We can simply look at /Better Angels of Our Nature/ to know what a hack Pinker is. His thesis is only good for intra-civilizational violence on decline, which i

We can simply look at /Better Angels of Our Nature/ to know what a hack Pinker is. His thesis is only good for intra-civilizational violence on decline, which is true and fascinating. Not a cause for celebration, but for study -- he should take into account the purpose of study is to study, not celebrate. This failure cripples his work beyond his knowledge area (psychiatry, neuroscience). Anyhow, /Better Angels/ is the most messed up, sloppily cited, cherry-picked history of human civilization I may have ever read from an academic. There is a certain Eurocentrism deep throughout, but one does not have to read between the lines. His estimates of battle deaths are prima facie ridiculous. Ancient wars always take the highest estimates. It's a wonder humans did not go extinct millenia ago, given how they kept killing a quarter of the population on a regular basis. Modern wars like Iraq, even at his time of writing in 2010-11, had far, far more deaths than he counts. Maybe he does not want to count anything that isn't a uniformed combat death, but then he would have to admit something happened to cripple typical life expectancy. I was about to lose my mind at the incredibly racist portion on Polynesians and genetic predispositions to violence and cannibalism. I say "incredibly" literally. I cannot fathom how it got published and praised. I imagine the exorbitant length meant most reviewers stopped a third of the way through. And Pinker has been the head of the editing panel for the American Heritage Dictionary since the Fifth edition, a serious downgrade from the Fourth, by the way. Pinker is more than jack of all trades, master of none. He is a charlatan. It would be all the more tolerable if he had a sense of humor.