Someone took a counterintuitive whitepill after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last week:
When people debate whether to make laws “tougher”, the discussion usually assumes that there’s a see-saw, and you just get to pick its position. You can push down on one side to make crime lower, and on the other side you’ll get tougher laws. Or you push the law side of the see-saw down to make laws looser (whatever that means in context) and you’ll get more crime.
But that’s not actually a good description of reality. For any given set of laws, there are all sorts of other factors that will massively increase or decrease crime rates without changing the law. And that means that laws-on-the-books probably aren’t a major factor for determining actual, on-the-ground levels of violence. Here’s a neighborhood-level map of murders in Baltimore:
Everybody in that map lives under the same laws. But the murder rate in some neighborhoods is 20x higher than others. The people in the gray neighborhoods with zero shooting murders could kill someone just as easily as people in the dark green neighborhoods. More easily, actually, since they’re wealthier and better educated and so could probably do a better job planning their crimes. But they just … don’t choose to kill people.
This is an unsatisfying observation. People want a big, clearly labeled button they can push to get a desired result. “<bad thing> doesn’t happen because I <took action x>.” It’s not very satisfying to realize that the actual reason the bad thing doesn’t happen is because millions of people simply choose not to do it. The reasons they choose not to are understandable and pretty stable: they have better things to do with their life, they’re not aggrieved enough, and mostly they are too moral to go out of their way to do something truly evil. Occasionally, someone breaks from that norm and chooses to do the bad thing. That’s jarring, but it shouldn’t distract too much from the miracle that the only thing preventing violence from being 100x the current rates isn’t law — it’s a culture and norms that make people freely choose a better path. That should be encouraging. People do the right thing because they want to, not because the law forces them to.
We wrote about this in more depth in a previous edition of the newsletter, which we’ll excerpt at length below:
A friend pointed out a non-gun-related example [of a technically possible but culturally unthinkable phenomenon]: leveraged buyouts. Suppose you want to buy a company. The company costs $100 million, but you only have $10 million. One way to solve that problem is to go amass another $90 million. A faster solution is to ask a bank to let you borrow $90 million. “Do you have any collateral?”, they will ask. “Lol nothing that will make a dent in a $90 million debt”, you will say, “At least not right now. But lend me the money to buy this company. After I buy it, then the company itself will be my collateral.”
This achieves two cool things. First, it allows the company and the buyer to reach a deal, which pretty much ipso facto means that both achieved their best available outcome. Second, as a buyer it means your dollar goes a lot further — you 10x’ed the buying power of the money you had on hand. (That’s where the “leverage” in “leveraged buyout” comes from.)
So you can imagine that private equity folks would do these deals all the time. And today they do. But as far as anybody can tell, LBOs didn’t become a thing for decades until somebody … simply chose to do one. The first was done in 1955, a few more happened in the ‘60s, and by the ‘70s, Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George Roberts had set up shop at Bear Stearns doing LBOs all the time. In a textbook innovator’s dilemma, the firm balked at giving them the resources they needed for this disruptive new line of business, and they left in 1976 to go start KKR and become billionaires.
There are (to oversimplify things) two theories for how something goes from being technically possible to actually happening. From “OSD 197: Frickin’ laser beams”:
There are competing philosophies on this one. Great man theory suggests that you need the right genius to come along, and there just aren’t that many of them.
Then there’s the opposite view, which you could call an innovator’s version of the efficient market hypothesis. The idea is that inventions get created basically about as soon as it’s possible for them to be created. There’s something to that. People had always thought it would be cool to have some place you could see any video ever made. But that wasn’t feasible until the right foundations were in place — widespread broadband internet, sufficiently fast computers, sufficiently cheap storage, and web browsers with good video players. And YouTube was launched within a year or two of that confluence of factors finally being present.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. People are always throwing stuff at the wall, and as soon as it’s technologically possible for it to stick, it probably will. But not quite instantly, and not in a predetermined way. Discrete individual ideas can bend history.
“Technically possible but culturally unthinkable” supports great man theory. “Great” in the sense of influential, not necessarily morally great. For example, say, ISIS.
What did the rise and fall of those lone wolf ISIS attacks look like empirically? I included only the Americas, Europe, and Australia in the chart below — the vast majority of victims died in attacks in Middle Eastern countries, but the scope of this inquiry is to see how a meme (in the selfish gene sense) translates into real world violence. In other words, how the ISIS meme translated into violence in countries where ISIS could support attacks largely only through ideas, not materiel.
The chart almost perfectly tracks the rise and fall of ISIS’s territorial holdings, on a trailing 6-12 months basis.
