If one technological advance—like mobile phones—causes a multitude of small changes, which all push one outcome in the same direction, then that’s sort of a single-cause model in disguise. It still pays a complexity penalty as a hypothesis but a smaller one. On the other hand it is worth asking why the consequences of something all (or almost all) push the lever of crime in a specific direction, and this is not true for other technologies.
If you mean modernity in general leading to a lot of technological advances, then we’re back to the same problem, the ones that decrease crime should be fairly randomly distributed. If we see a big change in crime rate in one period and not anywhere else, then either one factor has a disproportionate impact on crime; or a disproportionate number of crime-decreasing technological changes have occurred at once. The latter pays a complexity penalty.
If you mean a big change over the last ~150 years, then yeah I’d say having lots of causes for certain trends makes sense.
I mean something like, modernity has led to improvements to a whole bunch of different things (and also worsening in some small number of other things). It doesn’t seem all it would be all that surprising to me that improvements would on average have some sort of directional effect, even if a priori predicting that effect (easier to do crime vs easier to prevent crime) is hard.
Ah, I should have clarified what you meant before responding.
modernity has led to improvements to a whole bunch of different things … It doesn’t seem all it would be all that surprising to me that improvements would on average have some sort of directional effect
I agree with this assessment, but modern-ness has been increasing at a reasonable rate for the past six decades at least. If modernity just caused a bunch of changes with a net effect on crime, we would see a (relatively) steady increase. The time distribution of changes in crime rates tells us something else is going on.
Unless an argument gives good reasons why—for example—there is some property of the 90s that produced an exceptional number of improvements which reduced crime and very few which increased it, as opposed to other decades where the improvements both increased and reduced crime and mostly cancelled out, then that explanation suffers a big complexity penalty.
Even if all the arguments as to why certain technologies decreased crime rather than increasing it seem solid, we should be very suspicious of the coincidence of them all happening at once. That sort of thinking smacks of post-hoc rationalization and the conjunction fallacy.
If one technological advance—like mobile phones—causes a multitude of small changes, which all push one outcome in the same direction, then that’s sort of a single-cause model in disguise. It still pays a complexity penalty as a hypothesis but a smaller one. On the other hand it is worth asking why the consequences of something all (or almost all) push the lever of crime in a specific direction, and this is not true for other technologies.
If you mean modernity in general leading to a lot of technological advances, then we’re back to the same problem, the ones that decrease crime should be fairly randomly distributed. If we see a big change in crime rate in one period and not anywhere else, then either one factor has a disproportionate impact on crime; or a disproportionate number of crime-decreasing technological changes have occurred at once. The latter pays a complexity penalty.
If you mean a big change over the last ~150 years, then yeah I’d say having lots of causes for certain trends makes sense.
I mean something like, modernity has led to improvements to a whole bunch of different things (and also worsening in some small number of other things). It doesn’t seem all it would be all that surprising to me that improvements would on average have some sort of directional effect, even if a priori predicting that effect (easier to do crime vs easier to prevent crime) is hard.
Ah, I should have clarified what you meant before responding.
I agree with this assessment, but modern-ness has been increasing at a reasonable rate for the past six decades at least. If modernity just caused a bunch of changes with a net effect on crime, we would see a (relatively) steady increase. The time distribution of changes in crime rates tells us something else is going on.
Unless an argument gives good reasons why—for example—there is some property of the 90s that produced an exceptional number of improvements which reduced crime and very few which increased it, as opposed to other decades where the improvements both increased and reduced crime and mostly cancelled out, then that explanation suffers a big complexity penalty.
Even if all the arguments as to why certain technologies decreased crime rather than increasing it seem solid, we should be very suspicious of the coincidence of them all happening at once. That sort of thinking smacks of post-hoc rationalization and the conjunction fallacy.