My kids are very aware that Halloween candy may be poisoned. Every year, after they finish trick-or-treating they will lay the buckets of candy on the table for inspection[1]. I will then taste several packs to make sure they are safe. If I do not show any side effects we conclude that the candy eaten was good. The kids wait patiently for a couple of weeks as I repeat the process and certify that all the candy they brought was indeed safe. Then I serve the kids salad.
This actually just sounds like a really elaborate "tax" on your children's stash. If you fear the candy is actually dangerous, then perhaps you'd be better off just buying some from the store and distributing it to your kids, that ways they don't run the risk of loosing their parent.
Despite the constant fear mongering of "stranger danger", turns out most people don't actually want to kill you.
One of the things I like about the sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc) is that we're slowly being reminded that it's okay to trust our neighbors, despite the constant attempts by the media to spread fear.
Except when you neighbors are the ones renting out the apartment next to you on air bnb, and you have drunk noisy people bumping around next door all the time.
I don't see how it is different from having noisy drunk people as your permanent neighbors. Ultimately, your non-airbnb permanent neighbors are just as much of a stranger to you, with certain specific exceptions.
Your permanent neighbors tend to be noisy and drunk occasionally, people renting an airbnb are on holidays and likely to be noisy and drunk, then a week later you'll get a new batch likely to be noisy and drunk.
But does anyone oppose reasonable rules for time-of-day-based noise levels in an apartment or neighborhood? It really doesn’t matter if your permanent neighbors or transient guests are the ones making the noise, either should cause the property owner/renter to get fined/evicted.
> But does anyone oppose reasonable rules for time-of-day-based noise levels in an apartment or neighborhood?
Even if this were a viable solution, it does nothing for the lost sleep during the months (or in may case, full year) it takes to establish these rules and get them consistently enforced.
Also, it's not a viable solution. There are a couple huge problems.
First, evicting owners is no small thing. In fact, neither is evicting renters. In fact, neither is fining owners/renters for sums of money that would actually cause a change in behavior. These are all very expensive options of last resort that are likely to end in lawyer fees.
Second, with notable exceptions, HOAs/land lords dislike playing mediator/enforcer (and for good reason -- see below). So rules are hard to make and harder to enforce.
Third, there's a real cost imposed on any community that tries to legislate "be a normal neighbor". If you want an enumeration of the potential downsides of this approach, talk to anyone who has had a bad experience with an over-zealous HOA.
You could try to make and enforce a set of rules in a way that solves the problem but doesn't drive normal neighbors insane with pedantic/vindictive rule-violation-reporting. But it turns out that's a rather hard set of rules to come up with/fairly enforce. It's just much easier and, frankly, more effective, to ban airbnb et al.
I'm not opposed to apartment sharing on principle, and in fact my personal political philosophy should bias me toward defending the practice. But my actual experience makes me wary of buildings/neighborhoods that allow airbnb. If airbnb doesn't figure out a solution to this problem, they're going to face increasing resistance.
> Even if this were a viable solution, it does nothing for the lost sleep during the months (or in may case, full year) it takes to establish these rules and get them consistently enforced.
I don't understand that argument. It might make months to establish a ban or effective enforcement of temporary tenants as well. Obviously that sucks, but I'm just trying to think about which rule would be more effective and reasonable.
> First, evicting owners is no small thing. In fact, neither is evicting renters. In fact, neither is fining owners/renters for sums of money that would actually cause a change in behavior. These are all very expensive options of last resort that are likely to end in lawyer fees.
Again, I don't understand. Those are the exact same options we have to disincentivize owners/renters taking in temporary tenants. What alternative enforcement mechanism are you suggesting?
It seems like you're focusing on the difficulties in enforcing my suggestion without recognizing that literally the exact same difficulties exist in enforcing your suggestion.
> turns out most people don't actually want to kill you.
All it takes is one person who does.
