missing out on the net-positive contribution of white males, and thereby shooting themselves in the foot, and for what? A demographic shift in the short-term that will lead to reduced violence. But also the troubles that come along with gender-imbalance. And in the long-term, the population will go back to being roughly 50:50 male-female anyway.
> 2. You can't have white women without white men.
As objectionable as some might find it, tearing apart families through immigration policy is already possible. If the idea is that immigration is bad because it brings more crime, the conclusion is clear, if we evaluate things objectively.
I wasn't talking about tearing families apart. I was talking about the fact of biology that white females can only come into being if there are white men to father them. In any case, I simplified my comment into just one point.
Actually white females can come into being if the definition of white is expanded. Initial conceptions of whiteness didn't include Scottish and Irish people, and recently Richard Spencer said he thinks 80% of Italians are white. This would have been an unthinkable statement even in the 1970s.
White is a fluid category with no real objective basis. I recently saw a very amusing argument between an American, English and Polish troupe. The American said that Poland was a great example of a pure white ethnostate. The Englishman said the American was an idiot - Polish people were Slavic. The Polish nationalist said they were both idiots - Polish people are Polish, not Slavic nor White.
I challenge anyone to come up with an objective definition of whiteness.
I am very interested in a serious conversation about the initial topic. If you want to talk about that, I would be happy.
But in the meantime I will play along with this tangent, since I guess it could be fun, too.
Embracing a new definition of the White race does not cause more white females to be brought into being (at least, not in any easily predictable way). It simply causes females that had already been brought into being to be reclassified from non-White to White.
And their fathers would have to be White, too.
At no point in time are there White females who do not have White fathers.
Interesting. When did the first white father exist? Could you provide historical and scientific evidence of that person's existence and proof of their whiteness?
I think some Homo sapiens sapiens in Europe mated with some Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and that's where the white skin came from. Maybe. But this was a very long time ago and there's no historical record or way of using DNA evidence to narrow anything down to a specific date or a specific person. Even if we did know the person whether we met the conditions for being white would depend on what kind of definition of the White race we were using. For example, whether we were using a definition that focused on the current point in time, or one that was interested in the White race as it exists and evolves throughout the past and future.
Oh interesting, so you're saying the definition changes through time and those changes can change the amount of white people in the world.
That also seems to suggest there's no objective definition of white, which also seems to suggest that any claim that all white people need to have a white father would be utter garbage.
> so you're saying the definition changes through time
No, I was saying you could have a static definition that accepted the obvious fact that the White race would evolve over thousands of generations.
I will also say now that there are many definitions of the White race and that to whatever extent there is one "the definition" of the White race, it changes over time, too.
And you have at the end made a logical error. Just because there are a range of possible definitions of the White race does not mean that all possible definitions of the White race are acceptable. Just because there are components of and aspects of the definition of the White race that my change, does not mean that there are not components and aspects which may not change. And, while there may be edge cases, in general, one needs to have White parents to be White. That's because one's race is determined by one's ancestry.
> the obvious fact that the White race would evolve over thousands of generations.
Ok so there was a long period of time when "white" people didn't have white fathers. But earlier you said that's not possible.
Another way of saying there's edge cases for a rule is that the rule isn't a rule at all.
> That's because one's race is determined by one's ancestry.
Not true! You and I both agree that some people that were previously referred to as non-white are now commonly referred to as white. Ancestry is one part of the muddled definition that racists try to worm their way around into being objective. The truth is there's no objective basis for race, it is all made up, and it changes pretty constantly. I'd consider myself white but I have Polish (Slavic) and Scottish (previously non-white) ancestry. But, at some point, it became fine for me and people like me to call ourselves white. The English would have disagreed, as recently as the 1850s.
> Ok so there was a long period of time when "white" people didn't have white fathers. But earlier you said that's not possible.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that, for example, the 100th generation of White people would be different from the 10,000th generation of white people.
White females can't come into being without White fathers. They could during the formation of the White race. But they can't now.
> You and I both agree that some people that were previously referred to as non-white are now commonly referred to as white
not a contradiction
> Ancestry is one part of the muddled definition that racists try to worm their way around into being objective
Biological race is just ancestry.
