The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. Of course we should have a sense of perspective about how bad things are currently (which seems to be what Pinker is saying), but we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward), and more importantly, whether there are any forces or incentives on the horizon that might reverse the trend (IMO, no).
Better futures have to be consciously fought for. We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy. Even Fukuyama was iffy about that as he admitted in a WSJ interview in 2014, and things have only gotten dicier since. My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better. Pinker ignores that to his detriment.
we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward)
There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph of the level of violence in society - it can be, and is, something that we can measure. You don't need an opinion about it. There's nothing subjective to think about and decide on. It's based on information. As such, your opinion is objectively wrong. There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have been over the past 200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are getting better. The only way to make the numbers look like things are getting worse is to cherry pick a short window - for example, you can show violent crime rose in the first decade of the 21st century, but it fell for the previous 5 decades to that, so things are still better now.
> It's based on information. As such, your opinion is objectively wrong.
Hang on, I'm not making the claim you think I'm making. Pinker observes that the level of violence in society is at an all-time low- that is, as you say, an objective fact beyond dispute (modulo measurement error). But there is a clear implied claim there that this fact means pessimism for the future is unwarranted. That is what I am disputing, because I think trends and incentives are more important than current numbers (think about how a company's share price can fall even if they have a great quarter, if investors don't think its future prospects are great)
I also dispute your claim that _every_ metric shows things are getting better. Some are, especially in areas like health and lifespan, but others (income inequality, social cohesion, faith in democracy, etc.) are not. There are legitimate grounds for disagreement as to which metrics are more important to the question of "should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future", and maybe your opinion differs from mine, but that does not make me objectively wrong.
We'll always be able to say "But what if things get worse again?!" just as we'll always be able to say "What if things carry on getting better?". Any answer to the question is useless. We should guard against doing things to make the world worse, obviously, but I don't see much value in pessimism, especially if it requires ignoring a long term trend.
That said, speculation about the future beyond a few years away is largely pointless anyway. We get things wrong far more that we get things right, and when we are right it's mostly because we were either lucky, we've only looked at the predictions we want to look at and ignored the wrong ones, or we were so vague we couldn't have been wrong. Predicting the future is hard.
Sorry but this is arrogant (and condescending) hubris and is wilfully misintepreting the gp comment.
Firstly there is no single bias free set of figures. Information has been thrown away and distorted to produce a single line, without error bars. (Even error bars themselves suffer from the same issue)
Then what you describe sounds like overfitting. You cannot just discard a change in a trend out of hand. It may be a blip or it may not be.
Worst of all though is that graphs of complex systems do not contain all the information (obviously) about the future direction of that particular graph. It may be better to distrust other information sometimes, but thoughtful and cautious thinkers should be encouraged to be skeptical.
"There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph of the level of violence in society"
Yes, there is.
Imagine a society without justice/police in which people must fend for themselves. It would quickly deteriorate to the point wherein there would be a fair bit of violence.
Imagine you - the same person you are now - in that situation.
It would be a completely different dynamic of 'violence' and represent a completely different situation - and yet it could very well have little or nothing to do with our moral position (i.e. 'better angels').
Second - I think that 'war' is a completely different kind of violence than regular violent crime.
One could argue that the only thing that has made modern countries less apt for war is MAD, i.e. the fact that there's no real possibility for gain or winning outcomes, with nuclear weapons, the borders are largely frozen. Point being: a weapon, of all things, could have such geostrategic importance that it quashes violence, irrespective of anything else ('better angels') etc..
"There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have been over the past 200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are getting better. "
This is also false.
From 1960 to 1992 crime in the Western world grew by 800%.
That's almost a 50 year period out of 200 and is not 'cherry picking'.
Violent crime today is still about 600% greater than it was in 1950.
It's a paradox few want to face: that the 'liberation' of the 1960's was also coincident with a massive increase in crime, which peaked in 1992 and has come down somewhat, but still quite high compared to the 1950's.
Anyhow - I don't think it makes any sense to look at violence outside the big contextual things.
While I generally agree with your points, the statement "* i.e. the fact that there's no real possibility for gain or winning outcomes, with nuclear weapons*" assumes facts that are simply not available.
Some day, nuclear weapons will again be used in anger, and there most certainly will be survivors (it's actually not very hard to survive one unless and until you run out of food), and who knows what they'll conclude about "winning" vs. losing outcomes.
