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You write “You can give these people houses but without treatment they will still be begging on the street.” Your choice of words makes me wonder whether you w

by Jolter 2y ago

You write “You can give these people houses but without treatment they will still be begging on the street.” Your choice of words makes me wonder whether you would agree that an addict who sleeps in an apartment is better off than an addict who freezes their ass off in an alley at night. Maybe solving for housing first is a way to eliminate some of the suffering in the world. By demanding that their life “is in order” before providing housing, I think we are demanding the impossible from someone who clearly is not capable of making perfect choices.

balamatom 2y ago
"Here I am, working my ass off, true-believing in the eventual payoff of all that delayed gratification, stressing myself sick over making the Right Choices in this unwinnable game - and someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices gets their problems solved for free? The sheer audacity!" I feel like the cognitive dissonance between the above line of thought and the social expectation to demonstrate "kindness", "generosity", "compassion" is at the root of many people's rejection of an universal social safety net. Can't let themselves realize that a homeless beggar on crack might not only be just as human, but in some ways even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros. Unfortunately, not getting one's fundamental assumptions challenged is very often a much more powerful motivator than any desire to actually reduce the actual suffering of actual beings.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  That's not what cognitive dissonance is. That's a dissonance between what people truly think and what they want/need to display. Nice closing joke, though, got a laugh out of me!
  - pmdulaney 2y ago
    No, I think the poster's notion of cognitive dissonance is more correct than yours. Cognitive dissonance refers to the anxiety caused by attempting to embrace two different convictions or beliefs that are incompatible with each other.
    - balamatom 2y ago
      Back in the shitpiles, we used to call that a "false consciousness". We are required to authentically participate in being each other's jailers, wholeheartedly and without losing our minds; even the Scrivener's hopeless "I would prefer not to" is beyond the capabilities of a great many. Hence, yes, enforced cognitive dissonance, and all the "fun" things that are causally downstream from that.
      - pmdulaney 2y ago
        Upvote for the Bartleby reference.
- criddell 2y ago
  Who are you quoting?
  - balamatom 2y ago
    Someone who is obviously Not Capable of formulating the quoted sentence. Not to worry though, I used my psi training to read their mind for them.
    - criddell 2y ago
      Oh, so a strawman.
      - balamatom 2y ago
        Certainly someone with important organs replaced by piles of rotting straw.
- wwweston 2y ago
  This is probably the fundamental attribution error in play -- "my situation is a twist of circumstance but their situation is a reflection of poor character and choices that need to be policed." The Golden Rule is an ages-old part of this conversation because it helps people confront this common bias. Imagine your situations are reversed, how would you want things done? Do that.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    Yeah, believing the mantra "If you work hard you'll succeed" also means believing "If you're a failure that means you're lazy".
    - wwweston 2y ago
      There seems to be a class of decent mantras / heuristics like this: * Good at a first approximation for directing your own agency (conscientious effort definitely improves chances of success, there are few reasons not to engage it other than "your ladder is on the wrong wall" situations). * Much poorer as a general model of the world, especially one that should be socialized.
  - balamatom 2y ago
    Past a certain point (which a lot of people encounter quite early in life) I'd rather liken it to sunk cost fallacy, than to fundamental attribution error. Otherwise, the Golden Rule is great, except for FAE being a good example of how it isn't particularly applicable in practice.
  - Ferret7446 2y ago
    This doesn't mean the attribution error is wrong in the direction you're implying it is. It does not mean that your assessment of others' situations is wrong, it may mean your assessment of your situation is wrong (and your assessment that others made bad choices is right).
- bnralt 2y ago
  The fundamental contradiction is here: "someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices" yet is "even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros." Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them. The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems. There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people. Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.
  - balamatom 2y ago
    A great many people who would be generally accepted as Successfully Schooled in the art of making Right Choices, when left truly on their own - and not out in the woods somewhere, but out here, in the very bowels of this right here civilization - would also rather quickly encounter misery and death. Do you believe that what I noncoincidentally capitalize as "Right Choices" are actual right choices in some absolute, or at least universally shared, or at least non-self-contradictory frame of reference? I see them more like unilaterally mandated moves in some arbitrary social game that we all have, voluntarily or not, been recruited into (and which persists not in spite of, but because it is fundamentally nonsensical). Of course, my viewpoint is incorrigibly biased by having witnessed manifestations of empathy significantly more often among the "dregs of society" than in what one would call "polite company". Anyway, empathy is only the first step. Effecting systemic change takes significantly more right thought and right action than is generally permitted. And those aren't really things one can delegate. (I've found the lack of those things among the "down and out" vs. the "better off" to be about equal, the comparison I was making was along another axis.) In other words, if the social safety net that you have experienced leads to the outcomes you describe, that means it's a bad implementation of a social safety net - not that we shouldn't have an actual one. Outside of Kafka, people don't just randomly wake up one day to find out they've somehow transformed into helpless monsters. It's a gradual process, and there are people at every step of the way, who are making the choice to allow others to slide into poverty and insanity, for the sake of not disrupting some comfort zone which may not even be particularly comfortable.
