by cognisonance 23 Replies latest watchtower bible
I read the first link, I wonder if you have actually read the second one?
I am not qualified to comment on whether the data support the view that humans are becoming less belligerent or not. If you have read 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' in full you will know that it is full of evidence for an improvement in the human condition which is unaffected by any errors in statistics.
It is a compelling book that any ex-JW would benefit from reading.
Cofty,
I have have read some of, and skimmed the rest of, Silent Risk -- which are the unfinished technical derivations for his four more accessible books (Incerto). Reading time is always limited for me so I opted to skim the technical work than read through his four books. I always have too much to do, but enjoy being distracted by topics outside my main expertise. I first heard about Taleb's work on a financial investing forum talking about the risk of black swans (in that context, left fat tails in probabilistic Stock return models).
I thought it was interesting that Taleb was warning of the lack of rigor among scientists by and large, and social scientists in particular, using Pinker as the poster child. I have not read The Better Angels of Our Nature, only watching the related video I posted originally in this thread.
It's not that the evidence Pinker provides is of no value. It's helpful and ex-JWs should be aware of it since it paints a vasty different picture than JW dogma. However the issue is with Pinker's use of that data to make inferences that lack statistical rigor. Taleb says he doesn't have enough data to make the claim he is making. He even names two fallacies after Pinker:
Pinker Fallacy 1: Mistaking fact-checking for statistical estimation (page 66, Silent Risk).
Pinker Fallacy 2: Underestimating the tail risk and needed sample size for thick-tailed variables from inference from similar thin-tailed ones (page 67 Silent Risk).
And Taleb also uses this example to show how Pinker's arguments can be flawed:
One often reads in the press that "more Americans slept with Kim Kardashian than died of Ebola" or the usually characteristically fooled by randomness Steven Pinker who wrote: "Terrorism kills far fewer people than falls from ladders - the real threat is our overreaction". Aside from ignoring the fact that it is vigilance and overreaction that lower such casualties, there is a method to compare risks without falling for naive empiricism.
... Take a number K, say 100,000. which has a higher probability of exceeding K, Ebola victims or #x : the number of people who spent significant time between bedsheets with Kim Kardashian? Likewise the probability of the number of people falling from ladders tripling next year is of the order of 10^(-14) (it is subjected to the Chernoff bound, about which more next chapter) so its probability of exceeding K is astronomically lower, while the number of American killed by terrorists is not subjected to such bounds -- Silent Risk page 11.
Here is a more direct analysis on Pinker's argument from Taleb: The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do The Data Really Say?
But even Taleb's analysis runs contrary to JW dogma (by refuting the notion that the world is getting worse): "Our data do not support the presence of any particular trend in the number of armed conflicts over time. Humanity seems to be as belligerent as always. No increase, nor decrease."
The frequency of wars isn't really the point.
The decline in violence and murder rates in society and the increase in personal safety, human rights, rights of children, end to slavery, cruel punishments and many more factors make this the best time to live in all of human history.