> Imagine a society without justice/police in which people must fend for themselves. It would quickly deteriorate to the point wherein there would be a fair bit of violence.
that conclusion is not warranted by the premise. How about this as an alternative outcome: "Imagine a society in which people actively defend community values for themselves and in cooperation with a community of similarly concerned citizens. It would quickly stabilize into a mostly non-violent community."
What are police, but a group of people specifically dedicated by the community to a specific task? Just because there is no dedicated, professional person filling a role, does not mean the role will not be filled.
The problem is, there is no upper limit on "enough". Wars have been started on grounds of vital resources like food, water, etc. it's not common nowadays, as technology helped us to produce food more efficiently, and it's enough for the current population of the planet. Maybe it will not be enough for 15 billion people, which is not happening in the near future.
But then there are wars started on grouds of religion (ISIS), or territorial agression for the future generation (WWII), and none of these has to do with current resource limitations. These are based on ideologies that are made up and controlled by few and distributed via media.
Technology has made it possible to spread these kinds of ideologies more efficient than ever. It's everywhere, in news, facebook, even in Hollywood. And it is slowly transforming people to accept a greater level of violence.
Would it have happened if Germany's economy wasn't devastated by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression didn't affect economies worldwide and the German currency was completely devalued? Would the national socialist party get such control?
Those measurements aren't as accurate as you might think. E.g. many local police forces in the US are under pressure to under report crimes of all sorts, and/or too busy to record petty crimes that are unlikely to be closed, and this can even extend to the hardest of them all to do that, murder. E.g. Chicago as of late redefining boundaries so murders that happen in places that used to be counted aren't any more (like in the highway to the airport as I recall).
Or, of course, it can be done at the medical examiner level, as I've heard in one case in the U.K. Fortunately for both those countries, we've got independent and apparently uncorrupted victimization surveys as a double check against what the authorities report.
And I should note that if you go beyond the US to e.g. the U.K., you won't find such a copacetic result, for a steady reduction in interpersonal violence rates since the 13th Century has been reversed in just half a century....
When I was learning piano in college, I reached a point where I hit a major wall, and where I actually got worse over a period of time. My playing got clunkier and less expressive, and I was unable to communicate as well as I had before. Extremely upset, I went to the old emeritus piano wizard of the faculty for advice. He had been listening and told me that I had actually been improving very quickly, but my musical awareness had been increasing even faster. So relatively, my perceptions were telling me I was getting worse.
I tend to think that is behind the feelings of things being more violent. We're still adjusting to globalism and the greater feelings of interconnectedness.
The problem is what time frame we are talking about. Yes, society looks nice now if you compare it to 200 years ago. But that's not relevant. The fact is by a lot of measurements (not limited to crime) the 1990s was the best decade ever (at least in the West). The question is how we can get back to that.
Well, the US economic boom (the longest recorded expansion in US history), for example. And the drop in violent crime in the second half of the 1990s variously attributed to Bill Clinton's crime bill, the eventual indirect benefits of either legalizing abortion, or banning leaded gas. Limiting the window to the West avoids the whole issue of civil wars in Eastern Europe making anything seem better in comparison.
Don't forget the drop in the number of younger men, the most likely to become criminals, as the Baby Boomers grew older. Not to mention a bunch of the incorrigibles getting locked up for long periods of time.
Note that the article talks about the number of living Boomers and Millenials surpassing them. I'm not making that point. The max number of Boomers was about 79 million. 75 million Millenials is quite comparable to that.
We normally look at crimes by rates, X per 100,000, so the fact that the total population is quite a bit bigger between the two periods is significant.
So is the fact that the item you're comparing today's still living, old Boomers to a by definition much younger Millennial population. There were once quite a few more Boombers, and circling back to my entire point, young Boomers of the criminal producing age.
That US economic boom was followed pretty spectacularly by a bust caused mainly by the rampant speculation that fueled the boom being based largely on bullshit.
You're clamoring for a soap bubble that didn't withstand a tiny pinprick.
I think it's at least fine to say that the parent is to some extent equivocating anecdotal personal "evidence" with extensive research and drawing very different conclusions.
