Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology
14 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 24th of February, 2026. Title, Malicious Streetlight Effects vs. Directional Correctness. A semi-non-apology. This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com. Malicious streetlights are an evil trick from dark data journalism.
Some annoying enemy has a valid complaint, so you use facts and logic to prove that something similar-sounding but slightly different is definitely false. Then you act like you've debunked the complaint.
My favourite, in quotes, example, spotted during the 2016 election, was a response to some hashtag-build-the-wall types saying that illegal immigration through the southern border was at near-record highs. Some data journalists got good statistics that proved that the number of Mexicans illegally entering the country was actually quite low.
When I looked into it further, I found that this was true. Illegal immigration had shifted from Mexicans to Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, etc. entering through Mexico. If you counted those, illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs. But the inverse evil trick is saying something directionally correct in quotes.
That is, slightly stronger than the truth can support. If your enemy committed assault, say that he committed murder. If he committed sexual harassment, say that he committed rape. If your drug increases cancer survival rates by 5% in rats, say that it cures cancer.
Then, if someone calls you on it, accuse them of literally well-actually-ing you because you were directionally correct and it's offensive to the victims to try to defend assault-committed sexual harassers. This is the sort of pathetic defence I called out in If it's worth your time to lie, it's worth my time to correct it.
But trying to call out one of these failure modes looks like falling into the other. I ran into this on my series of posts on crime last week.
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Chapter 2: What are malicious streetlights in data journalism?
I wrote these because I regularly saw people making the arguments I tried to debunk. That crime is way up, but that police departments are cooking the books and refusing to take reports. Or that murder in particular is up, but this is disguised by improving trauma care.
See, for example, this blog post responding to my anti-reactionary FAQ, Lincoln Post, which uses the improving trauma care thesis to argue that, quote, Medical advances over the past 40 years have masked the epidemic of violence. Aggravated assault is up 750% since 1931. and the murder rate, if it weren't for better medicine, would be at least 4,000% up. That's 40 times greater.
Imagine the right side of the above graph magnified by 5 times. Instead of the murder rate being 8-9 times higher than in 1900, it would otherwise be 40-45 times higher. So much for falling crime. End quote.
Scott writes, And in the responses to this very post, whose title was Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Reporting Bias, several people proposed that actually maybe record low crime rates were just because of reporting bias. Names removed to protect the guilty, but, quote, And another quote, And this is what affects most people. Burglary happens to mostly empty second homes.
Assault is something the police are not interested in, and we know rape is underreported. End quote.
Scott writes, So I think it's important to argue that no, crime rates really are down, and it's not just reporting bias or modern medicine, and that this argument neutralizes a real and influential group of people trying to make the contrary argument that murder or crime rates are up and to push policy based on that position.
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Chapter 3: How does the shift in illegal immigration statistics illustrate the streetlight effect?
but some commenters accused me of employing malicious streetlight effect. Their actual concerns were about disorder, open-air drug markets, tent encampments, and seeing people fencing stolen goods. They thought I was being deceptive in trying to trivialise these by saying that a similar-sounding but slightly different concern, major crime like murder and assault, was down.
... ... ... ... ... ... On the other hand, it's a problem if malicious streetlight fallacy can never be challenged, because perpetrators can always defend themselves by appealing to some hypothetical group of people who think Mexican immigration is worse than Central American immigration and are lying to convince people that it's Mexican immigrants specifically.
My plan was to publish a post one day on crime and then the next on disorder, but I got so many negative comments the first day for talking about crime without mentioning disorder that I guess in the future I'll include in the post that disorder is a separate topic and I'll talk about it later. I don't know a better way to thread this needle.
This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com. Additionally, if you like hearing me read out Scott's posts and putting them on a podcast feed, you can support that work on Patreon at patreon.com.sscpodcast. To reference this, please link to the original post.
To contact me, you can use astralcodexpodcast at protomail.com. Thank you for listening, and I'll speak to you next time.
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