Ben Shapiro’s Facts Do Care About His Feelings
I’m not advocating against that. It’s fine. The set of all facts does not care about, or depend on, anybody’s feelings. But either a) that set doesn’t exist, or b) exists in a platonic realm of forms beyond our grasp, or c) takes too long even if we could grasp it. What we call facts then is really a metaphor, or more optimistically, an analog, the way a map is an analog of the land. Metaphors and analogs do care about our feelings. My metaphors care about mine. Ben Shapiro’s care about his. So here are some Ben Shapiro facts I feel differently about.
- There is no systemic racism, few racist apples doth not the barrel racist make.
The idiom is literally that one bad apple spoils the barrel. It releases ethylene which then ripens all the other apples. Since ripe is a nice word full of life and color, let’s replace this with white bread where one moldy slice doth indeed the loaf moldy make. Semantics aside, he’s right, this is true, and I feel the same way about individual apples, all cops shouldn’t be judged based on the actions of 1 rotten egg, being assorted edible items isn’t their primary identity and each should be evaluated as individuals. But that’s the point, why aren’t they being evaluated as individuals before they’re given guns and the power of the state over citizens? If I were an agency providing 100 babysitters for your daycare center and I said my screening system was so good it only let in 1 wolf for every 99 humans you’d tell me politely to fuck off even though it’s kinda unfair to an agency that is basically 99% non-wolf. I mean even most humans can’t boast of being 99% non-wolf, why such unrealistic standards for my agency? If you give someone a gun and the backing of the state, it’s not unreasonable to demand a selection process that does the minimum due diligence of not writing off that comment ‘oh what big teeth you have!’. If you pay for a babysitter, you have the option to patronize the business that guarantees 0 wolves. In a monopolistic state, I don’t have the option of patronizing a competitive police agency that guarantees 0 psychopaths. If I did, there wouldn’t be a protest. I’d just take my business elsewhere. It’s got nothing to do with all the non-wolf babysitters and non-psychopath-cops. It’s got nothing to do with all the wolf-babysitters and psychopath-cops either, I’m sure there are many parents with really annoying kids who’d be happy to have wolf-babysitters, it’s just that I don’t want any for myself and while I won’t question their right to exist I do question their right to my money and deference.
2. There is no systemic racism, extrajudicial deaths as a % of violent criminals do not show disproportionate bias against any race.
This is true. It’s strange therefore that we agree on the primary fact but derive the exact opposite inferences directly following it, Ben says this shows that the issue is of police brutality in general, and not racism, while I thought this fact shows the issue is of racism in general and not police brutality. Here’s how we’ve diverged from the same fact. There are 22 employees in a grocery store. 20 work the aisles wearing blue tees, white sneakers and a button saying ‘can I help you?’, 2 at the cash counters wearing yellow tees, white sneakers and the button. They switch shifts now and then. I need help, I’m wondering if the apples I’ve picked are ripe or rotten. It’s a crowded store, and I’m busy. Whom do I ask? Evaluating every single person I see is unfeasible. I need a shortlist. T-shirts are more striking than buttons or shoes, I use that as a primary filter. Since there are only 2 yellow-tee emps, I figure I’ll get a lot of false positives going after yellow-tee wearers. So I just go around asking people with blue tees till I find my help, I accidentally pick a few blue-tee wearing customers, but the time and effort I waste with these false positives is more than compensated by not having to scrutinize everyone’s feet and chest area to confirm they work here, both of which are creepy in very different ways. I value this saved time/effort more than I value the annoyance/embarrassment of blue-tee customers I have accosted. This is not incorrect procedure on my side, I’ve done the math and taken the optimal path. It’s the equation I’m optimizing for that’s messed up. This isn’t a police brutality issue in general, for that you’d have to prove that the % of extrajudicial harm in general is higher than it should be, this is of course an issue assuming it should always be zero, but that’s the inference from a different fact. For the fact of police injustice being proportional to a certain race’s contribution to crime, the inference is just racism. The inconvenient, rational sort of racism that happens when efficiency and results trump quality and morality. There are more false positives with innocent black people than white. There are more true positives also. The divergence in feeling-based-fact occurs when we each decide which of these we prefer to focus on. In a post-enlightenment liberal justice system that places a high multiple on the number of guilty people we’d tolerate going free if it meant an innocent person isn’t punished, I’d have assumed our optimization priority would be minimizing false positives. The fact that we say false positives are proportional to the true positives is indicative of the philosophy that we a) choose t-shirts as our primary shortlist filter b) find it acceptable to forego the effort of checking for sneakers and buttons before going after blue tees, and c) find it acceptable that as a consequence, a disproportionate number of innocent people we punish are wearing blue tees. That’s called systemic racism and it can exist even without racists. In statistics there isn’t really a trade-off between the values of precision and recall, their combination is what needs to be optimized. We seem to satisfied with the idea that Black FP / Black TP = White FP / White TP, comfortable with the result that this keeps Black FP / White FP = Black TP / White TP. Proportionality is not justice. A just system instead ensures Black FP = White FP = minimum.
