Arizona

[jmermin]

Yeah, I'm gonna go there.

So there's a thread on coleoptera's facebook in which (very loosely summarized) coleoptera calls for the victims to sue Sarah Palin, and LF decries the implicit blame assignment as a formal logical fallacy

Comments

[fractal9091]

I think that last sentence is an good and important point. Really, we don't know a priori what the actual danger of a given action is, and the danger is not constant. For example, Jeff could post violent metaphors in his LJ, and trust that his audience consists of sensible people who would never act on such things. In that situation, the only way to judge whether he is in fact being responsible or not is to look at the outcome - did any of his readers actually go and do something stupid? If something does happen, his metaphors would have to reevaluated in that context.

To put it more mathematically, since we don't know the true risk of such a post, when something happens we'll have to use Bayesian methods to update our expectation of the distribution of risk. Since Jeff is believed to know his audience better than we did, we hold him at least partially responsible for having known this improved model of the distribution. (Such responsibility is a consequence of trusting him and giving him greater freedom to say things in the first place.)

[johnthacker]

In that situation, the only way to judge whether he is in fact being responsible or not is to look at the outcome - did any of his readers actually go and do something stupid?

So you're saying that since the actual shooter in question didn't pay attention to Palin at all, then her culpability is less?

[fractal9091]

If she had no influence or control over the shooter, then I would say she has no responsibility for his actions.

[jmermin]

the only way to judge whether he is in fact being responsible or not is to look at the outcome

No, the way to judge my responsibility is to re-run the universe a million times from the instant of my posting, then re-run it again from the same moment, but stipulating that I didn't post it. Then count the deaths and subtract.

Since we can't actually do that, we make do with estimating my responsibility by guessing based on what we know about the size and character of my audience, the specific nature of the violent rhetoric, the likelihood that the signal would somehow get boosted, etc. Of course the actual outcome in this universe affects our estimation in a Bayesian way, but it doesn't affect the underlying probability that my post would lead to death at the time I posted it.

In the same way, Saturday's events have caused us to revise our estimate of Palin's responsibility upward. (Unless we're able to convince ourselves that the shooter was living under a rock for the last two years, and was never exposed, even indirectly, to anything she said.) But the actual underlying responsibility level hasn't moved.

Incidentally, if you think I am being irresponsible here, I hope you will tell me. It's not like I have an editor. Also, that's sort of exactly what I'm calling for in the post.