> The truth is there's no objective basis for race, it is all made up, and it changes pretty constantly
What about ancestry.
> d consider myself white but I have Polish (Slavic) and Scottish (previously non-white) ancestry. But, at some point, it became fine for me and people like me to call ourselves white. The English would have disagreed, as recently as the 1850s.
I'm not sure whether they would have. Doesn't matter either way. Racialist beliefs could have a totally illogical origin and yet be entirely correct. Beware the fallacy fallacy.
> White females can't come into being without White fathers. They could during the formation of the White race. But they can't now.
The white race is continually being formed, which is evidenced by the changing attitudes towards whether Italians, Greeks, Irish, Scottish and Polish people are white - amongst others. You'll find a tonne of people that disagree over whether Polish people, and others, are white. There's no central authority that definitively decides.
> Biological race is just ancestry.
What's the scientific definition of race? Feel free to use biology papers for this discussion.
There's no "the" scientific definition of race. There are various definitions of race that could be called scientific, although I'm not totally sure what it means for a definition to be scientific. The only thing that could be called "the" scientific definition of race is the very unscientific definition that generally emerges like this:
> Genetic variation is greater within groups than between them :^) There is no biological justification for racial groupings :^) Race is purely a social construct :^)
Which admittedly isn't much of a definition but does make it clear (incorrectly) that there is no valid biological justification for racialism.
I define a race just like dictionaries did before the race-doesn't-exist-except-as-a-social-construct movement was established did:
During what period (please tell me the years so I can understand) were white people "largely or totally isolated" from other people? In what area (would be great if you could show on a map) were they isolated?
Well, you're right if it makes you feel better. Clearly males are more dangerous than females and restricting male immigration makes some sense. I could see an argument that immigration should be female only.
That said. Apparently, we're talking about 1% of the population if the article is to be believed. So we're not really talking about all males here, nor even a majority of males for that matter.
Of course that also means we're not talking about anything close to a majority of black americans, but that's a whole other discussion.
Then you would notice that the averages between men and women on some things like height are significantly different even though it's easy to find individual counter-examples.
It's an analogue of rational market theory: no asocial choice can be rationalised as a good long-term plan so there must be externalities which are causative.
I don't believe in rational market players with full knowledge and equal information any more than I believe all violent men had externalities which were causative.
But I do believe poverty and epigenetic influences can exist.
There's a surprisingly prevalent, but misguided, school of thought which asserts that disparities in outcomes across gender or racial lines imply sexism or racism. This concept is closely associated with the "tabula rasa" or "blank slate" theory[0]. Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book that debunks this idea ("Discrimination and Disparities").
I mean, statistically illegal immigrants in the US are less likely to commit violent crime. [0]
Truthfully, that audience probably isn't too concerned with statistics.
I mean, yeah, this is kind of obvious if you think about it. The majority of violent crime in the US is committed by black people, so inherently a marginal increase in any other ethnic group (including hispanic) would (on expectation) lead to a decrease in per-capita violent crime, unless illegal immigrants were more violent than legal immigrants (which we have no evidence of).
What is always tricky about any attempt to use statistical prediction on something rare like criminality is that you have two things that are both true: the vast majority of crimes are committed by men, AND the vast majority of men are not criminals.
So what do you do with this information? If a crime is committed, you can guess with some accuracy it was likely committed by a man, but you can't arrest a random man and think he is likely the criminal.
Any attempts to preemptively limit male behavior is going to affect a lot more innocent men than guilty men.
Excellent point, I hope we can apply this to all demographic factors.
However, if we are limiting people based on potential for violent criminality, one category leaps out for effectively applying restrictions to, and that's men.
I'm totally against applying those limits based on potential violent criminality, however.
The guy that shot Kate in SF had been deported 6 times.
The guy that shot his neighbors in Texas recently had been deported 4 times.
Getting into the US, and living in the US, with whatever history of violence you have is apparently very easy.
There are multiple places along the US Mexican border that are both easy to cross and don't have any sort of fence. Usually the large fence just stops. If you cross in those locations you are immediately asked to wait in line for a bus to be taken to a detention center where you are given an I-94 and an NGO funds your bus ride to New Jersey and New York where you will work under the table for cheap and skip your immigration court hearing. If you DON'T want to get caught, it is harder, since the border patrol knows where the crossing areas are and the terrain is more hostile although less patrolled.