Much of the criticism I've read of "The Better Angels..." has towed a similar line. It's obviously a hugely complicated subject, with at best terrible data for most of the period under examination, but I found that Pinker really did synthesize and explore a tremendous amount of data, history and theory in a way I found intelligent and compelling.
Pinker at least offers a more substantial counter-narrative to the standard news cycle where you're likely to get shot the next time you walk out your door. I would argue that view drives greater violence through a disproportionate law-and-order response to even the suspicion of a crime.
i dont think the parent disputed the data. Why should we not be worried about the recent rise of violence, stagnant wages, rising inequality in a time of peace? there is no excuse to be complacent. If we were in a virtuous cycle before, it might well be that we are entering a vicious one. That is worrisome.
I am old enough to remember being optimistic about the next year. I m afraid the newer generation has not felt what its like
> The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me.
I think it's a necessary counterbalance to a 24 hour news cycle that brings the most violent and strife-filled events into constant focus. It is easy to get the impression that the world is worse than its ever been. That's why it's important to take a step back and see a different perspective that accurately reflects how the world today compares to the past -- a past which we as humans are biased towards romanticizing anyway.
> My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better.
That is one perspective that may or may not manifest into measurable "worseness" in the future. Some people have a different perspective, and could point to things like: https://givingpledge.org/
I haven't read "Better Angels" yet or gone through this interview, but if he actually ignores the forces that are aligned toward making the global situation worse, that would surprise me. I have read "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate" and neither lacks that nuance, especially the latter title. He continually refers to the political struggle at the core of the Nature/Nurture debate and its practical implications for everyday life. Given the nature of his thinking and the thickness of Better Angels, I'd be surprised if he doesn't acknowledge the possibility of malign forces. His motivation for writing the book, I thought, was to encourage people to participate in the struggle against that malignant current (even if it's the minority vector in his view) and engage in the opposite direction of having a positive impact on global society through the continued pursuit of Enlightenment.
You're correct in looking at the thickness of the book and being wary of what's coming out in the media. In the book, the trends and statistics were just a section (albeit a big one) but the rest of the book discusses a lot of theory as to what is driving the downward trend.
Ed Herman wrote a critique of the book, which I think is fair. For instance, Pinker chose to use Vietnam casualty stats from a source that a lot of intellectuals dismiss as painting a forgiving picture of the situation.
Regardless, I think the book gives a lot of great history lessons, statistical explanations, game theory discussion, talk on Hobbes and the Leviathan, political correctness as a social driver, the effects that education, technology, communication have, and so on.
Unfortunately, when it comes to current event interpretations, I think overall Pinker is out of his wheel house (compared to, say, Chomsky or Ed Herman), and he should be concerned that the media, which is sympathetic to corpoarte and State interests, are eager to solicit his opinions on the present day geo-politic picture
"Unfortunately, when it comes to current event interpretations, I think overall Pinker is out of his wheel house (compared to, say, Chomsky or Ed Herman), and he should be concerned that the media, which is sympathetic to corpoarte and State interests, are eager to solicit his opinions on the present day geo-politic picture"
Really good point I had been fuzzily trying to seize but hadn't been able to pin down without your perspective. I was compelled to highlight that portion of your post in particular.
Not sure if you read the book but it's far from a happy-go-lucky-optimism, if anything Pinker is as cynical about human nature as Thomas Hobbs. Heck, you can even call this book the Leviathan 2.
With that being said I think he does a good job providing a lot of nuance, data, and qualitative arguments. And tbqh, it's convincing.
The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me.
Any state that wants to stick around had better be good at defending itself and its interests. If you're so "enlightened" that you've forgotten how to resolve conflicts in a non-ritualized/systematized way, then someone is going to come along and
We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy
Was that ever a theory, or was it really just something that people wanted to believe because it sounds hopeful and nice? For most people, it's the latter. It actually has an economic basis to it, however. The more you distribute wealth and power, the wider a constituency must be protected by the current regime.
it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse
Exactly how much worse? There's nothing fundamentally wrong with a local maxima, so long as the overall trend is up. The backslide can't be too excessive without destabilization, however. (We're seeing that!)
I'm reading your comment and having trouble figuring out exactly where we disagree.
> Any state that wants to stick around had better be good at defending itself and its interests.
I agree? I'm not sure where in my comment you got the opposite impression, nor why it seems relevant to my argument.
