Violence Has Not Been Declining Over Time (opens in new tab)

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...

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

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...

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.

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