Because you're assuming your conclusion in part of your argument. — S

When I'm talking about causes and influences and their difference, I'm not forwarding an argument.

Obviously I meant that it was a cause prior to other particular causes within a particular context relating to what we discussing. It was very silly of you to misinterpret what I meant in that way — S

But an influence can occur immediately prior to what it's influencing. So why would you classify influences as "causes prior to other causes"? That's why I wouldn't read it that way. It's stupid.

Prior cause isn't a distinction. All causes are prior. That's a core part of the idea.

Maybe you think that other people are essentially robots?

Even if 'hate speech' (whatever that may be, really..) — Tzeentch

Yeah, we haven't touched on those issues much. It's another big can of worms.

Prior cause: a cause further back in the chain of cause and effort. — S

All causes are prior to what they cause. But sure, a cause can be further back temporally in a causal chain.

How was I "begging the question 'in full context'"?

Cows are countable; milk is not. — Pattern-chaser

Not that I agree with the math fetishism he's espousing, but why wouldn't he just say that there's n liters of milk?

A good challenge for you is to find the speech that will cause me to think that speech can be causal to actions.

That's blatantly begging the question. — S

That's not what "begging the question" conventionally refers to, and you consider conventional usage correct, so per your views, that's incorrect.

They're just prior causes. — S

Prior causes? As opposed to simultaneous causes or causes after the fact?

The writings of Marx influenced my thinking, which in turn was a causal factor in my act of purchasing books on Marx. — S

You chose, against better judgment, to purchase Marx books. Good judgment would have been purchasing books about the Marx Brothers.

If you had been caused to buy the books, you wouldn't have had a choice.

Oh, so you've already conceded. I must've missed that. — S

haha

Well, and I'm actually serious about the sex assistance program(s). Watching the Rodger video, he strikes me as a guy just really frustrated about not being able to get laid (which must have been because of a "creepy," unusual personality--it certainly wouldn't have been a factor of his looks, his socio-economic status, etc.). If he had gotten laid, especially regularly, things would probably have turned out different.

Decisions are influenced, and influences are causes in some respect. — S

Influences are not causes in any respect. Influences don't remove free will. Causes do.

"Indirect cause" would only make sense as something far back in a causal chain.

Right so what started out as "that's just what libertarianism is" is now about the exact degree of vagueness libertarianism as a whole philosophy ascribes to restrictions on liberty. — Isaac

What? I didn't say that libertarianism was about "liberty" by the way. That's like people who think that "progressive rock" was literally about "progress."

Perhaps you could return the evidence favour and provide me with the quotes from the classic libertarian philosophers — Isaac

I'm not talking about "classic libertarian philosophers." I'm talking about people in the party and what their views are. I was involved with the party on local, state and national levels for awhile back in the late 80s and the 90s

Yes, but you're the Flat Earther in this case. — S

You're the "video games cause violence" guy,

What would it take for you to concede the point? — S

Brain damage, probably.

What if some teenage boy had gone out and murdered a group of popular teenage girls at his school, and then killed himself, and left behind a suicide note and diary explicitly naming Elliot Roger and incel culture as his motive? — S

I would say that he decided to take the actions he did, where he at least decided to credit Elliot Rodger as an influence on his decision (whether that was accurate or whether he had some ulterior motive for it, such as being S on thephilosophyforum and thinking it would "prove a point").

Reviewing Elliot Rodger a bit more, I'd be in favor of something like a program dedicated to providing sex for anyone interested in having sex but having trouble with acquiring it. Something like government-sponsored call girls, or call girls as an extension of socialized medical coverage. I'd bet that would help stave off violence motivated by frustration like Rodger's more than outlawing "hate speech" would.

It would be totally unreasonable of you to deny the causal link here. — S

I think it would be totally unreasonable of you to claim a causal link.

Obviously, different people think that different things are reasonable.

He was embroiled in incel culture, and he has since become a hero in the eyes of those who delve in that twisted world. I would not at all be surprised if others have since followed in his footsteps. — S

"He was embroiled in incel culture"--is this known from people knowing something like a username he used on a message board or something? And if so, wasn't he someone posting "hate speech" himself? If that's the case, why wouldn't we think that both his hate speech and his actions were symptomatic of something about him, rather than being caused by someone else's hate speech? How would we conclude the latter?

Not that I needed to look him up to answer, actually, but no, of course I'd not say that someone should be held legally responsible for any crimes done subsequent to their speech.

I'm not in favor of any conspiracy laws, for example.