> Was that ever a theory, or was it really just something that people wanted to believe because it sounds hopeful and nice?
"The End of History and the Last Man" was hugely influential in political science circles in the 90's and early 2000's, on both the left and the right. People definitely bought its premise of the inevitability of liberal democracy as eventually taking over the world through market forces and social movements alone.
I would argue it even had a cultural impact outside academia and policy wonks. Even now, when people say they're not worried about current problems because "it'll work itself out somehow", they are implicitly citing Fukuyama even if they don't realize it.
> The backslide can't be too excessive without destabilization, however. (We're seeing that!)
Which is why I'm talking about forces and incentives. I wouldn't be so worried if I could see anything on the horizon that might push things back upward. But the trends that alarm me (breakdown in social trust, loss of trust in democracy) are mostly positive feedback loops that only get stronger with time.
Heh, I guess I just inferred that from the tone of your comment, but maybe you were irked by the same implications I was and was responding testily to them, not me. Or maybe I just misread you entirely. Mea culpa :)
I don't think that this paper is the nail in the coffin that NNT or his groupies present it as.
There are a lot of arbitrary transformations in the data that, while acceptable and in many cases enlightening, are by no means the only way of analyzing it. For example, having a bounded function between the population min and max and then a dual function that goes to infinity may help, but it's not immediatly obvious why.
I find the rescaling of the data to be a fraction of the population (as Pinker did) to be more natural than their functional normalization, in spite of their objections. I also think that analyzing data in a cumulative fashion, rather than simply as events that occurred in a point in time (with uncertainty) is far more appropriate in the ease of simultaneously handling both short-duration events (WWII, US Civil War) and protracted violent conflicts (i.e. Mongol invasion, Hundred Years War). Then, breaks in slope in the cumulative w/ time function can be much more easily discerned. (Also do this with your budgeting/accounting instead of your monthly expenditures or whatever to see if your spending habits are changing). But again, looking at the cumulative function is great for getting a running tally through time but has problems with normalization.
The point here is not necessarily that they did anything wrong, but that it's an ambiguous situation with lots of what Andrew Gelman refers to as 'researcher degrees of freedom'[1], and it's necessary to read all of it critically, and realize what researchers are doing and why.
It's a bit unfair to claim that a person can't have _anything_ interesting to say in regards to _any_ subject because you disagree with the statistical methods in one of his books, isn't it? Moreover, not all of Better Angels relies on a statistical argument, and so it might still be the case that Pinker has some interesting insights into the nature of violence.
So which parts of Chapter 7 and 8 - the ones that deals with the applicable neurology and psycology - do you disagree with? I presume that the chapter on inner demons felt very relatable when you read it, pierre? :) Please do elaborate on your concerns with the Blank Slate and The Sense of Style while your at it.
The problem with people that believe that being reasonable is the reasonable thing to do is that many crucial moments of our lives depends on taking irrational moves. I remember someone saying that the way to win in a game in which both of you are chained together at the edge of a mountain and the first one to take rational moves lose is to dance while singing at the edge of the mountain. Like in poker we need some irrational moves to win in society. Also, America was discovered because someone make a trip to nowhere.
"One of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer the irregular to the regular when there’s a choice — strided versus strode, strove versus strived, hove versus heaved — "
Oof, reading through the discussion on English linguistics brought back some pleasant but loud arguments I had with an Editor pal[1]. She was fantastic at grammar, of structural accuracy, and enjoyed that nature of language. On the other hand, I look at words and conventions and prefer the "let's see how horribly we can break and re-assemble these things and have fun communicating" school of grammar-as-fluid. I think it genuinely helped each of us appreciate the merits and contributions of both attitudes toward English and writing.
[1] Disclosure: She's recently become my screenwriting editor on retainer
Steven Pinker always reminds me of that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!".
His entire career as a public intellectual seems to be as a defender of the status quo, reassuring tech-inclined liberals that everything is fine, that they can go on consuming, because "the system" is working well.
And he writes gigantic tomes that require gigantic tomes to reply to, so it's a bit of a war of attrition.
Better futures have to be consciously fought for. We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy. Even Fukuyama was iffy about that as he admitted in a WSJ interview in 2014, and things have only gotten dicier since. My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better. Pinker ignores that to his detriment.