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My new favorite book of all time

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Re: My new favorite book of all time

#321

Post by ABCLAW »

ust wrote: post #317
ABCLAW wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yugoslavia under Tito is a great example of a cauldron of economic and sectarian violence being temporarily held in check by a violent warlord. Given none of those issues actually got solved during his time, the complete disintegration of his country which followed his death is a great example of actual conflict not being accurately tracked by violence figures. Feel free to check out the development figures for the b…

I'm sorry, but your comment about Yugoslavia is extremely simplistic, if not outright wrong. While ethnic tensions certainly played a large role, the causes for the war were numerous, and also include outside influences (end of Cold War, geopolitical situation, etc.). BTW, Tito was dead for 11 years before the war started, and while he certainly was a dictator, albeit somewhat more lenient than other communist dictat…

I don't understand the objection; if resolving ethnic tensions was actively impeded by Tito's dictatorship, then the argument that violence was suppressed rather than resolved is untouched.

The characterization of Tito himself isn't important (call him a benevolent strongman if you prefer - I don't have a horse in the race), other than to examine the role of a system which suppressed violence rather than resolved conflict.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#322

Post by abawany »

Bartweiss wrote: post #290
8ytecoder wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author covers that. (More details and argument for why he thinks that is in his book) https://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-ab... The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb. The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinka…

> Finally, the Nuclear Peace theory can’t explain why non-nuclear powers have avoided war, too—why Canada and Spain, for example, never escalated their dispute over flatfish to a shooting war. Frankly, this looks to me like Pinker is reasoning from a provably false premise. Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war. The Congo War killed ~4 million people, including 300,000+ via direct killings. The Yugoslav Wars killed…

I agree re. 'Non-nuclear powers haven't avoided war.' Vietnam, Cambodia, Syrian War (as you stated) IMO have been primarily proxy wars that resulted in a lot of killings while helping the powers avoid killings of their own people. Who can say they would have fought/killed at the same rate anyways if they weren't pushed/armed to do so but it seems to me that the casualty rate would have been lower in Vietnam, for example, if the US and USSR/China had not been involved. EDIT: syntax.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#323

Post by TulliusCicero »

ABCLAW wrote: post #310
TulliusCicero wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? If you're making the assertion here, it's on you to support it. Don't try to put the burden on others to disprove something you've shown zero evidence for, that's ridiculous.

Entirely. The burden is placed upon the objector to have even a passing argument against the initially held position, otherwise you can raise infinite substance-less objections against an otherwise strong point and 'win'. This tactic is used in court and in point-based debate systems to game the system (in the first to drive up expenses, and in the second to score uncontested points). The bar doesn't need to be high,…

That's not how debate works. The initial burden of proof is on the person making the assertion, you're just shoving off your responsibility onto others.

You complain about substance-less objections, but so far you've just made a substance-less assertion. It's hypocritical.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#324

Post by Nomentatus »

torstenvl wrote: post #281
ABCLAW wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The issue is that violence is a poor metric for progress. Pinker has made it clear that the description of declining violence is done in order to describe the improvement of the human plight, as most succinctly crystallized in the title of his first work on the point, and the overarching research thesis of his second. The structure of his first argument also points to this: violence has decreased, and all of the r…

There was a time when "normal people" had better access to justice - the fact that you even need to ask this question should cause... ...you to realize that your propositions are not accepted uncritically and you should support them with evidence.

Costs, start there. In Rome, you'd have a better chance to seek justice if poor (if a citizen, and most people weren't.) But you'd have been better off decades ago as what counts as "small claims" has been totally trashed by inflation.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#325

Post by mirimir »

emmelaich wrote: post #303
resu_nimda wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You acknowledged that he made a specific argument about violence, which is a fairly straightforward and measurable metric. He didn’t claim that “conflict is being better managed” or that “things are getting better,” which are extremely subjective and hard to quantify. Your point about the legal system, while valid, seems irrelevant to his argument. And you didn’t provide any argument that the situation has gotten wor…

If you imprison people (violent or non-violent or even innocent) you may get less measurable violence. But perhaps only if you exclude imprisonment from your definitions of violence. That's one of the things ABCLAW is hinting at I think. I don't think it is the case, but it's worth considering.

> All in all, 15 percent of African-American men in the United States have been to prison (compared to about 6 percent of all adult men). But those figures reflect all men alive, including older men lucky enough to have escaped the great incarceration drive. For younger cohorts the risks are far higher. For boys born in 2001, the lifetime probability of incarceration is estimated to be 32 percent for young black men, 17 percent for Latinos, and 6 percent for whites.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/mass-incarceration-statis...

That seems like a lot of violence. I wonder if Pinker includes that.

Edit: To clarify, I consider state violence, even if legal punishment, to nonetheless be violence.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#326

Post by bkirkby »

ABCLAW wrote: post #310
TulliusCicero wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? If you're making the assertion here, it's on you to support it. Don't try to put the burden on others to disprove something you've shown zero evidence for, that's ridiculous.

