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Comment by HopenHeyHi | Hacker News Reader

You can "see hints of bias" literally everywhere you look my friend. Also known in sane times as having a perspective.

Nat said nothing more than stabbings are bad and assumed it was a violent crime, a sane reasonable assumption given the information available.

What exactly is the problem? He genuinely believes violent crime is up and that this was some random hobo. I don't recall you or anybody else even theorizing this was a stabbing by somebody who knew Bob personally.

You think his opinion is wrong and therefore he is "biased"? And if this turned out to be what he thought you'd say what exactly in that case? Maybe you're the one who is biased.

At some point people got to stop playing this aha, gotcha games and agree on some base reality. Either violent crime is up or it is not. Some people like Nat are genuinely convinced it is based on their experience living there.

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A wallet is reported 'stolen' in an office. Suddenly everyone is suspicious of each other. Every item formerly lost is now suspected to be stolen. You get your own wallet stolen. A month later when re-arranging your desk you find your wallet between the desk and the wall. You feel sheepish for your loud crowing about your wallet being stolen and how you too were a crime victim. You sheepishly keep quiet. Humans just act this way. The idea of what is 'a sane reasonable assumption' depends on a lot of things - information that one may or may not be processing in a completely rational manner.

From your response I can already feel what your response is going to be and I want to say I am not disagreeing with you I just think it's interesting how group think works - I myself am not immune.

I, happily, don't live in SF. Every single time I go there it seems to get worse and my personal anecdotal experience is really bad but I don't have a dog in this fight. I think it is important to communicate about these things clearly and fix problems instead of bickering.

It is alarming to me (as a not American btw) that everything gets so politicized to the point that base reality cannot be agreed on. Crime in SF should not be some democrats vs republicans or philosophical outlook thing, it should just be a local issue.

Your explanation about his behavior is quite plausibly also sane and rational. I believe you believe that and see how you can think that. I just hope you can afford him the same benefit of the doubt I am affording you so you can talk it out without games, that is all I am saying.

Well if he woke up on a random day and tweeted about it, it’d be totally fine. SF is an unsafe place and we should talk about it.

But he started his train of posts in relation to this specific incident. He tapped emotions by saying things like “Bob was someone’s father” and the city was complacent etc. So when it turns out that the city was doing something and it wasn’t a crime committed by a homeless person, I feel the responsible/neutral thing would have been to inform his followers about the truth.

He can still tweet about SF crime rates. But don’t you think someone who hasn’t been following the news but has been following only his tweets will be left with an incorrect impression of the city and the incident?

> He tapped emotions

As he had emotions.

> But don’t you think someone who hasn’t been following the news but has been following only his tweets will be left with an incorrect impression of the city and the incident?

A hypothetical somebody who is very impressionable to begin with perhaps. Nat isn't news or the source of truth. If you take the Twitter bit out of it and Nat/Bob were your neighbors these are very normal human reactions and conversations. Crime is on his mind and somebody he knew got stabbed to death.

I agree that if/when he breaches the subject again he should point out that this stabbing wasn't accidental, sure, of course. I hope he does. I sense that people who disagree with his politics/conclusions hope he doesn't. That is lame.

It is all too convenient and normalized these days to think of people you disagree with as slimy hypocrites with hidden agendas playing Machiavellian games. Heck, you know what, tweet at him, like a human, without the gotcha, and find out instead of assuming.

I can promise you this: if it turns out you are right about this then I will say that I was wrong. :)

Then it behooves him to say “yes I was wrong”. GP was saying they trust him less because he doesn’t feel the need to publicly admit he was wrong, meaning he could find out he’s wrong about other things but not admit it.

This feels straightforward to me. It’s easier to trust people who admit they’re wrong when they’re wrong.

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