Amazing post, thanks. I was recommended this youtube video today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnitLNObR7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnitLNObR7c wher

Amazing post, thanks. I was recommended this youtube video today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnitLNObR7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnitLNObR7c where Pinker shows a graph with a very strong decline in global war deaths. Along with many of the other graphs in his talk, I was very skeptical of it and believed that it must have been made using highly cherry-picked data, probably justified with a convenient definition of war. This post makes it clear that such an analysis is really very difficult to make and depends on so many things, even without asking some tricky questions: What about terrorism? What about the war on drugs? Are deaths in the Israel-Palestine conflict counted? How about union-busting mercenaries in the Congo? What about the war on black people in the US where over 1000 were killed last year?