Astral Codex Ten

Graham

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Graham

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Graham is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between June 11, 2021 and November 27, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Holt, like Graham and Yudkowsky, sees school as instilling permanent cognitive biases”; “Graham shares his experience as an “ex-cop in a city with a lot of homeless””; “According to Graham’s Wikipedia page : In interviews in 2022 and 2023, Linehan said the debate over transgender issues had “consumed his life"". It most often appears alongside San Francisco, ACX, California.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: June 11, 2021
  • Last seen: November 27, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: How Children Fail
June 11, 2021 · Original source
And he makes similar claims, similarly argued, to those of Paul Graham and Eliezer Yudkowsky, that the strategies that lead to nominal success in school are often the ones that stop at superficial understanding of the subject--hacks to be able to get to the correct answer quickly, without ever really looking at the problem.
Inline links: Paul Graham, Eliezer Yudkowsky
Per the last demographic survey of the readership of this blog, you are most likely not nine years old. However, you are almost certainly a former nine-year-old, and that’s another excellent audience for this book. Holt, like Graham and Yudkowsky, sees school as instilling permanent cognitive biases--habits that are best unlearned whenever you can.
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
Graham shares his experience as an “ex-cop in a city with a lot of homeless”:
Inline links: Graham shares
Also from Graham:
Inline links: from Graham
Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
August 30, 2023 · Original source
According to Graham’s Wikipedia page:
Inline links: Wikipedia page
In interviews in 2022 and 2023, Linehan said the debate over transgender issues had "consumed his life": it had lost him work, made him financially destitute, and ended his marriage
Open Thread 354
November 04, 2024 · Original source
1: Comment of the week is Graham on the Prop 36 post - he argues that the reason cops aren’t enforcing the existing misdemeanor penalty for shoplifting (up to six months in jail) is that by the time it gets through the DAs, this is reduced to “a stern talking to”, and it’s not worth cops’ time to arrest anyone who won’t be punished. Therefore, in order to get the six months in jail that’s already on the books, we apparently have to increase the law to three years in jail. I appreciate this perspective, but it only leaves me more confused - for example, didn’t San Francisco recall its soft-on-crime DA and replace him with a tough-on-crime DA who promised to throw the book at shoplifters? Don’t these charts from the San Francisco DA show that most arrests lead to charges, and the problem is almost entirely that most reports don’t lead to arrests? I still don’t feel like I understand the dynamics behind why our current laws can’t be used to arrest and imprison shoplifters.
Inline links: Graham on the Prop 36 post, these charts
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
The cost of imprisonment to families and communities - for example, now the prisoner’s children are without a father, the prisoner’s family is without a son/brother/etc, the prisoner’s corner store is without a customer, etc. Although we can’t quantify these, pro-longer-sentencing people note that when you survey the poor minority communities most affected both by crime and by mass incarceration, they tend to say they want the government to be tougher on crime. This suggests that at least some of the unquantifiable benefits outweigh the unquantifiable costs. Even if we’re not going to swallow the result whole, I think these kinds of analyses help us understand what we’re really getting per extra incarceration-year. For about $30,000 - $120,000 in imprisonment costs, we’re getting four fewer shopliftings, two fewer car thefts, and a small decrease in violent crime. Long Prison Sentences Are Probably One Of The Least Cost-Effective Ways To Reduce Crime This paper estimates that an extra police officer prevents about 20 crimes per year. This is true prevention, not incapacitation (ie the officer’s presence deters criminals from acting, rather than catching them afterwards). We previously said an extra year of incarceration averts 7 crimes. But the 20 crimes from police and 7 crimes from incarceration aren’t directly comparable, because the 20 is reported crimes and the 7 is total crimes. Only about 40% of crimes are reported, so we expect that the police officer really prevents about 50 total crimes. A year in prison costs $60,000 (ignoring costs to the prisoner themselves). An extra police officer costs $150,000. So prison prevents one crime per $8,500 spent, and police prevent one crime per $3,000 spent. This looks even better once we adjust for the moral cost of prison: the cop is three times as cost-effective without locking someone in a cage for a year! So What Do We Do About Shoplifting In California? This post was somewhat motivated by an earlier guest post on California’s Proposition 36, which argued that lengthening prison sentences for shoplifters wasn’t the right tool to fight shoplifting. The comment section was pretty hostile to this thesis and refused to believe it. Now that we know more, let’s look at this question again. …and it’s not clear that anything we’ve learned bears on this question at all. We said before that 327 shoplifters in New York City were responsible for a third of the city’s petty theft, and that each of them gets arrested twenty times per year. A similar group of Dutch offenders shoplifted 256 times per year. Proposition 36 increased sentences for shoplifting from six months to three years. But it doesn’t seem like these shoplifters are getting six months or three years. It doesn’t seem like they’re even being arrested. If they are, they’re either being let off without penalty, or - at most - in jail for a few days. So for me, the interesting question isn’t “should jail sentences be short or long?”, but rather why we can’t punish repeat shoplifters at all, with short sentences or long sentences. I asked the comments section this question, and got some good responses from people with criminal justice experience: Graham (ex-cop) says: Police have limited time and resources, they they focus - individually and at the department level - on the priorities that the voters and elected officials set for them. When elected officials say “the punishment for crime X is a stern talking to” the police get the message: crime X is not important. That’s why we don’t use undercover sting operations to apprehend jaywalkers. That is what has happened with theft in California. Police are not - and should not - waste time hunting down and arresting thieves who will be immediately released, which is the current regimes. For some reason the author thinks police should commit time and resources to