
John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war - benbreen
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining
======
dash2
There are lots of good reasons to worry about the ability of standard
statistical tools to predict the future in the non-linear world of the social
sciences.

This article fails to hit its target, though. John Gray mentions other kinds
of violence - incarceration, civilian casualties. But he offers no evidence
that these are going to be so negatively correlated with casualties in war as
to overturn Steven Pinker's thesis. He also talks about proxy wars, but these
are included in the war statistics, no?

An actual attack on Pinker's evidence would require getting your hands dirty
in the numbers. Instead we get handwavy complaints about the murkiness of
official statistics and the opacity of numbers. It's true they are murky, but
they are less murky than intuition and anecdotes.

~~~
lbarrow
The author links to a much better critique of Pinker by Nassim Taleb. The
basic idea is that Pinker uses data about very thin-tailed processes, like
street crime, to make inferences about very fat-tailed processes, like
casualties in war.

~~~
drited
Pinker's comments on Taleb's critique are worth a read, available here:
[http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/comments_on_taleb...](http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf)

~~~
oskarth
...Which Taleb in turn responded to in the (updated) version of the rebuttal:

 _Pinker’s Rebuttal of This Note: Pinker has written a rebuttal (ad hominem
blather, if he had a point he would have written something 1 /3 of this, not 3
x the words). He still does not understand the difference between probability
and expectation (drop in observed volatility/fluctualtion ≠ drop in risk) or
the incompatibility of his claims with his acceptance of fat tails (he does
not understand asymmetries-- from his posts on FB and private correspondence).
Yet it was Pinker who said “what is the actual risk for any individual? It is
approaching zero”._

~~~
mjfl
Nassim Taleb has a weak habit of ascribing every argument against him to an ad
hominem attack. Taleb does have a point, war could very well become less
frequent but more deadly. If the current nuclear stockpile stays where it's
at, the next major war could kill all of humanity. However I think Pinker's
argument is, barring that, life does seem to be getting better, and I think
his argument there is valid. In his chapter "The Long Peace", he goes over how
there has never been a period in history where the 500 lb gorillas of the
world have been without war in a long time.

~~~
curun1r
> life does seem to be getting better, and I think his argument there is
> valid.

I think anyone who's protested or supports the #BlackLivesMatter movement
might quibble with that conclusion. Making conclusions like that based off
crime data is specious if violence is in anyway systemic. Violence doesn't
have to be murders, assaults and robberies...incarceration is its own form of
violence and incarceration rates are as high as ever. Poverty is its own form
of violence and income inequality is as high as ever. And civil asset
forfeiture is basically legalized robbery, so if you included those statistics
along with reported robbery statistics, you'd probably find that robberies
have actually increased.

What I see happening is that some (rich) people have realized that
nationalistic bonds no longer tie us together as strongly as they used to.
They've been replaced by economic and religious bonds. So yes, the leaders of
the largest countries in the world have largely avoided war against each
other. But the top stratum of these countries has been very active in
colluding against the bottom strata (G8, WTO, TPP, etc). They've largely waged
war against the lower classes in all countries for many years now without most
people realizing it. Just because the violence is perpetrated under the guise
of law enforcement does not change the fact that it's still violence. And we
still have "official" (not declared, but acknowledged) wars against religious
extremist groups (Al Qaeda, Isis, etc), so there's that too.

In short, the nature of violence has changed, not the prevalence of it. That
you don't realize it only reflects that you're not (yet) a target.