> One of the things I like about the sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc) is that we're slowly being reminded that it's okay to trust our neighbors
Except it's not neighbors but complete strangers you're asked to trust, and that trust is sometime misplaced. There's absolutely no difference in that between the "sharing economy" (which has little to do with sharing) and just plain economy.
And keep in mind that it's not in fact random strangers you interact with, there and in many other situations - an activity can be more dangerous than the random chance of meeting a dangerous criminal would indicate, when it attracts such criminals more than it attracts other people, possibly because it makes it easier for them to find victims or evade detection.
None of which matters for Halloween candy, since it's provided by actual neighbors and so common that it really is basically random.
>> One of the things I like about the sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc) is that we're slowly being reminded that it's okay to trust our neighbors
> Except it's not neighbors but complete strangers you're asked to trust, and that trust is sometime misplaced.
I'm guessing you've never lived in a place where the common means of transportation is to just stand by the street, look for the next car coming by with empty seats, and signal/ask how much it is to your destination?
So I guess when people complain about being assaulted by poor vetting by Uber, that's just noise and the uproar is overblown and we should accept assault by taxi drivers as the price of living in society.
> So I guess when people complain about being assaulted by poor vetting by Uber, that's just noise and the uproar is overblown and we should accept assault by taxi drivers as the price of living in society.
What kind of a strawman is that? Where did I ever suggest you should just "accept assault by taxi drivers"? Go report them so that we can weed them out. Nobody suggested we do nothing.
A lot of times when this is brought up it isn't mentioned there is an assumption here. That we are already at the efficient frontier and any move is necessarily a trade off.
In my experience that assumption is usually false. There are usually ways where you can actually reduce the amount of danger and the number of people exposed to it and increase the number of people getting a more efficient service at the same time.
Look for these outward movements of the efficient frontier. The opportunity is almost always there. When we're really at the efficient frontier of what is possible and have no choice but to make tradeoffs let's say so loudly because something has gone very, very right to get to that point.
Agreed. Like Vision Zero[1] which some municipalities have instituted as initiatives to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in their jurisdictions through a variety of measures with the obvious goal of reducing such to the absolute minimum.
Vision Zero is a project that's unable to come to terms with its own beliefs. Their stated goal is zero traffic fatalities no matter the economic cost, and yet they don't actually embrace policies that would reduce fatalities to zero. Their policies seem to merely be the same old stuff you'd see out of traditional planning, but with a little higher cost assigned to injuries and fatalities.
That's good, and it plays nicely to your point that the status quo isn't always at the right balance point, but the hypocrisy is off-putting.
I would date my understanding of the myth to be from 1980, informed by a friend's mum, so the myth was oral tradition by then, across the pond in the UK. So a handful of years after 1974 the meme had spread.
This had morphed into an 'only in America' story for those of us outside the U.S. - we believed this happened on a regular Halloween basis in America and was part of 'trick or treating' (itself more American than British). Imagine the image of 'gun mad' America harbouring such 'psychos' in the community, this was easy to do if you had never been to the U.S.
The idea of a razor blade in some type of sweet did do the rounds, again in the 'made in America' context, with the myth spreading verbally. As children adults would tell you but you took reassurance that there were no crazies like that where you lived, again, only in America.
Sweets given to you as a child could be of variable quality. Sweets with a clove in the middle do exist, I think at the time I would have preferred the razor blade option, cyanide would have tasted better. Sweets kept past their sell by date might not be too good either, old folks could hand you these and expect you to enjoy them. So 'trick or treat' was actually part of the deal with all sweets offered by neighbours and other people you were to meet. It was therefore imaginable for the American myth to be true.
> This had morphed into an 'only in America' story for those of us outside the U.S. - we believed this happened on a regular Halloween basis in America
As an outsider I never got the impression that this actually happened/happens in America, more that this is some strange fear American's have.
Nitpick: 'trick or treat' doesn't refer to the ambiguity of the offering. It's actually a threat to play a trick on households that don't supply treats. I.e. give me a treat or I'll play a prank on you. It's not really serious, though.