Someone getting deported 6 times probably doesn't go through those easy points you mentioned. I imagine if youve been physically deported by the government, if they find you again at a point like that, you get sent back?
Yet if someone can come back in 6 times, I have to assume even the harder routes aren't THAT hard.
Yeah maybe the park ranger shouldn't have left his weapon around for strangers to play with it. Create less enticement for crime and you'll see less crime.
I don't think leaving a weapon somewhere is an enticement to crime.
If I saw a weapon loose somewhere, I would report it to my local police. If I was an illegal, I would ignore it. If I was a shady illegal, I might take the gun and try to sell it or keep it for personal protection.
You know what I wouldn't do? Go pointing it anywhere around a group of people.
Playing with a gun around a crowd of people.. that you brought with you to a crowd of people...
It's not like he found the gun THERE. He didn't even find it that day. He was just playing with a random gun that wasn't his, in a crowd of people. Ya, accident.
That's actually happened at least once in history [1]:
> Convict women in Australia were British prisoners whom the government increasingly sent out during the era of transportation (1787-1868) in order to develop the penal outpost of New South Wales (now a state of Australia) into a viable colony.
This would have some extremely interesting population-level genetic consequences if it was accompanied by some sort of social change to allow polygyny. In particular, it would reduce the correlation that exists across all adaptive traits due to assortative monogamous mating patterns. Right now, all "desirable" traits like health/intelligence/strength/etc are strongly correlated, but when you reduce the strength of assortative effects, the correlation weakens significantly.
Yeah, for an illustrative example of assortative mating effects, consider the stereotype of the rich nerd with the hot wife. Kids are smart and attractive. This plays out at every pareto level in the sexual marketplace.
Basically, monogamy breaks the ability of sexual selection to "dilute" bad genes with good ones. I'm not anti-monogamy, but it's a social technology which has tradeoffs (this being one of them).
You seem to be makimg several claims here, some more related to what I think is your main point than others:
1. Racists insist that we should examine all demographic factors when trying to identify who the criminals are
2. They shy away from the pure fact that violent crime is almost exclusively perpetuated by men.
3. There are no calls from them for a restriction on male immigration.
4. Using "but" and "yet" between 1 and 2 and 3 shows you believe that 2 and 3 delegitimize 1.
Regarding point 1, I think you are mostly correct, although not all racists would agree. ("Not all racists!")
Regarding point 2, I think you are certainly wrong insofar as there is no lack of admission. But I think your main point is really implied from 3 which is that racists only seem to focus on racial group differences rather than sex differences for violent crimes, which has been used as one of the major "scientific" justifications for racism while ignoring that the same argumemt when applied to men vs. women would show that women are better than men. And this is certainly an interesting point as you said.
Regarding 3 itself — and not your implied argument I expanded on above — it is also not exactly correct. Most racists would find female immigrants more favorable than male immigrants.
In any case, regarding your main point, I believe mosts racists would say that males "equal out" females in some way, for example that men created medicine, or would point out that at the very least society cannot continue without men from a biological point of view or some other explaination, and these explainations are not relevant wrt race.
All this said, I think the way you made this argument with its multiple subtly different claims is part of what generated so many responses. Not that that is inherntly bad.
I mean that's great and all but the racist point on the invention of medicine is not only unverifiable, it also leads immediately to the observation that white men didn't invent agriculture, the wheel, philosophy, writing. If men can be excused because they did great things, then why not other categories of people?
"Invention of medicine" was just shorthand for "men contributed the most to medecine and invented modern medicine/biology."
>it also leads immediately to the observation that white men didn't invent agriculture, the wheel, philosophy, writing.
Not all racists are white. leaving that aside, white racists would say that white men perfected agriculture, the wheel, philosophy ect.
>If men can be excused because they did great things, then why not other categories of people?
