I’ll bite, but I think you ought to know that I cannot so far understand you’re reasoning.

Who, then, is qualified to speak on these issues? Is only aggregate data through official channels, and not individual experience, relevant to the discussion?

I'll try to defend the argument of "first hand anecdotal data vs statistics". At least i'll provide some arguments.

Imagine going to any place of work for a week. Let's say a trading center. How much will you learn from first hand but short-term experience? People tend to say you need 10,000 hours of practice to be good at a given skill. In a week you are barely starting to get familiar and it's already over. You haven't experienced any depth or any breadth of the domain.

Another example would be: how much of a country can you learn by visiting 1 city? At some point to fit the huge problem space into 1 mind you need to generalize and use statistics. In addition to practical experience so you're not lost in abstract concepts.

Personally i think that both first hand experience and stats/theoretical knowledge are necessary to be effective at a domain. So I'm glad to see a politician getting personally involved.

To the defense of the other side, I would say first-hand experience tend to be more engaging than theory/stats, especially to politicians (usually non STEM profiles who got where they are through developing EQ, not critical thinking). This results in politicians only engaging with that type of approach, and typically having a limited/personal understanding of the problems they are in charge of.

I wish for instance that a politician in charge of a topic would have to go through a mandatory 1 week intense course from domain experts to broaden their perspective and understanding. Instead it tends to be all emotion, all urgency, and leaning the way most people are pulling, whatever the rational merits of that position.

It seems to me that homelessness is a desired state by the far-left progressives. I don't get the sense from talking to people here in Berkeley/Oakland that they want to eradicate homelessness. If you offer a few discussion points about possible solutions, you get sneered at and shot down. The arguments are weak and don't hold up, so they are varnished with emotional appeal (be kind to homeless) and other soft-tactics of altruism. I disagree with this whole premise. You can still be kind and try to solve homelessness and clean up our streets. There is nothing wrong with that and infact the only right thing to do. Like every city in the world. No one should be afraid of calling homelessness a problem that we want to get rid of. Methods of doing that can be debated but resist the appeal for this so called wokeness that is endemic in places like Universities.

Desired state seems like a stretch, but the cynical part of me does wonder sometimes whether having visible homelessness around is seen as inevitable proof that the capitalist system is irredeemable and must be replaced.

A more likely explanation is the way that paternalistic administration of care is anathema to the current way of thinking. That is to say that one should never presuppose how to solve someone else’s problems, but rather one should listen to their lived experiences and give them what they say they need to solve their own problems. This is a good principle to follow in most situations, but like all prescriptive outlooks it fails when exposed to certain edge cases. In this case, the edge case is people who lack the executive function to know how to better their situation, or even to take advantage of situations that will when they’re presented.

> Desired state seems like a stretch, but the cynical part of me does wonder sometimes whether having visible homelessness around is seen as inevitable proof that the capitalist system is irredeemable and must be replaced.

I think these are two separate variables and Capitalism when properly regulated works extremely well (it has moved millions from poverty in China and did the same in the US - wages went up by 350% from 1930-1970).

Agreed, but I’ve noticed that over the past few years there’s been a shift away from talking about implementing some socialist policies into capitalism and towards the irredeemably of the capitalist system. At least that’s been my experience among my liberal circle. I think it’s the influence of the growing far left movement, who are now the cool kids on the left. The word “liberal” is a pejorative to them; synonyms with someone who defends the status quo, which is deeply uncool.

The social problem of homelessness is thus an issue of the intentions of a specific political group? And their manners? They sneered, did they? Not nice, but that seems like a distraction. Political groups and intentions are apart from the business of dealing with the problem. What you are dismissing as "wokeness" might just be familiarity as this problem has festered for a while now.

There is some evidence that this just clean up the streets approach is part of the reason so many ended up here after having been cleared out of wherever else they started. In Berkeley/Oakland cleaning up the streets just shifted people around at great cost so now the focus is on cleanup and portable toilets for basic sanitation.

The far-left position on homelessness is simply "let's build enough houses by whatever means necessary" (depending on where one is on the authoritarian/libertarian scale, the list of acceptable means varies).

The difference is in the language. "Clean up our streets" puts the emphasis on the homeless as the problem for everybody else, as opposed to homelessness being a problem for the homeless.

So you’re saying any attempt by a politician to go and talk to homeless people in person - not to get to the root of the cause, but just to listen to them and observe - should be avoided as it’s just a publicity stunt?

And what do you mean “ignore the problem”? I directly quoted his conclusion which included “we should do more to house them”. Can you point to a conclusion of his where he actively sought to ignore the problem?

I’m struggling to wrap my head around your rationale. If the situation were different - let’s say a lack of childcare options - would you also tell politicians not to talk directly to parents looking for childcare? Only talk to advocacy organizations because such a “stunt” doesn’t get to the “deep seated social issues at hand”?

And what do you mean “waste a week”? Since when is having leaders directly engage people a problem? What angle are you coming at this from? I’m trying to understand your motivations when you’re actively rejecting efforts to find solutions.

I believe he is trying to say that 1) drawing conclusions from the one-time observations of a single individual is unlikely to be accurately representative of the actual situation, and is at great risk of all sorts of selection, recall, and confirmation biases. 2) in that context, ignoring all the other managerial responsibilities of a mayoral position so you can engage in a relatively non-scientific attempt at information gathering when you have people you can consult who are experts on the topic and have spent years studying and collecting data, is quite rightly a poor use of time.

