Comment by nathan_compton

Yes, much like an AI, we can arrange a series of tokens in any order we want to create the appearance of an argument. All I'm saying is that given that many, many people listen to hip hop (which is, incidentally, a much more expansive genre than Post Malone) and very, very, few people commit violent crimes, it is clear that hip hop is probably not the proximal cause of violent crime. The vast, vast, majority of people who listen to hip hop never commit a crime. Furthermore, to the extent that social science research means anything, correlations between media and criminality have been difficult to definitively find, for example: https://www.ucanmadison.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2017_....

I should note that if Gwern's observations about correlations are true, then a negative result should be taken seriously, since positive correlations should be easy to find. Absence of strong correlations should reasonably be taken as a sign that a definitive connection is hard to come by. Of course, any good research in this field will attempt to control for confounds and if you ask me personally, I'm not optimistic about that prospect. But to the extent that this research says anything at all, the case isn't strong.

I'm not even saying you are per se wrong - it does seem reasonable that media that glorifies lawlessness might increase lawlessness. But if it does, it clearly only does so in a small population which also share a lot of other factors (like poverty, for example). Given that most humans enjoy hip hop without negative consequences, focusing on it as a potential intervention seems off base. A ban on hip-hop would be very unlikely to reduce crime, but a decrease in poverty would probably do so (accepting that we can't really figure out how to do that). A focus on hip hop is extremely flaccid.