Hacker News Reader

Comment by duncanawoods | Hacker News Reader

I found Start The Week very good this week. Pinker appeared with Rob Riemen (philosopher, author of On Facism and Humanism) and Tali Sharot (neuroscientist, author of The Influential Mind.)

I thought Pinker's progress argument was soundly defeated by Rieman. His counter-argument was that Pinker's arguments have the same hollowness of similar arguments before the WW1 and then again WW2. Pinker wants to claim things are getting better but it seems blind to how we can use our "progress" to bring forth previously unimaginable horror. The complacency of seeing progress solely in economic and scientific terms leaves the gate open for our basest natures to dominate. Such progress seems to have no predictive power for what we as a civilisation might sink to next.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09rwszj

View on HN

> Pinker wants to claim things are getting better but it seems blind to how we can use our "progress" to bring forth previously unimaginable horror

In The Better Angels of Our Nature [1], Pinker posits a single measure of progress: the population-adjusted frequency of violence. He then proceeds to argue, on very long time horizons (e.g. thousands of years), that this metric has almost monotonically declined. The horrors of the twentieth century, in his eyes, are balanced by the larger population. (There is disagreement regarding his pre-historic data [2].)

TL; DR If population keeps rising with technological ability, ceteris paribus, the average person will be better off tomorrow than today. Even if ever-more terrible things happen from time to time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

[2] https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/sites/fasn/files/Pinker's%20Lis...

> If population keeps rising with technological ability, ceteris paribus, the average person will be better off tomorrow than today. Even if ever-more terrible things happen from time to time.

I think that's a pretty big assumption... population has an upper bound to how large it can grow without causing terrible things to happen (destruction of all non-human supporting ecosystems, for instance), whereas there are no similar limits to the terrible effects of misused technology.

Also, if population were to drop, say from a new plague or the loss of resources from a cataclysm, the terrible capabilities of technology are still available and thus have a larger impact relative to the new population level.

It's to hard to argue with his data over those long periods, but the acceleration of new technological capabilities since WWII is quite unique in their power. It seems to me that much of the recent increases in prosperity and peace are based on the political and economic systems that have remained relatively stable throughout this unique time period. Should this situation destabilize this very new technology could be unleashed with uniquely terrible consequences.

I think that Better Angels makes a stronger case from a qualitative point of view than it does from the quantitative point of view. Taleb and others have criticized Pinker’s statistical analysis quite convincingly, but the historical narrative still stands: looking at the human cruelty throughout history, it’s hard to deny that there are many violent practices that are now taboo, and that we seem to have broken out of the hobbesian trap.

The overall historical narrative that he presents, about specific factors like capital punishment and infant mortality, is generally valid. But Pinker's use of historical evidence is at least as flawed as the issues with his statistics. Better Angels literally appears to be based on a group of research assistants, without archival training, being let loose in a library and tasked with cataloguing all examples of violence and mortality throughout history.

This leads to an obvious sample bias and to Pinker basing the bulk of his argument on some truly questionable, non-peer reviewed secondary sources. It is frankly the kind of approach that would get called out if done by an undergraduate history major.

And I say that as someone who thinks Pinker is a fantastic writer, and who is sympathetic to much of the argument of Better Angels. But it's hard for me not to see some level of condescension in Pinker's approach to doing historical analysis. What he does in that book is akin to me (if you couldn't already guess, an historian) trying to write a pop linguistics book by reading a bunch of library books on the subject and chatting with the linguistics professors who have offices down the hall from me.

I stand corrected, and appreciate hearing your perspective. It does have a different structural feel to it compared to works I’ve read by respected modern day historians (which isn’t that many), so I think I can see what you’re getting at.

Another related development is that you don't need to have a successful military career to distinguish oneself. Also, compulsory military drafts aren't nearly as widespread.

I enjoyed it but took exactly the opposite from it, I thought Rieman's argument was weak whereas Pinker's seemed more empirical.

WW2 is interesting, Europe had been squabbling for a very long time before then, since then not very much. It's hard to imagine modern countries carpet bombing cities when technology offers us highly targeted weapons.

As far as I can see the only fly in the ointment is the environmental destruction we have been going through, I see almost no evidence that we are going to deal with climate change in time to avoid a catastrophe.