How about Anjem Choudary? — S

No idea who that is off the top of my head. Looking it up now.

Just look at a case like that of Elliot Rodger, and similar or related cases, and the impact that that has had. — S

Had to refamiliarize myself with who he was just now, but the Wikipedia page says that, per his manifesto, "He explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him, and punish sexually active men because he envied them."

What is the hate speech connection supposed to be there. What speech did he hear (from someone else) that supposedly contributed to him being violent?

I think it's even harder than that, though I think the correlation can be much higher. But that's the problem. How do you eliminate which came first issues? We don't have discrete events, I don't think, where we can track an exposed and a control groups. All we can do, I think, it note increases in hate speech and see if this is followed by hate crimes. But, that might simply be the natural cycle. People hate, they talk, they act. — Coben

When we're just looking observationally at the world at large, it would be difficult to even say that there's been an increase in hate speech.

And then re crimes, there's a problem (again, when we're just looking at this broadly) of not knowing what, if any, hate speech someone was exposed to, and whether some of the hate speech we were looking at broadly wasn't uttered by some of the people committing the crimes in question (which undermines that the speech caused the action rather than both being symptomatic of something about that individual).

Sorry, but that's just dumb. No one on my side of the argument ever suggested anything like a causal impact of 4,999 people for every 5,000. You think that we thought that hate speech was like 99.99% effective? Are you deliberately missing the point or something? — S

I'm mocking the notion of there being a strong enough correlation to conclude that hate speech is causal to violence.

The actual experiment - not an easy one to either set up or perform using surveys and interviews - would be better if it compared groups of people who have been exposed to groups not exposed. So, even if most people exposed did not commit violence, if there was an increase in violence by those exposed we now have a correlation between exposure to hate speech and increased numbers of violent acts. — Coben

That's fair, but if the numbers are so small--say that we had 500,000 people not exposed to hate speech and only 60 were subsequently violent, and then 500,000 exposed to hate speech and 100 were subsequently violent, it's tough to say that suggests anything at all about a connection between the speech and violence, because it's basically a negligible difference that could be attributed to just about anything. (Although I'd agree that it might make a difference in establishing a correlation if we can show a similar difference in numbers over many iterations . . . although if we're dealing with numbers like that, we'd quickly run out of people)

Yes. Almost certainly I will. That's the point I've been trying to make. — Isaac

Okay. Maybe you'd do that but I wouldn't. I already gave examples of situations where I wouldn't at all say that.

Is there seriously NO study where we've simply followed people we know were exposed to hate speech, compared to people we know were not, where we've seen what the comparative correlations between hate speech and subsequent violence are?

Are you suggesting standard libertarianism doesn't weight individual freedoms against the restriction of liberty of others? — Isaac

Not that vaguely. I explained it and also copy-pasted the explanation again.

Of course you'd say that, because you're too entrenched in your position to acknowledge any faults with it. — S

So we've gone from complaining re an imaginarily anticipated objection to any methodology suggested to complaining that I'd not have a problem with some methodology. lol Basically, whatever I say, there will be a complaint about it.

No, it wouldn't. It would suggest that it causes violence for approximately every 1 in 5,000 people, — S

If there's a correlation between hate speech and nonviolence so that 4,999 out of 5,000 people exposed to hate speech are not violent, then why can't we conclude that hate speech causes nonviolence? I thought that significant correlations were supposed to suggest causality, no?

Yes, I didn't get to mentioning the low sample size. — Isaac

Again,. you presenting your objections is irrelevant to whether I'd have a problem with it. I'd be fine with that. A larger sample size would be fine, too, but not necessary for me to not have a problem with it.

Maybe I should say "Whatever I suggest you're going to say has methodological problems" lol

If it even so much as frightened a person into feeling they did not have the liberty to walk down the street, it should be dropped. — Isaac

That's not standard libertarianism. It's something you're making up/based on your own views rather. (Not that it matters if something is standard libertarianism, but you're attempting to argue here as if it is, as if that would have normative weight.)

Individual liberty, even in libertarianism, is weighed against imposing restrictions on the liberty of others. — Isaac

I already explained this to you above:

"Parties involved in the action" excludes observers, by the way.

Letting people do what they want to consensually do is a "good in itself." Prohibiting them from doing what they consensually want to do is problematic in itself. (In my opinion, of course--this stuff is always someone's opinion.) It's not about speech causing anything else.

Something only becomes nonconsensual, where that's a problem, when someone's action has a significant, causal physical affect on someone else (re significant, I'd say it has to be longer-term, where the effects have to be observable on a macro level), where, of course, the person who was affected didn't consent to whatever it is.

