Part of the problem I have with law enforcement is that so much of it is so arbitrary.
Like, to a large extent, I understand the philosophical and legal reasoning behind giving them wide discretion. But at the same time, when all a cop (at least, in many states now, USED to) could say was the three magic words, “I smell marijuana”, and your civil liberties just magically disappeared… well, it’s not unreasonable to feel that that is incredibly unfair, and to want some leniency or a “do-over”.
I live down the street from a police station, which was placed in my neighborhood over 20 years ago to help secure it for the incoming wave of gentrification that I now benefit from. Crime is still a problem in parts of the area. I’ve never had a bad interaction with our cops — unlike back home — and the general sense, justified or not, is that they’re too lazy/racking up corrupt overtime/busy with serious crime to bother hassling minorities too bad [ed: let alone unjustifiably shoot a minority].
And yet, even as I might nod to a cop in the street or at the deli, and generally don’t see myself as a target, I also don’t entirely trust them, because I don’t trust the power they have over me, even if they never exercise it.
Interesting. I thought I was kind of being paranoid to have this idea of "I already don't like you because I can imagine you doing a thing I don't like," but when the power someone has over you is real, that feeling can be reasonable, can't it?
I mean, it’s the same reason people feel leery around their bosses and HR.
So many of the rules that we are taught to live by in our society truly go by the honor system, and are honored in the breach more than not. Most of the time, telling a dirty joke or saying “fuck” won’t get you fired.
Except for that ONCE, where you maybe go a little too far or tell the joke in front of the most humorless person.**
Likewise, most of the time, you drive in System 2, and your System 2 brain is mostly calibrated for local traffic patterns and quirks.
Except for that ONCE, when you make a mistake and have an accident, or a cop decides he’s gotta make his quota off you on that particular day.
I wonder if people didn’t mind this stuff as much when they just knew it was random luck of the draw. But today, everyone KNOWS the cops have their quotas, and they KNOW it’s because municipal government is unaccountably fucked. When it’s all a big unstoppable leviathan grinding you in its gears, you stop seeing it as some fundamental question of law and order, and you just rage against the unfairness of happenstance.
** Fun story, at work we had this one acronym that is pronounced like “sex vid”, and it was always hilarious watching people stifle laughter in meetings where it kept having to be said repeatedly.
I’m kind of the opposite. If somebody is being a jerk in public and they get called out for it, I am completely on the side of the righteous. The dad and the fruit snacks—-I assume they are wrapped in some kind of plastic, so the whole “I can’t sell these, they’ve touched the floor” seems like an overreaction. But good for that store employee who at least tried to make the connection in front of the kid that their behavior affects others.
"But when I see someone getting reprimanded, I instantly identify with that person." I have the same affliction. I attribute it to PTSD from 13 years of public school characterized by routine reprimands for petty infractions of policies for which the people doing the reprimanding could not even begin to articulate a justification.
I always sympathize with the person being berated even if they committed the "crime." I figure it had something to do with my own mild PTSD from high school or college turning papers in late, etc., feeling like being chastised was unnecessary because I already felt guilty and had to deal with the problem. It seems like rubbing salt in the wound. The dad putting the fruit snacks back in the basket is a perfect example.
Our culture is a system of low-quality feedback. Apply what you think should be a standard of high-quality feedback to each of these situations and see if this changes the way you think about them (maybe some of them will).
Pinning me down? I love it. But examples won’t make sense without a theoretical foundation. This would require a book, but fortunately, there is a good book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In an interview with NPR, he related the story of a consultancy he worked for the Israeli military some decades ago. His job, as an expert psychologist, was to observe, test, and evaluate officers candidates. In retrospect, he said, he and his colleague(s) evaluated each candidate with great confidence, but they later discovered that their evaluations were undependable. The good news, according to Kahneman, was that he and his colleagues improved at the evaluations overtime because they created a feedback system for their work that was comprehensive and persistent. My standards for high-quality feedback: truthful, relevant, timely, and well-measured. But instead of an example, I offer a class of examples: critiques of character and personality are usually irrelevant and sometimes untruthful. If the behavior is the problem, then high-quality feedback requires critiquing the behavior and not having arguments about personalities. On social media, it should be perspicuous since there is a written record of what people write. Think of all the times that people are mistaken in their feedback because they are falling to take into account what was written, and it is just people yelling at each other because they are taking extreme positions because they are merely attacking or defending personalities with whom they have parasocial relationships. We can continue this by mining such examples from other threads. We can use the code word, “Kahneman.”