I remember being a kid (8 or 9) and sitting down with my friend at his house with his parents and going through all our candy together to check for danger signs. Sure enough, there was a single-wrapped Reese's peanut-butter cup with a hole in the wrapper, and we opened it up and found a sewing needle stuck inside the peanut-butter cup. (I don't think I'm making this up, but memories being what they are, this might have been a story that was told to me. I do remember vividly the breaking of the peanut-butter cup into two pieces and the needle falling on the table, though, so I'm inclined to believe the memory.)
This would have been in the late 1980s. So, in my case, the fear did not come from the media, but from a personal experience.
So rather than saying, "this never happens, it's just a myth", we should be saying, "this can happen, and let's take steps to protect ourselves".
Anyone remember the Tylenol Poisonings[0]? That was real, inspired copycats, and led to tamper-resistant and tamper-evident packaging. Tragic, but at least we learned from the tragedy.
While it's true that not everyone is out to get you, at the same time it's foolish to think that no-one is out to get you.
Believe it or chewing a sewing needle don't actually kills you; but sure you can be afraid of anything and still get validation of that fear; you know a lot of people die from heavy objects falling from buildings? You should protect from that too, it has happened before so clearly you should take steps to protect yourself (and it has happened a lot more than candy poisoning), perhaps always using a construction helmet would be a nice first step. And traffic accidents, so many pedestrians die from car accidents that its weird we all don't have personal airbags around our torsos and heads; at the end of the day being alive its the biggest risk factor of dying and the only sure way to not die is to be already death.
Your story is amazing, but it is an anecdote. The data found by researchers about the dangers of Halloween candy suggest that the risk is more or less non-existent. The point is not that people should think no one is out to get them, it is that they ignore real dangers because the media likes to talk about imaginary ones, and ignore real ones like pollution, which are not as exciting.
The fear of needles and razor blades goes back at least to the 1960's. The actual number of documented cases is very small, and the vast majority of those don't even involve injury. Follow up studies discovered that most of the reports turned out to be hoaxes perpetrated by the kids or parents (an older sibling playing a prank on a younger sibling, then getting scared when the parents found out and letting the parents report it as legit).
It's been going on longer than the article suggests. When I went trick-or-treating in the 1960s, my parents did not allow us to eat anything that was home-made or not in a sealed package, because they were worried about deliberate poisoning.
Around 1972 or 73 on Halloween, some neighborhood kid found a razor blade in an apple. Turned out he'd inserted it himself as a prank.
A lot of things have much earlier roots than can be found with searches of documents.
Back in 2nd grade my friend got a small snickers bar at school that he discovered had a hole in the wrapper and a same size/shape hole also extending further into the candy bar. I recall it being a small squarish kind of hole, you could sort of see it going into the candy bar.
No idea if he did it himself or not, but he never admitted it. It could easily have been some part of a toy that poked into it.
After school we went to his house and cut it to pieces with a knife in his kitchen. It was an exciting adventure, we were eager to see what might be inside. Never found anything, though I'm not sure what we were expecting to find.
We didn't eat it either. But it did freak me out enough as a kid that for awhile after I would check for candy wrapper breaches.
Fears aside, I suspect that the larger tragedy is that Halloween treats are now mostly sugary candy and chocolate. I remember a time when there was much more variety. I also remember how quickly things changed after the first (likely unsubstantiated) scare in my community.
It seems a little counterintuitive to hand out anti-halloween material to trick-or-treaters. I mean, it's still observing Halloween even if it's not candy you're giving out.
Today they are almost exclusively pre-packaged candy of well known brands. They used to include a lot more home made products, like cookies, cupcakes, caramel apples, popcorn balls, rice krispy treats, etc.
There were a few houses near me that gave out something special in the late 80s. One house gave out baggies of home made popcorn, brownies at another, candy apples at one house, and one house took a polaroid of you in your costume. These were all beloved houses.
