# Shaggy's Guide to Why "Following the Rules" Works Better Than Attacking Police Officers

Here’s a neat little model of human behavior: Suppose you are a person who does not want people to know about the thing you are hiding. The constraint is that you live in an apartment complex where there are rules—about hallway cleaning, noise, whatever—and your neighbor keeps complaining about you breaking them. The obvious move is to escalate: lean into the “rules are tyranny” bit, double down, maybe get aggressive with the complainer. The model predicts you will lose, but you will lose loudly, which feels like winning.

Shaggy, our hero from this Reddit saga, appears to have read this model and thought: “Yes, but what if I also attacked a police officer?” [This is what we in the business call a “reading comprehension failure,” though it is also, technically, a reading comprehension success—he understood the model perfectly and then rejected all its outputs as suggestions rather than warnings.] The sequence of events, as reconstructed from the comments: Shaggy complained about rules. Someone—possibly Martha, the sweet old lady; possibly the building; possibly the universe—filed a complaint. Police arrived. Police searched his apartment. Police found his stash. Shaggy, faced with this turn of events, chose to attack an officer. Shaggy was arrested.

This is where the model breaks down in a way that’s almost touching. There is no syllogism that ends with “and therefore I will physically assault law enforcement.” There is only the moment when a person realizes that the rules he has been ignoring were actually preventing something much worse from happening—i.e., police arriving—and that his response to this realization should not be to make it worse. Yet here we are.

The comments section, naturally, had opinions. One user noted the arrest with the flat affect of a man who has seen this movie before: “Ahh yes, physically assaulting a police officer. Cause we all know that always ends well.” Another simply wrote, “Ruh roh, Shaggy!” which is perfect, because there is no more accurate summary of this entire episode than the sound a cartoon dog makes when he has done something irreversible. (A third user made a Shaggy Rogers joke—“It wasn’t me”—which is the kind of callback that makes you believe in the internet, briefly.)

The real insight, though, is embedded in a comment from someone who recognized the hallway-cleaning detail: “As soon as you mentioned hallway cleaning I knew this was Germany. Es gibt eine Hausordnung!” Which is to say: some people live in places where the rules are features, not bugs. They are written down. They are enforced. They are, in a real sense, the point. Shaggy lived in one of those places and treated the rules like a suggestion, then treated the enforcement of those rules like a personal attack, then treated the police like a problem to be solved with his fists. At each step, he was optimizing for the wrong thing—for winning the argument instead of, say, not going to jail. The model predicted this perfectly. The model is very good at predicting what people do. The model is terrible at predicting why they keep doing it.