@futurebird I think all of the police and detective shows on TV have something to do with it.

But why has crime gone down. The best explanation seems to be unleaded gas and removal of lead from the environment, especially peoples’ homes.

But the average person doesn't like this explanation. It takes 18-20 years to see the results of less lead in crime statistics, and it doesn't involve punishing "bad" people.

@futurebird

Something that really gets me-- like it feels like it's gnawing on the back of my tonsils, this deeply unpleasant thought-- is that if somebody felt like trying to make far-reaching calculations about what groups of humans think (or, at least, are saying online...) well, isn't that what these LLMs and massive city-sized data centers are basically FOR?

Accurate or not, biased or not, slop and self-digestion notwithstanding, somebody out there is trying to keep a pulse on the culture-- all cultures, every discourse-- and making sweeping decisions based on what amounts to the "AI" goddamned summary of how likely which proles are to revolt on any given day, and why. And the 1984/brave new world/fahrenheit451 alarm bell in my brain starts going off again. Forget mere tinfoil hat crinkling, this is blinking lights and claxons.

@AnnyJoe @bmoe

To be fair they seem to have only two modes:

1. Do nothing
2. Beast mode

Even the beauty shop owner I've been talking about, who is very annoying and conservative lamented that he hates the thought of calling cops on local teens because the police over-react. But, he's also getting fed up, and plenty of people seem strangely excited to see a child beaten into the ground for horsing around on a bicycle, for example:

Sauropods.win

(sauropods.win)

@AnnyJoe @bmoe

I think the beauty shop owner would be happy if he had some help tracking down the parents of the the teens who keep stealing bleach to do bathroom sink highlight jobs. And in nearly every case this would be sufficient to solve the problem.

@paulc

"The best explanation seems to be unleaded gas and removal of lead from the environment, especially peoples’ homes."

I don't know if this is the "best explication" At least where I live I think it has more to do with increased population density and our neighborhood having a substantial number of poor but stable families so the social fabric is functional again.

In the 80s there were a lot of abandoned buildings and lots and just fewer people around who would respond ... normally.

@violetmadder

I'm not convinced that LLMs are a reliable statistical tool.

For example. If I did my fantasy intensive polling and interviewing project and had little text paragraphs from thousands of carefully sampled people would an LLM be a good way to summarize all of those responses?

How would it compare to human sorting and reading and statistics about word frequency?

I want to see some side by side comparisons.

@futurebird @AnnyJoe @bmoe another case where facial recognition and vigilante justice would solve problems but also be problems themselves. Although maybe "extra-juditial justice" would be a better term than "vigilante" for the shopkeeper finding the parents and showing them the video.

@violetmadder

In my experience polling firms skimp on leg work. They hate paying people to go and find and interview their sample because it's expensive.

There are a lot of data out there, but it's very biased in unpredictable ways.

Pulling text from facebook twitter or X has nothing on doing interviews on a sample you have randomized well.

And it's critical to try to find the entire sample to the best of your ability.

@futurebird

Not reliable, no. And I'm starting to think that's one hell of a double-edged sword. Because on the one hand, no they don't REALLY have solid or accurate conclusions on what the resistance is up to, but on the other hand these egomaniacal bastards sure would love to BELIEVE they do which is just as scary in its own very special horrible way as they seem plenty confident enough to use the data to target arrests and bombings.

@violetmadder

The kind of polling work I see tells me they aren't really interested in finding out what people really think or what people REALLY care about.

There are topics they don't even ask about that are massive. The questions are leading and full of assumptions.

@semitones @AnnyJoe @bmoe

A good faith operation wouldn't need to do that. "call your parents they need to come pick you up" is enough of a punishment. (and pay for the item)

But this is very boring and difficult work that requires police who work in the same neighborhood for years (their "visibility" statistical system means I never recognize any of the officers since they are sent all around the city by the computer)

It's a whole different way of looking at the role of police.

@futurebird @violetmadder as someone who has worked in NLP for over a decade, word counts would be a much better way to go. You could probably also cluster them in some way which might help distill the data down.

In fact, this would be a terrible application of an LLM. Anything involving counting or understanding of anything countable, and LLMs fall flat on their face. They generate random words, in essence. Not good when you’re trying to observe something.

@futurebird I feel like polls won't get you the answers you seek.

In the 70s, NYC had a massive crime problem. The subways were dangerous, car break-ins were frequent, petty theft was at an all time high.

Why?

Heroin.

There was a massive (and now well-documented) gang moving tremendous amounts of heroin in the 70s, and lots of people were doing it and having the associated problems. So crime overall was actually high.

@futurebird
Eliminating that heroin supply is what cleaned up New York, not the broken windows policy or stop and frisk.

So there is the perception and the reality, as you say. How would better polling reflect the presence of an organized criminal underground that no longer exists?

@Wyatt_H_Knott

I'm interested in WHY people are so receptive to "crime is out of control" political messaging.

The causes of the crime itself isn't a matter for polling and also is very interesting.

@futurebird @violetmadder
One of my favorite books is “Seeing Like A State” by James C Scott. It’s about how states try to make the world “legible” by creating simplified understandings of the world, and then actually imposing those understandings on to the world. This often works in the short term, but destroys the contextual knowledge and capacities of the people imposed upon in the long run.

This style of polling might better reflect that contextual knowledge