Approximating Intelligence: The Innocent Defend the Guilty

The Gist.

You aren't legion, you are not many. The 'no true Scotsman...' fallacy is baked into any group identity. If someone were to call you, an individual, a liar or a thief, the truth of those accusations is entirely within your control. Move from "I" to "We" in your identity and you've lost that control.

Granted there is nothing particularly noble about "not my problem" but the position is honestly defensible. If you are not as yet following, this is a frustrating difference between being a Christian and being an Atheist. That difference being that being a Christian is a group identity, with a whole menu of beliefs that ostensibly correspond to behaviour (no lying, no stealing, no infidelity with intimate partners) and there's also a degree to which that group identity is monolithic, in which case those professing the value of the belief system are on the hook for the conduct of those who share their group identity.

By contrast, Atheism requires a specific belief to not be held. Such that, if my fellow atheist is busted for sexually harassing two women at a cocktail party, I don't need to denounce them as not a true atheist, because there's nothing in the rules of not believing in any gods that pertains to attitudes about women. There's no requirement for disowning or a definition retreat if my fellow atheist is busted attending a séance, reading their horoscope, picking up a penny and any other superstitious practices.

That asymmetry pointed out, the biggest one is between operating as an individual and operating with a group identity where there's an assertion that the group identity has some absolute predictive power. 

Giving the easiest way to not have the innocent come out to defend the guilty and thus preserve real problems, is to disown group identities and just be individuals. 

The second easiest recourse is to relax the predictive power, and make concessions like 'granted most of us are actually assholes, but good dudes like me should be given a chance...we need something to change.'

By Vocation 

I grew up the son of a primary school teacher. Teachers, like all professions, are comprised of people. So leading into the subject of this post, it is very relevant that I recognize that my parent left me with no romantic illusions of the noble art of teaching. But someone else whose parent was a teacher could have been gifted illusions of the noble profession of teaching.

What is my impression of a romanticized view of teaching? It'd comes across to me, that all educators are passionate, intelligent, competent people that forego economic opportunity out of a civic, or perhaps humanitarian duty to give children the best quality education possible. That further than that, passionate, intelligent, competent people could not become victim to, or stifled by, a bad culture imposed on them by administrators etc. That any failings of the education system, are to be found in a lack of funds, or the powerful effects of media or something.

In my final year of secondary school, I was struggling in English. Getting C's and D's. It was distressing and odd, because English was a subject I had excelled at up until year 12, except for a few lessons learned early on like I can't skip reading the assigned text because I'd read it 6 years earlier. Turns out I hadn't memorized The Hobbit as a 7 year old. Since then though, with minimal effort whatever I coughed up on a page got B~A+. 

My instincts told me what was wrong, the teacher had it in for me. Alas, though my mother had impressed upon me that teachers and administrators could be bullies or incompetent, as had other teachers in my time. My own education had made me incredulous that a teacher would be so unprofessional. Teachers surely, had to pass tests too, and somewhere in there, they would have been tested on professionalism. 

I did well in school, I put in effort particularly with maths where I was weak but pride and convention had had me refuse to drop it in favour of more humanities, but the big thing was that I changed English classes, after a professional consultant demonstrated why she earned the big bucks by saying 'you have to evaluate who the teacher is'. 

My principle, a relentless stats freak, was well aware that I'd turned things around, yet hadn't put together the stark correlation that as soon as I changed teachers my grades dramatically improved.

So I put to you, that such a person exists that is mentally/emotionally unstable, and for whatever motivation becomes a teacher, but takes it upon herself to balance the scales of cosmic justice by penalizing students that remind her of students she disliked in her own high school experience, for whatever reason - bullying, romantic rejection, apathy, outperformance, allocation of attention.

Giving us a great example for a vocational innocent defending the guilty - by insisting that person doesn't exist. Something like no teacher would be so unprofessional as to grade a student on anything other than academic performance (including punctuality).

A kind of affirming the consequent, where if I were submitting bad school work I would get bad grades. I have bad grades, therefore my school work must be bad. A formulation vulnerable to falsifying through experiment - anonymize my work and give it to several teachers. If there's some kind of consensus that the work was bad, the formulation survives, but if there's a consensus that the work is better, or there's no consensus, the formulation is falsified, and who your teacher is matters.

