[peppersghost93]

"If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic."

I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.

[Workaccount2]

The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.

If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.

But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.

This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.

[ryandrake]

ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.

If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.

[drewbeck]

If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.

As you say, stats very often obfuscate.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.

This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.

[GuinansEyebrows]

pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).

one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."

another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".

there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.

[lotsofpulp]

You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).

Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.

[ImPleadThe5th]

"If you research police corruption you'll probably find out the police are corrupt."

Large corporations and the police both have statistically significant problems to be a concern to the average person.

Frequency isn't the issue it's recurrence across municipalities. That's what makes it clear there is a systemic issue.

Imagine if we didn't make laws about murder because "It's not that frequent of a problem only 1 in 500,000 people are murdered"

[JumpCrisscross]

> I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong

You really can't. You can start off with a prior that it's more likely the corporation is wrong than not. But if you're assuming your conclusion, you're going to find evidence for what you're looking for. (You see the same thing happen with folks who start off by assuming the government is in the wrong.)

[api]

When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?

If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?

The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.

Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.

[peppersghost93]

Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.

[ljsprague]

Many individuals optimize for profits too.

[dmos62]

It might seem like bias will get you to where you're going faster, but at the end of the day it's just bias.

[ang_cire]

I have a bias towards not dying, and so far that has steered me away from activities that increase my likelihood of it. Bias is not intrinsically negative (that's prejudice), it just means a preference towards.

[peppersghost93]

That bias is well earned. Maybe one day corporations will do enough good things in the world to undo the evil they've perpetuated. I'm not holding my breath.