Based on the point I made above, they might say that men are excused because they are continualy useful, while other races did great things but only because white people were not there to do it first becasue they were not yet civilized, but once they became civilized then there is no need for for others. (Although there is a few hundred year gap between the begining of western European civilization and the start of major European advancements, which I would put at about 1500, but you can imagine such an arguemt or similar argument in any case.)
>when trying to identify who the criminals are, but they shy away from the pure fact that violent crime is almost exclusively perpetuated by men.
I am not a cop, but I would be very surprised if a violent crime happens where it is unknown if the suspect is a man or a woman, that most cops (around the world) give it a 50-50 chance that the criminal is a man or woman.
I would bet they will start by looking for a man, all else being equal.
I think you will find that racists will be okay with basically any immigration restriction. Its like people arguing back with anti affirmative action people that legacy admissions are unfair. Well they would happily give up a benefit they will never receive to get what they want!
Immigration? I'm pretty sure there are enough problems with locally born men who are criminals. Immigration is but a drop in the bucket when it comes to problems.
> And yet, there are no calls from them for a restriction on male immigration.
I'm pretty sure they call for restricting immigration of both sexes. Besides, if you believe violence is partly genetic, then a sex-based immigration restriction is a solution that lasts only one generation.
You know what they say. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I would expect that if that were the case we would have long noticed certain paternal lineages having all the aggression.
Now I'm curious if men are disproportionately more violent than women also due to the much-memed "socioeconomic factors"?
Or would you concede that there is a genetic element in the gender disparity? And would you then also recognise that factor in the racial disparity?
I also want to add that if the violent crime rate of White men was the biggest problem we faced as a society, well what a wonderful problem that would be to have. That would be a utopia compared to the challenges being faced by non-White and increasingly multiracial populations around the world right now.
Even so, being male is a very weak predictor, since only a few percent of men are violent criminals. (And yes, that implies that race is an even weaker predictor.)
Every single bayesianism advocate is aware of this. It's so obvious that it's implicit - there's simply no need to state "95% of crime is committed by men"; this is completely uncontroversial and does not need to be discussed. The controversial part is applying bayesianism to other, more politically sensitive predictors.
The proper Bayesian response would be to look for factors that are better predictors, since both "being male" and any race are very weak predictors (see my other comment upthread).
Sure, compute the odds ratio for committing a violent crime due to being male. It is large, which in plain English means "most violent criminals are male".
But that doesn't mean the probability of a randomly chosen male being a violent criminal is large. It's still small, because you have to multiply the odds ratio by a very small prior (since the prior probability of a randomly chosen person being a violent criminal is very small). So if all you know about a person is that they are male, you still have only a very weak prediction that they might be a violent criminal. In other words, in plain English, "most males are not violent criminals".
What you need to have a strong predictor is some factor X for which not just the odds ratio but the posterior probability of being a violent criminal, conditioned on X, is large, i.e., for which you can say "most X's are violent criminals". Being male is not such a factor.
This is a pointless observation since the male/female difference is the approximately equal for all races. In contrast, black women in the US commit more murders per capita than do white men: 5.8 versus 3.5 per 100k, as of 2021 per the FBI/Department of Justice. Black women are the only female group with this distinction compared to the male ethnic majority in the US, and all other countries of which I am aware.
It does not. Americans have a median income roughly 10% higher than Germans, far more guns per capita than Germans, and nearly 40% of male homicide suspects in Germany are non-German in any case:
>Can you not just accept that "white" (however you like to define the term presently) men commit significantly more murders in America than in Germany?
Sure, I agree and I'm pointing out reasons as to why that is. I have never before heard gun policy lumped in with "socioeconomic factors."
My original point is that socioeconomic factors alone don't explain the gap in murder rates between e.g. black women and white men in the US and in other countries. Your argument to the contrary is woefully insufficient. Comparisons between the same race and sex in two similar cultures at similar income levels isn't enough.
We already know wealth and income correlate somewhat with crime. This effect is seen within racial groups. What we don't know is why large gaps exist between different groups at similar income levels. The effect is particularly stark and peculiar when it comes to violent crimes e.g. rape which have nothing to do with stealing to feed oneself.
Violence perpetrated ON immigrants however, would inevitably rise since the same statistical validity applied to most women being the victims of violence.