~~~
mjfl
The nature of violence has not changed. The class warfare you speak of has
existed since the dawn of man. It just has been brought to the forefront of
our issues now because there are no longer evil tyrants skinning people alive
(outside of North Korea). To say otherwise is incredibly ignorant of history.
You could take Ancient Rome, for example, as a place where class warfare was
entrenched and a major force of change. Marx, of course, thought of the same
kind of struggle. People try to portray the Nazis as the cartoonishly evil to
explain what they did to the Jewish people but they forget that the 1920s-30s
was a ruinous time for everyone except the mostly Jewish banker class who were
able to transfer their currency out of the German marks before the
hyperinflation. You had a situation where Jewish families were traveling
around in carriages while people on the streets were starving to death.
Conspiracy theories sprouted up. The National Socialist party (Nazis) were
supposed to remedy such differences of wealth, and they did it in the most
destructive way possible. The atrocities during the WWII were largely due to
class warfare taken to an extreme level. That's why I think you should be very
weary when you refer to the situation that presents itself now as "war". Most
of violence in history has been moralistic violence, don't fall for it. In any
case, no, the nature of violence has not changed, though the costs have
increased, which is for the better.

------
hammerzeit
While this doesn't invalidate his arguments in and of itself, but it's worth
noting that John Gray's core philosophy seems to be diametrically opposed to
even the _idea_ of Pinker being right.

Gray's philosophy, at least at the coarse level I understand it, seems to be
predicated on the idea that humans are incapable of improving on ethical or
moral dimensions beyond their inherent nature [0]. His truck with Pinker is
not ultimately about whether it's currently true or not that we are becoming
less violent, but whether or not it is ever true. Gray is approaching this
from an _a priori_ , non-empirical perspective, rather than attempting to meet
empirical evidence with empirical evidence.

I'm not sure if he's ultimately right or not, but I don't find abstract
rebuttals to empirical arguments to be particularly compelling.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28philosopher%29#Pol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28philosopher%29#Political_and_philosophical_thought)

------
lbarrow
This article is a bit over the top and has a lot of non-sequitors, but the
statistical critique of Pinker's book by Nassim Taleb the author linked to is
excellent:
[http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf)

------
detcader
And how many Iraqis were killed by UN sactions at the behest of the U.S., the
U.K., and Israel? People like Pinker are rewarded for a reason.

> When Denis J. Halliday tendered his resignation from his posts after 13
> months on the job (September 1997 - October 1998) as UN Assistant Secretary
> General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq where he managed the Oil-
> for-Food Programme, and with a 34-year career at the United Nations, then-
> Secretary-General Kofi Annan turned to another experienced international
> civil servant, Hans C. von Sponeck, to carry on the UN mission. Sponeck had
> joined the UN Development Program in 1968. He had worked in Ghana, Turkey,
> Botswana, Pakistan, and India, and had become the Director of the UNDP
> European Office in Geneva -- an assignment that he had confessed to the
> General-Secretary he found "boring." Following his new assignment in October
> 1998, Sponeck arrived in Baghdad on November 8, 1998. He did not last much
> longer than Denis Halliday. Sponeck resigned from his positions on February
> 10, 2000. Like Halliday, who had said that, "We are in the process of
> destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that,"
> Sponeck decided that he could not remain associated with the punishing
> policies against the Iraqi people that he judged were genocidal in nature --
> policies that had only one goal, regime change. In the years ahead, both of
> them worked tirelessly to stop the inevitable march to madness, the March
> 2003 invasion of this ravaged and mutilated country.

[http://gicj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97...](http://gicj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97&Itemid=59)

------
johngossman
Basically Gray's argument comes down to: human nature hasn't changed. This may
be true, but considering the irrefutable real advances in agriculture,
medicine, literacy, communication, education and transportation reflected in
such things as life-expectancy, infant mortality and various standard-of-
living measures, it is certainly debatable.

~~~
sowhatquestion
Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine. People assume that because (for example) the
human tendency towards selfishness hasn't changed, that "human nature" is a
reliable constant. But as philosophers have been pointing out at least since
Hegel, it's human nature _to create technologies_ \--and I mean technologies
in the broadest sense: language, tools, artistic works, social and political
institutions-- _that thoroughly reshape and redirect the influence of innate
nature_. You don't have to go all the way to strong social constructivism in
order to understand this, but people treat it as an either/or!

------
jim_greco
The best part about Pinker's book is he actually uses data to backup his
thesis. Gray is just rambling and appealing to emotion.

