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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

by ABCLAW 9y ago

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 existence of conflict within or between societies. Better Angels indicates that violence has gone down, but does not sufficiently set out the basis to indicate that conflict is being better managed over time. If anything, it indicates that conflicts are being 'won' as the winners are increasingly able to ignore the plight of the losers. On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. In short, the courts are simply too expensive for normal people to avail themselves of, outside specialty practices like family or traffic issues. The result being that the majority of people do not actually have the ability to enforce their legal rights. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it. We can pretend things are getting better but absent thinking about what 'better' means maybe the lid on the boiling pot is just getting heavier faster than the heat is being turned up.

zaksoup 9y ago
I work on criminal justice reform and this is SO true. I cringe every time I hear these kinds of stats being brandished without context as evidence of our society 'working'. Ben Thompson is a particularly bad example of this, but it certainly seems like it's the folks 'winning' the conflicts that love to cite 'reduced conflict'.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  I'm a Ben Thompson reader / listener, and I'm not sure which of his arguments you're referring to, but I'm intrigued by the premise. Would you mind throwing out some links and further commentary on this?
  - zaksoup 9y ago
    Last week's (Friday, Jan 26) Exponent has a lot of this kind of conversation after his article about Amazon Go. Toward the end of the article is this gem [0]: > In fact, they are all gone, replaced by automation. And, in the meantime, nearly all of humanity has been lifted out of abject poverty. I think Ben is an incredibly intelligent and accurate commentator who constantly ignores the very real side-effects of tech on poverty and justice in favor of handwaving about potential side-effects of regulation that doesn't currently exist. > Still, what of those companies that can’t afford to pay for zero rating — the future startups for which net neutrality advocates are willing to risk the costs of heavy-handed regulations? [1] Meanwhile, 48% of America have only one broadband provider and 30% have no access to broadband at all [2]. Ben is scared of title II but strangely silent on the same cable companies he's so desperate to protect from scary scary 'regulation' spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make municipal broadband in underserved locations illegal. [3] All this being said, I am a frequent reader of stratechery, an exponent subscriber. I think Ben gets it right more often than not, but I often find that he goes out of his way to defend 'capitalism' in ways that seem antithetical to his other espoused beliefs. All of his articles and their associated exponents on anti-trust take great pains to make the point that 'real capitalism' has competition [4,5,6]. He fails to address what, if 'real capitalism' means competition, our current economic situation is. Personally I'd describe myself as a socialist so perhaps this is just a pure idealogical divergence on our parts, but it seems like Ben is make the same arguments about capitalism that are so popular among people criticizing communism: "Sure, it works great on paper, but in practice it is an abject failure". I fail to see how Ben's points about capitalism and competition, which I agree with, are not the exact same critique of our current economic system. Sorry for the long and late reply, this sort of just became a bit of an unstructured rant about all the things I yell at exponent in my car on the way home Friday evenings... [0] https://stratechery.com/2018/amazons-go-and-the-future/ https://stratechery.com/2018/amazons-go-and-the-future/ [1] [https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/ https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/ [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband-still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br... [3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-cable-lobby-misinformation-campaign-against-muni-broadband/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-ca... [4] https://stratechery.com/2017/ends-means-and-antitrust/ https://stratechery.com/2017/ends-means-and-antitrust/ [5] https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/ https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopo... [6] https://stratechery.com/2017/everything-is-changing-so-should-antitrust/ https://stratechery.com/2017/everything-is-changing-so-shoul...
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  I rarely here them expressed as examples of society "working", but rather as examples of society progressing. And like most things, progress is rarely equally distributed, but that doesn't mean it's not being made overall.
resu_nimda 9y ago
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 worse than before. Was there a time when “normal people” had better access to justice and ability to enforce their rights?
- ABCLAW 9y ago
  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 reasons have to do with humanity getting better, smarter and more empathetic. Here I suggest that in order to make that claim, broadly, we need to understand what violence is, and why its reduction may actually be a symptom of things getting worse for people. I am not the only one to make this distinction. Many groups advocating for historical 'have-nots' make the same counterpoint in reaction to Pinker's work. 2) With regards to the legal system, the issue is tremendously worse than it used to be. There was a time when "normal people" had better access to justice - the fact that you even need to ask this question should cause readers to pause and reflect upon what that means for the system. The legal system, like measures of international violence, have social purposes - this is where Pinker's arguments fall flat to me. Think of them as pressure release valves. If the negative causal force (i.e. Conflict) causing those systems to need to act aren't actually being reduced, yet the system is systemically reacting less and less to the stimuli it is receiving, it is akin to a server reporting that it is A+ Okay and only under 25% load, but ignoring that it is discarding 99% of requests to it. No sane engineer would think things are getting better if the report drops to 24%, given the full context.
  - resu_nimda 9y ago
    You have yet to provide even a hint of a demonstration of how the have-nots have it worse than before. It should be pretty simple, just one example of backward progress that you think is more relevant than reduction of violence. Your second paragraph is pure logical fallacy and fully uncompelling.
