Yesterday it was Ray Kurzweil. Today it is Steven Pinker. What is it with these people trying to reassure us that the world is getting better for the average person? They’re the real world equivalent of the ‘This is fine’ dog.
Look, I agree with them: in many ways, the world is gradually getting better for some of us, and slowly, increasingly more people are acquiring greater advantages. I am personally in a pretty comfortable position, and I’m sure life is even better for oblivious buffoons hired by google to mumble deepities, or for Harvard professors. Pinker and Kurzweil even make the same trivial argument that it’s all the fault of the news:
News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall to zero, there will be always be headlines to click on. The data show — since the Better Angels of Our Nature was published — rates of violence continue to go down.
So, the solution would be…to start reporting every police officer who is not shot? Balance the bad news with a representative amount of good news? Does anyone wonder why the news reports more crimes than flowers blossoming in the park? I agree with Pinker that news priorities are often a mess — he makes the point that a single mass shooting gets disproportionate attention compared to mass of single shootings, and I’d add that it’s ridiculous that ‘celebrities’ get so much press — but there’s a reason for that. Telling me that Joe is fine is not something I need to worry about, or should do anything about; telling me that Jane has been beaten up tells me there’s a problem, and that something needs to be done. I don’t want loudspeakers and sirens in town constantly announcing “THERE IS NO TORNADO” with a “THERE IS A TORNADO” inserted a couple of times a year.
The purpose of the news is not to give a statistically accurate picture of the world. OK?
A statistically accurate picture of the world is an excuse to hide behind numbers rather than to pay attention to individual lives. There’s a place for careful actuarial assessment and there’s a place for ‘WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING’. You have to keep both positions in perspective, or it leads to misleading assessments like this one.
Belluz: But as you mentioned, there’s been an uptick in war deaths driven by the staggeringly violent ongoing conflict in Syria. Does that not affect your thesis?
Pinker: No, it doesn’t affect the thesis because the rate of death in war is about 1.4 per 100,000 per year. That’s higher than it was at the low point in 2010. But it’s still a fraction of what it was in earlier years.
1.4 per 100,000 is objectively better than 1.5 per 100,000. I get that. 1.3 per 100,000 would be better still. We can dream of a day when it reaches 0 per 100,000. But how will we get there, if as the number gets smaller and smaller, we tell ourselves that this is fine, see, the number is tiny, and it’s getting tinier, and so we should talk about it less and less? This is a recipe for complacency. And it leads to horrible ideas like this:
Belluz: Another thing we often lose sight of is that, in terms of global and local violence, terrorism and war deaths are negligible.
Pinker: Yes, the rate of death in homicides far exceeds the rate of death in terrorism at a local level, and for that matter, in wars. More people die in homicides than in wars globally by far.
No. No death is negligible.
What his numbers mean is that in an average group of 71,000 people, every year one person is going to be taken aside to be shot, or have a bomb dropped on them, or to step on a landmine, and just generally to die a horrible, violent, bloody death, and we shouldn’t worry about it, because hey look, 70,999 of us are still here! And of course we assume that we will be one of the survivors, because we know that college professors are statistically even less likely to die in wars.
It’s also misleading because the odds are not uniform. I have no anxiety about the insignificant number of college professors getting killed in a war, but I might have very different priorities if I were a citizen trying to survive in Syria or Iraq. It’s extremely easy to sit back in our comfy chairs and cite low numbers in some places, as if that makes the problem go away.
It also ignores the general misery. Being a refugee, or living in poverty, are co-factors in the general statistics of death. That 1.4 per 100,000 is a small number, but it’s much larger if you’re a member of a group that is already enriched in suffering — these deaths are not uniformly distributed, and they’re spread around in a way that is grossly unfair.
The numbers are not sufficient. We need to look at the problems.
Pinker’s solution seems to be to not talk about the problems, which doesn’t seem to me to be a strategy for solutions.
I think there should be less coverage of rampage shooters. If there are 30 deaths in a day from individual homicides in the US, and five people died in a mass shooting, it’s not clear why the mass shooting gets 100 times more coverage than individual homicides.
Hey, Professor Pinker! I’m raising my hand! Me! Me! I know the answer!