I'd love to do that for the younger kids in my neighborhood. But a lot of the slightly older kids that come to my door are awfully surly. They are trying to grab handfuls of candy from the bowl as you are trying to give them one, and they also steal anything else that happens to be on your front porch that night. I don't really want to deal with trying to give them something special.
No one is spending their money to give your kids free drugs on Halloween. I saw a similar story from the local news channel about marijuana edibles being passed out. As the original article says, poisoned candy is not really a thing. I'd be more concerned about your kids being hit by a drunk (or distracted) driver on Halloween than eating something poisoned.
Someone gave my brother a marijuana cookie one time when he was about nine, but it wasn't on Halloween. Seems like giving out edibles from your own house would be an easy way to get a mob of pitchfork-weilding parents on your lawn.
The professionally produced kind are all labeled on the actual food surface with some sort of impression or imprint that's unmistakable unless you're completely innocent of any knowledge of the world.
This is why people don't trust the media. They make up a story out of nothing or stretch it to to a point where it has no relation to what actually happened. This article for instance is given a title and claim that bath salts are being mixed with candies but provide nothing to back it up. The video points out the drugs are being made to look like candy, not being mixed with it. They pull in two unrelated sources to drive buzz. Police found drugs in Franklin County then the reporter went to their own Sheriff for a generic candy statement. It is about 650 miles between the two counties.
It helps in such a discussion to move beyond the surface fear to get to the root fear and then make an affirmative argument instead of a negative one.
In this particular case, the truth of the matter is that you really do have to trust strangers to be kind instead of randomly malicious. Instead of making an argument that the fear is unfounded, it would be more effective to make a case affirming the fearful person's trust in their community.
I find the same attitude has now permiated American politics. You can say something as neutral as, "I'm very cautious of getting riled up by overblown narratives that lack factual evidence or are presented in an obviously inflammatory manner" and suddenly you're the anti-Christ.
I find that generally it helps, counterintuitively, to start with what the DBT[1] literature calls "validation" - reassuring the person that their fear makes perfect sense in light of their priors.
You can call this "affirming the emotional truth of what they're saying" if you want, and -- here's a part that took me years to learn -- you can do it without being dishonest.
For example, dialog between Them (T) / You (Y):
T: I don't think I'll let my kids trick or treat this year, what with all these sickos putting razor blades in chocolate bars, and weed in gummy bears, and did you hear about those AIDS-infected needles being left in coin return slots? There's all this danger around, it's just so awful, what a horrible place this world is, I mean what kind of person poisons children? [etc for 5 more minutes]
Y: Yeah definitely, I see what you mean - there are so many really crazy and evil people in the world. I mean with these shootings, and bombings, it's like we never get a minute to just rest and not be scared of something!
T: Right, exactly!
Y: I'm trying to remember though, what was the halloween candy thing? I mean I thought I heard something in the 80s about that but it went away, or was a hoax or something. Did something happen last year?
T: Well I can't remember but I mean the news was just saying a minute ago to look out for marijuana-laced gummy bears
Y: Yeah, weed candy would be pretty bad. I tried edibles once and got pretty fucked up, I mean, it wasn't really a pleasant experience. But then, some people really seem to like it. .... wait a minute, drugs are expensive. who wastes them on random kids? ... Did the newssay they found some somewhere, or just that it was a thing that could theoretically happen?
T:
Y: And the other "scary candy" stuff - do you know ifthere are any stats on how often this happens? I mean I 'm sure somebody did it at some point, because people are insane, right, but considering the way idiots drive, I wouldn't be surprised if kids have a higher chance of getting picked off by a bad driver, than killer candy. Which is scary too of course, but I mean, we're already living with that, and don't keep them inside.
Actually come to think of it ... I can't think of a single case I've ever heard of where an actual specific kid got hurt from poisoned candy. Maybe there are a bunch of em but it's kind of weird that we wouldn't have at least some detail - was it a boy or a girl, where in the country, how old etc? I mean it would have to be all over the news if it happened, so I wonder if this is just one of those cases where the media likes to scare the shit out of everyone all the time to get attention?