~~~
foobarqux
Except Pinker's data is problematic, cherry picked in a way to support his
thesis. For example casualties in the Afghanistan war were not counted because
it was labelled as a civil war. He also defines "less violent" as relative to
the size of the world population which is at least debatable.

~~~
niels_olson
> cherry picked in a way to support his thesis.

1000 pages is a lot of cherry picking. And let's face it, at least his thesis
is declared and we can interpret his data selection in that light. Gray offers
no quantitative evidence. As far as I can tell, he's trying to cow the reader
with a lot of "I read way more political philosophy than any a' y'all." Taleb
offers a statistically oriented critique, but again offers no data, and
apparently no proof-reading.

If anything, the evidence we have from Gray and Taleb is N=2: 2 ostensibly
smart fellows found enough grist in Pinker's work to write a publishable
response without gathering any data themselves. That alone suggests Pinker's
thesis has merit.

~~~
benbreen
From the perspective of historical evidence, Pinker's book is indeed cherry
picking. He has a huge number of footnotes but when you actually look through
them, you find that dozens and dozens are from the same book, which purports
to explain thousands of years of history but wasn't even written by a
professional historian. I find aspects of Pinker's argument to be convincing
but his use of historical evidence is, frankly, not much higher than the level
of the undergraduate students I teach. And since a large part of the book
deals with historical change, that's problematic.

------
pnathan
If someone is chanting about how war is a relic of the past, how humanity has
ascended past all that, then one should look to their powder: that is the
_exact_ attitude displayed in the 1900-1913 era, just prior to the most
horrific cataclysm of violence yet to date. And it was also popular in the 20s
and 30s, as a sop to the wounds of the Great War.

~~~
mikeash
When was the last time the planet went 70 years without a major war? Maybe it
won't last, but it seems like _something_ has changed.

~~~
tormeh
Nukes made war more costly. No one is safe from them, not even civilians on
the winning team. And in contrast to conventional warfare, technological
superiority won't save you either. Nukes don't need to explode near you, it's
enough that radioactive dust be carried in by the wind to make your life hell.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Ironically, nukes were a substitute technology for large armies. So they were
also a cost reduction - for those "advanced" enough to join the nuke club.

Like it or lump it, the logic of MAD is still inescapable. It's a real-life
Catch-22 that's led to a large scale peace.

Nukes are only useful if you don't use them but project the ability to use
them. As Nash equilibria go...

~~~
mikeash
Cheaper peace, more costly war, sounds good!

My worry with nukes is the black swan events. Used to be there would be a big
war every few decades. Nukes put a stop to that... but what if instead of a
big war every few decades, they just mean there's a _really, really_ big war,
once, after a long period of relative peace?

~~~
ArkyBeagle
You have to make the protocols ...wait for it... failsafe.

------
tim333
>Lacking any deeper faith and incapable of living with doubt, it is only
natural that believers in reason should turn to the sorcery of numbers. How
else can they find meaning in their lives?

\- strikes me as a bit of a straw man argument. As a believer in reason myself
I see it as rather uncorrelated with living with doubt. People up on reason
can often handle probabilities and uncertainties - it's more the religious who
have a problem with doubt.

Looking at Pinker's numerous statistics it seems highly probable the world has
been getting more peaceful. Gray's arguments implying doing the stats is
dubious when you can nit pick some of the details seem rather weak.

------
alricb
Auguste Comte, little-known? Le Bon, maybe, but Comte?

The best explanation I've seen for the lower homicide rate in the developed
world is that it's mainly due to a more powerful state with better policing,
leading to fewer people dying in fight-homicides.

Back in the more "tribal" days of Europe, people's safety depended on their
belonging to some sort of group (extended family, today we might call them
gangs), because usually the "police" was one guy per village or neighborhood
who could do little to stop a cycle of vengeance except by trying to get the
involved groups to negotiate. It was also fairly easy to escape punishment by
getting away from the area were the murder had been committed.

This meant that fights over minute matters could easily escalate into deaths,
and that murder begat murder.