- strken 2y ago
  The social safety net relies on both altruism and self-interest. We trust that getting people into housing will improve their lives, but we are also looking to improve their interactions with us. I don't care whether the guy who smells like piss and lies beside the supermarket door has earned a room. I would, however, like him to use the shower and laundry attached to the building. If he isn't doing those things even though he has a home now, then we're down to altruism rather than altruism + self-interest.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Generally the rant is not about those who are not capable of making the "right choices", but about those who are capable but are not. I know a someone who was getting straight A's in school until they decided to drop out and have a few kids - I feel robbed when she is getting help because she always was able to make "good choices" and instead I'm supposed to forego some luxury I want to support her as well. I know many more people who are unable to make "right choices" and I want to help them.
sideshowb 2y ago
FWIW I didn't read that as an argument against providing housing, I read it as an argument in favour of providing housing and treatment.
phkahler 2y ago
>> Maybe solving for housing first is a way to eliminate some of the suffering in the world. That's probably true, but the ability to do it strongly depends (I'm thinking US centric here) on keeping the borders closed to illegal immigration. The last thing you want is a flood of people coming for the free/cheap housing. BTW I believe the US currently has a housing shortage, particularly at the lower end of the market.
- Jolter 2y ago
  I don’t know of any place (including Finland) that would consider people without a residence permit to be eligible for “housing first”. It is a fairly simple filter to implement, and should solve your problem.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Why do we need to close the borders at all? Most people crossing the border are looking for a good life including a good job, not handouts. Let those people in and get a job and they will provide more than enough economic gain to offset the homeless. (the above is a bit too simple and thus wrong, but not nearly as simple are your analysis)
  - phkahler 2y ago
    >> Why do we need to close the borders at all? Because those people need a place to live and they don't bring a home with them. It's added stress on the market. I will also be costly for any program that subsidizes housing in any way.
bluGill 2y ago
You are both missing something important: no all homeless are addicts! There are lots of different reasons someone could be homeless. As such there is no one side fits all. This article says their policy is only about 80% effective. They are extremely good by world standards, but it is far away from perfect. The question remains what to do about that other 20% - and if you find an answer would that be better for some of the other 80%? (note that I said if - I have no ideas. Also I didn't specify all of the other 80% being helped and so we have to figure out what that means to the overall policy)
- slothtrop 2y ago
  Most homelessness is also temporary, with around the same range of 80% moving on within a year. That being the case, the value-added of free housing appears marginal compared to the cost. It would best target those who are a) chronically homeless, but b) neither addicted or mentally unfit to be employed, which sounds like a vanishingly small demographic. Mind you I take "effective" and desired outcome here to mean that they won't continue to roam out in the streets, either to be close to dealers or from being mentally unwell.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    There is a bunch of it depends there. California has more homelessness than other states. Part of this is in some areas housing is so expensive middle class people cannot afford to live there, but they can get jobs there and so being homeless is often the only option if you don't/can't leave. Part of this is California has a fairly mild climate (well in the places people live): you won't be comfortable some nights, but the weather won't kill you. States with lower housing costs do appear to have lower homelessness rates.
    - slothtrop 2y ago
      That's right, it scales most closely with housing cost. That tracks with homelessness generally being temporary, being priced out. California is also infamous for rent control policies in NIMBY cities that have been an abject failure. The supply of rental units was low because they are artificially risky and promise too little in return. Zoning and regulatory reform spurs more building including smaller, dense units, which lowers prices. There's a fantasy among leftists that developers are snubbing mixed-density and dense mid-rises because condos pay more. No one leaves money on the table. Everything is built on credit, and banks deem these builds riskier in large part owing to the impact of zoning and regs. Condos have a lot of overhead, which checks a lot of boxes, while this would be unaffordable for other units. They also ignore that there are small developers in cities that try to compete, but can't get loans, because of these regulations.