Entirely. The burden is placed upon the objector to have even a passing argument against the initially held position, otherwise you can raise infinite substance-less objections against an otherwise strong point and 'win'. This tactic is used in court and in point-based debate systems to game the system (in the first to drive up expenses, and in the second to score uncontested points). The bar doesn't need to be high,…

ok. counterpoint: steven pinker, et. al.

go!

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#327

Post by ABCLAW »

rotrux wrote: post #314
ABCLAW wrote: post #213

I've read a lot of the discussions regarding Pinker's work in both books (but particularly his position in Better Angels), and I've always found his position to be slightly disconcerting. Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time. Violence is not a first order phenomenon at a social scale - it's presence is predicated upon the existence of other key criteria, largely the exist…

@ABCLAW, you make a very good argument that on a micro-scale we have an unprecedented crisis on our hands. However that lack of precedent comes from a volumetric perspective of the issue. I believe you're failing to take into account a per-capita perspective vs the total-volume-of-humans perspective. There have never been this many humans on the planet before today. To try and be more concise: Is the per-capita decre…

Thanks for the response.

My response is not based upon the 'relative violence' objection which some other writers have used. Put simply they have stated that violence does not scale linearly with population size, and that the types and methods of violence across different scopes looks different, but Pinker's argument ignores this level of abstraction - I think there's some merit to this position, but my critique comes from a different angle.

My argument is that rates of violence themselves are not a good metric to determine if society is progressing and humans are becoming better. I support this by stating that there are confounding variables which lower rates of violence, but also represent a regression in progress, none of which are controlled for by Pinker's analysis.

Violence is not an uncaused cause. First order in this respect refers to how far down the causal chain violence is. I am stating that at a social level, violence does not spontaneously manifest itself- there are contributory factors which function as the cause of violence. The primary factor which I identify is conflict. Reduction and resolution of conflict by peaceful means is a more valuable method of analyzing the progress of society.

From there, I indicate that at the micro level, access to justice is in peril - some countries have largely lost the ability for their middle class to access their official forum for conflict resolution. Elsewhere, I've indicated that citizen-state and state-state dispute resolution are impacted by surveillance and nuclear armaments. Accordingly, from the perspective of conflict resolution the full story is more complicated and whether or not any of these trends are positive is highly debatable.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#328

Post by no_identd »

8ytecoder wrote: post #112
topleveldomain wrote: post #17

" War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations." I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigge…

The author covers that. (More details and argument for why he thinks that is in his book) https://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-ab... The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb. The theory of the Nuclear Peace is evaluated in chapter 5, pp. 268–278. I think it’s unlikely. World War II proved that conventional warfare was already unthinka…

>The explanation for the decline of violence in the second half of the 20th century is obvious: The bomb.

Sorry, but that sounds like a load of folk psychology. Leaded gasoline on the other hand, well, see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis

(see especially this section: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis#Evidence..., and the one on alternative explanations immediately below.)

And see also, the absurd boatload of articles Kevin Drum written on about it for MotherJones:

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&dcr=1&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Cc...

(this google query has the results sorted by date, this: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-crime-co... is their oldest article on the matter, and this [note that this one takes a bit until it gets to the point, but it gets there]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/11/crime-and-the... is their newest on it.)

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#329

Post by torstenvl »

Nomentatus wrote: post #324
torstenvl wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when "normal people" had better access to justice - the fact that you even need to ask this question should cause... ...you to realize that your propositions are not accepted uncritically and you should support them with evidence.

Costs, start there. In Rome, you'd have a better chance to seek justice if poor (if a citizen, and most people weren't.) But you'd have been better off decades ago as what counts as "small claims" has been totally trashed by inflation.

The most readily available state historical summary of small claims limits I could find is from CT, where the 1981 limit was $1,000 (approx. $2,623 in 2017 dollars) and is now $5,000.

https://www.cga.ct.gov/2017/rpt/pdf/2017-R-0166.pdf

In California, the small claims limit was set at $7,500 in 2005 (approx. $9,695 in 2017 dollars) and is now $10,000.

http://www.personalinjury-attorney.com/california-small-clai...

Is there a jurisdiction you have in mind where the small claims limits increases have been outstripped by inflation?

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#330

Post by mcguire »

ABCLAW wrote: post #289
torstenvl wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when "normal people" had better access to justice - the fact that you even need to ask this question should cause... ...you to realize that your propositions are not accepted uncritically and you should support them with evidence.

This seems so open ended so as to be fruitless - We aren't going to peruse 300 page UNDP or 50 page CBA methodological reports to define the issue, then jump into the data sets themselves on this forum. But they exist, and they're easy to search for if you want to satisfy yourself. This just isn't the place, nor is that the point of the assertion. If you have a particular observation or set of data which contradicts…

"If you have a particular observation or set of data which contradicts what I'm saying maybe I can be more helpful."

I remember hearing once that 1948 was the first year in the United States without a lynching.

http://www.duhaime.org/LawMuseum/LawArticle-120/Crime-Punish...

https://carolashby.com/crime-and-punishment-in-the-roman-emp...

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