A few years, maybe a decade after graduating, the Australian government introduced the "Myschools" website. A way to promote transparency of school performance to prospective parents. 

There was, predictable pushback, but it is where it first became salient to me, that the innocent often come out to defend the guilty. 

Politicians, like all jobs, are comprised of people, and like teachers tend to run the full gamut of competency. I'm sure there were many problems with the initiative and it's implementation. 

To the point of this post though, I heard opinions that I simply could not believe were genuine, and the charitable reading of would be "delusional" (charitable because delusions can be sincerely held). That basically, bad teachers don't exist. 

The very first blog I ever read on the internet was Bob C. Cock's weekly rant on the old primussucks.com website. I can't find the specific post even on internet archive thanks to flash no longer being a supported plug in, so paraphrasing Bob Cock said 'some of the most uninspiring people I have ever met were teachers...people who faced the choice after completing their liberal arts degrees of becoming a teacher or working in a bookstore. So you become a teacher...'

But it apparently left Australia with the impression that schools that have been mismanaged, and somewhat self-selected for a demotivated, uncaring, self-serving and cynical staff is somehow literally unthinkable.

Here for your reference is the My School website. I feel confident you can tell that it is the product of much compromise based on it landing on a terms of use agreement. 

And here's an excerpt of the response from the wikipedia page on the website:

Teachers' unions and some parent bodies have expressed concerns that the data is being used to formulate league tables of schools. Principals claim that students have been asked to leave some schools because their performance on NAPLAN tests was expected to damage those schools' rankings.[6] Independent think tank the Grattan Institute calls for schools to be judged on the individual improvement students make every year rather than the comparison based on raw test scores used on My School.[7] The Australian Education Union has resolved to boycott future NAPLAN testing if the My School website is used in this way.[8]

The oppositional arguments listed above, were not the impassioned arguments I was hearing. I was hearing pushback on the very principle that a parent might be able to discover that the school their child attended was by some measure, shit.

So What Was So Scandalous About the Spotlight Investigation?

This being when the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team cracked the code on how the Catholic Church was moving around it's sex-offender priests and covering up sex abuses. 

Because of the cover-up, of actual crimes, which is a crime (usually) it can't be said to be an incidence of the innocent defending the guilty. Particularly when paedophile sex-offenders have been reassigned to remote indigenous communities because it's harder for those communities to get the word out.

There is though, I feel an important inference to be gleaned, and is easier to glean if you are not religious, and maybe easier if you have a marketing degree and think about brands and products a bunch.

To an extent, I sympathise with the existential crisis posed when you are a bishop or cardinal or other ranking clergy and some messenger brings you the bad news that Patrick made an underage boy in his care swallow his semen.

There are other religious beliefs that do not saddle their leaders with the burden of being good people, just having magic powers or whatever. But the Abrahamic religions tend to demand (or historically, simply assert) something of the priestly class' character. 

To cut to the chase, apparently the one true god's representatives on earth, cannot keep out the paedophilia in the screening process before ordaining holy men. That or the entity that can supposedly hear the prayers of the flocks, is totally okay with kiddy fiddling.  

Even more to the chase, organized religions tend to have romanticized illusions built in. Moral certainty is the dilemma, that and an unfortunate group identity.

This I put it to you, is that why abuse-of-minors is a bigger scandal for church leaders (not just the highest profile Roman Catholic Church, but also other Christian denominations like Southern Baptists, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are now well documented) than teachers, even if in absolute numbers the problem of teachers abusing students is a much larger problem.

I just don't see it discussed much, but people turn up, kneel in pews, put coins in baskets, confess their sins, practice rituals before meals and bed all because they believe in a pretext that priests know what they are talking about. That they are talking about something that exists.

From an atheist perspective, that's the last cover-up: That there's no god hearing your prayers, not one that cares at any rate. Leaving no-real conundrum over how child-molesters infiltrated. But if you want to preserve the belief that you have privileged access and insight into a postulated entity, yeah you have a conundrum if it is blind to pedos.