by Jolter 2y ago

balamatom 2y ago

"Here I am, working my ass off, true-believing in the eventual payoff of all that delayed gratification, stressing myself sick over making the Right Choices in this unwinnable game - and someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices gets their problems solved for free? The sheer audacity!" I feel like the cognitive dissonance between the above line of thought and the social expectation to demonstrate "kindness", "generosity", "compassion" is at the root of many people's rejection of an universal social safety net. Can't let themselves realize that a homeless beggar on crack might not only be just as human, but in some ways even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros. Unfortunately, not getting one's fundamental assumptions challenged is very often a much more powerful motivator than any desire to actually reduce the actual suffering of actual beings.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
That's not what cognitive dissonance is. That's a dissonance between what people truly think and what they want/need to display. Nice closing joke, though, got a laugh out of me!
- pmdulaney 2y ago
  No, I think the poster's notion of cognitive dissonance is more correct than yours. Cognitive dissonance refers to the anxiety caused by attempting to embrace two different convictions or beliefs that are incompatible with each other.
  - balamatom 2y ago
    Back in the shitpiles, we used to call that a "false consciousness". We are required to authentically participate in being each other's jailers, wholeheartedly and without losing our minds; even the Scrivener's hopeless "I would prefer not to" is beyond the capabilities of a great many. Hence, yes, enforced cognitive dissonance, and all the "fun" things that are causally downstream from that.
    - pmdulaney 2y ago
      Upvote for the Bartleby reference.
criddell 2y ago
Who are you quoting?
- balamatom 2y ago
  Someone who is obviously Not Capable of formulating the quoted sentence. Not to worry though, I used my psi training to read their mind for them.
  - criddell 2y ago
    Oh, so a strawman.
    - balamatom 2y ago
      Certainly someone with important organs replaced by piles of rotting straw.
wwweston 2y ago
This is probably the fundamental attribution error in play -- "my situation is a twist of circumstance but their situation is a reflection of poor character and choices that need to be policed." The Golden Rule is an ages-old part of this conversation because it helps people confront this common bias. Imagine your situations are reversed, how would you want things done? Do that.
- netsharc 2y ago
  Yeah, believing the mantra "If you work hard you'll succeed" also means believing "If you're a failure that means you're lazy".
  - wwweston 2y ago
    There seems to be a class of decent mantras / heuristics like this: * Good at a first approximation for directing your own agency (conscientious effort definitely improves chances of success, there are few reasons not to engage it other than "your ladder is on the wrong wall" situations). * Much poorer as a general model of the world, especially one that should be socialized.
- balamatom 2y ago
  Past a certain point (which a lot of people encounter quite early in life) I'd rather liken it to sunk cost fallacy, than to fundamental attribution error. Otherwise, the Golden Rule is great, except for FAE being a good example of how it isn't particularly applicable in practice.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  This doesn't mean the attribution error is wrong in the direction you're implying it is. It does not mean that your assessment of others' situations is wrong, it may mean your assessment of your situation is wrong (and your assessment that others made bad choices is right).
bnralt 2y ago
The fundamental contradiction is here: "someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices" yet is "even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros." Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them. The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems. There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people. Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.
- balamatom 2y ago
  A great many people who would be generally accepted as Successfully Schooled in the art of making Right Choices, when left truly on their own - and not out in the woods somewhere, but out here, in the very bowels of this right here civilization - would also rather quickly encounter misery and death. Do you believe that what I noncoincidentally capitalize as "Right Choices" are actual right choices in some absolute, or at least universally shared, or at least non-self-contradictory frame of reference? I see them more like unilaterally mandated moves in some arbitrary social game that we all have, voluntarily or not, been recruited into (and which persists not in spite of, but because it is fundamentally nonsensical). Of course, my viewpoint is incorrigibly biased by having witnessed manifestations of empathy significantly more often among the "dregs of society" than in what one would call "polite company". Anyway, empathy is only the first step. Effecting systemic change takes significantly more right thought and right action than is generally permitted. And those aren't really things one can delegate. (I've found the lack of those things among the "down and out" vs. the "better off" to be about equal, the comparison I was making was along another axis.) In other words, if the social safety net that you have experienced leads to the outcomes you describe, that means it's a bad implementation of a social safety net - not that we shouldn't have an actual one. Outside of Kafka, people don't just randomly wake up one day to find out they've somehow transformed into helpless monsters. It's a gradual process, and there are people at every step of the way, who are making the choice to allow others to slide into poverty and insanity, for the sake of not disrupting some comfort zone which may not even be particularly comfortable.
strken 2y ago
The social safety net relies on both altruism and self-interest. We trust that getting people into housing will improve their lives, but we are also looking to improve their interactions with us. I don't care whether the guy who smells like piss and lies beside the supermarket door has earned a room. I would, however, like him to use the shower and laundry attached to the building. If he isn't doing those things even though he has a home now, then we're down to altruism rather than altruism + self-interest.
bluGill 2y ago
Generally the rant is not about those who are not capable of making the "right choices", but about those who are capable but are not. I know a someone who was getting straight A's in school until they decided to drop out and have a few kids - I feel robbed when she is getting help because she always was able to make "good choices" and instead I'm supposed to forego some luxury I want to support her as well. I know many more people who are unable to make "right choices" and I want to help them.

