If you want to refute Pinker's arguments, you don't have to ramble on exaggeration and misrepresentation of actual facts, you just have to cite one broad metric in which humanity has worsened over the past decades.
That's assuming (and it's already wrong) that the "past decades" are representative of a general trend (and we can't eg. regress to WWII levels in a hurry).
Within the U.S., how about economic inequality and political partisanship, to name two?
Note that Pinker's argument is global, but not total, and not strictly monotonic.
We can probably point to a time when things were better for the average white male.
this has been done by cirillo and taleb [1], and the results are sobering: there is no evidence for a drop in violence. in fact, there isn't sufficient data for any kind of claim (intuition: major conflicts account for the majority of deaths; the inter-arrival time of a major conflicts is 100 years (ballpark); therefore 60 years of relative peace are not sufficient).
EDIT: removed preaching, since not relevant to the parent comment.
But he will still say that "oh, but we are having less violent deaths". Well, possibly. But deaths never came so fast from single individuals/actions/operations.
You always lose when the other part sets the metrics and they cannot be discussed.
That is what I did.
"Are the millions incarcerated in the vast American prison system and the millions more who live under parole included in the calculus that says human freedom is increasing?
If we are to congratulate ourselves on being less cruel to animals, how much weight should be given to the uncounted numbers that suffer in factory farming and hideous medical experiments – neither of which were practised on any comparable scale in the past? "
Pinker isn’t making the point that there is no injustice. Or that there is no violence. Just that there is less injustice and less violence. Significantly less than previously in history.
To answer your question, yes. Yes, the prisons of the US are included.
It seems odd to me to refute wide scale increasing demographic statistics with narrative examples.
The GP was explicitly requesting a specific negative. I wouldn't find that odd. Gray's article doesn't give any detailed statistics in response but questions it broadly by asking good questions. Another question he has asked is whether, given that the number of military deaths in war has dropped, whether the number of casualties has too, or if it also counts civilians affected, made homeless, forced to migrate away from home, had their lives ruined. Or whether the changing nature of warfare is any less violent (e.g. proxy wars in far away countries). Personally, I find them interesting, not odd, questions to ask.
I'm less convinced about Grays critique of Pinker's views on the Enlightenment (e.g. paraphrasing.. many of the founders of the Enlightenment were explicit racists and eugenicists - their rationality has more in common with Maoism). I think that the Enlightenment has changed in meaning over the years.
So looking for a broad metric, not an example of something that is worse now (prison system).
Which is just a hazy and lazy estimation. Which we then takes to mean we're in some ever-progressing path.
Meanwhile the 20th century saw some of the biggest horrors, worse than the "middle ages".
His larger point is that taking the larger arc of history into account, the world is on the whole less horrible than it once was. He doesn't claim we can't or won't regress.
This is what I found interesting as my understanding was the general consensus that 20th century was bad but the data shows otherwise.
Genocide occurred frequently, it just wasn’t reported on and wasn’t thought of as bad. Pinker goes into quite a bit how violent primitive tribes were in genocide. These examples weren’t large in absolute terms as the tribes were small, but relative were huge as they were close to 100%.
Also covers the violence in pre-history with violence rates of 30% from fossil record (not sure if this is the right term for 100k human ancestor remains as I don’t think they are fossils).