Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology

Malicious streetlights are an evil trick from Dark Data Journalism. Some annoying enemy has a valid complaint. So you use FACTS and LOGIC to prove that something similar-sounding-but-slightly-different is definitely false. Then you act like you’ve debunked the complaint.

My “favorite” example, spotted during the 2016 election, was a response to some #BuildTheWall types saying that illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs. Some data journalist got good statistics and proved that the number of Mexicans illegally entering the country was actually quite low. When I looked into it further, I found that this was true - illegal immigration had shifted from Mexicans to Hondurans/Guatemalans/Salvadoreans etc entering through Mexico. If you counted those, illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs.

But the inverse evil trick is saying something “directionally correct”, ie slightly stronger than the truth can support. If your enemy committed assault, say he committed murder. If he committed sexual harassment, say he committed rape. If your drug increases cancer survival by 5% in rats, say that it “cures cancer”. Then, if someone calls you on it, accuse them of “literally well ackshually-ing” you, because you were “directionally correct” and it’s offensive to the victims to try to defend assault-committed sexual harassers. This is the sort of pathetic defense I called out in If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It.

But trying to call out one of these failure modes looks like falling into the other. I ran into this on my series of posts on crime last week. I wrote these because I regularly saw people make the arguments I tried to debunk. That crime is way up, but that police departments are cooking the books by refusing to take reports. Or that murder in particular is up, but this is disguised by improving trauma care. See for example this blog post responding to my Anti-Reactionary FAQ, which uses the improving-trauma-care thesis to argue that

Medical advances over the past 40 years have masked the epidemic of violence . . . Aggravated assault is up 750% since 1931, and the murder rate, if it weren’t for better medicine, would be at least 4,000% up—that’s 40 times greater. Imagine the right side of the above graph magnified by five times. Instead of the murder rate being 8-9 times higher than in 1900, it would otherwise be 40-45 times higher. So much for falling crime.

This was one of the most important neoreactionary blogs! The belief that murder rates had gone up 45x since the Good Old Days was one of the driving justifications for the neoreactionary movement!

And in the responses to THIS VERY POST, whose TITLE was “Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Reporting Bias”, several people proposed that actually, maybe record low crime rates were just because of reporting bias. Names removed to protect the guilty, but:

Don’t tell me crime is down. I’m not wrong. The statistics produced by the same police who do nothing about crime are wrong.

In several European countries, the police does not care at all about smaller crimes, like someone beaten up, so it does not go into the stats. And this is what affects most people. Burglary happens to mostly empty second homes. Assault is something the police is not interested it, and we know rape is underreported.

So I think it’s important to argue that no, crime rates really are down, and it’s not just reporting bias or modern medicine, and that this argument neutralizes a real and influential group of people trying to make the contrary argument that murder/crime rates are up, and to push policy based on that position.

But some commenters accused me of employing malicious streelight effect Their actual concerns were about disorder, open-air drug markets, tent encampments, and seeing people fencing stolen goods. They thought I was being deceptive in trying to trivialize these by saying that a similar-sounding-but-slightly-different concern, major crime like murder and assault, was down.

I don’t know how to get around this. On the one hand, it’s a problem if people are saying false things, and nobody can correct them without getting mobbed by a bunch of people accusing them of committing malicious streetlight fallacy, muddying the debate, using Dark Data Journalism to steamroll over lived experience.

On the other hand, it’s a problem if malicious streetlight fallacy can never be challenged, because perpetrators can always defend themselves by appealing to some hypothetical group of people who think Mexican immigration is worse than Central American immigration and are lying to convince people that it’s Mexican immigrants specifically.

My plan was to publish a post one day on crime, and then the next on disorder, but I got so many negative comments the first day for talking about crime without mentioning disorder that I guess in the future I’ll include in the post that disorder is a separate topic and I’ll talk about it later. I don’t know a better way to thread this needle.