darawk 9y ago
All that is true, but its important to define the comparison. Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence. The fact that our current system is imperfect does not mean it isn't better than it was. That being said, I find Nassim Taleb's criticism of Pinker's ideas much more relevant: That you can't know what kind of distribution you're in until it's over. Violence may simply be becoming more fat tailed. The common case is low-violence, but with low probability periods of hyper-violence (e.g. nuclear war). There are decent a priori reasons to think this may be the case, and it's not something Pinker can effectively rule out.
- TuringTest 9y ago
  > Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence. Not necessarily, if it means that you've getting the bad end of injustice and have no way to get justice done.
  - darawk 9y ago
    True but I think it's pretty clear that that's not what's going on in most of the world. To be explicit, that does happen. And it happens much more than it should. But it happens quite a bit less than it used to, and that's the important point.
- ABCLAW 9y ago
  >The fact that our current system is imperfect does not mean it isn't better than it was. Sure, but that's my point. Pinker makes an argument for "it is better" without actually delving into confounding measures of "better". >Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence. First: If you were systemically dispossessed, you might take chaos over certainty of a negative outcome. But before we get there, why compare it to 'perpetual' violence? I don't see a basis for that in historical data or arising out of first principles. Third, lack of access to conflict resolution was a micro example on the citizen to citizen level; it isn't the only potential cause for a reduction in violence. If we look at the citizen to state level, the increasing (accelerating, even!) capability, scope and organization of the state to stamp out dissent seems like a great confounder. Would we argue that a reduction in violence directly caused by the state's mounting ability to cause death or incarceration against dissenters is a good thing and that as violence decreases due to fear increasing that things are 'better'? The same argument applied to interstate conflict very quickly circles back to how catastrophic nuclear and conventional weaponry has become, which is what Taleb's argument is based upon.
nouveaux 9y ago
I agree that it's not clear that conflict is being better managed overtime. However, there is a lot of merit acknowledging the reduction in violence. There is so much fear for physical violence that there has been a significant reduction in kids walking home from school or playing outside by themselves. It would be better to acknowledge how physically safe we are regardless of what happens in the court systems.
Bartweiss 9y ago
I generally agree, but I'm a bit confused by your framing. Better Angels offers a range of causes for declining violence, and one of them is explicitly 'Leviathan' - the rise of state power pushing out all other forms of violence. His other forces are far more optimistic, but the "monopoly on force" argument is certainly not absent. Having said that, I agree that people discussing and interpreting Pinker's work (Pinker himself included) tend to provide vastly more optimistic readings than I think are actually supported by the evidence. Across Pinker's "five causes" it's quite possible that Leviathan is the main player, and that others like 'Commerce' and 'Reason' are operating less to reduce conflict than to redirect it from violent dispute to fait accompli victories.
- ABCLAW 9y ago
  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 moment we cross the threshold. That said, Pinker himself heavily downplays the 'Leviathan' effect in interviews, debates and responses to criticisms, and bothers very little to examine what it means, especially because if the Leviathan is the primary force in quashing violence, then the rest of his project - in demonstrating the progress of mankind - is actively hampered.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    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 rights, the answer is not "civilization and reason" but "because it would cost a million times what the fish are worth". Increased trade means most peaceful relationships are mutually beneficial, increased GDP per capita means that a life lost to violence is increasingly expensive in monetary terms, and the increasing mechanical capacity for war means that any small conflict can be easily escalated to a prohibitively expensive one. 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". That worries me, and I think Pinker does us all a disservice by conflating a decreasing appetite for violence with decreasing use of violence. Leviathan is there in the book, but not so much in the public conception.
trophycase 9y ago
Violence has decreased because the systems of control have improved exponentially.
- JustAnotherPat 9y ago
  Yes, just throw every potential violent person in jail/prison.
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    That's one route, but if you look at, say, western Europe, countries there largely have both much lower incarceration rates and lower homicide rates than the US.
maxsilver 9y ago
> 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 immense complexity of software, and then walk into work and load up five package managers on top of one another and npm install left-pad or whatever. Urbanists / Urban Planners decry the cost of housing and lack of transit, then go to work everyday and rapidly increase the cost of housing and eliminate transportation access. Education that used to cost $4k/yr now costs $40k/yr. Healthcare costs are rising exponentially and life expectancy is dropping. People complain about corrupt politicians doing bad things, and then go and vote for the corrupt person with the party affiliation of their choice. "Things may be getting better" in the most general sense or at the most base levels. I don't dispute that. But 100% solved (or mostly solved) problems are becoming rapidly unsolved at a scary rate, and it's affecting a lot of regular people in bad ways.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  > Urbanists / Urban Planners decry the cost of housing and lack of transit, then go to work everyday and rapidly increase the cost of housing and eliminate transportation access. I'm not following here. Lack of urbanism in American cities seems largely the result of various government decisions, especially at the local level. I'm guessing those urbanists and urban planners are voting for politicians friendly to transit and walking and housing supply (or at least more friendly than the opposition), so what exactly are you blaming them for?
  - maxsilver 9y ago
