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> without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime. This really just betrays that you were not paying atte

> without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime. This really just betrays that you were not paying attention beyond the tagline. Multiple cities have already implemented trial programs to replace police services with mental health and EMT professionals to wild success. Denver has the STAR program [0] and I'm aware of a similar program in New Orleans and I'm sure other cities. I simply don't think anyone who gets upset at the "defund the police" over the pithy tagline is arguing in good faith. > Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se. Proponents of capitalism seem to have never encountered Goodhart's law. [1] [0] https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Public-Health-Environment/Community-Behavioral-Health/Behavioral-Health-Strategies/Support-Team-Assisted-Response-STAR-Program https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Almondsetat 3y ago
Your reply has a big claim, namely that they have had a "wild success". Instead of giving sources for this claim you provided us with contextual information that proves nothing
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  I bet they get fewer arrests. How would you measure success?
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  Not one of the programs they mentioned, but you might find this interesting https://klcjournal.com/mental-health-cahoots/ https://klcjournal.com/mental-health-cahoots/
- phatskat 3y ago
  I don’t have sources readily available but several programs across the country have reallocated parts of their police budgets to mental health crisis services, among other things, to seemingly good success. There are also places that tried defunding and then quietly voted for _more_ budget for policing. Here’s a good follow up on what Defund the Police led to: https://youtu.be/3irrROBg7Sg?si=MRDyPOEC2q0SR13O https://youtu.be/3irrROBg7Sg?si=MRDyPOEC2q0SR13O
- llbeansandrice 3y ago
  You could try googling any of the programs. > The program is producing paradigm shift results. In its inaugural year, STAR has successfully responded to 1,396 calls. Of those, there were no arrests, no injuries and no need for police back up. We've learned from these calls that expanding the program can help further reduce the need for law enforcement and emergency medical services to respond to 911 calls in certain crises, like intoxication, welfare checks, indecent exposure and more. https://www.wellpower.org/star-program/ https://www.wellpower.org/star-program/
0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
>Multiple cities have already implemented trial programs to replace police services with mental health and EMT professionals to wild success. That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities? Suppose someone is suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill -- does Denver now call a mental health or EMT professional for that person? >Proponents of capitalism seem to have never encountered Goodhart's law. [1] The severity of Goodhart's law depends on the mismatch between what you want and how you measure it. If you're able to measure what you want very accurately, Goodhart's law is not as much of an issue. Goodhart's law doesn't just apply to capitalism, it applies in many social domains -- including the political domain. The grandparent comment states: >There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming. Lobbying, campaign finance, price fixing, bribery, and police-ran protection rackets only relate to free-enterprise competition in the vaguest possible sense ("they all involve money"). I brought up the logo police idea for discussion because I think it's possible that it could align feedback loops better than the status quo. I invite you and everyone else to shoot holes in the idea, and guess how specifically it could fail. It could be that it fails in predictable ways, yet is still an improvement on the status quo. One of my hot takes is that it's good to rotate your metric on a regular basis, in order to flush out actors who are purely optimizing for the current metric and nothing else. Unfortunately, any beneficiary of the status quo has a strong incentive to maintain it even if it's flawed, and random members of society only have a weak incentive to fix it. That creates friction that prevents rotating metrics. From an incentive engineering perspective, this meta problem seems like the highest-leverage thing to solve. If we could fix that public goods problem, we could keep tweaking incentives on a regular basis and hopefully outrun Goodhart's Law faster and better than we are currently able to do. I wonder if mechanisms for solving public goods problems, like dominant assurance contracts, could be helpful here. Ultimately standard left/right debates sound pretty tired to my ears. In an ideal world, "incentive engineering" would be just as rich of a discussion as "software engineering" is today. The current situation is like if every HN post about software engineering was either an argument for why static typing sucks, or an argument for why static typing rocks. There's a much bigger world out there people. The heroes vs villains frame that people want to apply to every problem is often an impoverished one, IMO.

Almondsetat 3y ago

Your reply has a big claim, namely that they have had a "wild success". Instead of giving sources for this claim you provided us with contextual information that proves nothing

wizzwizz4 3y ago
I bet they get fewer arrests. How would you measure success?
lazyasciiart 3y ago
Not one of the programs they mentioned, but you might find this interesting https://klcjournal.com/mental-health-cahoots/ https://klcjournal.com/mental-health-cahoots/
phatskat 3y ago
I don’t have sources readily available but several programs across the country have reallocated parts of their police budgets to mental health crisis services, among other things, to seemingly good success. There are also places that tried defunding and then quietly voted for _more_ budget for policing. Here’s a good follow up on what Defund the Police led to: https://youtu.be/3irrROBg7Sg?si=MRDyPOEC2q0SR13O https://youtu.be/3irrROBg7Sg?si=MRDyPOEC2q0SR13O
llbeansandrice 3y ago
You could try googling any of the programs. > The program is producing paradigm shift results. In its inaugural year, STAR has successfully responded to 1,396 calls. Of those, there were no arrests, no injuries and no need for police back up. We've learned from these calls that expanding the program can help further reduce the need for law enforcement and emergency medical services to respond to 911 calls in certain crises, like intoxication, welfare checks, indecent exposure and more. https://www.wellpower.org/star-program/ https://www.wellpower.org/star-program/

0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago

>Multiple cities have already implemented trial programs to replace police services with mental health and EMT professionals to wild success. That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities? Suppose someone is suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill -- does Denver now call a mental health or EMT professional for that person? >Proponents of capitalism seem to have never encountered Goodhart's law. [1] The severity of Goodhart's law depends on the mismatch between what you want and how you measure it. If you're able to measure what you want very accurately, Goodhart's law is not as much of an issue. Goodhart's law doesn't just apply to capitalism, it applies in many social domains -- including the political domain. The grandparent comment states: >There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming. Lobbying, campaign finance, price fixing, bribery, and police-ran protection rackets only relate to free-enterprise competition in the vaguest possible sense ("they all involve money"). I brought up the logo police idea for discussion because I think it's possible that it could align feedback loops better than the status quo. I invite you and everyone else to shoot holes in the idea, and guess how specifically it could fail. It could be that it fails in predictable ways, yet is still an improvement on the status quo. One of my hot takes is that it's good to rotate your metric on a regular basis, in order to flush out actors who are purely optimizing for the current metric and nothing else. Unfortunately, any beneficiary of the status quo has a strong incentive to maintain it even if it's flawed, and random members of society only have a weak incentive to fix it. That creates friction that prevents rotating metrics. From an incentive engineering perspective, this meta problem seems like the highest-leverage thing to solve. If we could fix that public goods problem, we could keep tweaking incentives on a regular basis and hopefully outrun Goodhart's Law faster and better than we are currently able to do. I wonder if mechanisms for solving public goods problems, like dominant assurance contracts, could be helpful here. Ultimately standard left/right debates sound pretty tired to my ears. In an ideal world, "incentive engineering" would be just as rich of a discussion as "software engineering" is today. The current situation is like if every HN post about software engineering was either an argument for why static typing sucks, or an argument for why static typing rocks. There's a much bigger world out there people. The heroes vs villains frame that people want to apply to every problem is often an impoverished one, IMO.