3. There is no systemic racism, the laws are very clear, it is illegal to be racist and the state protects the rights of everyone against discrimination
This is true, the laws apply to everybody, in fact it is additionally true that white drug offenders get incarcerated at higher rates than blacks. But jurisprudence also says equal laws that can predictably lead to unequal applications in practice are actually just unequal laws. If all of us were grown in a petridish in a lab, raised by a sentient lamp, and then set free into the world obeying the 3 robotic laws, then the system bears no responsibility for any resulting differences in outcome. Unfortunately this isn’t true and we’re all transplanted from a diverse set of fields. We want a society that aims for equality of opportunity not equality of outcome, this is true, but we also know that a law saying ‘opportunities must be equal’ does not result in equality of opportunity. This is a very difficult problem, I’m personally in favor of a one-time affirmative action head-start funded by a tax-deductible gift from the wealthiest 1% and then nothing after that (1-time debt from the rich that gets paid off by reduced taxes over the next 10yr period where the state hopefully has a lower fiscal liability owing to a lower level of societal deprivation), but I can see that’s just one of a thousand possible options on the continuum between ‘past is past, the sins of the father must not be the son’s’ to ‘affirmative action to reliably ensure equality of outcome into perpetuity’. It’s very different to say it’s a difficult and almost unsolvable problem to saying there is no problem because we fixed Jim Crow so the legal system is now free of racism, and all individual instances of racism are rotten apples that we all agree to be deplorable.
4. This is a class issue. Controlling for income/employment/class, there is no disparity in incarceration, crime, and police mistreatment.
This is true. It is a class issue. No one has lost sight of that. The largest noise around popular protest is always around class issues, have you met Bernie Sanders? But surely we are capable of juggling more than one issue. This is a dominantly class issue. of course. This is also sub-dominantly a race issue. One does not disprove the other. It isn’t distracting from the fact that Bezos is a trillionaire. Every day I light a bonfire on my porch. Every day the neighbors come and tell me to stop doing it, the house might catch on fire, and the wooden houses on the street are more vulnerable than the stone ones. One day the house catches on fire, and all the wooden ones start to burn. It takes a brave person to say let’s not focus on the burning houses, or making wooden houses more fireproof, let’s focus on the bonfire that caused it, that’s the root of the problem, we must ensure that bonfire is made smaller in the future. Yes that is also true, in fact it is more true than the issue of houses being wooden, but why are these truths needing to compete?
5. Looting/Rioting is not protesting, and it turns everyone against the cause
This is true. And it’s even worse than that. It turns everyone against protest in general, and that’s not great for maintaining a bulwark against tyranny. Noone argues the first amendment right to peaceful protest, it’s a safeguard against authoritarianism. Also, not many argue with the idea that most protesters aren’t looting and most looters aren’t protesting, they’re opportunists engaging in rational crime. Rational because the reward from anarchic looting far outweighs the risk of paying a cost for it by getting caught. Rational crime is very dangerous, because it’s difficult to disincentivize, religion has tried it but given it’s also tried pederasty and homophobia its messages are not foolproof and impervious to the manipulation of convenience. So here’s the larger problem. We want to protect the right to protest. We know that any large protest is going to suck up finite law/order resources like Aragorn’s army drawing the Eye of Sauron away from Gorgoroth and Amon Amarth, inevitably leaving a policing vacuum that draws in opportunists. One feeling-based-fact, Ben Shapiro’s for instance, is that while large protests may not be directly responsible for looting, since it’s such a predictable consequence they are still answerable for it and liable to the backlash of public sentiment. The other feeling-based-fact is since we know protest+looting is a package deal, we have to decide if our right to protest is important enough that we will accept this package deal and mitigate its consequences. How? Ignore the protest locations and instead police the locations that are vulnerable to looting, you know, do your job? Don’t fall for the ruse of Aragorn’s army, lord Sauron, eye on the prize, Amon Amarth. If the state’s response is that protests need policing resources to be diverted because without it they turn violent and rioty, then let’s see that happen and those protests certainly deserve to have public sentiment turn against them, but as long as there is legitimate evidence protests and looting are two parallel phenomena, with the state incompetently suppressing protest while incompetently helpless against looting, it’s naive to conflate protest and anarchy without compromising your own constitutional right to protest in the future and letting the state off the hook for their one single purpose for existence.
6. It is idiotic to say the whole system is evil and corrupt and we need to tear it down.
Yes. We can reform political institutions while retaining the edifice. We can reform neoclassical economics to internalize externalities while retaining a free market economy. What would ‘tearing down the system’ even look like without Bane and Scarecrow? It’s a metaphor. The system is corruptible. The corruptions need to be excised, or our character rolled back to a previous save-state, wiser and more directed this time. Until I do a whole-body-scan and find out where the tumor is, I just say I have tumors without needing some insufferable pedantic to come say “no you don’t, your pancreas has tumors sure and it’ll probably kill you, but you as a whole don’t have tumors, so don’t ask the surgeon to euthanize you and replace you with an actor”. I won’t, it’s not what I mean. Conservatives: Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.
These are things I got from just a single 7min clip. Same fact, different context, different feelings. Analogs. Best case scenario, we use each others’ to build a more complete analog of reality. Base case scenario, we realize that unfortunately the other person’s metaphor subtracts from the value of our own and therefore we’ll just have to keep our respective ones agreeing that we don’t impinge on the other’s right to keep theirs. Worse case scenario, the metaphors cannot co-exist without impinging, we cooperate to find a mutually agreeable set of differing metaphors that can exist without impinging. Worst case scenario: there exists no plurality of non-impinging metaphors. I wouldn’t bet against the likelihood that a large number of people believe this worst-case scenario is actually base-case, and that explains the nature of rhetoric and polarized discourse.