But why should that be? Very few of these attackers received material support from ISIS, and in fact for many of them, the only sense in which they were ISIS attacks at all is that the attacker pledged allegiance to the group. So this graph could mostly be titled, “Loners who rent a truck or get a gun or make a bomb, shout something about ISIS, and then kill people: 2014-2019.” People are no less able to do that in 2019 than they were in 2015, or 2005 or 1995 for that matter. In most cases, ISIS’s contribution was just the awareness that this is a thing that one can do. And there’s no reason that would have changed from 2014 to 2019. The internet still exists, people still post pretty much whatever they want, and information spreads anarchically.
Actually, though, I glossed over an important nuance: “ISIS’s contribution was just the awareness that this is a thing that one can do.” I think that may be a lot more powerful than we think. The declaration that hey, this is a thing. If you are part of this, you are part of something.
Contrary to popular belief, the people who commit mass murder aren’t necessarily mentally ill, at least not in the sense of having a diagnosable condition. Some do, but most don’t. So that’s not the common thread.
What is a common thread is that they are almost all frustrated losers. The anguished virgin. The disgruntled husband who explodes and kills the extended family. The racist killing the outgroup that he feels is threatening his ingroup. The religious zealot doing the same. And, for that matter, the impoverished high schooler who kills a classmate after school over some trivial slight, or the husband who kills his wife — both of which, awfully, happen hundreds of times more often than mass shootings.
The shape changes but the mass stays constant: a hopeless loser who feels like he or his group are losing, thinks he spots who’s to blame, and decides he’s going to show everyone that damn it, he’s not the loser that you (and, subconsciously, he) think he is.
This mental model does a lot better at explaining the decline in ISIS-inspired attacks. Roughly nothing has changed in terms of people’s ability to carry out such attacks. So what must have changed is their desire. Now that ISIS isn’t on the upswing, nobody wants to join a losing team.
“Joining” them no longer gives people “See, I’m not a loser” validation. Because now, to join them is by definition to be a loser.
ISIS attacks charted a course from “technically possible but culturally unthinkable” to “actually happening” and then went back to being culturally unthinkable. With zero change in feasibility at any point.
Applying this to guns, you get to a surprising result: all misuse of guns lives in this “technically possible but culturally unthinkable” zone. The reason it’s surprising is that history tells us all your impact will come from focusing on the “culturally unthinkable” part — but gun laws focus exclusively on the “technically possible” part. Rather than focusing on making misuse culturally unthinkable, the focus is on making it technically impossible. Empirically, the history of making something that’s technically possible and ubiquitous into something that’s technically impossible and rare is … not a successful one. But not everybody agrees about that, at least at an emotional level. You could summarize disagreement over gun rights as a disagreement about whether it’s more effective to focus on making violence culturally unthinkable or technically impossible.
Before 1968, anybody in the US could have any semi-auto rifle mailed to their house without a background check of any kind. Before 1934, they could do the same with machine guns. What has changed with respect to mass shootings is not their technical feasibility (which, if anything, has gone down). It’s their cultural status as a thing that one can do. With a detailed guidebook of performative specifics. Malcolm Gladwell expands on that here:
We misleadingly use the word “copycat” to describe contagious behavior — implying that new participants in an epidemic act in a manner identical to the source of their infection. But rioters are not homogeneous. If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.
Finally, Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model — to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?
…
What [Columbine killers’ names] are doing is laying out a script so precise that it makes it possible for kids with really really high thresholds to join in …. They’re making this particular “riot” more accessible.
[Name of a thwarted school shooter] is not a psychopath. He’s a nerd. And 40 years ago he’d be playing with his chemistry set in the basement and dreaming of being an astronaut. Because that was the available cultural narrative of that moment…. Now he’s dreaming of blowing up schools. He did not come up with that himself. He got it from the society of which he’s a part, and we’re responsible for that.
For people who are interested in reducing misuse of guns, this is actually good news. It means that you can spend your time on the easier problem of culture, not the impossible task of undoing technical advancement. It also means that technical advancement needn’t be a concern. Since it’s not the limiting factor on misuse, tech can move forward without perseverating at each step that maybe this time it’s different.
We should be optimistic here. The types of gun misuse that are most concerning today were once culturally unthinkable. There’s no reason they can’t be that way again.
On the subject of "why not more violence?", two comments.
The first, which I'm sure is basically a talking point for this crowd, is that this is an extremely valuable question to ask, and the fact of it has deep insight if you think about it. We all like to point out how many guns there are in America: the left says "oh no" and the right says "those are rookie numbers". But the fact is, we have like 10x the guns in this country but we do not have 10x the murder rates of other countries. In fact, one of my favourite accidental redpills that Scott Alexander dropped, is that if you exclude the super violent inner city ghettos as outliers (a reasonable thing to do if you want a stat representative of anyone who _doesn't_ live in them), the US gun violence rate is slightly less (but within margin of error of) Canada's. The presence of hundreds of millions of extra guns WITHOUT hundreds of millions of extra violent crimes is pretty suggestive evidence _against_ guns causing violence
The second is that I think that pointing to some kind of American exceptionalism culture-wise misses a pretty important and under-discussed point, which is that a) the US can police violence extremely effectively _when it wants to_; and b) the uncertainty of anarcho-tyranny is a force multiplier for the tyrant.