    I'm referring to the hyper-libertarian "gentrification is the solution to gentrification", "trickle down economics is the only affordable housing", "governments should be for-profit corporations" type philosophy that folks working in that space typically have (at least, in the US). A lot of these people will say things like "what a shame that poor neighborhoods always lose their affordable housing and economically diverse populations". And then they go to work everyday for architects or property developers or city hall or construction companies, and explicitly target 'undervalued' poor neighborhoods for 'investment' to intentionally drive the property values up, despite knowing that those actions will directly displace many/most of the existing residents due to price. It's one modern day version of saying "such a shame that smoking kills" while working for Phillip Morris. Or saying "digital advertising is so intrusive, annoying, and invasive" while working for Google. ----- And while this is just one of many different examples of that problem -- the contraction itself is what really bugs me. People who claim "X is such a bad problem, we should fix X" while going to work every day to make X worse.
yters 9y ago
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 "barbaric".
- diego_moita 9y ago
  > 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]
  - yters 9y ago
    #1 https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide 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#Extermination_procedure 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.
rotrux 9y ago
@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. <== this statement will be the case tomorrow, and the day after, and has definitely been the case since we've gained the ability to estimate the global population. To try and be more concise: Is the per-capita decrease in violent-crime a better or worse measure of its reduction than the overall volume of violent-crime? I believe the former is, you appear to believe the latter is. If it's the latter, I'm right there with you. More people ==> more crime ==> more fringe-cases ==> more of a burden on defense-attourneys in the US, unless employment growth in that sector is keeping pace with population-growth, minus whatever the influence of the PER-CAPITA decrease in violent crime is. I want to contest two points you've made: > "We can pretend things are getting better..." - violent crime per-capita IS decreasing...that's just a statistical fact unless there's a problem in the way data has been collected. The overwhelming consensus is that easier access to educational materials (think wikipedia) is the big causal factor there. This next one isn't related to any of this^, but I still disagree, and pretty strongly: > "Violence is not a first order phenomenon at social scale" - By "not first order" I'm assuming you're saying violence is an emergent property of human interaction(if I'm misunderstanding you, please correct me.) However, I can be violent to myself or say...animals without anyone else around. By your definition, A delusional autocrat who starts a war out of paranoia of something fictitious (like...idk...ghosts) isn't being violent.
- ABCLAW 9y ago
  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.
deleted 9y ago
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igravious 9y ago
> 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. I really think that this is one occasion where you should base your opinion on what an author has written rather than on what discussions the author's work has engendered. > Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time. No. Pinker makes a specific argument (he does not attempt to make the argument) that contrary to popular opinion the world is not in fact going to hell in a handcart but rather the lot of the average person is improving over time when measuring social factors against times gone by. He takes a number of metrics and plots them over the course of centuries and millennia. What he is _attempting_ to do is convince us. > 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 existence of conflict within or between societies. To be honest, I'm not sure that what you're saying makes sense sociologically speaking. And anyway, it's probably neither hear nor there for our purposes if violence is a first-order or second-order phenomenon (whatever that would mean) in the context of social systems. What matters is if we agree that certain types of violence are decent metrics for measuring the human condition over time. We could take suicide, state conflicts, civil unrest, incarceration rates, state torture, severity of punishment, and on and on. And in fact this is what Pinker does. And for practically every form of human-on-human misery you can think of the stats show that violence is decreasing. If you agree that this is a good proxy for the human condition then you then agree that society is getting 'better'. > Better Angels indicates that violence has gone down, but does not sufficiently set out the basis to indicate that conflict is being better managed over time. If anything, it indicates that conflicts are being 'won' as the winners are increasingly able to ignore the plight of the losers. ? No. It does not indicate, it demonstrates that many many forms of violence have decreased. It does not show that "conflict is being better managed" over time (how would one measure that?) and it certainly does not need to use whatever that as a proxy for its main demonstration. That's your assertion, not Pinker's. It is up to you to convince us of that. (I am not convinced.) And even if you did it does not invalidate Pinker's claims! > On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. In short, the courts are simply too expensive for normal people to avail themselves of, outside specialty practices like family or traffic issues. The result being that the majority of people do not actually have the ability to enforce their legal rights. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it. I agree with everything you say here (though you have no stats to back it up I do believe that it would be possible to demonstrate some of your assertions here) but the fact that it is increasingly difficult for the average person to enforce their rights is no counter-argument to the claims in Better Angels. You do realise that Pinker is talking about practices like being hung, drawn and quartered and being burnt at the stake and any number of unimaginable horrors which we no longer do, don't you? > We can pretend things are getting better but absent thinking about what 'better' means maybe the lid on the boiling pot is just getting heavier faster than the heat is being turned up. No. To make a claim is not to pretend. Pinker _has_ thought about how you can measure 'better'. The funny thing is, it actually seems like people want the world to be getting worse for some perverse reason. I cannot otherwise explain the ridiculous arguments (including by the likes of Taleb) against Better Angels.

