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Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

Yugoslavia under Tito is a great example of a cauldron of economic and sectarian violence being temporarily held in check by a violent warlord.

Given none of those issues actually got solved during his time, the complete disintegration of his country which followed his death is a great example of actual conflict not being accurately tracked by violence figures.

Feel free to check out the development figures for the bloc countries and read up on the history. Should be instructive.

>Your second paragraph is pure logical fallacy and fully uncompelling.

Well, I haven't seen your argument demonstrating that that's the case, but from the tone of this reply, I'll have to stop responding to your points as I don't think there's very much effort towards understanding and discussion.

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I'm sorry, but your comment about Yugoslavia is extremely simplistic, if not outright wrong. While ethnic tensions certainly played a large role, the causes for the war were numerous, and also include outside influences (end of Cold War, geopolitical situation, etc.). BTW, Tito was dead for 11 years before the war started, and while he certainly was a dictator, albeit somewhat more lenient than other communist dictators, describing him as a "violent warlord" is a mischaracterization.

I don't understand the objection; if resolving ethnic tensions was actively impeded by Tito's dictatorship, then the argument that violence was suppressed rather than resolved is untouched.

The characterization of Tito himself isn't important (call him a benevolent strongman if you prefer - I don't have a horse in the race), other than to examine the role of a system which suppressed violence rather than resolved conflict.

"The issue is that violence is a poor metric for progress." Just to echo the commenter, I don't think Pinker is stating that humans are progressing in general - he is just stating that violence is decreasing. I also agree this is a measurable metric, that Pinker does well to argue for.

If he claims things "are getting better", I think he says that "violence is decreasing", where "violence" is a measure of worseness.

If we want to talk about progress, though, we would have to define what progress really means. Will Durant (from "The Lessons of History") says progress is more like the increasing ability of mankind to control his environment. If so, I would think there is some evidence for that.

In terms of social injustice, Will Durant also makes an argument that there will always be this. Power is always concentrated to the few (that's just how it works in order to have organization), and those not in power will always have some level of injustice. The amount of people in power and their motives can change depending on the era/civilization/society.

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