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Your summary of what the book says is directly at odds with data that I've seen in books like Enlightenment Now. https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-viol

by btilly 6y ago

Your summary of what the book says is directly at odds with data that I've seen in books like Enlightenment Now. https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-a-look-at-the-data-5af708f47fba https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-... does a good job of summarizing the data. Every archeological site on record and every primitive society we have been able to study records a rate of death by human violence that exceeds by orders of magnitude what is seen in modern civilized societies. In fact they all exceed what happened in the USA+Europe from 1900-1960, and usually by a large multiple. Even with 2 world wars, Western civilization killed fewer per capita in violence than any previous period in history that we have data for. In short, Hobbes was right. Every attempt that I have seen at taking a quantitative approach has backed that up.

dundarious 6y ago
I’d encourage you to read R. Brian Ferguson’s work, especially Pinker’s List. It goes into Pinker’s methodological errors (basically, he double counts much of his data, and even without that, is over confident of the explanatory power of that data). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_List_Exaggerating_Prehistoric_War_Mortality https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_...
soledades 6y ago
Two paragraphs above the part I quoted: What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. But, as before, Pinker's list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent. Further info: The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'

by btilly 6y ago

dundarious 6y ago

I’d encourage you to read R. Brian Ferguson’s work, especially Pinker’s List. It goes into Pinker’s methodological errors (basically, he double counts much of his data, and even without that, is over confident of the explanatory power of that data). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_List_Exaggerating_Prehistoric_War_Mortality https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_...

soledades 6y ago

Two paragraphs above the part I quoted: What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. But, as before, Pinker's list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent. Further info: The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'