boni_bo comments on No peace in our time? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 26 May 2015 02:41PM

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Comment author: joaolkf 27 May 2015 03:35:10AM 0 points [-]

What about this one?

Once Braumoeller took into account both the number of countries and their political relevance to one another, the results showed essentially no change to the trend of the use of force over the last 200 years. While researchers such as Pinker have suggested that countries are actually less inclined to fight than they once were, Braumoeller said these results suggest a different reason for the recent decline in war. “With countries being smaller, weaker and more distant from each other, they certainly have less ability to fight. But we as humans shouldn't get credit for being more peaceful just because we’re not as able to fight as we once were,” he said. “There is no indication that we actually have less proclivity to wage war.”

Article: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/wardecline.htm Paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2317269&download=yes

Comment author: boni_bo 27 May 2015 05:18:51PM *  -1 points [-]

Pinker tries to provide several complementary explanations for his thesis, including game-theoretic ones (asymmetric growth, comparative advantages and overall economic interdependence) which could be considered "not really nice reasons for measuring our (lack of) willingness to destroy each other". Like SA said, Braumoeller seems to conflate 'not very nice reasons to maintain cooperation' with 'our willingness to engage in war hasn't changed'. And this is one of the reasons why Taleb et al. missed the point on Pinker's thesis. To test if it's business as usual, if our willingness, what ever that is isomorphic to, is the same, one needs to verify if State actors are more likely to adopt the risk dominant equilibrium than the payoff equilibrium or if there is intransitivity. There is a connection between the benefits of cooperation and the players willingness to coordinate. What if the inability to dominate places our future in a context where we see don't see fat tails in deaths from deadly conflicts? What if the benefits of cooperation increases over time along with the the willingness to coordinate? What if it's not business as usual?