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I've written a few times before here that I don't believe stochastic terrorism is a reasonable concept, so it's nice to see Scott Alexander come out with a similar argument in his recent post. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-stochastic-terrorism
And hey, it actually mirrors me quite well!
As I've said before
Meanwhile he says
It's basically the same thing! No one ever uses it for themselves, despite that by the same standards it often could be!
It's hard to add too much to this since I think he covers the general issues I normally would argue pretty well, but I do think he missed something key. Stochastic terrorism breaks a fundamental rule of humanity, we are not a hivemind and people only control themselves. I can not brainwash someone else to kill for me, and I can not brainwash them to not kill either. No matter how similar that person may be to me. They could be my neighbor, they could be a twin, and I would still lack that ability. We are individuals responsible for ourselves.
I often quote Reagan on this.
Reagan of course was speaking against the idea that criminals shouldn't be held responsible for their actions because "society" but the logic works the other way around too, society should not be held responsible for the criminal. The lawbreaker is the one who makes the choice to break the law.
Stochastic terrorism is just another part of one sided demand for the "enemy" (those who the speaker disagrees with) to mind control other "enemies" from bad behavior, and to blame them when they fail to do so.
This is something I've also argued before. https://www.themotte.org/post/2899/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/360516?context=8#context
Unsurprisingly, given that Scott is the Rightful Caliph, I agree that accusations of stochastic terrorism are usually bunk. Moreover, he properly identifies the true fault line:
I guess the major question is whether we just need a separate keyword to describe "not sufficiently against extra-state violence in a coherent and consistent way". Follow-on questions that I care less about would be whether people who satisfy this separate keyword are necessarily open to the charge of stochastic terrorism on the terms of their own position on that matter.
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I agree with @Opt-out that stochastic terrorism is real, but what do we (society) do about it?
A problem specifically with stochastic terrorism (and what Scott explains in his article) is that it can consist of innocuous expressions that are OK on their own. For example, consider the game Wolfenstein 3D, which has you killing Nazis. Is this video game immoral? Now, let's say there's a politician who's very curt, dresses very sharply, and has very conservative policies; he's not a Nazi, and his policies aren't that cruel, but he resembles one. Is it wrong to say "this guy really looks like a Nazi"? Or, back to Charlie Kirk, it's factually true that some of his policies were shared by Nazis (the Nazis had some moderate and good policies even to liberals, like establishing some national youth program, not the part where it taught Nazi ideology). Is it OK to point that out?
There are insane people, and if we try to make laws against insane people, we create a nanny state where normal people can't do things that wouldn't cause problems among normal people. I can use fancy labels too: I call that "stochastic regulation". Of course sometimes it's justified, like banning the average joe from building a nuclear bomb, but I think only when the potential negative consequences are much worse than the positive ones (what good reason would the average joe build a nuke? On the other hand...) Nobody sane would look at Wolfenstein 3D and a sharply-dressed politician and think "I need to kill that guy". But moreso, nobody sane would break into a random person's house claiming to be Harry Dresden from The Dresden Files, yet here we are. Certainly movies like The Dresden Files that depict heroes saving people from kidnapping shouldn't be condemned, and probably Wolfenstein, the Nazi appearance allegory, and pointing out facts shouldn't either. Where do we draw the line?
Also, general arguments against speech laws: the infrastructure can be used against innocent speech, and they create a general vibe-killing effect that affects uncontroversial expression.
To be clear, I do think some of the rhetoric against Charlie Kirk, specifically "Charlie Kirk is a Nazi" was not innocous and should be discouraged. The point is that other "stochastic terrorism" can arise from completely innocuous expression, like violent fictional media and pointing out obvious allegories and facts, which should barely if at all even be discouraged.
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I'd have given you a "good" on the volunteer page, except that there are edge cases you're ignoring (you still got a "neutral"). Most notably, this is false:
This is literally denying that cult brainwashing works. I think it is extremely clear from the available evidence that cults are capable of brainwashing people to kill - usually people who've joined the cult voluntarily, but frequently not people who'd have killed absent those techniques. This isn't really what we're discussing, but you're hyperbolising here.