arresting people who will not even be booked into jail and/or will be immediately released. So apparently the police aren’t arresting these people because the attorneys aren’t punishing them. What do the attorneys have to say for themselves? Andrew Esposito (ex public defender) says: [Graham] doesn't actually know what he is talking about. Evidence on this topic shows pretty clearly that arresting someone for misdemeanor larceny and then letting them go actually does a good job of preventing them from shoplifting in the future. If the police are saying "what's the point of arresting because they'll just let them go" then they are severly mistaken. In addition, almost every state regime has escalating punishments based on records. This could look like a three strikes law (your third misdemeanor larceny conviction becomes a felony) or alternatively handled at sentencing, where a judge, when deciding what punishment is appropriate, chooses to give harsher sentences to those who have comitted the crime before. In either case, you still want to be arresting even first time offenders who will receive a slap on the wrist, because when you arrest them the second or third times they will no longer be wrist slapped, but locked up for increasingly long stints. In my own jurisidiction, first offense petit larcenies were handled with community service, second offense was a weekend in jail, third offense was 10 days in jail, and then after that you'd be looking at serious time on the order of months, and eventually years. It should be (possibly weak) evidence of the system working that the vast majority of the theft cases that came through our office were first time offenders, not career thieves. Once someone gets caught, arrested and has to go through a trial, it suddenly doesn't seem worth it to steal shirts from target, or a steak from Kroger. My personal take is you want a system where the chances of being caught are very high, but then the punishments are relatively modest (but high enough to make it not monetarily worth it to steal). And CJW says: I was a municipal prosecutor for 10 years, a county one for 17, and a public defender for 4 […] In municipal court what would happen is they get a ticket, some cop has to write up a VERY brief probable cause affidavit but I would guess it still took an hour for the paperwork, I spend 5 minutes reviewing it and sign off on it. If the defendant doesn't show, they get a bench warrant, with a bond equal to the fine, say $200 first offense (plus cost of lost goods if not recovered). They get stopped for a ticket someday, and end up paying the bench warrant bond off to avoid jail, or they don't have that money in which case they sit in jail about a day before the municipal judge releases them because county jails don't have space to hold shoplifters for days and it costs like $40/day per inmate for the city to have them housed there. I would say only 1/100 cases would the defendant show up, demand a trial, and require me to get the loss prevention manager of Wal Mart to show up for night court. If it was a repeat offender, it might get referred to county, where the typical disposition might be 90 days jail suspended (it would be imposed only if they broke probation), with 2 yrs of unsupervised probation. Because I was both the municipal prosecutor and county prosecutor, I could actually control this a little and would cherry pick the cases out of municipal that I thought needed to go higher. (And sometimes in the other direction to cut somebody a break.) But if that had not been the case, there wouldn't be any coordination there and no rhyme or reason as to why some cases had a $200 fine and some had 2 yr bench probation period and real chance of jail. Over $750 it was a felony, which was a different matter. If a stealing victim was a private citizen these nearly always remained felonies. On a shoplifting, there was some chance it would get reduced to a misdemeanor. If property was unrecovered the person could make restitution in advance they had a better show of this. The reason mandatory jail doesn't work (and this applies to more than shoplifting) is that if you tell people they're going to jail, you have to give them a public defender. They are also less likely to want to plead guilty, and more likely to want a trial, or at least drag it out towards trial. In a regime where there is prosecutorial discretion, as I had, what will inevitably happen is that the state will face down an organized push from the local public defenders' office to set a bunch of shoplifting cases for jury trial. They know the state won't want to have those trials, and probably doesn't have the courtroom dates available to do so. And if you go ahead and call the bluff and try them, the odds are that the sentence the defendant gets won't be bad enough to deter this maneuver -- judges aren't supposed to increase sentences just because a guy chose to have a trial, so it's still unlikely he'd get more than whatever the mandatory minimum was set at. So the prosecutors will do the only remaining thing they can, which is amend the charge down to something that doesn't carry the mandatory minimum, thus allowing them to unclog the system. Theodidactus writes: Hello. Criminal defense attorney here. As I said on a previous post of yours, I don't think the tough on crime crowd realizes how many resources the US system is *obligated* to spend in the case of a criminal prosecution (and you can't have jail or prison without a criminal prosecution). If you charge someone with shoplifting and insist on 30 days in jail, the defendant can obligate the system to provide - a lawyer - a jury of 6 (in minnesota) or 12 (if you're going to impose prison time) - a judge - a court reporter - a prosecutor - a cop witness ...several of these for multiple hearings (you'll appear before a judge using your lawyer several times in the course of a criminal case) additionally, that same defendant can obligate the *victim* to provide - footage of the incident - a store witness all for a $5 pack of hamburger patty (yes, I have seen a shoplifting trial on a $5 pack of hamburger patty) ...and at the end of all this, even if the conviction sticks, you still have to sell a judge on sending some poor guy to jail for *thirty days*. Not that it can't happen, but it's such an immense expense of time and effort for everyone involved that it's usually much easier to cut a deal. I’m still not sure I understand what’s going on here, but it seems like there might be two problems: City attorneys believe that the scare of getting arrested, plus or minus a warning or small penalty, is enough to deter many people8. They have research which seems to back this up. Based on the research, they don’t impose stricter penalties for first-time offenders. But cops don’t believe this research, and feel frustrated that their work is coming to nothing, so they stop arresting people at all.
Inline links: This paper estimates, an earlier guest post on California’s Proposition 36, says, says, actually does a good job of preventing them from shoplifting in the future, says, writes, 8