Violence Has Not Been Declining Over Time | Hacker News Reader

Violence Has Not Been Declining Over Time

arxiv.org

There has been lots of contention around this topic. I personally agree with the contrary and Steven Pinkers position. You can see him refute Taleb's claims here: http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker....

I don't understand. Are you saying that Pinker claims that violence HAS been declining over time??

He does

his book is titled "Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined"

Great. Now I have to go and burn my copy of Blank Slate. Another one bites the dust. I feel like an orphan now.

I'm tempted to dismiss the Taleb paper as "lies, damned lies, and statistics". It has to do some rather complicated things to reach its conclusion, which correlates well with massaging data to fit an argument, and seeing as there's an academic dispute motivating that argument, there's a circumstantial-evidence case to be made for giving it no further thought.

I've read it, and it can't be actually called a refutal, more "here's why I don't think so":

"Better Angels goes out on a limb and speculates that the chances of all-out nuclear Armageddon were higher during the height of the Cold War than they have been since the Cold War ended. Perhaps that is statistically naïve; I don’t think so."

"Taleb is surely right to urge us to think about the magnitude of events with non-negligible probabilities, and to caution us about our inability to assess such probabilities with confidence. Yet he does not acknowledge the problems with his own suggestion that “the emphasis should be on the weapon” ..."

And then Pinker compares the warning of the possibility of the "worst case" (which would be a nuclear war or even a new conventional large-scale war, now that the world population is much bigger) with the "bloated American military budget" and the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.

So on one side we have the nukes "on the short fuse" always ready to launch, in spite of the known errors (and who knows how many unknown ones):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/take-nukes-off-a-...

and the response is, to paraphrase, if we'd worry about the worst case, we're doing the same error as the US going to war in Iraq.

It has no sense, as us taking steps to do something against the fatal threats would be exactly to remove the most dangerous paths for the fatal use of weapons by the very military structures that Pinker also recognizes as being ready to make much more damage than possibly necessary.

I don't think anybody can claim that our amount of care shouldn't be proportional to the scale of consequences that an error can produce.

http://thebulletin.org/press-release/board-moves-clock-ahead...

Thanks. I think I will add it to my read list.

I hope I have been clear enough, I don't consider that Pinker technically "refuted" Taleb, and I wrote in the previous post why. At least the Pinker's response appears to be quite honest, not trying to hide that it's more based on a general attitude than on facts or statistics.

http://bigthink.com/videos/steven-pinker-redefines-moral-rel... : so looking around for what pinker has been upto..clearly he has lost it. Even this example of moral solutions vs non moral solution is wrong as it's possible to do both.

Secondly: he brings up Norman Borlaug of the green revolution. First of all, he IS well known. I learnt about him in school. Maybe they didn't in North American schools. Secondly, his 'technology' has made a desert out of the most fertile lands in India. It was chemical farming that destroyed lives, economies, created poverty and spread cancer through the farming community. The land where green revolution was implemented in India is not even arable now. I am not only surprised but shocked that he would bring up Norman Borlaug as a hero..albeit maybe he meant well and didn't know the consequences of his actions.

I don't recognize this Steven Pinker or his words from over 15 years ago.

I have seen a lot of comments supporting Pax Americana, stating that we have seen fewer conflicts and therefore that violence has been in decline... This would seem to refute that.

I don't understand how the two are in conflict. Taleb asserts that the drop in violence is not somehow inherent to human nature, while the Pax Americana is a time of relative peace guaranteed by americas military advantage. When that advantage drops and other countries contest it, then violence will go up, just like the Roman Empires temporary advantage in military power produced a time of relative peace. For the two to be in conflict you'd have to assert that the Pax Americana was an inevitable and inherent development in human nature, which I'm not aware of anyone claiming.

Pax Americana is kind of riddiculous name for the fact that US has started over 200 military conflicts since WW2. America is at war 93% of it's existence:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/america-war-93-time-2...

To be fair, Pax Romana worked the same way right?

It did - while the inner parts of the empire were quite peaceful, there were still conflicts along the outer borders. Since there haven't been any wars on US soil for ages, calling it Pax Americana seems alright to me.

> there haven't been any wars on US soil for ages

I think, to be meaningful, Pax Americana must refer to an "empire" larger than the territory of the United States. There hasn't been a war in Western Europe since 1945; the longest lasting war in South America was the Falklands War at 74 days.

You don't consider Columbia's conflict with the FARC a war?

I meant to write "non-civil" or "international" war. Oops. I definitely had that in mind.

The world will never again reach the world wide death rates the Mongol empire inflicted. One hopes.

Those wars are the reason why 1 in 200 men are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. Inter 'race'(this is an artificial construct but I am using the word for lack of another better understood term) breeding happens only during time of war ..I.e. Conflict due to stressed resources.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC65039/

When peace lulls, there is no social change.

So I would say that there may not be wars fought with swords and cannons as much as olden days..but it's still being fought over land, ideology, water and resources.

I think Pinker has done his earlier fans a disservice by transforming into someone I certainly don't recognize but I am not all broken up about it because I have disowned Richard Dawkins too and that had prepared me. Maybe that's why he is calling himself an 'experimental psychologist' now instead of the cognitive scientist, linguist and psychologist he used to be..

Has anyone read Pinker's book?(better angels..) Thoughts?

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