T: I don't know, it still seems dangers
Y: Yeah, I mean, we should all take reasonable precautions in the world and stuff, but ... tell you what, let's google for reports of poisoned candy from last year and if it's really low, then figure we probably have better odds than from bad drivers, and let the kids have their fun?
T: ok
[off to google you go, snopes is first-ish hit followed by other less entry-level but more-authoritative sources, and pretty soon they're coming around]
===
It certainly doesn't work that way every time, or even most times, but it can. And this has applications far beyond halloween candy. (Dungeons and Dragons. Immigration. Drug legalization. Rock music. Video games.) The person probably isn't insane; they probably heard a bunch of scary stuff, and got scared. Telling them "don't be scared" isn't going to help, but joining them on their side of the fence, then guiding toward a different outcome (which may not change their initial thought much but may help them change their behavior, which gives them more data on safety/etc with which to update their mental model for future use) can be pretty effective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy -- Though DBT was developed to treat BPD (see link for more), the recommendations for learning/teaching emotional coping skills seem to generalize well to many other kinds of emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to a given stimulus.
I’m not saying that line of argument won’t work, but it’s certainly not one I would take with a friend or acquaintance since you’re effectively lying. I guess you could call it “tact” or “rhetoric,” but I find your suggested opening lines very slimy and dishonest.
How is it lying? They are acknowledging the emotional trigger of the situation without agreeing that it is rational. Sounds to me like exactly how one should approach a disagreement of irrational nature.
Would you mind suggesting an alternative opener, that would also work, that isn’t “slimy”?
It’s explicitly deliberately choosing your words to manipulate the other person, even if technically you’re not saying anything untrue. Perhaps “deceptive” is a better description than “lying.”
It's not deceptive at all -- and if it makes you feel better, it still works if you explicitly declare (preferably at a different time so as not to exacerbate their emotionally-triggered state) that you plan to use this technique.
You aren't saying "you're right to feel this way given the state of the world." You are saying "you're right to feel this way, given your specific priors." (And then, now that you are On Their Side, you go on to help them reevaluate the priors.)
The natural instinct for many of us is to start by disproving the other person's priors in order to demonstrate that their anxiety is unnecessary in hopes of reducing it. What I'm saying is that if you start by validating the emotional experience given their priors, you give their brain the space to back off from its fight-or-flight state and get into a position where it's capable of listening to your rational argument about why the alleged risk is likely overblown.
You don't have to sacrifice any truth value in doing this (instead of saying: "you're wrong to feel this way because your assumption is wrong", you are effectively saying "you are right to feel this way given your assumptions ... but btw, have you taken a hard look at those assumptions lately? Let's do that."). You're also framing it in a much more collaborative way - not "you are wrong and I will prove it and WIN", but "look our mutual goal is figuring out what Reality looks like, so let me stand over here with you and let's look at it together and try to figure out what we can see."
I'm making this point again because I myself struggled for years with this concept. I care about truth; honesty is important, etc. But if your goal is to get more people to see Reality As It Is, consider a strategy that starts by getting their mind into a more rational state, rather than assuming that state already exists.
I understand your sentiment, however, I disagree. Acknowledging differing perspectives to your own is something that is beneficial to discussion and mutual understanding.
My wife and I just went through our first session of counseling. The first instructions we received were to begin doing exactly this - before sharing our opinion or feelings, first acknowledge the feelings or statement of the other person, making sure that they feel heard.
Sure, sociopaths can use a similar tactic to manipulate others. Intent matters here.
Have you happened to speak to someone before and felt like they didn't actually listen to you?
If you live in a society where credulous people will accept stories like this, it's no wonder people wouldn't know or spend time with their neighbors. I can't help but see it as one grain of sand on a bigger beach.
[1] https://instagram.com/p/BMQMFqAjuKr/