by ABCLAW 9y ago

zaksoup 9y ago

I work on criminal justice reform and this is SO true. I cringe every time I hear these kinds of stats being brandished without context as evidence of our society 'working'. Ben Thompson is a particularly bad example of this, but it certainly seems like it's the folks 'winning' the conflicts that love to cite 'reduced conflict'.

sanderjd 9y ago
I'm a Ben Thompson reader / listener, and I'm not sure which of his arguments you're referring to, but I'm intrigued by the premise. Would you mind throwing out some links and further commentary on this?
- zaksoup 9y ago
  Last week's (Friday, Jan 26) Exponent has a lot of this kind of conversation after his article about Amazon Go. Toward the end of the article is this gem [0]: > In fact, they are all gone, replaced by automation. And, in the meantime, nearly all of humanity has been lifted out of abject poverty. I think Ben is an incredibly intelligent and accurate commentator who constantly ignores the very real side-effects of tech on poverty and justice in favor of handwaving about potential side-effects of regulation that doesn't currently exist. > Still, what of those companies that can’t afford to pay for zero rating — the future startups for which net neutrality advocates are willing to risk the costs of heavy-handed regulations? [1] Meanwhile, 48% of America have only one broadband provider and 30% have no access to broadband at all [2]. Ben is scared of title II but strangely silent on the same cable companies he's so desperate to protect from scary scary 'regulation' spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make municipal broadband in underserved locations illegal. [3] All this being said, I am a frequent reader of stratechery, an exponent subscriber. I think Ben gets it right more often than not, but I often find that he goes out of his way to defend 'capitalism' in ways that seem antithetical to his other espoused beliefs. All of his articles and their associated exponents on anti-trust take great pains to make the point that 'real capitalism' has competition [4,5,6]. He fails to address what, if 'real capitalism' means competition, our current economic situation is. Personally I'd describe myself as a socialist so perhaps this is just a pure idealogical divergence on our parts, but it seems like Ben is make the same arguments about capitalism that are so popular among people criticizing communism: "Sure, it works great on paper, but in practice it is an abject failure". I fail to see how Ben's points about capitalism and competition, which I agree with, are not the exact same critique of our current economic system. Sorry for the long and late reply, this sort of just became a bit of an unstructured rant about all the things I yell at exponent in my car on the way home Friday evenings... [0] https://stratechery.com/2018/amazons-go-and-the-future/ https://stratechery.com/2018/amazons-go-and-the-future/ [1] [https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/ https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/ [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband-still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br... [3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-cable-lobby-misinformation-campaign-against-muni-broadband/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-ca... [4] https://stratechery.com/2017/ends-means-and-antitrust/ https://stratechery.com/2017/ends-means-and-antitrust/ [5] https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/ https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopo... [6] https://stratechery.com/2017/everything-is-changing-so-should-antitrust/ https://stratechery.com/2017/everything-is-changing-so-shoul...
ryanwaggoner 9y ago
I rarely here them expressed as examples of society "working", but rather as examples of society progressing. And like most things, progress is rarely equally distributed, but that doesn't mean it's not being made overall.