I'd also like to point out that sure, to a large extent "stochastic terrorism" is just a dysphemism for slander/libel... which are still bad, including for the exact reason "stochastic terrorism" is noting (i.e. most people think Craster deserves to be murdered, so if people are misidentified as Craster they have a chance of being murdered - which is bad since they're not Craster - so it is bad to falsely declare someone to be Craster), and which there ought to be a norm against. Extending it out beyond there (and beyond outright incitement) gets ridiculous fast, sure.
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What Scott and you leave out is that much of this is just holding left-wing organizations to their own rules, after they spent years trying to smear the right with claims of stochastic terrorism.
Many left-wing people and organizations have said at length that spreading fear and mistrust about a person or group is an attempt at murder or genocide.
When the same group spreads fear and mistrust about Trump or Kirk, what else could they be doing if not trying to get them murdered?
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Like other said, it is a real concept. I think even you would put the line somewhere - maybe directly beseeching your audience for somebody to do the killing with a promise of fame and eternal gratitude? If not that, setting up a monetary account similar to what actual terrorist groups do for suicide bombers? There has to be a line. Stochastic terrorism is just the level bellow that. "Please can somebody kill that motherfucker already? In Minecraft of course". Just thinly veiled plausible deniability.
Maybe somebody has a problem with the word itself - stochastic terrorism may look like some manipulation, using the scary word terrorism to astroturf a concept creep. But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.
Going back to stochastic terrorism, there are similar old parallels. Just to name one - the wave of anarchist assassinations across the globe toward the end of 19th century. The response by governments across the democratic west was swift and decisive: banning of anarchist newspapers, persecution of anarchist instigators, forming new counterterrorist forces by governments infiltrating anarchist cells and more. It actually happened in USA after McKinley assassination, you had Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 targeting immigrants with anarchist background, you had Criminal Anarchy act of 1902. You had famous cases such as Emma Goldman who was arrested many times until she was stripped of citizenship and deported to Russia in 1919 together with almost 250 other radicals. Anarchism and especially its propaganda of the deed died, the freedom of speech survived.
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What if I, an influential Muslim theologian, proclaim a fatwa that says magicalkittycat is so evil that his or her killer is almost certainly to be forgiven by Allah and offered a spot in Heaven?
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Let's suppose the year is 1880, and someone who is not a member goes to a KKK meeting and tells them all about how their black neighbor is a rapist. They have no proof or evidence, they just make up a story about it and get everyone riled up. They do not literally advocate for violence, but they went there on purpose and told this story on purpose in this location to these people.
Some of the members, but not the storyteller, go and lynch the accused man.
Is the storyteller merely guilty of slander, equal to anyone else who makes any false rape accusation? Are going to the KKK and telling them in particular this story neutral acts which do not change the moral culpability of the action? Because that seems decidedly non-consequentialist. I agree with Scott that we can't really outlaw stochastic terrorism because it's too easily confused with regular criticism to avoid false positives.
But nobody is ever going to apologize for accidentally committing stochastic terrorism because it is almost by definition not an accident. It's primarily a crime of intent. If someone literally wants to someone to die but wants to skirt around legal prohibitions against inciting violence then all they have to do is carefully moderate their words to just fall short of the boundary and phrase them in a way that wink wink, nudge nudge everyone they're talking to knows mean "please commit violence". Adding "in minecraft" after wishing death on someone does not fool anyone that you literally mean you hope their character dies while playing minecraft but the person lives. Celebrating after someone gets assassinated is not consistent with an ordinary person who didn't realize their words might inspire a psychopath. If the death of the person is an intended outcome of the speech, a feature not a bug, then the people who encouraged it are morally guilty of stochastic terrorism, even if the law can't pin them down.
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Let’s note one thing - Scott doesn’t disagree with the concept of stochastic terrorism. He just thinks it’s a reasonable price to pay for having broadly free speech.