This isn’t on-topic, of course, but my immediate reaction is if retailers put items at toddler-height, there is no expectation of booger-free merchandise.
I’ve seen too many kids pawing stuff at their height while their distracted parents ignore or fail to notice the behavior.
That's weird. Why put unwrapped candy in a spot a toddler can reach. And the difference between how produce is displayed is different because you must wash it and usually cook it. Candy can't be washed or cooked and if I saw a parent shoveling candy off the floor and put on the shelf, I would complain. When my kid ruined food in the grocery store, which happened a couple of times, I insisted on paying for it.
It wasn't unwrapped, it was like fruit snacks in a shiny plastic wrap, like a candy bar. Produce can be bruised of course (funny thing, same Trader Joe's a checkout clerk dropped my avocados from a pretty good height, and just handed them to me and said "They'll be fine.") If the food was actually ruined I think paying for it is the right thing.
Your example is an interesting one because I don't even think the dad was in the wrong, or at the very least wasn't acting maliciously. To my mind, he was trying to fix the situation, and if the products were wrapped, he probably didn't even consider them having been on the floor to be a problem, especially if it were a relatively clean floor. It probably didn't cross his mind, even. To me, if I were in that situation, I would consider just leaving them on the floor to be the jerk move, more than anything. Making a mess and not doing anything about it.
While I understand the store employee's position, it probably wasn't fair to yell at the guy. Intervening is one thing, but in this case, it would have been better to have a more neutral tone. Berating him just leaves the impression that he would have been better off not trying to clean it up at all. Punishment for trying to do the right thing can be the most socially corrosive outcome of all.
But that's just arguing over the example. The broader article points to the difficult dichotomy between justice and grace/mercy, which is a good example of how two virtues can sometimes compete with each other, and that to prefer one over the other can be a hazard. I think a lot of folks get paranoid these days simply because large organizations can't naturally perform grace while also enforcing justice, since they're too large and blunt to really understand individual circumstances. Even in the best case situations, you either become a cog in the machine (i.e., pure justice) or government/business unfairly allows actually malicious folks to get away with hurting others (i.e., too much grace). To my mind, the only cure is to keep things on as local a level as possible, to try and reduce this kinda blunt force trauma, but that also isn't always easy or perfect. It's tricky.
A lot of it is tone of voice. IMHO in the two examples you give, it would be perfectly fine to reprove the offending party in a calm, respectful manner but I my sympathies would vanish if were done in in a vindictive, boorish manner.
This outlook comes from a Parent Encouragement Program I attended many years ago that applied Adlerian psychology principals to issues / behaviors typically encountered by parents
Agreed. Our local pizza place included a note one time when we had ordered via GrubHub or whatever that told us how it cost them so much more when we ordered that way, but if we used their website the cost to us was the same but would save them a lot on fees. Because of the presentation I happily switched the way I order.
> Obviously, some of it is political. The conservative in me would practically define progressivism as “making excuses for small-time wrongdoers,” or define away wrongdoing via intellectual sophistry.
That’s really sad. I know you come from a conservative background, and I saw that same trend in the progressive zeitgeist for tolerating disorder, but progressivism should mean above all else “support a robust safety net,” not “tolerate disorder” or “define away wrongdoing.” I’m all about mitigating the consequences of people’s economic actions, but not their criminal ones.
At one point or another either side has been the side viewed as the moral scolds, and no one likes moral scolds.
The Trader Joe’s employee was legit being unreasonable.
My sympathy lies with the fare evader simply because “contact with cops” is too severe a punishment for something with as little impact as fare evasion.
As for the restaurant story, the restaurant owner was totally in the right there (certainly I’d want the owner of my favorite restaurant to tell me if my ordering method of choice was parasitic), but he probably should have been a little nicer about it.
Part of the problem I have with law enforcement is that so much of it is so arbitrary.