resu_nimda 9y ago

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 worse than before. Was there a time when “normal people” had better access to justice and ability to enforce their rights?

ABCLAW 9y ago
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 reasons have to do with humanity getting better, smarter and more empathetic. Here I suggest that in order to make that claim, broadly, we need to understand what violence is, and why its reduction may actually be a symptom of things getting worse for people. I am not the only one to make this distinction. Many groups advocating for historical 'have-nots' make the same counterpoint in reaction to Pinker's work. 2) With regards to the legal system, the issue is tremendously worse than it used to be. There was a time when "normal people" had better access to justice - the fact that you even need to ask this question should cause readers to pause and reflect upon what that means for the system. The legal system, like measures of international violence, have social purposes - this is where Pinker's arguments fall flat to me. Think of them as pressure release valves. If the negative causal force (i.e. Conflict) causing those systems to need to act aren't actually being reduced, yet the system is systemically reacting less and less to the stimuli it is receiving, it is akin to a server reporting that it is A+ Okay and only under 25% load, but ignoring that it is discarding 99% of requests to it. No sane engineer would think things are getting better if the report drops to 24%, given the full context.
- resu_nimda 9y ago
  You have yet to provide even a hint of a demonstration of how the have-nots have it worse than before. It should be pretty simple, just one example of backward progress that you think is more relevant than reduction of violence. Your second paragraph is pure logical fallacy and fully uncompelling.

darawk 9y ago

All that is true, but its important to define the comparison. Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence. The fact that our current system is imperfect does not mean it isn't better than it was. That being said, I find Nassim Taleb's criticism of Pinker's ideas much more relevant: That you can't know what kind of distribution you're in until it's over. Violence may simply be becoming more fat tailed. The common case is low-violence, but with low probability periods of hyper-violence (e.g. nuclear war). There are decent a priori reasons to think this may be the case, and it's not something Pinker can effectively rule out.

TuringTest 9y ago
> Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence. Not necessarily, if it means that you've getting the bad end of injustice and have no way to get justice done.
- darawk 9y ago
  True but I think it's pretty clear that that's not what's going on in most of the world. To be explicit, that does happen. And it happens much more than it should. But it happens quite a bit less than it used to, and that's the important point.
ABCLAW 9y ago
>The fact that our current system is imperfect does not mean it isn't better than it was. Sure, but that's my point. Pinker makes an argument for "it is better" without actually delving into confounding measures of "better". >Inequality in access to the court system is better than a perpetual state of violence. First: If you were systemically dispossessed, you might take chaos over certainty of a negative outcome. But before we get there, why compare it to 'perpetual' violence? I don't see a basis for that in historical data or arising out of first principles. Third, lack of access to conflict resolution was a micro example on the citizen to citizen level; it isn't the only potential cause for a reduction in violence. If we look at the citizen to state level, the increasing (accelerating, even!) capability, scope and organization of the state to stamp out dissent seems like a great confounder. Would we argue that a reduction in violence directly caused by the state's mounting ability to cause death or incarceration against dissenters is a good thing and that as violence decreases due to fear increasing that things are 'better'? The same argument applied to interstate conflict very quickly circles back to how catastrophic nuclear and conventional weaponry has become, which is what Taleb's argument is based upon.

nouveaux 9y ago

I agree that it's not clear that conflict is being better managed overtime. However, there is a lot of merit acknowledging the reduction in violence. There is so much fear for physical violence that there has been a significant reduction in kids walking home from school or playing outside by themselves. It would be better to acknowledge how physically safe we are regardless of what happens in the court systems.