(the classic fight-homicide escalates from an argument over which Pink Floyd
album is the best; tempers flare up, the protagonists punch each other, the
loser of the fistfight comes back with a handgun)

------
comice
Gray seems to approach his criticism of Pinker from pretty much the same pro-
establishment viewpoint, and struggles to make clear the problems.

This 2012 article by by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson demolishes
Pinker's book far better and with fewer words:
[http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/12/steven-pinker-on-the-
alleg...](http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/12/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-
decline-of-violence/)

I doubt the Guardian will be rushing to publish it though. Gray is much safer.

~~~
tim333
Had a look. Meh. Moans about pinker not going on about the 1%'s economic
violence against the 99%, ignores the facts that you're vastly less likely to
die in war than was previously the case.

------
tek-cyb-org
Ask the arab and muslim world how non violent democracy is.

~~~
danbruc
This. We portray the USA as a good peaceful nation while it was at war 218 out
of 239 years of its history since 1776. On the other hand we portray Iran as
an evil danger to mankind while they did not attack any country since 1795 but
were invaded several times. Okay, there is IS having people with backward
religious believes, attacking innocent countries, torturing and executing
people, terrorizing their own people, producing propaganda and deliberately
lying to get support for or justify unjust actions...uppps, sorry, that was
the USA, too, sometimes I confuse them.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
> Okay, there is IS having people with backward religious believes, attacking
> innocent countries, torturing and executing people, terrorizing their own
> people, producing propaganda and deliberately lying to get support for or
> justify unjust actions...uppps, sorry, that was the USA, too, sometimes I
> confuse them.

Arguments could be made for this in the case of the US, but it's pretty cut
and dry as to IS.

~~~
Litost
If you watch pt1 and pt2 of this series, and take them at face value, you'd
arguably be hard pushed to see a huge difference in them either?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqwboEpZe88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqwboEpZe88)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDeT2tD97s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDeT2tD97s)

~~~
danbruc
Thanks for the suggestion, I just watched this and it's really worth those two
hours. Who is looking for a (relatively) quick glimpse at what a complex mess
the situation in the middle east was and is, this would definitely not be the
worst choice. And it is kind of beautiful in a strange way I can not really
pin down.

~~~
Litost
Glad you found them useful, i was mildy surprised mainstream media (the bbc)
was publishing them.

There's a digest and comments more eloquent than i can muster from the
guardian: [http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2015/jan/26/bitter-l...](http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2015/jan/26/bitter-lake-review-adam-curtis-afghanistan)

But yes, quite an eye opener and in place beautiful and haunting. If anyone
has any similar pieces i'd be interested in them though Curtis himself seems
to tackle some quite interesting topics:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis)

------
golemotron
I think Pinker is right about violence and war but reductions in those are
probably offset by social aggression and surveillance as Gray mentions when he
talks about the panopticon and incarceration rates.

We are biological creatures and we should expect that when interests collide
there will be aggression. When violence is hampered, it turns into other forms
of aggression.

------
_greim_
A common way to get riled up about your favorite cause is to point to the
state of the world and say "See? Look how bad things are." Pinker's argument
will thus fall into the cross-hairs of almost anyone with a political agenda.

~~~
foobarqux
It's the reverse: Pinker's book serves as a justification to ignore or
diminish the significance of (western) violence.

------
TheSpiceIsLife
"Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough
trouble predicting the past." \- Steven Pinker.

From John Gray's:

 _Pinker dismisses the role of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the use of
other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas has not prevented war in
the past; but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive._

The First and Second World Wars were so shockingly destructive as to make
Europe realise that, perhaps, there are better ways of going about things.
Like trade.

 _No serious military historian doubts that fear of their use has been a major
factor in preventing conflict between great powers._

Well, between two Great Powers -- the former USSR and the USA. Does anyone
really think the only thing preventing China, the USA, and Russia from
engaging in all-out war is the threat of nuclear annihilation? Everyone stands
more to gain from trade.