And yeah, it's in that sense not analogous to the earlier example of teaching. 

Firstly, on the guilt front, the administrators that covered up and shifted around the evidence their world view was not all they had claimed it to be, were aware that bad priests exist. I can fully believe that idealist teachers some subset at least*, and certainly children of idealist teachers could be unaware that shithouse teachers exist.

The other way the analogy is false, is that the claims of the education system are not equivalent. Education is largely secular in the jurisdiction where educators have the human rights recognized to complain. 

So I feel the key is tribalism, adopting a group identity. The idea that people do not simply become teachers or priests, but the idea that to become, or by virtue of becoming a teacher or a priest that someone is a certain kind of person.

A belief that cannot be retained if any exception is admitted to.

(*for example, a small school with a good administrative team could actually build a professional culture with no free-riders, career incompetents and unstable personalities. I also had a friend in high school that had been propagandized by their father, near as I could guess, that doctors were gods that walked the earth, and I made a claim that their was a huge problem with doctors taking drugs to get through their emergency room shifts, a proposition they couldn't believe. I was backed up by a friend who was also gunning to become a doctor and then at his house later witnessed him take a phone call from the propagandized friend asking him where he'd seen the news story on doctors taking speed. So it's plausible that such conceits can exist, quite innocently, about vocations.)

Most...

Although definitional advances or "concept creep" is more interesting, my above inference that tribalism and investment in a romanticized group identity permits of no exceptions, there is a well worn, well trod, somewhat well known fallacy, a reliable definitional retreat - the No True Scotsman fallacy.

It basically boils down to "well they don't represent us." 

So let's think about the Ford Pinto. The pinto is a popular punching bag of automotive history. Basically it had a reputation for catching on fire whenever anything crashed into it's rear end. Here is a dramatization from Spy Spoof film 'Top Secret':

What I'm confident is true, is that while the Pinto was in production and on the roads, most drivers did not lose their lives or their vehicle in a fiery explosions, for the simple reason that there is the raw probability of specific car models getting rear ended relative to the numbers on the road. 

Actual history aside, now let's pretend what happened was a user group calling themselves 'Pinto Drivers' defended the reputation of the model by claiming that if you get rear ended and your car catches on fire then you are not a 'True Pinto Driver'.

In other words, to defend the design flaws of the vehicle by discarding the individuals caught out by those design flaws.

I'm going to back peddle to religion for a second, I'm going to paraphrase one of my favourite things said by Sam Harris, because although content matters, to some extent it is universally applicable:

The problem with x fundamentalism, are the fundamentals of x.

Equally one could say:

The problem with x literalism, is what x literally says.

But keep in mind, we aren't talking about the problems of the design of the Ford Pinto, or people being commanded to cast out their right eye as the literal wording of the text. The problem is the disowning of the problem, the guilty, through definitional retreats. 

Basically if a member of your group identity embarrasses your romantic notions, they don't count*. And it permits people to persist in a belief without fixing problems, this might manifest as an expensive recall in terms of a design floor in a car model, or an existential crisis if you have to admit either your moral authority permits acts considered criminal by the law, or that your institution is thoroughly infiltrated.

What I want to really urge though, is sympathy, with the intuition to deny, back-peddle, redefine, distance, disown, wash-hands and embrace cognitive dissonance. 

'No true Scotsman...' 'A few bad apples...' 'Not all men...' 'Mostly peaceful protests...' 'These are not real Muslims...' '...was never a member...' '...acted alone.' 'Do not reflect the values of our brand...' '...are not politically engaged.' 'internalized...' '...shill.' This cognitive dissonance to handily dispense with contradictions does come out in pretty much every attempt to construct a group identity I've come across.

Since I've already invoked Sam Harris, one of his positions I find most challenging, or at least hardest to understand is his position on gun control. From this, let's move back from identities to consumer groups which are identities, but well...whatever.

