Monday, December 9, 2013

Mining the Anti-Reactionary FAQ

I may edit this post.
Cited Source: Pinker, via hbdchick
The overall violence rate kinks up twice. First time, just before 1800. The second kink is the first time all the component curves move in unison. It looks like it starts in, what, the 60s? It's as if a long-term global decline in violence was overwhelmed by something, in every country, at the same time.

This may be just a coincidence. At some point the parade of coincidences must be taken seriously.

Does anyone know why Italy and Scandinavia responded to the revolutions? Or perhaps did they respond to the same causes the revolutions responded to?

Notably, because we have this kind of graph, we can use it to proxy propensity-for-violence. Using this factor, we can adjust historical war deaths downward, just like we adjust historical dollars upward to adjust for inflation. Given our lower propensity to kill each other, how many wars should we have had, or how big should they have been?

2 comments:

RS said...

Ever check this guy out?

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-splintered-skeptic/

Alrenous said...

I have. Wanted to be impressed but wasn't. Best I can say about him is he's a lot less bad.

Taking his latest as a spot check. I might have caught him on a bad day, after all. http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2014/01/our-possible-imminent-divinity.html

Doesn't look like it, though. None of this is new to anyone who's read even the smattering of singularianism that I have.

He links, apparently approvingly, to the very aptly named Crooked Timber and Leiter Reports. While I can hope the support of Leiter is grudging, I have no evidence that it is.

I'll finish on the most positive I can, honestly. While I don't think finding the nuggets of wisdom at splintered mind is worth the effort, there is at least gold nuggets there to be found. I could mine it, as with the FAQ, and come up with not-nothing.