All of those biases are also applicable to experts. We hope they are less biased, but they can never be bias free and there are certainly cases where experts have been egregiously biased, often is very subtle ways, that have led policy grievously astray. Like when the USDA pushed the country away from fats and toward processed sugar

I think you two might be talking past each other here. There's nothing wrong with a politician (i.e. an elected leader) getting first hand experience with an issue. Many leaders do this all the time and get depressingly little press for it--and others do it purely for a PR win unmindful of the cynicism they're generating. I think this mayor was sincere in his intent, and also I think it's a good habit to assume positive intent (to be super corporate about it).

What I think people are taking issue with is the Mayor's seeming dismissal of some homeless as irredeemable, and his failure to acknowledge that homelessness is more than an issue of mental illness, substance abuse, and personal responsibility. That plays into the common stereotype of unhomed people, and as many pointed out, that makes the problem worse because it justifies doing little to solve the problem.

So while I believe the Mayor's intent was good, I also think he was misguided and a little arrogant. I'd be pretty peeved if my non-technical boss did a coding boot camp and came back all "huh I did that camp and I was right, your job isn't hard at all!"

It's also worth saying you don't need to go urban camping for a week to figure out how to solve homelessness. It's probably more effective to just go to endhomelessness.org.

Can you quote the exact statement by the mayor that you feel is unfair and/or unhelpful?

Sure but, I feel like you're gonna try and deeply litigate it so, I'm skeptical it'll be productive:

"What isn’t working is spending more money on it without changing behaviors. People are never going to [move] forward with their lives. You don’t want to be in a situation with public policy where you’re enabling really bad, destructive behavior."

It might sound kind of anodyne, but it's basically what leaders say when they're playing the personal responsibility card.

There are policies that increase homelessness. But even if you do everything right, you won't be able to solve the problem completely in liberal societies. In some more authoritarian countries, homeless people are simply arrested, taken back to their hometowns, put in institutions or just driven out of the cities. That's one way to deal with it.

It's absolutely right to put emphasis on self agency, there's actually a very concerning trend in society that people expect the government to solve all problems and ideally even pay them for simply existing (see the antiwork movement). Should this sort of thinking gain popular support the problem is going to get much bigger than it already is.

Misunderstanding, that part of the comment wasn't directed at those who're already poor or homeless. I completely agree with what you say.

Personal responsibility is good though right? Not that a lack is the cause or having more is a cure for every homeless person, but if those who didn’t currently take person responsibility changed and did - would that be a bad thing?

I guess it depends on exactly how you interpret his statement, but the core idea that money alone isn’t going to fix the problem seems reasonable.

I mean, if someone is out on the street due to addiction, they won’t recover without personal responsibility. If someone is on the street due to untreated mental illness, then yeah, personal responsibility likely won’t help.

I though his statement was relatively even handed.

Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag. It's like if we were all getting together to try and solve climate change and someone said "I'm super religious, I spent the last week in nature speaking with God, and it's clear to me that while there are other things we can and should do, this will never work without everyone individually praying every day." We would collectively be like "huh, convenient that the thing you're already super invested in seems to be critical to our efforts here, despite being completely unbacked by evidence...."

It's simply not the case that people will start making better decisions to the point that homelessness diminishes to background noise. It's a non-solution. We have to question the perspective of a leader who keeps pushing clear non-solutions.

The end of the road of the personal responsibility argument is "'good' people shouldn't waste their resources on irresponsible people". But homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility (is anything?), so typically when leaders start talking about it, something else is up.

> Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag.

This is the crux of it. Your position disagrees with mine, that's fine, but please don't assume that bringing up an issue based on personal experience with the problem is a "red flag." That's disingenuous and unproductive.

You then go on to strawman a bizarre tale of a religious person being overly evangelical about a deeply individual experience. Homelessness is a problem of society, and people. Yes we cannot address the individual at every point in a conversation, but that shouldn't mean we can't talk about the problems affecting individuals.

Personal experiences are valid and important, but they're almost never representative. That's why we run studies and experiments: our anecdotal experiences don't give us enough data and often lead to generalization fallacies. They also typically come along with confirmation bias, a pitfall which the Mayor here likely fell into.

For the rest of your post, I'm not saying we can't talk about problems affecting individuals? I think a lot of good can be done on the individual level: drug treatment, counseling, medical care, etc. Not sure where you're coming up with any of this.

You characterize it as a publicity stunt which is a dismissive way to put it, and then go on to say since in your opinion it was a publicity stunt none of what he says really matters. Not sure I agree with that.

I think you are simplifying things. Try to live in a tent in a homeless camp for a week and I promise you will have more insight into all the dynamics there than any outside observer will ever have.

> For starters, can we agree that a publicity stunt like spending a week in a tent as a live action roleplay is no way to get any insight on a deep-rooted social and economic problem? Specially given the clear preexisting bias and political motivation to ignore the problem, avoid accountability, and continue doing absolutely nothing?

No, we cannot agree on this. I don't understand how this is walking the walk, and not just talking the talk. If the mayor went on to make grandoise claims about homelessness that were unreasonable, I would start to agree, but I don't see that happening here.

> But no. I this case we're only seeing a former senator turned mayor somehow arriving at the conclusion that homeless people are all drug addicts and/or suffering from mental health problems.

This is strawmanning the mayor's point. He is claiming that we are not addressing the root cause of homelessness. He's not saying "homeless people are all drug addicts." Those are your words.