The Decreasing Violence of Man (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 21:55 (4594 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained


> > > > If you compute... crudely... the total number of dead in the 20th century (this includes ALL wars and genocides where figures are available) it amounts to 3 % of the CURRENT population of the world. (Of ~6Bn.)
> > > 
> > > The 20th century started at about 2 Bn. That is the figure to compute with.
> > > 
> > > When I was born the US had 125 million folks. By the end of WWII maybe 140 million. Judge WWII by those figures. You are a member of the population explosion.
> > 
> > The math is more complex than that, because the 180M violent deaths happened across 100 years. You start with 2Bn and a birthrate, nonviolent death rate. If you compute crudely on 2Bn, the total dead comes up to only 9%. (180M/2Bn)
> > 
> > You need stochastic stats (see calculus) to get accurate results. (Like what we do in insurance.)
> 
> .....because 180 million is better and more peaceful than 180 thousand... Enough said there. Statistically, a polar bear is the safest pet; would you buy one for your baby? I love how the author twists things around....Yes!! We ONLY killed 180 million... but that is OK because there were more people ALIVE to kill!! How wonderful are we!? Look at how peaceful we are that we ONLY killed between 3-9% of the global population!
> 
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> It is really scary how stupid some arguments are.-You really do seem to argue more with your heart.-If our goal is to answer the question, "Has man become more or less violent over time?" Than the only logical choice is to evaluate relative rates among people. To put it bluntly, yes, 180M is more peaceful than 180,000—It all depends upon the size of the pool. The computed violent death rates when looking at both archaeological evidence as well as what is known about existing non-state societies says that at some points in history—the rate of death for some tribal societies due to violence exceeded 64%. This of course was the highest part of the range. Averaged the death rate by violence is 15%. The dividing line Pinker chooses is the creation of state societies. -
If you have a tribe of 200, 100 men and women, and apply what is known about tribal warfare, that worst-case of 64% would mean that out of that 200, 128 were killed by violence. Using modern rates, you'd be looking at 10%. Meaning, only 20 would be killed by violence. And 10% is amortized using my own sloppy math of just dividing ALL violent deaths in the 20th century by the total number of people estimated to live at its beginning. -Yes. We are clearly doing something BETTER from our ancestors. 
Apply that rate to modern population numbers, using 2Bn as an unchanging number, and the argument is simple: instead of 180M dead in the 20th century you would be looking at 720M dead, not 180M. -If you focus on just the last 40 years, the death rate by violence has dropped below 1%. Even the total number killed in Iraq between US and Iraqis amounts to a total death rate 0.00000416 of the entire population. -If we kept the same death rate as our ancient ancestors, we'd be looking at losing 15% of our population yearly, or 900M/year. -When you look at those numbers (I ignore your claim of stupidity, because I think you're arguing with your heart, not your head), killing 10% of ourselves is an astonishing improvement over 15%. The end result: we ARE getting less violent. The rub is that its much easier for us to kill a ton of people. -Again, this doesn't change human nature, but the argument is pretty profound: we are obviously doing something different. What is it? Is it states?

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