Bartweiss 9y ago

I generally agree, but I'm a bit confused by your framing. Better Angels offers a range of causes for declining violence, and one of them is explicitly 'Leviathan' - the rise of state power pushing out all other forms of violence. His other forces are far more optimistic, but the "monopoly on force" argument is certainly not absent. Having said that, I agree that people discussing and interpreting Pinker's work (Pinker himself included) tend to provide vastly more optimistic readings than I think are actually supported by the evidence. Across Pinker's "five causes" it's quite possible that Leviathan is the main player, and that others like 'Commerce' and 'Reason' are operating less to reduce conflict than to redirect it from violent dispute to fait accompli victories.

ABCLAW 9y ago
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 moment we cross the threshold. That said, Pinker himself heavily downplays the 'Leviathan' effect in interviews, debates and responses to criticisms, and bothers very little to examine what it means, especially because if the Leviathan is the primary force in quashing violence, then the rest of his project - in demonstrating the progress of mankind - is actively hampered.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  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 rights, the answer is not "civilization and reason" but "because it would cost a million times what the fish are worth". Increased trade means most peaceful relationships are mutually beneficial, increased GDP per capita means that a life lost to violence is increasingly expensive in monetary terms, and the increasing mechanical capacity for war means that any small conflict can be easily escalated to a prohibitively expensive one. 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". That worries me, and I think Pinker does us all a disservice by conflating a decreasing appetite for violence with decreasing use of violence. Leviathan is there in the book, but not so much in the public conception.

trophycase 9y ago

Violence has decreased because the systems of control have improved exponentially.

JustAnotherPat 9y ago
Yes, just throw every potential violent person in jail/prison.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  That's one route, but if you look at, say, western Europe, countries there largely have both much lower incarceration rates and lower homicide rates than the US.

maxsilver 9y ago

> 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 immense complexity of software, and then walk into work and load up five package managers on top of one another and npm install left-pad or whatever. Urbanists / Urban Planners decry the cost of housing and lack of transit, then go to work everyday and rapidly increase the cost of housing and eliminate transportation access. Education that used to cost $4k/yr now costs $40k/yr. Healthcare costs are rising exponentially and life expectancy is dropping. People complain about corrupt politicians doing bad things, and then go and vote for the corrupt person with the party affiliation of their choice. "Things may be getting better" in the most general sense or at the most base levels. I don't dispute that. But 100% solved (or mostly solved) problems are becoming rapidly unsolved at a scary rate, and it's affecting a lot of regular people in bad ways.

TulliusCicero 9y ago
> Urbanists / Urban Planners decry the cost of housing and lack of transit, then go to work everyday and rapidly increase the cost of housing and eliminate transportation access. I'm not following here. Lack of urbanism in American cities seems largely the result of various government decisions, especially at the local level. I'm guessing those urbanists and urban planners are voting for politicians friendly to transit and walking and housing supply (or at least more friendly than the opposition), so what exactly are you blaming them for?
- maxsilver 9y ago
  I'm referring to the hyper-libertarian "gentrification is the solution to gentrification", "trickle down economics is the only affordable housing", "governments should be for-profit corporations" type philosophy that folks working in that space typically have (at least, in the US). A lot of these people will say things like "what a shame that poor neighborhoods always lose their affordable housing and economically diverse populations". And then they go to work everyday for architects or property developers or city hall or construction companies, and explicitly target 'undervalued' poor neighborhoods for 'investment' to intentionally drive the property values up, despite knowing that those actions will directly displace many/most of the existing residents due to price. It's one modern day version of saying "such a shame that smoking kills" while working for Phillip Morris. Or saying "digital advertising is so intrusive, annoying, and invasive" while working for Google. ----- And while this is just one of many different examples of that problem -- the contraction itself is what really bugs me. People who claim "X is such a bad problem, we should fix X" while going to work every day to make X worse.