We live in a surveillance state. The government runs facial ID databases, FBI probably already knows the guy's full identity, already reading his emails, already wiretapped his cell phone, etc. They _will_ eventually get him, they _will_ eventually find him guilty, they _will_ eventually imprison him. They might even give him the Bradley Manning treatment in prison (which I am sincerely convinced is an actual thing and not a joke or a conspiracy theory; after all, finding a discreet agent for this exact purpose was a published MKULTRA goal).
Will they get every murderer? No, because they don't want to, and it's not worth their time. But can they get any specific assassin, if they really want to? ABSOLUTELY. And any rational agent will be weighing this in their risk calculations. I think this provides an extremely powerful disincentive to this kind of overt violence.
For supporting evidence, consider how frequently the government overtly leverages this exact thing for the enforcement of lower level things, especially civil offenses. There's probably a 50 year backlog on health inspections at restaurants, eg., but the risk of failing one _and being forced out of business_ encourages compliance more than meticulously auditing every restaurant once a year and fining $1000 for each failure ever would.
And that incentive is going to apply _more_ at higher levels than at lower ones. Is this going to stop some street thug from street thugging? No, he _doesn't matter_ to the government, in fact, some parts of the government find his street thugging to be instrumentally useful.
But it will _absolutely_ stop CEO assassin wars. As higher profile people, they're more likely to attract the government's ire. And as wealthy, high status people, they have more to lose. Even if the government can only muster the resources to stop, say, five of these a year, when 100 CEOs _want_ to assassinate their rivals, they're going to think "do I risk the 5% chance that I'm the one they Make An Example Of?" and decide to just do nefarious underhanded business tactics instead that only risk civil liability
Final comment, I've probably deployed this canned rant on OSD before
> When people debate whether to make laws “tougher”, the discussion usually assumes that there’s a see-saw, and you just get to pick its position. You can push down on one side to make crime lower, and on the other side you’ll get tougher laws. Or you push the law side of the see-saw down to make laws looser (whatever that means in context) and you’ll get more crime.
> But that’s not actually a good description of reality. For any given set of laws, there are all sorts of other factors that will massively increase or decrease crime rates without changing the law. And that means that laws-on-the-books probably aren’t a major factor for determining actual, on-the-ground levels of violence. Here’s a neighborhood-level map of murders in Baltimore:
When people debate government policy they are always always always talking about Unicorn Governance (https://fee.org/articles/unicorn-governance/), not real governance, and as an engineer who has to care about implementation details, this grinds my gears so hard.
Sometimes gun people bring this up as a talking point, in the vein of: "oh, California, your 100 gun laws didn't stop this crime but I'm sure the 101st one would definitely fix everything". People understand this intuitively when they get enough distance from the issue. But for some reason, people will always talk about whether the law should or shouldn't be 'tougher', without bothering to think through any of the practical considerations of what that would imply (or if it's even possible).
For a potentially controversial example, the most recent instance of this that is annoying me is the talk around Trump deporting 11 million illegals. My liberal friends are horrified at this, my conservative friends are salivating at this. And all I can think is, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions of people who didn't want to leave, he failed, and then he tried a holocaust, and he failed at that too. If even LITERALLY HITLER couldn't accomplish this, how do you think Trump will? Besides, the Jewish people in Nazi Germany didn't have 5 rifles in every household, Americans do. Mass deportations? Good luck with that". It _doesn't matter_ what the law says. It _doesn't matter_ what policy changes. It _doesn't matter_ what executive order he signs. It is just impossible, on a sheer practical logistical level, to deport 11 million people, many of whom have access to arms, who don't want to leave. You lack the physical manpower, you lack the logistical capacity, you lack the money, hell, you probably lack the rifles. There's about 300k armed soldiers in the US military, many of whom are occupied with existing deployments. If even _one percent_ of those illegals take up arms, they're fielding an army just as big as what the actual US army could spare to oppose them.
In a twist of supreme irony, this is actually a perfect example of the second amendment _working as intended_.
On the subject of "why not more violence?", two comments.
