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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature has been pretty thoroughly debunked here:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-...

It's hard to take that article seriously when it's surrounded by anti-vaccine stuff[1] and various conspiracy theories[2][3][4].

I tried reading the actual content, but the unnecessary verbiage and hostility forced me to skim it. The counterarguments I did read are mostly FUD. For example: How can we know that people in prehistoric tribes were likely to die from violence? Well, there's an entire field of forensic anthropology that's up to the task. Pinker's just citing the experts.

The claim that Pinker misconstrued numbers particularly annoyed me. If we want to compare violence across societies, we need to compare homicide rates, not the absolute numbers. Pinker rightly acknowledges this, but the authors of this article claim only absolute numbers matter.

And throughout the piece, the authors try to push their own agenda. Something about modern society corrupting humankind. It quickly grows tiresome to read.

I'm sure there's a decent critique of Pinker's book somewhere, but your link isn't it.

1. http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-australias-vaccine-mafia...

2. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-walls-are-crumbling-down-ar...

3. http://www.globalresearch.ca/just-as-isil-gets-exposed-as-a-...

4. http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-killings-terrorism-or-fal...

I second this.

Whenever this book comes up there are comments about it being debunked and Pinker cherry-picking sources, but I have yet to find a serious scholarly critique.

I would seriously love to read a view from, say, a professional historian as to pinker's methods.

If anyone knows a good non-wingnut counterpoint please tell.

The wikipedia article[1] of the book contains several quotes with references to negative criticism that look fairly credible to me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature...

Thanks for this. The article has grown since I last checked dome years ago. The quote about non-combatant deaths struck me as particularly interesting. I look forward to reading further on the subject.

Edit: Disregard, it seems as though the book does take a scientific approach.

From the comments I am reading here I am gathering that Pinker's work is exploratory and not scientific (keep in mind that I have not read it myself). If that is the case then there are no grounds for a counterpoint.

Exploratory works can be used as a framework on which to build points and counterpoints, but attempting to disprove them is a fundamental error.

All it comes down to is this default argumentative state that the internet seems to have.

I've read the book and would not call it exploratory at all--it is lengthy and exhaustive. I found myself skimming over additional supporting data in many cases.

I'm most interested in accusations that he cherry-picked his sources or data, and I haven't seen any of these backed up. (Other than rambling rants like the above "criticism" which says that adjusting for world population is "massaging the numbers".)

Edit: typos

That article is a serious scholarly critique, did you read it?

The authors are not affiliated with the site, the website just hosts a mirror of the text. The anti-vac nonsense is nonsense, no argument there.

The authors have a perspective that's much different from Pinker's, but it's no more ideological. Much of the critique is about the framing and assumptions made by Pinker -- which they strongly disagree with -- not so much about the facts themselves. You can create any kind of narrative by "citing the experts", but of course not every narrative is equally valid.

It's not true that the authors claim modern society is corrupting mankind. However, they are contemptuous of much of western foreign policy and they don't hide that. If you don't like their writing style that's fine, but that doesn't address the substance of the arguments.

It's also not true that the authors claim only the absolute numbers matter, and relative homicide rates do not. But they do object to treating the death toll of WW2 relative to the world population because they think the horror of WW2 doesn't logically depend on de population of india and china (and for the other reasons given in the article).

The article was originally published elsewhere (the original is linked), it has no relation to any other articles on that site.

I don't see any unnecessary verbiage, certainly none that would interfere with reading the article. Not having even read the article makes your handwavey dismissal of the it all the more specious.

Thanks for highlighting this, it was an interesting read if a little long. For those without much time probably the most interesting part is "Massaging the Numbers: Pinker’s Non-Proofs of Long-Term Violence Reduction".

This great article debunks a lot, but also acknowledges some important underlying points:

"Pinker has no serious evidence for ..., even though his sources’ evidence for the decline in homicide rates in European countries over many centuries is solid."

And some points in the article are also highly questionable:

"Perhaps most important, the absolute numbers of people who die because of armed conflicts are a first-order measure of the true human cost of violence, and we should never permit the moral gravity of this loss and suffering to be relativized by the juggling of numbers until they all match the same global population in any given year."

This would mean that we can never compare the past with the present...

Is murder only half as bad today compared to 100 years ago because now a murder only gets rid of 1/7billionth of the world population? In one sense, yes. In another sense, no, obviously not. Pointing out that this is dubious moral arithmetic is in my opinion completely fair, and the entire thesis of the decline of violence rests on the treatment of violence in this sense.

A lot of the murder decline over the last 60 years is fake. Improved trauma care means people don't die from wounds that were lethal not long ago. The violent assault rate has not actually gone down that much.

If that is true WHY is there such a serious decline from 1980s and early 1990s to today in the States?

Also why is there tremendous amount of police killings in the 1920s-1930s is so far above from what they were in the 1950s, 2000s+?

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