Like, to a large extent, I understand the philosophical and legal reasoning behind giving them wide discretion. But at the same time, when all a cop (at least, in many states now, USED to) could say was the three magic words, “I smell marijuana”, and your civil liberties just magically disappeared… well, it’s not unreasonable to feel that that is incredibly unfair, and to want some leniency or a “do-over”.
I live down the street from a police station, which was placed in my neighborhood over 20 years ago to help secure it for the incoming wave of gentrification that I now benefit from. Crime is still a problem in parts of the area. I’ve never had a bad interaction with our cops — unlike back home — and the general sense, justified or not, is that they’re too lazy/racking up corrupt overtime/busy with serious crime to bother hassling minorities too bad [ed: let alone unjustifiably shoot a minority].
And yet, even as I might nod to a cop in the street or at the deli, and generally don’t see myself as a target, I also don’t entirely trust them, because I don’t trust the power they have over me, even if they never exercise it.
Interesting. I thought I was kind of being paranoid to have this idea of "I already don't like you because I can imagine you doing a thing I don't like," but when the power someone has over you is real, that feeling can be reasonable, can't it?
I mean, it’s the same reason people feel leery around their bosses and HR.
So many of the rules that we are taught to live by in our society truly go by the honor system, and are honored in the breach more than not. Most of the time, telling a dirty joke or saying “fuck” won’t get you fired.
Except for that ONCE, where you maybe go a little too far or tell the joke in front of the most humorless person.**
Likewise, most of the time, you drive in System 2, and your System 2 brain is mostly calibrated for local traffic patterns and quirks.
Except for that ONCE, when you make a mistake and have an accident, or a cop decides he’s gotta make his quota off you on that particular day.
I wonder if people didn’t mind this stuff as much when they just knew it was random luck of the draw. But today, everyone KNOWS the cops have their quotas, and they KNOW it’s because municipal government is unaccountably fucked. When it’s all a big unstoppable leviathan grinding you in its gears, you stop seeing it as some fundamental question of law and order, and you just rage against the unfairness of happenstance.
** Fun story, at work we had this one acronym that is pronounced like “sex vid”, and it was always hilarious watching people stifle laughter in meetings where it kept having to be said repeatedly.
I’m kind of the opposite. If somebody is being a jerk in public and they get called out for it, I am completely on the side of the righteous. The dad and the fruit snacks—-I assume they are wrapped in some kind of plastic, so the whole “I can’t sell these, they’ve touched the floor” seems like an overreaction. But good for that store employee who at least tried to make the connection in front of the kid that their behavior affects others.
Yes, wrapped. Good observation that part of the point is for the *kid* to learn something, not to give the dad a hard time.
"But when I see someone getting reprimanded, I instantly identify with that person." I have the same affliction. I attribute it to PTSD from 13 years of public school characterized by routine reprimands for petty infractions of policies for which the people doing the reprimanding could not even begin to articulate a justification.
I always sympathize with the person being berated even if they committed the "crime." I figure it had something to do with my own mild PTSD from high school or college turning papers in late, etc., feeling like being chastised was unnecessary because I already felt guilty and had to deal with the problem. It seems like rubbing salt in the wound. The dad putting the fruit snacks back in the basket is a perfect example.
Our culture is a system of low-quality feedback. Apply what you think should be a standard of high-quality feedback to each of these situations and see if this changes the way you think about them (maybe some of them will).
Interesting. Example?
Pinning me down? I love it. But examples won’t make sense without a theoretical foundation. This would require a book, but fortunately, there is a good book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In an interview with NPR, he related the story of a consultancy he worked for the Israeli military some decades ago. His job, as an expert psychologist, was to observe, test, and evaluate officers candidates. In retrospect, he said, he and his colleague(s) evaluated each candidate with great confidence, but they later discovered that their evaluations were undependable. The good news, according to Kahneman, was that he and his colleagues improved at the evaluations overtime because they created a feedback system for their work that was comprehensive and persistent. My standards for high-quality feedback: truthful, relevant, timely, and well-measured. But instead of an example, I offer a class of examples: critiques of character and personality are usually irrelevant and sometimes untruthful. If the behavior is the problem, then high-quality feedback requires critiquing the behavior and not having arguments about personalities. On social media, it should be perspicuous since there is a written record of what people write. Think of all the times that people are mistaken in their feedback because they are falling to take into account what was written, and it is just people yelling at each other because they are taking extreme positions because they are merely attacking or defending personalities with whom they have parasocial relationships. We can continue this by mining such examples from other threads. We can use the code word, “Kahneman.”