It’s because they’re anomalous and extreme. They may be more rare than single homicides, but as long as we’re focusing on statistics, look at this:
Look at the US numbers. Norway has a higher homicide fatality rate for its population, but we’ve got that weird thing of much higher rates of men grabbing an assault rifle and running amok in a school or shopping mall. Why? Shouldn’t we care about that? Shouldn’t we try to do something about this specific, anomalous problem in our society?
The problem really is not that the news is reporting them. The focus of the problem should be on addressing the cultural sickness that has turned too many American men into gun-fondling assholes who explode into rampages.
Pinker also tries to claim that it’s also the fault of the media, because murdering a lot of people is a way to get your name in the news and become famous. This is also ridiculous. It ignores deeper sociological problems to claim that these are purely vanity killings. You might also ask what there is about our culture that makes the trivial fame of getting your name mentioned a bunch of times on CNN so important to us.
And then there’s … this. Ugh. So much wrong.
There is a concern over the phenomenon of depolicing — of police being less willing to intervene in potentially violent incidents out of a fear they’ll be accused of racism. There’s reason to think that this phenomenon, post-Ferguson, has been one of the contributors to the increase [in violence] from 2014 to 2015. I think it’s not addressed by liberal politicians and if they pretend it doesn’t exist at all, they’ve created an opening for the right to exploit the issue.
Whoa. Those damned liberal politicians. Don’t they realize that the real problem here is that the police are worried about being accused of racism? That the reason that 990 people were shot by police in 2015 or that the reason Philando Castile or Sandra Bland or any of those other human beings were murdered had nothing to do with racism, or trigger-happy militarized cops, but were a consequence of insufficient aggression by the police, who are intimidated by fear of being called a mean name?
You know what I think is going on? That after centuries of oppression and exploitation, after so many years of abuse and violence, economic and physical, that was not reported by the institutional media that simply took it for granted as a universal property of a racist society, rising awareness of inequity is making people question the role of the enforcers. It’s funny how smashing shackles is reported as violence, but placing them on others is law and order.
But jesus fuck, white people: you’re embarrassing me. They “fear they’ll be accused of racism”, and that’s the real problem, rather than fear you’ll be shot at a traffic stop for a broken tail light.
PZ, that chart shows the fatality rate from mass shootings with Breivik’s horrific mass murder distorting the chart. The US homicide rate is higher than Norway’s.
I know. But even trying to bend over backwards to show the worst case still leaves the US hanging out there as an outlier.
The difference between progressives and many others is that progressives measure the world against what it could be instead of against what it has been.
Measured against what it has been, our current world is probably the best ever, on average, for most people. Not that there aren’t geographic or socioeconomic subsets for which it has been better, and even disturbing regressive trends in some places.
Measured against what it could be, there is a lot of room for improvement. Really, NEED for improvement.
Need for improvement is not the same as EVERYTHING BEING ON FIRE. Progressives sometimes overlook this. Or, like PZ, they confuse having a sense of historical perspective with being complacent.
And please — “no death is negligible”? Such silly rhetoric is beneath you, PZ. A given number of deaths can be negligible in the big picture of how many people die.
August
Something about this argument feels like the mirror image of Newt Gingrich arguing that, even though the stats say violent crime is going down, what’s important is the feeling people have that it’s going up. I think it’s absolutely the job of journalism to put the facts in context, which includes looking at statistics at the right level.
And of course you could easily invert the mass shooting argument: because they’re so much more common in the US you’d expect them to get less notice. Which I guess is true, in a way – the coverage per mass shooting is certainly less than the coverage of the one mass shooting we’ve had in NL in the past years.
Things are better. The world today is better (for most people, most of the time) than it’s ever been in the past.
But it’s not good enough. We could do so much better. We shouldn’t judge ourselves by the standards of the past, or even the standards of today. We need to hold our present up against the future so that we can make the best future for everyone.
k5083 #3
Bless your heart.
Something somehow tells me that the “Israel – 2 mass shootings” stat omits what happens to Palestinians.
The Mexico numbers also look particularly questionable – drug wars don’t count either?.
I think this is what Stalin meant when he said that “the death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is just a statistic”
Not OK.
That actually is (one of) the purposes. It’s not the only one, but it definitely belongs there.