That heritable factors which correlate with race significantly impact rates of violent crime, including large differences in crime rates between groups; that these differences matter more than sex differences, particularly given taboos around race; and that this knowledge should drive expectations for fair criminal justice policy.
No one believes that since most imprisoned murderers are men, there's systemic anti-male bias in the justice system. The relevant biological differences between sexes are acknowledged and accepted. I'm asking HNers to accept similar well-studied differences between ancestral genetic groups.
Refusal to acknowledge and accept these differences has already led to bad policy, such as de-policing America's black communities, which has cost hundreds of black men their lives in just the last few years. A minority of this minority is allowed to run wild and victimize their neighbors and society at large. This is plainly unsustainable. We can take our medicine now and accept the need to police violent criminals, even if they are black, or we can keep our heads in the sand until something far worse boils over. This is the core message of all my comments on this link and race issues at large.
The reality is, if we were using demographic factors to prevent immigrants who cause violence from coming into a country, there's a few that are much more predictive than race.
First, we'd ban all men.
Second, we'd ban everyone under the age of 30. Maybe everyone under 50 if we were feeling really fascist.
With these two evidence based restrictions, we'd effectively eliminate violent crime perpetrated by immigrants. That's the stark reality, and its so funny to see racists try to avoid these points.
> We already police men way more than women, what's your point?
We would need to put more police in places where men congregate to be truly consistent - like software companies. The de-policing of men's places of work like these, may be putting us at risk, after all.
I could say that no one has seriously proposed "eliminating ALL violent crime perpetrated by immigrants," and you're using this absurd strawman as some sort of shield to avoid discussing race, and that people generally accept other groups who commit violent crime at similar rates to their own, and it's just one group in the US in particular who falls way outside the bell curve (per link theme)... but it's clear you aren't here for earnest or honest discussion, so I'm out.
Oh no you've got me all wrong! I love discussing race, and in particular how made up the concept of whiteness is. It's just most racists don't like to have that discussion, they'd rather try to throw stats around to justify more policing, but the stats don't lie - it'd be by far more effective to focus on and police men of all persuasions, rather than focussing on different made up race categories.
"Made-up race categories" are visible to the naked eye, to principal-component analysis of alleles, to measures of genetic distance, to surveys of visible and invisible traits, to even the smallest child who's only begun to speak.
What was the Human Genome Project for? Your mockery and denial, I guess. Why have scientists spent lifetimes improving DNA sequencing technologies, carefully gathering data, and drawing conclusion based on the evidence? So you could laugh it all off, I suppose.
Your refusal to acknowledge reality fails to budge reality. The natural world doesn't care about race or sex solipsism. Policy founded on reality-denial will always eventually fail and be replaced. Whether it fails hard or soft and what is allowed to replace it is the question of our time in America.
> "Made-up race categories" are visible to the naked eye, to principal-component analysis of alleles, to measures of genetic distance, to surveys of visible and invisible traits, to even the smallest child who's only begun to speak.
Initial definitions of white, didn't include Scottish and Irish people.
I believe they are simply pointing out the hypocrisy of the racist rant. Racists claim that the reason they are against immigration from certain countries because of the increase in crime rate they would allegedly bring.
It is true that I'm being condescending to racists. I'm also not expecting a positive response if the person (not necessarily you) I'm engaging is racist. It would be foolish.
> "allegedly"
Allegedly doesn't mean that they are wrong. It simply means that I don't know if they are wrong or right, because I don't have enough data. If I thought it is complete bollocks I would have written it as such.
Also you seem to ignore that the main point of my comment is the "hypocrisy", i.e. only pointing out racial statistics, ignoring the gender (and possibly other variables, such as age) related ones.
Eh. I certainly don't want bigots on HN. But TERF has become a slur to silence anyone that says anything that people can take offense to in the context of trans issues, and isn't always deserved or accurate.
It's not racism and calling it that does a disservice to the issues of actual racism. Also, nobody says that. Police will always use correlation to predict criminality. You will never change that, but we can change the reason for the statistical correlation: poverty.
Male immigration is too profitable, so nobody with a voice would want to curb it.
Yet the truly poor are subsidized with food stamps and subsidized housing. Poor people in West Virginia (a large amount) generally don't kill each other. What am I missing?