But even if it did go ahead, and even if no one committed any hate crime afterwards, that wouldn't prove anything of relevance. — S

Of course I wouldn't say that it "proves" anything, since that's a category error anyway.

I'd simply say that there's not a problem with the methodology.

If only 1 in 5,000 people are violent after exposure to hate speech, then it would much more strongly suggest that exposure to hate speech does NOT cause violence but the opposite.

No, but that's the problem. Do Flat Earthers not also feel that they're reasonable and warranted in their "challenges"? — S

I'm sure they do. So it wouldn't make any sense to ask them whether their challenges shouldn't be reasonable and warranted.

Just extrapolate from the example. We'd need some way to see just who is exposed to the hate speech in question--we could use something where it wasn't set up as an experiment, for example, but where we have a relatively small group where we can identify the people exposed to it, and then we'd need to keep track of all of those people and see how many engage in violent actions in a relatively short period of time after the speech. And we could compare it to any other group exposed to some other speech, not the hate speech in question, and keep track of those people over the same period of time and compare how often they were violent.

You don't think whether your "challenge" is reasonable or warranted should be a matter of concern? — S

Do you think that I might be challenging something where I don't feel that it's reasonable or warranted?

Why? Is this just a foundational feeling you have — Isaac

Yes. Again, I have a problem with not allowing people to engage in whatever consensual actions they'd like to engage in. That's not resting on some other stance for me.

It's not that unusual of a stance. It's the basis of libertarianism for example.

Absolutely any claim I forward will have flaws in its methodology. — Isaac

No, it won't. Here's an easy example where that wouldn't be the case, an easy example of something where I'd say, "That's not flawed methodology:"

An experiment is set up where we have, say, 500 people in an auditorium who are exposed to hate speech (however we define it in the experiment--however we define it would be fine)--say via an hour-long lecture or something. We then monitor those 500 people for a set period of time, let's say a week, and we note how many of them engaged in violent incidents (which we'd also have to define, but any way we define it that bears some resemblance to what's conventionally called violence would be fine) in that span.

To make a correlation claim stronger there, we'd have another group of 500 people who were given a lecture with no hate speech, and we monitor them for a week afterwards, too.

Our two groups should be more or less "randomly" selected, which we could easily do from any larger population.

I wouldn't say that has any methodological flaws in making a statement about a correlation. Maybe someone else would say that, but I wouldn't.

This isn't the only example that I'd say has no methodological problems for stating a correlation. It's just an example that falsifies your claim that I'd say that any claim has methodological flaws.

But why should your "challenge" be given the time of day? — S

I'd never be saying anything like it "should." It's just a matter of whether you care whether I agree with something, whether you care if I have a particular view, etc.

Of course, I'd find it odd that someone keeps responding to me and apparently trying to convince me of something if they on the other hand say that they don't care whether I agree or have the same view, but people can be odd. <shrugs> Normally I'd expect folks who don't care if I agree to just ignore me.

To those who argue both that hate speech is not causal to action, and that eroding free speech is bad for society, I'm wondering in what way is erosion of free speech meant to be bad. — Isaac

Not allowing people to say/express whatever they feel like saying is bad in my opinion. Because we're not allowing something that they wish to do, where the thing in question is only consensual with respect to the parties involved in the action in question.

"Parties involved in the action" excludes observers, by the way.

Letting people do what they want to consensually do is a "good in itself." Prohibiting them from doing what they consensually want to do is problematic in itself. (In my opinion, of course--this stuff is always someone's opinion.) It's not about speech causing anything else.

Something only becomes nonconsensual, where that's a problem, when someone's action has a significant, causal physical affect on someone else (re significant, I'd say it has to be longer-term, where the effects have to be observable on a macro level), where, of course, the person who was affected didn't consent to whatever it is.

I know that's what you were asking for. I'm interested in why. — Isaac

Weren't you reading what I was writing? I'm challenging that there's the correlation that you're claiming there is.

Are you really so naive as to think that social sciences are capable of delivering unequivocal proofs of forces in social dynamics? I doubt that.

So you knew full well that whatever I was able to find by way of evidence would be arguable. — Isaac

I already clarified that I'm saying nothing at all about proof.

Again, I was challenging that there's the correlation that you're claiming there is. A way to counter that is to show the correlation. That doesn't mean that any arbitrary claim about a correlation would necessarily be accepted simply because someone made it. We have to critically examine the methodology. But that's nothing about proof.