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theseus comments on No peace in our time? - Less Wrong Discussion

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

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Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 27 May 2015 09:39:05AM 1 point [-]

Pinker argues that all types of violence are going down. Cirillo and Taleb deliberately chose to ignore homicides:

We avoided discussions of homicide since we limited L to values > 10, 000, but its rate doesn’t appear to have a particular bearing on the tails. It could be a drop in the bucket. It obeys different dynamics. We may have observed lower rate of homicide in societies but most deaths risks come from violent conflict.

I'd note that they chose to ignore homicides, and it seems that homicides undermine their general point.

Comment author: theseus 29 May 2015 09:06:27AM 2 points [-]

Pretty sure I remember reading Taleb on this, stating that homicides follow a normal distribution and he accepts Pinker's argument there. He de-couples this from the other kinds of violence, saying that the narrative stretches too wide--specifically warfare should be analyzed separately, since that follows Pareto distributions.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 29 May 2015 02:15:13PM 0 points [-]

That's fine.

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