No Wonder So Many People are Depressed

[K]

Yes, the question is what best fosters technological development. It'll be a bit disheartening if the answer turns out to be war. The obvious case study that comes to mind is the Soviet Union vs. United States, especially in the Space Race.

[David]

It needn’t be disheartening, even if that is true – clearly, technological development is not a desirable end in and of itself, and the catastrophic consequences of war would tend to outweigh its benefits. So, finding the second-most effective means of technological development is not necessarily a bad goal.

[K]

[Mugwump]

[K]

I guess we should make the possibly important distinction between overt war and cold war. A real war presumably diverts scientific effort from fundamental research to warfare development. The Manhattan Project is a startling example.
Cold wars are somewhat different.

[Dave The Man]

I see gone bit off Topic

[David]

Has it really? We’re discussing a lot of different things in here, it’s true, but ultimately all of this relates to the question of whether or not our world is getting worse. Or was it depression that you were hoping to discuss?

[Dave The Man]

[stui magpie]

^

Not much has changed since 1975 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXj_ruy5OgM

[K]

[K]

Steven Pinker:

"The core of the book tries to document the reality of progress by plotting the major indicators of human well-being, including longevity, education, affluence, leisure time, and richness of experience, and shows that all of them have increased over time—contrary to the fatalistic, pessimistic view of the world that one can get from reading the news, which concentrates on salient negative events, as opposed to gradually improving trends. I should have added to the [above] list safety from accidents, safety from personal violence, and risk of death in war."

https://thebulletin.org/steven-pinker-real-risks-undeniable-progress11693


[In general, but here in particular, quotation does not imply approval of the quote or its utterer. It caught my attention because he mentions the news viewpoint.]


Pinker continues:

"[The book] then asks why these improvements have occurred. And since the book does not advocate any mysterious arc of progress that lifts us ever higher, it identifies the causes in the values of the Enlightenment, mainly the use of reason and science to improve human well-being. Overall, it’s a defense of the Enlightenment values, primarily reason, science, humanism, and progress."


[The caveat perhaps applies even more strongly. To come: criticism of Pinker's book.]

[K]

Elizabeth Kolbert on Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011):

"The scope of Pinker’s attentions is almost entirely confined to Western Europe. There is little discussion in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” about trends in violence in Asia or Africa or South America. Indeed, even the United States poses difficulties for him. Murder rates in the U.S. are, over all, significantly higher than those in Europe, and in some parts of this country they’re so high as to be positively medieval. ...

"As Pinker’s views on African-Americans and Southerners probably indicate, there is much in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” that is confounding. Those developments which might seem to fit into his schema—a steady rise in the percentage of Britons who identify themselves as vegetarians, for instance—are treated in detail. Yet other episodes that one would think are more relevant to a history of violence are simply glossed over. Pinker is virtually silent about Europe’s bloody colonial adventures. (There’s not even an entry for “colonialism” in the book’s enormous index.) This is a pretty serious omission, both because of the scale of the slaughter and because of the way it troubles the distinction between savage and civilized. What does it reveal about the impulse control of the Spanish that, even as they were learning how to dispose of their body fluids more discreetly, they were systematically butchering the natives on two continents? Or about the humanitarianism of the British that, as they were turning away from such practices as drawing and quartering, they were shipping slaves across the Atlantic? And what does it say about the French that they liked to refer to their colonial project as la mission civilisatrice?

"When Pinker does take on aspects of European history that challenge his thesis, the results are, if anything, even more exasperating. ...

"Pinker’s math here is, at best, fishy. According to his own calculations, the Second World War was, proportionally speaking, the ninth-deadliest conflict of all time—in absolute terms, it was far and away the deadliest—yet the war lasted just six years. The Arab slave trade, which ranks as No. 3 on Pinker’s hit list, was an atrocity that took more than a millennium to unfold. The Mongol conquests, coming in at No. 2, spanned nearly a century.
...

"And along with the deadly weapons have come the deadly ideas. Though Pinker would like to pretend otherwise, Fascism and Communism are inventions that are every bit as modern as women’s rights and the eurozone. When you add Mao and Stalin to Hitler, the death toll from mid-twentieth-century atrocities rises to well over a hundred million. Before Pol Pot invented the killing fields, he studied in Paris, where he developed a taste not just for Marx but also for the classics of French literature."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/peace-in-our-time-elizabeth-kolbert

[K]

To me, the flaws raised in reviews of Pinker's books (quoted above and in posts to follow) really undermine his credibility. One might have hoped that he'd have learnt from the mistakes of the earlier book, but instead the impression is that he simply does not care and has wilfully repeated and amplified them in his latest book, perhaps seduced by the undeserved influence popular writing has given him.

Kolbert above questions his "fishy math". Elsewhere, Ada Palmer notes (without any concern) that "charts are easy to niggle at: a chart of declining war deaths per annum beginning in 1945 might look very different had it started in 1600". I think both are valid concerns. Yes, if his charts really mean something, they should not be dependent on some magic starting point like 1945 (and it is the author's responsibility to show the reader that it indeed is not dependent on that). From what Kolbert writes, Pinker normalized the death toll by population but not by timespan, when surely the relevant metric is the rate of deaths per capita per year. And those are just the non-technical problems...

[David]

K, I intend this gently, but ... are you seriously trying to critique a book you haven’t actually read?

[K]

David, I'm not critiquing the literary style or structure. I'm critiquing the scientific reasoning and use of data (statistical methodology). In this regard, what is claimed in the books is not in dispute. Whether those are correct claims to make from a scientific perspective is in question. If people were claiming direct quotes and specific graphs were in the books, and he were claiming he was misquoted or no such graphs were in the books, then the terms of debate would be totally different and we'd need copies of the books just to begin the argument.
For example, it is a fact that he has chosen to look at war deaths (as a proportion of population) per event and not per time. That is not in dispute. (I know that Kolbert has not simply misunderstood Pinker or made a false claim, and that I have not simply misunderstood her, because Pinker's response to her shows it. I was leaving discussion of his response for a future post. You will no doubt be pleased to learn that I have read his response, though you may be less pleased to learn that I think it's rubbish.) The question is whether that is the logically correct or practically reliable thing to do. At the point of that question's raising, the book is neither necessary nor sufficient to address it.

Is that clear?


It's also worth questioning whether the actual claims requiring domain-specific expertise that he makes are correct. This raises an interesting question, namely, what the best way to do this is. If you think that merely reading the book is a good way to do this, then you must assume the reader is an expert in all of those domains (or at least one, in which case he can at least evaluate the relevant subset of claims). If one is not an expert, it's actually more useful to heed the words of reviewers who are experts in those areas. I am not an historian specializing in the Enlightenment, for example. If there is a professor who is such an expert, his review is more useful for evaluating Pinker's historical claims concerning the Enlightenment than my naive reading of Pinker's claims. If they disagree, who would you be more inclined to believe? The expert or the dilettante? The answer may partly depend on how much you respect that field of study and how much you respect the dilettante.


[David, do you actually own a copy of the earlier book? In some sense I hope you do not, because Pinker does not deserve the book sales. But it would be useful if you do, because Pinker in one of his counterattacks does refer to some pages in it.
And also, David, with or without your own copy, you have read the earlier book, though not the latter, so if you think Kolbert et al. have misrepresented him more generally (surely she has not directly misquoted him), you should comment on it.]