This isn’t on-topic, of course, but my immediate reaction is if retailers put items at toddler-height, there is no expectation of booger-free merchandise.
I’ve seen too many kids pawing stuff at their height while their distracted parents ignore or fail to notice the behavior.
That's weird. Why put unwrapped candy in a spot a toddler can reach. And the difference between how produce is displayed is different because you must wash it and usually cook it. Candy can't be washed or cooked and if I saw a parent shoveling candy off the floor and put on the shelf, I would complain. When my kid ruined food in the grocery store, which happened a couple of times, I insisted on paying for it.
It wasn't unwrapped, it was like fruit snacks in a shiny plastic wrap, like a candy bar. Produce can be bruised of course (funny thing, same Trader Joe's a checkout clerk dropped my avocados from a pretty good height, and just handed them to me and said "They'll be fine.") If the food was actually ruined I think paying for it is the right thing.
Yeah, of course you had sympathy for the father then - he was in the right!
Your example is an interesting one because I don't even think the dad was in the wrong, or at the very least wasn't acting maliciously. To my mind, he was trying to fix the situation, and if the products were wrapped, he probably didn't even consider them having been on the floor to be a problem, especially if it were a relatively clean floor. It probably didn't cross his mind, even. To me, if I were in that situation, I would consider just leaving them on the floor to be the jerk move, more than anything. Making a mess and not doing anything about it.
While I understand the store employee's position, it probably wasn't fair to yell at the guy. Intervening is one thing, but in this case, it would have been better to have a more neutral tone. Berating him just leaves the impression that he would have been better off not trying to clean it up at all. Punishment for trying to do the right thing can be the most socially corrosive outcome of all.
But that's just arguing over the example. The broader article points to the difficult dichotomy between justice and grace/mercy, which is a good example of how two virtues can sometimes compete with each other, and that to prefer one over the other can be a hazard. I think a lot of folks get paranoid these days simply because large organizations can't naturally perform grace while also enforcing justice, since they're too large and blunt to really understand individual circumstances. Even in the best case situations, you either become a cog in the machine (i.e., pure justice) or government/business unfairly allows actually malicious folks to get away with hurting others (i.e., too much grace). To my mind, the only cure is to keep things on as local a level as possible, to try and reduce this kinda blunt force trauma, but that also isn't always easy or perfect. It's tricky.
A lot of it is tone of voice. IMHO in the two examples you give, it would be perfectly fine to reprove the offending party in a calm, respectful manner but I my sympathies would vanish if were done in in a vindictive, boorish manner.
This outlook comes from a Parent Encouragement Program I attended many years ago that applied Adlerian psychology principals to issues / behaviors typically encountered by parents
Agreed. Our local pizza place included a note one time when we had ordered via GrubHub or whatever that told us how it cost them so much more when we ordered that way, but if we used their website the cost to us was the same but would save them a lot on fees. Because of the presentation I happily switched the way I order.
> Obviously, some of it is political. The conservative in me would practically define progressivism as “making excuses for small-time wrongdoers,” or define away wrongdoing via intellectual sophistry.
That’s really sad. I know you come from a conservative background, and I saw that same trend in the progressive zeitgeist for tolerating disorder, but progressivism should mean above all else “support a robust safety net,” not “tolerate disorder” or “define away wrongdoing.” I’m all about mitigating the consequences of people’s economic actions, but not their criminal ones.
At one point or another either side has been the side viewed as the moral scolds, and no one likes moral scolds.
The Trader Joe’s employee was legit being unreasonable.
My sympathy lies with the fare evader simply because “contact with cops” is too severe a punishment for something with as little impact as fare evasion.
As for the restaurant story, the restaurant owner was totally in the right there (certainly I’d want the owner of my favorite restaurant to tell me if my ordering method of choice was parasitic), but he probably should have been a little nicer about it.