Interesting. I found the empiricism shallow. Its like Pinker is looking at a stock chart in a bubble and believing it will always go up. The issue is that the circumstances for next crash is not visible on the chart so no amount of ticks or chart analysis will reveals its future value.

> when technology offers us highly targeted weapons

So long as we can believe other humans are worthless, disgusting and categorise them as a disease worthy of eradication, every evil is on the table. I'm not sure we have progressed to make us less likely to do that.

For example, are we even more vulnerable to combination of high and low tech to stir up hate? e.g. a social media led ideology that could lead crowds going house-to-house with machetes.

> Its like Pinker is looking at a stock chart in a bubble and believing it will always go up.

Pinker has often explained that he's not doing this. He has never denied that there can or will be a next "disaster" and that he would have no ability to predict it. But there is a big difference between a bubble bursting and a centuries-long trend reversing.

It's the difference between saying, "I am going to fail this class tomorrow," and "I will fail to become a wiser and more educated human being throughout the course of my lifetime."

It's the difference between saying, "The tech bubble is going to burst," and "Technological progress will stall and we'll spend hundreds of years at the level we're at today if not worse."

Even if the former happens, you haven't made any headway whatsoever in demonstrating that the latter is likely to happen.

---

> So long as we can believe other humans are worthless, disgusting and categorise them as a disease worthy of eradication, every evil is on the table. I'm not sure we have progressed to make us less likely to do that. For example, are we even more vulnerable to combination of high and low tech to stir up hate? e.g. a social media led ideology that could lead crowds going house-to-house with machetes.

Your counterargument simply boils down to: it's possible for things to get worse.

Well yes, that's true. It's possible. In fact, it's trivially easy to develop a hypothetical example of how things might get worse. But that's not convincing, because you haven't provided any evidence at all of underlying reasons why your hypothetical is likely to come true.

Pinker on the other hand has built quite a strong case demonstrating that the underlying reasons that lead to human violence, suffering, and misery are largely changing for the better.

The stock chart example is not arguing that calamity is likely. Its a skeptical argument to illustrate the limits of the type of empiricism that observes and extrapolates the path of a complex system without understanding it.

You might want to claim Pinker is not making a prediction, but he uses terms like "progress" that imply future states insead of neutral past-tense language that could equally apply to a random walk.

> Your counterargument simply boils down to: it's possible for things to get worse.

Not really. Rieman's counter-argument is that the source of human violence is human-nature which has not changed and that looking at some metrics is the wrong way to reach a conclusion. I believe Rieman's argument is that we are seeing the emergence of the next form of facism. He is not saying calamity might happen but this it is beginning to happen. I believe he thinks that the remedy for the darkness of human-nature is culture/humanism that has regressed with the decline of organised religion and concentration on science above humanities.

> The stock chart example is not arguing that calamity is likely. Its a skeptical argument to illustrate the limits of the type of empiricism that observes and extrapolates the path of a complex system without understanding it.

You should read The Better Angels of Our Nature, or at least a summary of it. The entire book is an attempt to "understand the complex system," as you put it. It's an attempt to understand the underlying causes of violence. It does not involve merely looking at charts and extrapolating that they will go up or down based on their previous trends. Pinker himself criticizes that type of lackluster "analysis".

> Rieman's counter-argument is that the source of human violence is human-nature which has not changed and that looking at some metrics is the wrong way to reach a conclusion.

"Looking at some metrics" — again, this is total strawman that can only honestly come about by failing to read Pinker. His argument is not and has never been, simply, looking at metrics and extrapolating. Instead, he's analyzed the sources of human violence, and found that Rieman is quite wrong — it is not so simple as "human nature".

In actuality, there exist systems and institutions that are external to human nature that drastically and predictably influence the levels of violence we feel compelled to inflict upon each other.

For example, we have police for a reason. Because, by and large, they work! I don't know any well-read people who advocate returning to a pre-police society and think it will make us safer. And that's just one of many dozens of advancements in institutions that's led to a much less violent world, despite human nature remaining what it always has been. Is it possible for violence to still exist with police? Of course! But it's also a likely bet that, overall, it will be lessened.

The vast majority of refutations of Pinker unfortunately fall into one of two camps: (1) Arguing against the strawman claim that Pinker bases all of his conclusions on statistical extrapolation, which is simply false. (2) Arguing against the strawman claim that Pinker thinks it is impossible for things to ever get worse in unpredictable ways, which he repeatedly denies.