sideshowb 2y ago

FWIW I didn't read that as an argument against providing housing, I read it as an argument in favour of providing housing and treatment.

phkahler 2y ago

>> Maybe solving for housing first is a way to eliminate some of the suffering in the world. That's probably true, but the ability to do it strongly depends (I'm thinking US centric here) on keeping the borders closed to illegal immigration. The last thing you want is a flood of people coming for the free/cheap housing. BTW I believe the US currently has a housing shortage, particularly at the lower end of the market.

Jolter 2y ago
I don’t know of any place (including Finland) that would consider people without a residence permit to be eligible for “housing first”. It is a fairly simple filter to implement, and should solve your problem.
bluGill 2y ago
Why do we need to close the borders at all? Most people crossing the border are looking for a good life including a good job, not handouts. Let those people in and get a job and they will provide more than enough economic gain to offset the homeless. (the above is a bit too simple and thus wrong, but not nearly as simple are your analysis)
- phkahler 2y ago
  >> Why do we need to close the borders at all? Because those people need a place to live and they don't bring a home with them. It's added stress on the market. I will also be costly for any program that subsidizes housing in any way.

bluGill 2y ago

You are both missing something important: no all homeless are addicts! There are lots of different reasons someone could be homeless. As such there is no one side fits all. This article says their policy is only about 80% effective. They are extremely good by world standards, but it is far away from perfect. The question remains what to do about that other 20% - and if you find an answer would that be better for some of the other 80%? (note that I said if - I have no ideas. Also I didn't specify all of the other 80% being helped and so we have to figure out what that means to the overall policy)

slothtrop 2y ago
Most homelessness is also temporary, with around the same range of 80% moving on within a year. That being the case, the value-added of free housing appears marginal compared to the cost. It would best target those who are a) chronically homeless, but b) neither addicted or mentally unfit to be employed, which sounds like a vanishingly small demographic. Mind you I take "effective" and desired outcome here to mean that they won't continue to roam out in the streets, either to be close to dealers or from being mentally unwell.
- bluGill 2y ago
  There is a bunch of it depends there. California has more homelessness than other states. Part of this is in some areas housing is so expensive middle class people cannot afford to live there, but they can get jobs there and so being homeless is often the only option if you don't/can't leave. Part of this is California has a fairly mild climate (well in the places people live): you won't be comfortable some nights, but the weather won't kill you. States with lower housing costs do appear to have lower homelessness rates.
  - slothtrop 2y ago
    That's right, it scales most closely with housing cost. That tracks with homelessness generally being temporary, being priced out. California is also infamous for rent control policies in NIMBY cities that have been an abject failure. The supply of rental units was low because they are artificially risky and promise too little in return. Zoning and regulatory reform spurs more building including smaller, dense units, which lowers prices. There's a fantasy among leftists that developers are snubbing mixed-density and dense mid-rises because condos pay more. No one leaves money on the table. Everything is built on credit, and banks deem these builds riskier in large part owing to the impact of zoning and regs. Condos have a lot of overhead, which checks a lot of boxes, while this would be unaffordable for other units. They also ignore that there are small developers in cities that try to compete, but can't get loans, because of these regulations.