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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13538 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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

Of course they're constantly hypocritical over it too, I've never seen a person say "whoops, I accidently committed stochastic terrorism without intending to by speaking negatively about someone to my large audience". Weird how it's only ever applied to others the speaker doesn't like.

Meanwhile he says

The “stochastic terrorism” concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. “Stochastic terrorism” mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you’re too blinkered to realize that.

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.

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."

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

I've been speaking about this type of issue since I was an older teen seeing Gamergate get called a harassment campaign because a few people sent death threats going "Hey that's not very fair, the large majority of people aren't engaged in threat sending just because a few did! In fact it could even be just one insane people sending several".

I said it about the 2023 pension protests in France "Hey, there's a million people marching you can't expect every single one to be completely moral and good. You shouldn't point to a person being bad and use it to blame the others there"

I said it about Jan 6th "Sure a few people were violent and those ones deserve to be locked up, but your average protestor didn't engage in a crime and it's unfair to say that they're a violent group"

I said it about police during BLM (the large majority of cops do not engage in killing innocents) and about BLM protestors (the large majority of protestors did not engage in looting or arson or other crime).

I've said it about Xianjang and the Uyghurs, I've said it about both the population of Gaza and the population of Israel (most of them are rather peaceful on both sides), I've said it about Russia and pushed back against calling their population orcs despite that I support Ukraine in war and think we should aid them way more!

And I'll keep saying it about other groups, like trans people now. People don't deserve blame for things they don't do, and they don't deserve blame for happening to share group/geographical area/etc with someone who commits violence. Especially because of the Chinese robber fallacy, but even without it.

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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