I see no issue with accusing my enemies of stochastic terrorism. YES they are doing it. And YES my enemies who blasted on Twitter that Charlie Kirk was literally Hitler or something contributed to his death. And yes MSNBC blasting Trump is Hitler for 8 years contributed to the derangement of all the people who shot him. And yes I want my enemies to be judged in the public square as contributing to Charlie Kirk’s death.
This isn’t a question of whether stochastic terrorism is a real thing. It is a 100% a real thing.
I was going to reply that I am not a free speech absolutists so sure I’m fine limiting some speech, but honestly Scott confirms stochastic terrorism as being real.
I would also not that there are milder ways to criticize Elon Musks axing USAID (which was good for America to do) like just doing costs-benefit analysis instead that tweet is more emotional. But yes because of stochastic terrorisms Elon Musks would be dead in 3 months if he took his security budget to $0.
But like I said I’m not a free speech absolutists and supported Pinochet killing 20k or so communists when they may have mostly been doing speech at that point because communism is bad.
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All good so far as individuals are concerned. Individuals are unpredictable. Populations are predictable. I think the concept is fine so long as it's combined with other evidence and at the population level. Just because people are imprecise and "scholars" are political hacks doesn't hurt the concept itself. If you tell enough young men that some thing is bad and they will be rewarded for hurting it, some percentage will take you up on the implicit offer to the degree it is legitimized by their social context.
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You may not be interested in social maneuvering, but it's interested in you. You will be held accountable for the actions of others like you, you will face the consequences of their choices. You are your brother's keeper, whether you like it or not.
Act accordingly or suffer. That's all.
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A very appropriate topic for this forum because stochastic terrorism is also very often employed with a mote-n-bailey style. The way a college professor or editorial writer might employ the idea is certainly overly broad and highly partisan. But there is also a fairly defensible core truth that thought leaders and politicians do generate incentives, carrots and sticks if you will, for their followers. If you encourage and celebrate behavior you are going to get more of it, if you punish it less.
Some people take this concept too fair, IMO, and apply it to people like the Gabby Giffords shooter or the Charlie Kirk assassination. But it is real. We are seeing it today with the ICE interference. All the people who have been killed by ICE think they are heroes and are going to be socially and even financially rewarded for doing something that is incredibly stupid like following around law enforcement officials performing official duties while honking at them, blowing whistles, and using your car/body to impede their movement. This has inevitably led to several of these goaded on "heroes" intentionally, or unintentionally, placing the lives of officers in grave danger, with very unfortunate outcomes. We, of course, also saw this with BLM where politicians were literally paying bail for people who were burglars, arsonists, thieves, etc. On the right this sort of outcome has largely not led to politicians giving permission for (mostly) low level crime, but instead manifests as internet nastiness, but if the right gained more media power (particularly outside the 60+ age group) and NGO/Government Bureaucrat influence it could plausibly escalate into the BLM levels. Or not, prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future, moreso about a future that probably wont exist in any of our lifetimes.
I also would add that a thing about stochastic terrorism as a concept, is it does also appear to have a specific flavor of the modern day sort of discourse where everyone wants to portray themselves as, basically, the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars and portray the enemy as The Empire, or failing that, a faceless unflappable Borg threat. Your goal, even as an objectively powerful person like a tenured professor, NYT Op-Ed writer, or Congressman(woman more likely), to pretend you have little power and the forces you struggle against are unflappable and vast (meanwhile, they are 4chan posters and what were formerly known as twitter eggs). Its a sort of thinking not even worthy of being called a conspiracy theory, its one level stupider than almost even the stupidest conspiracy theories wherein you, again a professor at some place like Harvard, get into a twitter spat with some writer at a mid tier internet publication. And following you losing the debate and turning tail, one of the other guy's followers start DMing you butthole pictures you think its a good argument that he should be fired and banned from Twitter, because of the butthole pics from a rando.
I feel like I rambled a bit here, but these are my thoughts.
I actually think Tyler Robinson is likely a fair example of stochastic terrorism. I have not followed the early trial leaks, but there were a lot of signs pointing to him being radicalized by "trans genocide" rhetoric on Discord.
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