yters 9y ago

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 "barbaric".

diego_moita 9y ago
> 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]
- yters 9y ago
  #1 https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide 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#Extermination_procedure 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.

rotrux 9y ago

@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. <== this statement will be the case tomorrow, and the day after, and has definitely been the case since we've gained the ability to estimate the global population. To try and be more concise: Is the per-capita decrease in violent-crime a better or worse measure of its reduction than the overall volume of violent-crime? I believe the former is, you appear to believe the latter is. If it's the latter, I'm right there with you. More people ==> more crime ==> more fringe-cases ==> more of a burden on defense-attourneys in the US, unless employment growth in that sector is keeping pace with population-growth, minus whatever the influence of the PER-CAPITA decrease in violent crime is. I want to contest two points you've made: > "We can pretend things are getting better..." - violent crime per-capita IS decreasing...that's just a statistical fact unless there's a problem in the way data has been collected. The overwhelming consensus is that easier access to educational materials (think wikipedia) is the big causal factor there. This next one isn't related to any of this^, but I still disagree, and pretty strongly: > "Violence is not a first order phenomenon at social scale" - By "not first order" I'm assuming you're saying violence is an emergent property of human interaction(if I'm misunderstanding you, please correct me.) However, I can be violent to myself or say...animals without anyone else around. By your definition, A delusional autocrat who starts a war out of paranoia of something fictitious (like...idk...ghosts) isn't being violent.

ABCLAW 9y ago
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.

deleted 9y ago

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igravious 9y ago

> 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. I really think that this is one occasion where you should base your opinion on what an author has written rather than on what discussions the author's work has engendered. > Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time. No. Pinker makes a specific argument (he does not attempt to make the argument) that contrary to popular opinion the world is not in fact going to hell in a handcart but rather the lot of the average person is improving over time when measuring social factors against times gone by. He takes a number of metrics and plots them over the course of centuries and millennia. What he is _attempting_ to do is convince us. > 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 existence of conflict within or between societies. To be honest, I'm not sure that what you're saying makes sense sociologically speaking. And anyway, it's probably neither hear nor there for our purposes if violence is a first-order or second-order phenomenon (whatever that would mean) in the context of social systems. What matters is if we agree that certain types of violence are decent metrics for measuring the human condition over time. We could take suicide, state conflicts, civil unrest, incarceration rates, state torture, severity of punishment, and on and on. And in fact this is what Pinker does. And for practically every form of human-on-human misery you can think of the stats show that violence is decreasing. If you agree that this is a good proxy for the human condition then you then agree that society is getting 'better'. > Better Angels indicates that violence has gone down, but does not sufficiently set out the basis to indicate that conflict is being better managed over time. If anything, it indicates that conflicts are being 'won' as the winners are increasingly able to ignore the plight of the losers. ? No. It does not indicate, it demonstrates that many many forms of violence have decreased. It does not show that "conflict is being better managed" over time (how would one measure that?) and it certainly does not need to use whatever that as a proxy for its main demonstration. That's your assertion, not Pinker's. It is up to you to convince us of that. (I am not convinced.) And even if you did it does not invalidate Pinker's claims! > On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. In short, the courts are simply too expensive for normal people to avail themselves of, outside specialty practices like family or traffic issues. The result being that the majority of people do not actually have the ability to enforce their legal rights. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it. I agree with everything you say here (though you have no stats to back it up I do believe that it would be possible to demonstrate some of your assertions here) but the fact that it is increasingly difficult for the average person to enforce their rights is no counter-argument to the claims in Better Angels. You do realise that Pinker is talking about practices like being hung, drawn and quartered and being burnt at the stake and any number of unimaginable horrors which we no longer do, don't you? > We can pretend things are getting better but absent thinking about what 'better' means maybe the lid on the boiling pot is just getting heavier faster than the heat is being turned up. No. To make a claim is not to pretend. Pinker _has_ thought about how you can measure 'better'. The funny thing is, it actually seems like people want the world to be getting worse for some perverse reason. I cannot otherwise explain the ridiculous arguments (including by the likes of Taleb) against Better Angels.