Again we'll see the behaviour 'My dad smoked a pack a day for 60 years didn't miss a beat.' 'I have a glass of wine with dinner. I'm not one of those problem drinkers.' and 'if everyone just followed these x basic rules there would be no accidental gun death' type sentiments are I assert, a manifestation of the innocent coming out to defend the guilty, through that appeal to statistics that apply to Ford Pintos and drivers in general, religious practitioners, smokers, drinkers, recreational drug users etc.

Let me concede a point, some drivers are culpable, other drivers are not. Drunk drivers, are not true drivers in the sense that when appraising the problem of road fatalities assuming drunk or otherwise under the influence drivers are descriptive of the larger driving population could shift someone erroneously, from thinking we have a drink driving problem to a car problem.

And then it's the nanny state coming to take our cars away. That though is a relatively complicated collision of two consumer goods, cars and alcohol for which we actually do deprive people of consuming both simultaneously but not individually. You can get blotto, or you can drive yourself home, but not both.

What about fire arms? For those that don't know, I'm Australian, and subsequently, I mostly don't know what it takes to get a handgun in Australia. It appears possible, but for the commission of crimes a black market price tag of $20k for a handgun; we're talking about the handgun being in the same ballpark as a getaway vehicle for a bank-job. There's an important difference though - it's easy to steal cars.

I'm not going to do a deep dive into the numbers, largely because I'm sure it's largely fruitless. The principle is this: why not make it as hard to obtain a handgun as it is to get a commercial pilot's license? 

The US situation is almost certainly going to fall under the Thomas Sowell dictum of "there are no solutions, just trade offs' largely because there's an estimated (or perhaps accurate) 1.2 guns for every 1 person in the United States. There are simply too many guns already in circulation that have to be taken into account - whether that's addressing mass shootings, school mass shootings, gang homicides, police shootings of unarmed civilians, or accidental fatalities particularly involving minors.

The probability that anyone has a gun is so high as to change the equation, the probability that anyone can obtain a gun is even higher. 

Libertarian magicians Penn & Teller are for the time being good poster children for innocent gun owners and Penn Gillette as part of their bullet catch act often runs through 4 rules to prevent accidental fire arm injury reproduced for your convenience here:

1. Always treat every gun as though it were always loaded unless you yourself have checked it.
2. Always be sure of your target, not just the target but above, below and to either side of your target.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until the target is in the sights.
4. Do not point the gun at anything you do not intend to shoot.

And we can see that Alec Baldwin did not follow the first rule. I kind of got lazy and probably paraphrased there. But these rules seem similar to the road rules that disqualify me from getting a license, kind of like failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Where my driving instructor drilled into me what constitutes a complete stop, lacking the physical sensation of the halt as the vehicles momentum is arrested no matter how low/non lethal that momentum was, he would say 'you just failed your test.'

The probationary drivers license examination seems based on media I've consumed roughly analogous across the world these days, and focused largely on avoiding property damage (with the emphasis on parallel parking, angle parking, reversing etc. in the test.) not homicide, suicide and manslaughter, which are certainly possible by automobile, but just run the thought experiment of assassinating time-travelling Hitler with a car vs. a handgun, and hopefully you'll immediately understand that cars might be deadly weapons if you are content to kill random pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicle passangers, but quite inefficient for a targeted assassination vs. a handgun, 

So why shouldn't legally obtaining a gun and possessing it be harder than getting a driver's license, more in-line with a pilot's license. Or being taught to skate by Hal. Racking up 100 hours of lessons by a qualified instructor at a shooting range, having certified parties install your storage facilities be they safes or cabinets... all that shit. I plead ignorance of the process where it works, and also ignorance of the process where it doesn't.

Again complicated, constitution, states rights, I don't care I'm south of the border. 

But the fundamental phenomena is that you could almost set your watch to the subset of gun owners and gun enthusiasts that are responsible that will defend not irresponsible gun owners/handlers, but the ease with which irresponsible gun owners/handlers can get their hands on guns, because in the context of a responsible gun owner that ease is a fact of convenience, not the problem it is when shifted to irresponsible people.vccccccc 

And to be clear, the innocent defending the guilty in the context of gun control, the... not so much the guilty, but the irrelevant probably make the most noise. By this I mean that subset of the population with an overt bias towards being hyper-sceptical of any state or government powers while simultaneously almost no scepticism of the powers extended to private citizens. The "If I wanna have my own armed thermo-nuclear ICBM that's nobody's business but mine!" types.