> we can change the reason for the statistical correlation: poverty.
Even within the same income bracket, the black homicide rate is an order of magnitude larger than the white one (and after 1975, the homicide rate of the richest blacks is larger than of the poorest whites):
What exactly is the argument? That rich blacks commit murder at a higher rate than poor whites directly contradicts the argument that it is all about poverty. So the usual argument that slavery led to poverty and poverty leads to crime is wrong. What's left? That these people are committing murder to avenge the slavery of their ancestors, or that murder was baked into their culture by slavery?
This was an economic problem as much as punishment. If they really only wanted to reduce the crime, since most transportees were subject to capital punishment (I think the value was absurdly low, some figure less than a pound value in theft attracted a death penalty) they could have just killed them.
The point was to extract value from their labours, elsewhere.
Also, Australia v1.0 was Carribean/USA v2.0 if the UK/US war hadn't ended transportation to sugar and tobacco plantations they'd have continued supplying Jane Austen with plots (Mansfield park)
Subsequently it was political: pre union protosocialist chartists, Irish independence players.
"Cancer Ward" is sort-of about the post Khrushchev thaw, and how one political feels conflicted about his exile, and ultimately returns to the settler steppes.
Emma Goldman, and around 100 other US left wingers were exiled to the USSR by a young J. Edgar Hoover in the post WW1 context. I don't think it was colonising behaviour however.
If I recall, the way in was to land a glider on the roof of World Trade Center. This would obviously not work today. Overcome that issue and you've got a plan!
An idea of penal colony is idiotic (sorry to break HN rules), but why not long term prison.
I wonder if it could be codified into law. "If you've been responsible for x% of convictions, we will imprison you for increasingly longer periods", or "Top 1% of people when sorted by number of convictions will get a long-ass sentence the next time they get convicted."...
Prison is step one for the violent and most people in prison haven't commited a violent crime. We will make say three honest attempts to reform you but if you can't go around without seriously harming others eventually we have to cut our losses. Is putting the violent among themselves really all that bad?
If you're going to be racist at least make it believable. You're literally going with the Django Unchained "3 dots on their skull" answer here. If you talked about black culture promoting crime a lot of people here would be much more sympathetic.
Enzymes don't care if you believe in them or not. I don't care whether people are sympathetic to my comments or not. I care what is true and what is false, in the real world where it matters to real people. You can read the decades of high-quality and well-replicated research in this area or not. Either way you will live with the consequences.
And just so we understand, these are some institutions you imply have somehow misrepresented the science they funded, performed, peer-reviewed, and published on this topic: the National Institutes of Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Australian National University, University of Southern California-Los Angeles, Sam Houston State University, University of Cincinnati, University of Texas at Dallas, Iowa State University, and St. Louis University.
Family structure is part of it too, but I figured my comment was already too long. Yet if somehow you return black family structure to its pre-1960s state of harmony, you will still face the problem of disproportionate violent crime rates. This article is from 1958, years before extra-marital birth rates took off in the US black community:
The only solution is to face facts, apply equal standards of justice without regard to race, and keep that single-digit percentage of violent black criminals away from regular black folks and everyone else so good people have a chance to succeed. Over time with consistent and fair law enforcement, improvements in medicine, and effective universal public education, I am confident people of all races can live together in harmony. That is the objective of the American idea, and its success or failure will make or break this country.
- Does our society have systemic biases in law enforcement and the judicial system?
- Is it really sad that we are unable to, as a society, entertain conversations about genetically modifying our own gene pool to prevent criminal offenses?
- Why are nearly half of your comments about racial politics in America? Perhaps you have a bias yourself to examine.
- Why are links to twitter considered valid sources. Common. How can you expect people to take you seriously
- Are you racist? I'm only asking because you seem racist
> Do you think the carriers of MAOA-2R want to experience uncontrolled violent aggression? Do you think we should at least offer them a choice? Do you think parents who can afford it will waver when given the choice to offer impulsiveness- and intelligence-enhancing gene therapies to their children? Do you think it fair for those options to be available only to the wealthy?
