My new favorite book of all time • Hacker News Board

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#341

Post by mcguire » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #312

intrasight wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fact that liberal democracies don't go to war was the main reason - at least amongst western democracies. And even among non liberal democracies (eg China and Russia) as long as there is enough wealth and quality of lifestyle at risk amongst the ruling elite, there's not going to be much appetite for war.

Or more to the point, countries that trade together don't go to war against each other. The surest way to keep the peace is to be mutually dependent.

That was the assertion prior to WWI.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#342

Post by mirimir » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

ABCLAW wrote: post #340

mirimir wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Pinker explicitly removes these from his analysis, stating that including them is confusing and only serves to allow people to attach 'violence' to things they dislike, and that physical violence is a large enough topic for a book. He may be right logistically regarding book writing, but he does not account for the effect of his narrowed scope in his conclusions, nor does he account for the extraction of morality in…

Ummm, "confusing"? I'd say more like "inconvenient" for his thesis. I mean, how is having my neighbor beat the crap out of me, and hold me hostage, any more violent than some cop doing the same?

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#343

Post by yters » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:02 AM UTC

diego_moita wrote: post #318

yters wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how you define violence. If you define it as ending of innocent human life, then violence has skyrocketed astronomically around the globe since the advent of legalized abortion. If you instead say our violence has become less messy and more controlled, then that seems true. But then Auschwitz would meet this definition. The gas chambers were invented because gunning civilians down en mass was considered too "…

> violence has skyrocketed astronomically [...] since the advent of legalized abortion. [citation needed] > The gas chambers were invented because gunning civilians down en mass was considered too "barbaric". [citation needed]

#1 https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-world...

56 million abortions every year according to Guttmacher.

#2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp#Exterminati...

Heinrich Himmler visited the outskirts of Minsk in 1941 to witness a mass shooting. He was told by the commanding officer there that the shootings were proving psychologically damaging to those being asked to pull the triggers. Thus Himmler knew another method of mass killing was required.[51] After the war, the diary of the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Höss, revealed that psychologically "unable to endure wading through blood any longer", many Einsatzkommandos – the killers – either went mad or killed themselves.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#344

Post by keane » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

kleer001 wrote: post #307

keane wrote: post #219

Pinker wants to establish metrics to evaluate the state of the world. Once he establishes the metrics, he wants to show that the state of the world is improving over time. Showing improvement by these metrics, he wants us to celebrate this. This is easy to appreciate. He is right. There really are large differences in living and these differences are commonly experienced as better. There is real cause for celebration…

> if all 7 billion people expressed that they believe "murder is wrong" this would not establish that murder is wrong. How else do you propose we establish morality if not by consensus?

Options vary. The first option is to admit defeat and adopt Moral Nonrealism. Most of academia and global intelligentsia have done this; Pinker finds them frustrating as fuddy-duddy spoilsports for insisting on logically-sound conclusions.

The other option is to adopt Moral Realism (ie, Theism). This won't please Pinker either.

I explain more about this at http://liamk.org/is-love-real and in my comment history on this site.

Lawyer and political commentator Ben Shapiro also explains this on the libertarian-themed and ethics-focused show The Rubin Report here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9IwamztdqA

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#345

Post by cgmg » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:05 AM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #337

ABCLAW wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the response. My qualm is a bit more involved than just the centralization of force. It has to do with whether or not the causes of violence are decreasing, or whether or not we're observing a temporary reduction in the overt displays of violence while the causes are left to grow in the background. In chemical terms, have we created buffering conditions for violence equilibria? If so, what happens the mome…

Ah, then I think we agree. My general take on Pinker's work is that to the extent that he's accurate, he's largely describing the impact of state power plus the benefits of prosperity. When he asks why murder is now so rare, the answer is a combination of "because if you murder you go to jail reliably" and "if someone wrongs you you call on the state". When he asks why Canada and Spain don't start a war over fishing…

> All of which is to say that I think we've solved some violence with sheer wealth, some with fear of the state, and perhaps very little with our "better angels".