Enough with consumer products and the regulation of them. Be they weapons or softdrinks, they illustrate that a majority consumer group can justifiably push back on attempts to regulate away their misuse. What's the decision rule though? I am going to say that it is: having the data.

*I had a confounding conversation with my partner about the definition of 'intuition' where we agreed a fair summery of her definition was 'an intuition is something that is always right, if an intuition turns out to be false, then it was not an intuition.' Similarly, there's some old Roman physician that claimed to have a panacea - a medicine that cured all ailments, everyone recovers or they die, in which case they were too infirm to be saveable. Under which, water, and air could be defined as effective panaceas.

Full Circle

In this sense, the big thing, the big egregious exercise of the innocent defending the guilty, is when the innocent are protesting the collection of and transparency of the data. "Most are/aren't..." is a lot more forgivable than "No true..." and again, I think the difference is empirical.

When MySchool was introduced by the Australian government, the only accountability schools had to legal guardians of the students were...I don't fucking know. Truancy officers? Informal reputation? An annual article in the broadsheet newspaper, unlikely to be read by the parents that stood to benefit most?

So you might feel a swelling of reassurance that I, some person on the internet, see a problem with those innocents that come out to defend the purveyors of electoral fraud. People saying we shouldn't be wasting time, effort, money and energy on the concerns of millions of people who feel a 2020 election was stolen. No.

It's the other way round, because the data does exist on how free and fair the elections in question were. The purveyors of what can confidently be called 'a big lie' told objectively different stories in their press conferences vs what they told to judges in court as their cases were routinely thrown out. You need to see my other post in this series on 'conversation starters' or JAQing off.

Generally, where the innocent defending the guilty is the biggest problem, is when they oppose the activity of establishing the truth or falsity of a claim. Of quantifying a problem in the first place. Namely, a dishonest defence of the guilty. 

"It's outrageous to suggest we should file expense reports. Nobody would abuse claiming expenses, so any attempt to establish whether anyone does or not is simply the greatest offense committed against innocent people ever."

In this sense, when the innocent defend the guilty it is the mirror image of what I call "conversation starters" and a lower priority, but nevertheless a way to confound intelligence such that it is not dominant strategy.

Here is why I prioritize them so:

I'm not sure how effective the innocent are at defending the guilty. Like 'MySchools' my initial example went up, and pleading ignorance as to how most parents select the schools their children attend, I'd suspect many still use their abstract impressions, word of mouth etc.

But don't get me wrong, it is a problem, it is transferring the cost of cognitive dissonance onto innocent parties. What makes it relatively smaller is that it is a defensive strategy. The people that have the problem aren't the ones creating the problem of innocent defending the guilty. Thus the interest group demanding transparency can agitate for that transparency until they have it.

"Conversation starters" and "just asking questions" is a greater problem because the transparency is already there. The rejection of facts on spurious grounds, often as in the recent case of vaccine hesitancy where the supply of facts leaves the safety and efficacy of vaccines (for example) overdetermined.

In which case, the tactic can be imposed indefinitely on matters for which all the material for resolution is known, but ignored, dismissed, denied. Conduct an audit and ask 'will the problem go away now?' to which the answer is no, and all that can be done is to conduct another audit.

By the definition of insanity of 'doing the same thing and expecting different results' not only are conversation starters themselves insane but they make their opponents insane.

When the innocent defend the guilty, typically it's because the guilty contradict the self-conception of their own group identity AND they can't be bothered filling out an extra form, waiting an additional 28 days or paying a $5 surcharge or anything that might inconvenience the innocent and eradicate the guilty.

However I believe the innocent to be fragile, certainly less robust than "conversation starters" in their dishonesty. Apply time and stress the innocent will break and actual problems can be engaged with.

Now, I can only speculate, but the fundamental peril is failing to notice that group identities get less descriptive the further you move from the whole. To the point of being almost useless, once you are looking at an individual engaging in anything physics permits.

I don't got much else to say on this. Onto the next.