Wed Dec 23 13:49:00 EST 2015

The Long Peace?

Attacks on Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and his rebuttal.

  • The "Long Peace" is a Statistical Illusions

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Author of Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

    This includes 3 articles, the first a nontechnical discussion of the book by science writer S. Pinker, the second a technical discussion of the flaw in Pinker's book published in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Applications, the third a technical discussion of what I call the Pinker Problem, a corruption of the law of large numbers.

  • Fooled by Belligerence: Comments on Nassim Taleb's "The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion"

    Pinker's rebuttal to Taleb. It begins:

    I was surprised to learn that Nassim Taleb had a problem with my book The Better Angels of Our Nature, because its analysis of war and terrorism harmonizes with Taleb's signature themes. The chapter on major war begins with 21 pages on historians' overinterpretation of temporal trends in war and could have been called "Fooled by Randomness." It was followed dozen pages on the thick-tailed distribution of the magnitudes of wars which could have been subtitled "The Black Swan." Yet rather than acknowledging our similar mindsets, Taleb has come out swinging, pummeling away at what he thinks is the message of the book, accompanied by a stream of trash-talk about my statistical competence.

    Taleb shows no signs of having read 'Better Angels' with the slightest attention to its content. Instead he has merged it in his mind with claims by various fools and knaves whom he believes he has bettered in the past. The confusion begins with his remarkable claim that the thesis in 'Better Angels' is "identical" to Ben Bernanke's theory of a moderation in the stock market. Identical! This alone should warn readers that for all of Taleb's prescience about the financial crisis, accurate attribution and careful analysis of other people's ideas are not his strong suits.

  • On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts

    Long mathematical paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, et al. claiming to disprove Pinker.

    We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data.
    ...
    All the statistical pictures obtained are at variance with the prevailing claims about "long peace", namely that violence has been declining over time.

  • Violent warfare is on the wane, right?

    Mark Buchanan: Physicist and author, former editor with Nature and New Scientist.

    Many optimists think so. But a close look at the statistics suggests that the idea just doesn't add up.

  • John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war

    A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray -- and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong.

I find it interesting how vociferous people are on both sides of what is essentially a science and math argument. It seems to me good evidence for (something I've blogged about before) The Argumentative Theory.

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.

I wonder if how one interprets the numbers for violence depends on whether they lean more to optimism or pessimism?


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