Guns, games and violence: The real questions you should be asking

Early violence is a bad teacher. But the mind can learn anew | Aeon Essays

A world of violence sustains itself through guns, poverty and other social ills, but also through the minds it creates

When is Political Violence Justified

What the Liberal Tradition Says on the Subject

A Better Conversation on Guns

For the U.S. to make lasting progress against firearm violence, it must change the way it talks about — and talks to — people who carry.

Causal Inference Is Eating Machine Learning

Your most accurate model might be your most dangerous one.

Social cognition and interpersonal violence

Why do some people resort to violence while others in similar circumstances do not? Drawing on 99 in-depth interviews with men from high-violence Chicago neighborhoods who participated in a community violence intervention, we examine how past exposure to violence shapes the social cognitions that influence future involvement in violence—through the schemas and scripts people use to interpret social situations and guide behavior. We identify three specific social cognitions that respondents associated with violence: misconstruing ambiguous cues as threats, defaulting to a narrow set of behavioral responses, and attributing violent behavior to fixed personal traits rather than situational factors. Respondents reported that participation in the program’s cognitive behavioral component shifted these social cognitions in ways they associated with reduced violence involvement. The consistency of these self-reports combined with the program’s experimental impacts suggest the hypothesis that these specific social cognitions could play an important role in violence and may be modifiable through intervention.

Global Pulse

Global public opinion on conflict, security, and defense

A Statistical Interrogation of “The Case for Causality, Part 1” by Rausch and Haidt – Matthew B. Jané

I don’t know anything about the literature on social media and mental health so my focus on this post is to interrogate the statistical approach taken by the article written by Zach Rausch and Jonathon Haidt (link here) and to some extent the original meta-analysis by Ferguson.

Decapitation and the End of Politics

How Targeted Killings Are Reshaping Modern Warfare

What About the Rapists and Murderers?

Trigger warning: rape, sexual assault, murder, torture, ablelism, trauma.

Temporarily Offline

A slightly unerving game on technological violence induced by pseudosimplicity and increasingly awful UI.

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Violence Against Women and Girls • Stimson Center

Examining the impact of AI on violence against women and girls, particularly concerning disinformation, online abuse, and women’s participation in public life.

Crime As Proxy For Disorder

...

Import AI 450: China's electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks

How will timeless minds value time?

The Violence We Call Order

Why does a broken window cause more outrage than a broken life?