Do you think people with a high propensity for violence (men) should be given gene therapies by their parents to reduce the production of the aggression-causing hormone testosterone?
As you surely know given your profile, testosterone is a hormone with many critical functions unrelated to aggression. Lack of sufficient testosterone causes osteoperosis, cognitive problems, fatigue, anemia, memory problems, hot flashes, and many other symptoms in men. It's essential for men's overall health and cannot be clearly disentangled from this role.
We do regulate the use of injected testosterone due to risks such as "roid rage" and enlarged heart among others. In the US testosterone is considered a Schedule III federally-controlled substance, i.e. a drug with medical uses that also has potential for abuse:
If a genetic mutation were known to code for impulsive violence, reduced IQ and little else, the story would be different. We wouldn't keep it around. MAOA-2R is such a gene. I know of no benefits to carrying this mutation versus its 3R or 4R variants. It causes a milder form of a disease called Brunner Syndrome, which confers a reduced IQ as well as increased violent aggression and reduced impulse control:
MAOA-2R lies in the same category as cancer-causing variants of BRCA1 or the allele for sickle-cell anemia in Western populations. We should treat it as such. There may also be non-genetic treatments for MAOA deficiency in the future. These should be explored and offered to those who might benefit. In the meantime we must accept reality. This gene, its effects, and its relative prevalence among racial groups (or "ancestral genetic populations" if you prefer) must factor into relevant public policy.
Given your comments thus far, I suspect that instead of engaging on the topic at hand you'll try to draw me further into some debate on whether men, seeing as they're so violent, should even be allowed to exist. Suffice it for me to say that the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis makes sense for humanity, and before "gender theory" reared its head we did a fine job keeping men in social spaces and structures where their more-aggressive tendencies were managed and expected.
> MAOA-2R lies in the same category as cancer-causing variants of BRCA1 or the allele for sickle-cell anemia in Western populations. We should treat it as such.
Oh do you mean the gene that is as prevalent amongst the famously uncriminal Japanese as it is amongst African Americans?
> Lack of sufficient testosterone causes osteoperosis, cognitive problems, fatigue, anemia, memory problems, hot flashes, and many other symptoms in men. It's essential for men's overall health and cannot be clearly disentangled from this role.
I don't know, maybe those criminal men would be better with osteoperosis, cognitive problems, fatigue, anemia, memory problems and hot flashes than without, don't you think?
I engaged primarily in arguments of fact. I did my best to cite sources and outline rational arguments. I was immediately condescended to, insulted, and slandered as racist and a liar. I admit I got testy in response, but you can see that I didn't fire first and was repeatedly provoked. None of the others users involved appear to have been silenced or banned.
This isn't just some academic comments section argument, it affects real policy and real people and real lives. Where on the whole Internet is open and honest discussion of this subject, who commits crime in America and why, permitted? Not Facebook, Reddit, very soon likely not Twitter. I had hoped HN of all places would be one such forum. I see now I was wrong. Your biased moderation is noted and a great disappointed.
I responded to the other user I saw who was breaking the site guidelines in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957674. If there were others, I didn't see them—I didn't read the entire thread. It's impossible to read everything.
I didn't ban the other account because when I looked at their comment history I saw a track record of mostly using HN as intended.
Could you please stop feeding flamewars and/or using HN for ideological battle? Regardless of what you're battling for or against, it's not what this site is for and destroys what it is for.
You're giving a variation of Yuval Noah Harari's "useless eater" or the "useless class"
The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?
I hope humanity - as a whole - sees value in helping and improving others vs drugging them and letting the wither to nothing.
For the US population:
Convictions include innocent people who follow advice to plea guilty [1], or who are wrongfully convicted [2], and don't include guilty people who got off, or who were never found [3].
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
[2] - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/7/14834454/ex...
> “African Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated,” the researchers write. “They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in ‘group exonerations.’”
[3] - https://www.insider.com/police-dont-solve-most-violent-prope...
> Federal government data from 2018 show that just 46% of all violent crimes reported to police were "cleared" with an arrest, and 18% of property crimes were cleared. Beyond that, only an estimated 43% of people who were the victims of violent crimes reported the incidents to police.
I expect this article to get flagged pretty soon.