The first, which I'm sure is basically a talking point for this crowd, is that this is an extremely valuable question to ask, and the fact of it has deep insight if you think about it. We all like to point out how many guns there are in America: the left says "oh no" and the right says "those are rookie numbers". But the fact is, we have like 10x the guns in this country but we do not have 10x the murder rates of other countries. In fact, one of my favourite accidental redpills that Scott Alexander dropped, is that if you exclude the super violent inner city ghettos as outliers (a reasonable thing to do if you want a stat representative of anyone who _doesn't_ live in them), the US gun violence rate is slightly less (but within margin of error of) Canada's. The presence of hundreds of millions of extra guns WITHOUT hundreds of millions of extra violent crimes is pretty suggestive evidence _against_ guns causing violence
The second is that I think that pointing to some kind of American exceptionalism culture-wise misses a pretty important and under-discussed point, which is that a) the US can police violence extremely effectively _when it wants to_; and b) the uncertainty of anarcho-tyranny is a force multiplier for the tyrant.
We live in a surveillance state. The government runs facial ID databases, FBI probably already knows the guy's full identity, already reading his emails, already wiretapped his cell phone, etc. They _will_ eventually get him, they _will_ eventually find him guilty, they _will_ eventually imprison him. They might even give him the Bradley Manning treatment in prison (which I am sincerely convinced is an actual thing and not a joke or a conspiracy theory; after all, finding a discreet agent for this exact purpose was a published MKULTRA goal).
Will they get every murderer? No, because they don't want to, and it's not worth their time. But can they get any specific assassin, if they really want to? ABSOLUTELY. And any rational agent will be weighing this in their risk calculations. I think this provides an extremely powerful disincentive to this kind of overt violence.
For supporting evidence, consider how frequently the government overtly leverages this exact thing for the enforcement of lower level things, especially civil offenses. There's probably a 50 year backlog on health inspections at restaurants, eg., but the risk of failing one _and being forced out of business_ encourages compliance more than meticulously auditing every restaurant once a year and fining $1000 for each failure ever would.
And that incentive is going to apply _more_ at higher levels than at lower ones. Is this going to stop some street thug from street thugging? No, he _doesn't matter_ to the government, in fact, some parts of the government find his street thugging to be instrumentally useful.
But it will _absolutely_ stop CEO assassin wars. As higher profile people, they're more likely to attract the government's ire. And as wealthy, high status people, they have more to lose. Even if the government can only muster the resources to stop, say, five of these a year, when 100 CEOs _want_ to assassinate their rivals, they're going to think "do I risk the 5% chance that I'm the one they Make An Example Of?" and decide to just do nefarious underhanded business tactics instead that only risk civil liability
Final comment, I've probably deployed this canned rant on OSD before
> When people debate whether to make laws “tougher”, the discussion usually assumes that there’s a see-saw, and you just get to pick its position. You can push down on one side to make crime lower, and on the other side you’ll get tougher laws. Or you push the law side of the see-saw down to make laws looser (whatever that means in context) and you’ll get more crime.
> But that’s not actually a good description of reality. For any given set of laws, there are all sorts of other factors that will massively increase or decrease crime rates without changing the law. And that means that laws-on-the-books probably aren’t a major factor for determining actual, on-the-ground levels of violence. Here’s a neighborhood-level map of murders in Baltimore:
When people debate government policy they are always always always talking about Unicorn Governance (https://fee.org/articles/unicorn-governance/), not real governance, and as an engineer who has to care about implementation details, this grinds my gears so hard.
Sometimes gun people bring this up as a talking point, in the vein of: "oh, California, your 100 gun laws didn't stop this crime but I'm sure the 101st one would definitely fix everything". People understand this intuitively when they get enough distance from the issue. But for some reason, people will always talk about whether the law should or shouldn't be 'tougher', without bothering to think through any of the practical considerations of what that would imply (or if it's even possible).
For a potentially controversial example, the most recent instance of this that is annoying me is the talk around Trump deporting 11 million illegals. My liberal friends are horrified at this, my conservative friends are salivating at this. And all I can think is, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions of people who didn't want to leave, he failed, and then he tried a holocaust, and he failed at that too. If even LITERALLY HITLER couldn't accomplish this, how do you think Trump will? Besides, the Jewish people in Nazi Germany didn't have 5 rifles in every household, Americans do. Mass deportations? Good luck with that". It _doesn't matter_ what the law says. It _doesn't matter_ what policy changes. It _doesn't matter_ what executive order he signs. It is just impossible, on a sheer practical logistical level, to deport 11 million people, many of whom have access to arms, who don't want to leave. You lack the physical manpower, you lack the logistical capacity, you lack the money, hell, you probably lack the rifles. There's about 300k armed soldiers in the US military, many of whom are occupied with existing deployments. If even _one percent_ of those illegals take up arms, they're fielding an army just as big as what the actual US army could spare to oppose them.
In a twist of supreme irony, this is actually a perfect example of the second amendment _working as intended_.