Well that's right out then.

Still, your point is well taken. People's tendency to wish for calm and an unrocked boat when they think things are okay is something I've started calling "jasmine in Damascus" thinking, which is a phrase I came across in this article ( https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-14/syrian... ) with perspectives from Syrians on Assad and the Syrian civil war, in particular this bit:

> I hate when Syrians reminisce about the smell of jasmine in Damascus, or the cheap cost of living before the war as some sort of excuse for a regime like Assad to remain without anyone saying no, without anyone in history objecting at the very least…. I don’t think that life was worth it.

This is why VC is a cancer on society. If you don't have a healthy business growing well, your business shouldn't get bigger.

On the flip side, I'd ask the question: if someone supports banning these data centers, why not support just banning the AI companies entirely?

I think there's much less to be said for that than we currently are trying to say for it. :-)

> "a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people" can be reframed from (my rewording) "confusing thing I'm excluded from" as "people who give a shit doing the work to change things"

Maybe to some extent, but overall I think not really. The thing is that the people working to change things are not, as far as I can see, actually working to find out what people want and then do that. Instead there are different groups each working to implement what they want, and it is a matter of who shouts the loudest and fights the hardest.

> There's the impossible extreme of "we live poll everything all the time", and you've made me really curious about a shift in that direction looks like.

Yeah that's a direction I think we should move in. I mean not exactly live poll, but the point is I think policy decisions should be structurally much more anchored to people's desires on individual issues. Right now our political system is mostly "vote for someone and then live with whatever they decide for two years". Representative democracy makes sense but increasingly it seems the perspectives and incentives of the representatives are out of sync with those of the citizenry. I think there should be a healthy role for direct democracy, a way for people to override or modify the representatives' decisions, basically saying "I may still be okay with you representing me, but you were wrong on this issue so we're going to change that one."

> they're not, like, disheveled people slaving over a stove with unclearly sourced hot dogs. Generally, juice and fruit outside park entrance, ethnic food under tent next to sidewalk, miniature hot dog stand at sporting event.

Well, maybe, but that too is a decision that should be based on what people actually want. Like maybe people are okay with the stands in certain locations, certain types of foods (e.g., meat vs. fruit), certain numbers of stands, whatever, but not others. And if that's the case it is those preferences of the population that should be aggregated to arrive at a decision.

I think this is an important point lurking behind a lot of disagreements about these kinds of issues: basically, there are a fair number of things that are legal that people don't want to be legal, and there are a fair number of things that are not legal that people do want to be legal. The first category likely includes, for instance, all manner of tax trickery practiced by the wealthy; the latter category includes things like going 75 mph on the freeway.

There are also cases where it's not entirely clear what most people want, but where (I would say) the legality should be based on what most people want, but it is instead based on a complex apparatus of legal jousting and machinations by small groups of people. I would put the food stalls in this category. If more people want the food stalls in LA than do not, then they should be legal; if more people do not want them, then they should be illegal. But their legality should not depend on which advocacy group was able to muster a bigger war chest to fund their legal fees and win a court judgment one way or the other.

I believe this is a symptom of fundamental failures in our system of law and government that have caused it to be quite unresponsive to the actual desires of the citizenry. This causes us to waste a lot of time and energy fighting over things like "crime" without making much progress because we are working against the grain of the social/legal apparatus that some people put in place over a long period of time.

The problem is he sets this up as a contrast between, on the one side, quantification, evidence, "graphs", and the like; and, on the other side, "your eyes", "lived experience", and so on.

But these are not necessarily in opposition. There is nothing unquantifiable about "lived experience" or people opinions about crime, nor is there any reason to dismiss such data as irrelevant to policy decisions.

Even if the "church of graphs" showed crime on a clear upswing, it would be absurd to say, "Crime has gone up, therefore we must build a new prison." To justify that action requires more than just that bare fact; it requires some kind of causal analysis that explains why that action would play a causal role in producing some desirable effect (like reducing crime).

On the flip side, it is not absurd to say "Surveys show that the perceived level of crime has gone up, so we should explore policies to address that." This is especially true if you swap "perceived level of crime has gone up" for "perceived quality of life has gone down", because perception is in some measure an irrefutable judgment on quality of life. (That is, if you think your quality of life has gone done, then to at least some degree it factually has, because part of what it means to have a good life is to know that your life is good and to be happy about that.) Such a swap is likely warranted, because many of the author's examples of "crime" in the article make more sense as examples of quality of life. Seeing things locked up in stores is not experiencing crime or even perceiving an increase in crime; it is experiencing a decline in quality of life which may plausibly be an effect of an increase in crime, but that's not the same thing.

So just having data doesn't tell you what to do, and just having feelings and perceptions doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything. What's missing in both cases is the causal explanation of how the data and/or the perceptions arose.

Whenever I see people talking about "lived experience" I get a bit leery, because often that seems to be a lead-in to an argument of the form "I personally experienced X, therefore large-scale change Y should be implemented." The fallacy there is not starting from perception or from gut feelings; it's starting from just your own perceptions and gut feelings. If you can get data that shows a lot of people share your perceptions and gut feelings, then we can have something to work with. What we do with that information can vary: sometimes there is a causal theory to be developed and action to be taken that can trickle down into a change in those perceptions; sometimes the answer is better education or messaging that makes clear to people that their perceptions were inaccurate. But the problem is not a "church of graphs".

With regard to the issue of crime as discussed in this article, it seems likely to me that the data adduced in support of the "there is no crime problem" position is missing something important that has a genuine impact on people's quality of life. This doesn't mean the data we have is wrong or irrelevant; it just means it's not the whole story. If you have a bunch of data on temperatures in different places around the world and you use that to pick the best place to live, you may be disappointed if you get there and find it's raining all the time. That doesn't mean your data was bad (temperature surely is a major determinant of what makes us like a certain climate) but that it's incomplete (you need more than just temperature).

The solution to this is not to give up on data, it's to bring more data into the fold. Data on people's perceptions is immensely useful as a starting point for policy. It's not an endpoint, but then neither is any other data.

> These lawsuits have to be designed with the idea that the people with the most resources will try to exploit them, and the people with the least resources will be unable to.

Agreed! That is why the goal needs to be to just directly and explicitly reduce the wealth of those with the most.

That's totally at odds with my understanding, but perhaps this differs between fields.