While the pirate population might have something to do with the price of tea in China, it has nothing to do with this conversation. The comment you replied to d

While the pirate population might have something to do with the price of tea in China, it has nothing to do with this conversation. The comment you replied to did not make a correlation=causation argument. The comment did, however, make an argument that historic behavior, in this case of society as a whole, may be used to predict future behavior. I don't believe that is an entirely unreasonable argument to make (though more data from more fields is always better). It is certainly a stronger argument than was made by the previous comment, which provided no evidence to back the assertion that it would be a disaster.