I think moral standards, at large, have certainly improved. The very concept of human rights, as understood today, was alien not so long ago. Same applies to concepts like presumption of innocence, equality before the law, equality of genders and ethinicities, freedom of the press, international laws regarding war/plunder/noncombatants, etc.

Peter Singer's concept of The Expanding Circle is relevant here.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#346

Post by haberman » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

pron wrote: post #339

haberman wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just conservatives saying that, it is also people who have been feminists their whole lives: https://areomagazine.com/2016/12/29/why-i-no-longer-identify... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/...

Yep, for centuries (millennia, actually) the pattern is the same. A social change movement is invariably viewed as having "gone too far", but in order to be perceived as reasonable, the critics invariably say that the previous generation was right. Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as h…

> Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as having gone too far (the American revolution and the abolitionist movement included).

Sure, by some. It's also true that in about 100% of cases where people have argued for legitimately bad social change (eugenics, communism, prohibition, etc.), those people (and their allies) cast their opponents as immoral and regressive.

It's like Carl Sagan said: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Today on Twitter I saw a conservative arguing that people who deny the personhood of a fetus are like slaveowners who denied the personhood of slaves. As a radical leftist, I doubt you'd agree with that. But this person is just as convinced as you that they are the progressive on this issue.

So we need a better heuristic than "people arguing social change are probably right." Some are right, others are not.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#347

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

jmilloy wrote: post #30

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…

Yeah. It seems to me that it's not so much that "war is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it." Or at least try to. That's probably a good thing, but it seems useful to me to approach it with a more accurate perspective.

[deleted]

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#348

Post by btrettel » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #295

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…

> On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it. This is a personal frustration of mine, and it happens in nearly every field. "Loudly talk about how terrible problem X is" and then go back to work everyday making X worse. Software Developers decry the immens…

I share your frustration. Sometimes I feel like one of the few people who tries to act consistently. Most people are defecting in a massive prisoner's dilemma despite complaining about how defecting is bad!

The suggestion that these apparently strongly held beliefs are actually about signaling doesn't seem to entirely square with my experience. Talk is cheap. One doesn't gain much credibility with me by just claiming to believe something I think is good. I need to see evidence that they've implemented it in practice. I don't know if I'm unusual.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#349

Post by kleer001 » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

keane wrote: post #344

kleer001 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if all 7 billion people expressed that they believe "murder is wrong" this would not establish that murder is wrong. How else do you propose we establish morality if not by consensus?

Options vary. The first option is to admit defeat and adopt Moral Nonrealism. Most of academia and global intelligentsia have done this; Pinker finds them frustrating as fuddy-duddy spoilsports for insisting on logically-sound conclusions. The other option is to adopt Moral Realism (ie, Theism). This won't please Pinker either. I explain more about this at http://liamk.org/is-love-real and in my comment history on th…

Somehow I knew you were going to lean on theism, I should have put that in my comment, oh well.

Nuts to that. I live in the real world.

The actual action of morality can have no basis except consensus. Biology is morality free as is physics. Even if you insist there's a "pure" moral law somewhere you still have to enforce it or it's a toothless theory. Then to enforce it you really have to get down to brass tacks and democracy.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#350

Post by ABCLAW » Tue, Jan 30, 2018, 3:11 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #342

ABCLAW wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinker explicitly removes these from his analysis, stating that including them is confusing and only serves to allow people to attach 'violence' to things they dislike, and that physical violence is a large enough topic for a book. He may be right logistically regarding book writing, but he does not account for the effect of his narrowed scope in his conclusions, nor does he account for the extraction of morality in…

Ummm, "confusing"? I'd say more like "inconvenient" for his thesis. I mean, how is having my neighbor beat the crap out of me, and hold me hostage, any more violent than some cop doing the same?

His words, not mine. I agree with you.