
Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence - Petiver
https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/steven-pinker-language-instinct-evolutionary-psychology-darwin-chomsky-linguistics-b792d7cd2a05#.pr8d00o74
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Analemma_
The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like
sticking your head in the sand to me. Of course we should have a sense of
perspective about how bad things are currently (which seems to be what Pinker
is saying), but we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to
be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward), and more importantly,
whether there are any forces or incentives on the horizon that might reverse
the trend (IMO, no).

Better futures have to be consciously fought for. We can't really rely anymore
on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward
peaceful liberal democracy. Even Fukuyama was iffy about that as he admitted
in a WSJ interview in 2014, and things have only gotten dicier since. My
current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things
currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the
incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or
forces aligned toward making it better. Pinker ignores that to his detriment.

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onion2k
_we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward
or downward trajectory (IMO, downward)_

There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph of
the level of violence in society - it can be, and is, something that we can
measure. You don't need an opinion about it. There's nothing subjective to
think about and decide on. It's based on information. As such, your opinion is
_objectively_ wrong. There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have
been over the past 200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are
getting better. The only way to make the numbers look like things are getting
worse is to cherry pick a short window - for example, you can show violent
crime rose in the first decade of the 21st century, but it fell for the
previous 5 decades to that, so things are still better now.

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edblarney
"There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph
of the level of violence in society"

Yes, there is.

Imagine a society without justice/police in which people must fend for
themselves. It would quickly deteriorate to the point wherein there would be a
fair bit of violence.

Imagine you - the same person you are now - in that situation.

It would be a completely different dynamic of 'violence' and represent a
completely different situation - and yet it could very well have little or
nothing to do with our moral position (i.e. 'better angels').

Second - I think that 'war' is a completely different kind of violence than
regular violent crime.

One could argue that the only thing that has made modern countries less apt
for war is MAD, i.e. the fact that there's no real possibility for gain or
winning outcomes, with nuclear weapons, the borders are largely frozen. Point
being: a weapon, of all things, could have such geostrategic importance that
it quashes violence, irrespective of anything else ('better angels') etc..

"There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have been over the past
200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are getting better. "

This is also false.

From 1960 to 1992 crime in the Western world grew by 800%.

That's almost a 50 year period out of 200 and is not 'cherry picking'.

Violent crime today is still about 600% greater than it was in 1950.

It's a paradox few want to face: that the 'liberation' of the 1960's was also
coincident with a massive increase in crime, which peaked in 1992 and has come
down somewhat, but still quite high compared to the 1950's.

Anyhow - I don't think it makes any sense to look at violence outside the big
contextual things.

~~~
Graphon1
> Imagine a society without justice/police in which people must fend for
> themselves. It would quickly deteriorate to the point wherein there would be
> a fair bit of violence.

that conclusion is not warranted by the premise. How about this as an
alternative outcome: "Imagine a society in which people actively defend
community values for themselves and in cooperation with a community of
similarly concerned citizens. It would quickly stabilize into a mostly non-
violent community."

What are police, but a group of people specifically dedicated by the community
to a specific task? Just because there is no dedicated, professional person
filling a role, does not mean the role will not be filled.

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return0
> Just because there is no dedicated, professional person filling a role, does
> not mean the role will not be filled

And thats how you get Somalia. Police was invented for a reason i suppose .

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EGreg
Violence happens when there arent enough resources

~~~
lez
The problem is, there is no upper limit on "enough". Wars have been started on
grounds of vital resources like food, water, etc. it's not common nowadays, as
technology helped us to produce food more efficiently, and it's enough for the
current population of the planet. Maybe it will not be enough for 15 billion
people, which is not happening in the near future.

But then there are wars started on grouds of religion (ISIS), or territorial
agression for the future generation (WWII), and none of these has to do with
current resource limitations. These are based on ideologies that are made up
and controlled by few and distributed via media.

Technology has made it possible to spread these kinds of ideologies more
efficient than ever. It's everywhere, in news, facebook, even in Hollywood.
And it is slowly transforming people to accept a greater level of violence.

~~~
EGreg
Greater level than what?

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oli5679
The entire conversations with Tyler series is great. He makes an effort to ask
slightly unconventional questions and doesn't show off.

Previous guests include Erza Klein, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Haidt and Nate
Silver.

[https://medium.com/conversations-with-
tyler/all](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/all)

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pierre_d528
[http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf)

Pinker does not know how to count. What is this doing here?

~~~
cossatot
I don't think that this paper is the nail in the coffin that NNT or his
groupies present it as.

There are a lot of arbitrary transformations in the data that, while
acceptable and in many cases enlightening, are by no means the _only_ way of
analyzing it. For example, having a bounded function between the population
min and max and then a dual function that goes to infinity may help, but it's
not immediatly obvious why.

I find the rescaling of the data to be a fraction of the population (as Pinker
did) to be more natural than their functional normalization, in spite of their
objections. I also think that analyzing data in a cumulative fashion, rather
than simply as events that occurred in a point in time (with uncertainty) is
far more appropriate in the ease of simultaneously handling both short-
duration events (WWII, US Civil War) and protracted violent conflicts (i.e.
Mongol invasion, Hundred Years War). Then, breaks in slope in the cumulative
w/ time function can be much more easily discerned. (Also do this with your
budgeting/accounting instead of your monthly expenditures or whatever to see
if your spending habits are changing). But again, looking at the cumulative
function is great for getting a running tally through time but has problems
with normalization.

The point here is not necessarily that they did anything wrong, but that it's
an ambiguous situation with lots of what Andrew Gelman refers to as
'researcher degrees of freedom'[1], and it's necessary to read all of it
critically, and realize what researchers are doing and why.

edit: [1]: [http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-
fre...](http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-freedom/)

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skiplist1
The problem with people that believe that being reasonable is the reasonable
thing to do is that many crucial moments of our lives depends on taking
irrational moves. I remember someone saying that the way to win in a game in
which both of you are chained together at the edge of a mountain and the first
one to take rational moves lose is to dance while singing at the edge of the
mountain. Like in poker we need some irrational moves to win in society. Also,
America was discovered because someone make a trip to nowhere.

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backtoyoujim
"One of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer
the irregular to the regular when there’s a choice — strided versus strode,
strove versus strived, hove versus heaved — "

#LiberalArtsMatter

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6stringmerc
Oof, reading through the discussion on English linguistics brought back some
pleasant but loud arguments I had with an Editor pal[1]. She was fantastic at
grammar, of structural accuracy, and enjoyed that nature of language. On the
other hand, I look at words and conventions and prefer the "let's see how
horribly we can break and re-assemble these things and have fun communicating"
school of grammar-as-fluid. I think it genuinely helped each of us appreciate
the merits and contributions of both attitudes toward English and writing.

[1] Disclosure: She's recently become my screenwriting editor on retainer

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RodericDay
Steven Pinker always reminds me of that Upton Sinclair quote, _" It is
difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon
his not understanding it!"_.

His entire career as a public intellectual seems to be as a defender of the
status quo, reassuring tech-inclined liberals that everything is fine, that
they can go on consuming, because "the system" is working well.

And he writes gigantic tomes that require gigantic tomes to reply to, so it's
a bit of a war of attrition.