 _Moreover deaths of non-combatants have been steadily rising. Around a
million of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of
non‑combatants, whereas around half of the more than 50 million casualties of
the second world war and over 90% of the millions who have perished in the
violence that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category._

That's disingenuous. Historically whole villages and towns, even cities, were
routinely laid to waste.

Gray's article is sufficiently hand-wavey and cherry-picky to not even bother
with.

From Taleb's critique:

 _Loss of the Island Effect: My point now is the loss of island effect, from
interconnectedness. The number one danger is a biological agent that can
travel on British Air and reach the entire planet. And it can be built in a
high school lab, or, even, a garage._

That sounds a bit sensationalist. A biological agent that has the potential to
be the _number one danger_ can be built in a _high school lab, or, even, a
garage._ Well, ok, sure, given a sufficiently equipped high school lab or
garage -now we might as well call it a Biological Weapons Facility- but built
by whom? Surely not high school students or me.

Generating a sufficiently virulent biological agent isn't trivial, but that
doesn't mean it's impossible. Maybe at some point in the future I'll be able
to '3D print' a biological agent with all the right traits. Let's hope that
never happens.

Taleb's statement above trivialises biological weapons, and spreads FUD.

 _Nuclear Potential: As I explain in Antifragile, risk management is about
fragility, not naive interpretation of past data. If Fannie Mae is sitting on
a barrel of dynamite I would not use past statistical data for my current
analysis. Risks are in the fragility.(Sensitivity to counterfactuals is more
important than past history, something Greenspan missed in his famous
congressional testimony)._

Pinker in 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' does repeatedly point out that we
can't assume anything about the future based on the past but that there does
appear to be a trajectory. Whether Pinker is wrong about that trajectory is
beside the point here because Taleb is taking issue with _naive interpretation
of past data_ , yet Pinker wrote in the same book "Social scientists should
never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the
past."

 _Pinker conflates nonscalable Mediocristan (death from encounters with simple
weapons) with scalable Extremistan (death from heavy shells and nuclear
weapons). The two have markedly distinct statistical properties. Yet he uses
statistics of one to make inferences about the other. And the book does not
realize the core difference between scalable /nonscalable (although he tried
to define powerlaws). He claims that crime has dropped, which does not mean
anything concerning casualties from violent conflict._

I'm half way through reading 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' and that
certainly isn't something I'd say about the book. Pinker admits that simple
weapons and nuclear weapons are different, but that he focus on death rates in
_war_ over time. Pinker treats civilian <> civilian deaths separately as
'murders', so surely Taleb isn't conflating murder and simple-weapon-war-
deaths.

 _Another way to see the conflation, Pinker works with a times series process
without dealing with the notion of temporal homogeneity. Ancestral man had no
nuclear weapons, so it is downright foolish to assume the statistics of
conflicts in the 14th century can apply to the 21st. A mean person with a
stick is categorically different from a mean person with a nuclear weapon, so
the emphasis should be on the weapon and not exclusively on the psychological
makeup of the person._

Should it? Why? Saying it should doesn't make it so, and doesn't convince. If
we place the emphasis entirely on weapons potential this is most certainly
game over. Yet global nuclear (and biological weapons) capacity has
_decreased_ since the height of the Cold War, and we're still here. This is
one point of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' \-- that despite our ability we
eradicate ourselves we've chosen -so far- not to, and Pinker acknowledges this
means nothing about predicting the future.

Now, I can't speak much for that part of the world I know little about,
geographically & culturally, and also mathematics isn't something I've studied
a lot, so I'll take it as given that Tabel's paper 'On the Super-Additivity
and Estimation Biases of Quantile Contributions' is correct, and that Pinker's
time series data is shaky.

So good, I've learned something from Taleb, and I think it's important to read
criticisms.

Tabel's paper doesn't contain the words _child_ , _women_ , _race_ ,
_religion_ , _rights_ , _animals_.

Edit: copy paste mistake resulted in only half my comment, corrected within 1
minute of posting.

------
jqm
Eh... let resources get scarce and social systems start breaking down. Then we
will see if increasing non-violence and altruism is really a trend.

