Human Emotions

Right now, our neighborhood is up in virtual arms (on NextDoor) about the homeless. The lines have been drawn between people who think the homeless need tough love to force them to deal with their social, mental health, and/or drug issues, and others who feel that they just need love and support, especially during Christmas. Both sides claim to have the homeless' best interests at heart. But, the tough love camp is accused of being closeted homeless-haters, and the love love camp is accused of caring more about how charity makes them feel inside than for what is best for the homeless. Both sides have a point.

Statistics get thrown about by both sides supporting their position. When you look into the data, you see that they are at best from sloppy or underpowered experiments. At worse, they have biases inherent to studies put out by advocacy groups.

So, how do you solve practical problems in a world with noisy data? Simple. Treat the world as if it gives you noisy data and keep your judgments and emotions to yourself. This post from Less Wrong on classification of social and biological ills as diseases hits the nail on the head:

People commonly debate whether social and mental conditions are real diseases. This masquerades as a medical question, but its implications are mainly social and ethical. We use the concept of disease to decide who gets sympathy, who gets blame, and who gets treatment.

Instead of continuing the fruitless "disease" argument, we should address these questions directly. Taking a determinist consequentialist position allows us to do so more effectively. We should blame and stigmatize people for conditions where blame and stigma are the most useful methods for curing or preventing the condition, and we should allow patients to seek treatment whenever it is available and effective.

Applying this to our homeless question: Don't concern yourself with whether that guy on the corner is homeless because he's an undisciplined hedonist who wants to be constantly high and can't live by civilized society's rule, or an abused former child who occasionally has to use drugs to self-medicate away his pain and longs for the warm home and stability we have. You want him gone, and you want his issues solved so he doesn't come back. Spend your energy on that.

P.S., I don't have a solution to the homeless problem.