The conflict is in part a "Two Cultures" division. Pinker's responses were little more than "look at the data", Riemen's responses were "read Nietzsche" - the two sides talk past each other.

> I don't know any well-read people who advocate returning to a pre-police society

Depends on the country! There are many police forces I hope never to meet. Its an interesting example because as good times fade and fascism rises, its precisely such an institution that becomes a source of violence and not a shield.

Riemens's argument something like: the trend of interest right now is the eternal allure of fascism that will corrupt such institutions and that Pinker's argument encourages complacency. I suspect they don't really conflict.

> The conflict is in part a "Two Cultures" division. Pinker's responses were little more than "look at the data", Riemen's responses were "read Nietzsche" - the two sides talk past each other.

That's definitely what was going on. But in situations such as these, isn't looking at the data an absolute necessity? I appreciate theory just as much as anyone else, but when we're trying to reason about how the world works, I don't see a good reason to ignore troves of experimental data and rely on theory alone, unless we believe that human beings are fundamentally random creatures.

> There are many police forces I hope never to meet. Its an interesting example because as good times fade and fascism rises, its precisely such an institution that becomes a source of violence and not a shield. Riemens's argument something like: the trend of interest right now is the eternal allure of fascism that will corrupt such institutions…

I don't think Pinker would put forth any counterargument here. His point is neither "A, B, and C specific forms of violence will never happen again," nor is it "X, Y, and Z remedies to violence are incorruptible." Rather, it's that there exist specific "changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand," and as such "have driven the multiple declines in violence" that he demonstrates with the data in his book.

>Its like Pinker is looking at a stock chart in a bubble

Having looked at a few stock charts of bubbles it's not like that - the bubble charts you chose a decade or two out of the 200+ year of stock trading and think that's how it will continue. Pinker's analysis is much more like that in Stocks for the Long Run where you look at all available data and figure stocks have averaged like 7% over the 200 years. It doesn't prove it will continue but is quite a fair representation of what has happened so far.

> I see almost no evidence that we are going to deal with climate change in time to avoid a catastrophe.

Admittedly it depends on what you mean by catastrophe, but if you mean the extreme interpretation, as often portrayed in the media, as in "the complete destruction of the human species and planet" i.e. The Day After Tomorrow or Mad Max, then you should look at the data on this because it will make you feel a whole lot better. [1]

If on the other hand your definition of catastrophe is along the lines of : "by 2100, 8 foot rise in global water levels, coastal cities being flooded, large loss of biodiversity, and heat waves that make life on regions on the planet deathly hot for certain periods of the year", then although that's the worst case scenario, it's still a likely outcome in the sample space.

1. https://www.skepticalscience.com/ - This is a great site for the layman wanting to better understand the scope and current state of climate change.

Disclaimer: I'm not at all familiar with Rieman, but I'll weigh in despite my ignorance :-P

> The complacency of seeing progress solely in economic and scientific terms

Well, his emphasis has been on rates of human violence. That's a pretty salient thing to study, no? Is your issue with his specific choice of quantitative metric, or the use of a quantitative metric in the first place?

> leaves the gate open for our basest natures to dominate.

If I recall correctly, Pinker touches on that in Better Angels of Our Nature's discussion of utopian political ideologies, such as Nazism, communism, and jihadism, which can justify enormous and perfectly avoidable human tragedies in the name of "it will all be worth it".

He's also fairly explicit that we shouldn't be complacent about the possibilities of such human tragedies.

> Such progress seems to have no predictive power for what we as a civilisation might sink to next.

Pinker's point is very much one of "there are no guarantees, but things are generally getting better". The purpose of his book was to (quite rightly) push back against the widespread misconception that the problem of human violence has only been getting worse.

I always found Pinkers optimism simply as a counter against the perception that the world is going to hell, which in turn fuels effects like "fake news" which turns such reporting into a self fulfilling prophecy.

I think that’s how he might see himself, a counter to the gloom and doom which is ubiquitous, fallacious and probably just another spurious product of human psychology. I think most it is owed to Hans Rosling.

Riemen mischaracterises Pinker's argument by saying someone writing before WW1 might say aren't people great which ignores their darker side but that's not Pinker's argument at all. If you read The Better Angels it's full of humanities basest natures and horrors and we've just got a bit better at restricting them. The new book is a bit like Better Angels but looking at other stats than war deaths.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com