Anything will be used by some asshole(s) to excuse their behavior. So?
And the way you keep those in perspective is you keep them roughly in the same place.
For example:
I regularly hear in the news here what the current yearly number of traffic deaths is, and usually it’s trending downwards. And pretty much in the next sentence, I hear about efforts to get the number smaller still. In the same news program that will occasionally report on traffic accidents. (Incidentally, between writing this and posting this, the radio started doing something along those lines, wrt. truck accidents, because unfortunately, they’re up 4% this time.)
What I think is bad is making news into an entertainment program. None of our major news programs seems to do that, but I hear it’s fairly common in the US.
And sometimes, the stats are the actual point of the news, such as reporting about Trump’s latest lies about Germany. No, pretty much nobody thinks it’s a catastrophe, and actually, if you ignore the part of the numbers originating just of the fact that someone might be here not quite legally, then the crime numbers have pretty much not changed at all. The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. (And most of the ones having made the news at the beginning of the year (if I recall correctly) have been here for longer, and for that matter, are a completely different population from Syrians – they’re North Africans, presumably with French as their first or second language.)
Another problem with the romantic idea that the world is going to hell in a hand basket is that it can become a self fulfilling prophesy. There are a lot of people that will just give up and jump into the basket. Like the last guy in a gang bang who reasons ‘She’s fucked anyway, I might as well get mine’
How charitable of you to rationalize the people who slip through the cracks.
“Screw you, I’ve got mine.”
According to the Bureau of Statistics there were 26.4 million traffic stops in 2011, involving about 12% of all drivers (13% of all black drivers). The vast majority of people, even black people, are NOT shot at traffic stops. However, if people are afraid they’ll be shot at a traffic stop they are more likely to run which will increase their chances of being shot.
Pinker isn’t suggesting ignoring the problem, he’s suggesting that media attention exacerbates the problem.
The world is getting better. Now that we solved the easiest/worst problems we can go solve the next set of problems, and make the world even better!
Pinker seems to get stuck at the full-stop. Most people I know who parrot his lines are able to continue on with the progressive goal.
Hey, I’ll try that line out at the next funeral I go to. I’m sure people will appreciate it.
“Sure, your mom’s life expectancy was 5.42 years less than white US citizens and she had a disproportionate disease burden and was victimized by violent crime at a far greater rate, but when we average things out and include all the privileged people in the world, things look great!”
Isn’t there a case to be made for the culture of fear that the U.S. seems to possess being created, or exacerbated by the media’s constant focus on blood and violence?
It seems to be a no win situation with regards to the media: downplay the horror incidents and you promote complacency. Emphasis them and promote overreaction and societal-scale othering.
@11, kevinalexander:
And the problem with the romantic idea that the world is growing better and better (whatever you, personally, mean by “better”) all on its own is that it becomes a reverse self-fulfilling prophecy. People pat themselves on the shoulder, stop worrying about what’s wrong, and any activism towards as well as social improvement itself stops.
Isn’t the Big Idea behind Pinker’s Better Angels the vaunted SELF-DOMESTICATION? That society (somehow) makes our fellow man gradually less violent? Well, what happens if we all read self-congratulatory narratives by overprivileged, reality, disconnected Harvard professors and stop working towards a more livable, peaceful world because the majority thinks improvement is out of the individual hand? That improvement occurs only through impersonal forces like education, technology, economics or genetics?
Oh, and Kevin Alexander? Maybe try for a more considerate analogy next time. Pharyngula has many readers who have been the victims of sexual assault.
I deeply apologize, it was inconsiderate. I was going for accuracy and didn’t think it through.
And what does little or no attention do to “the problem”? Guilty cops are getting slaps on the wrist left and right even with this problem “exacerbation” already.
What people aren’t getting is that the strict truthfulness of “the world is getting statistically better” doesn’t matter. That’s a hard verifiable fact. The problem is what Pinker seems to be suggesting we do with bad news, which seems to me he’s proposing to mitigate their spread.
I am a fan of those types of articles because they show that we can tackle major problems, that we are making things better, and that society is not irreparably broken. I think we live in a society obsessed with negativity and pessimism, to the point that we think things are spiraling out of control and getting worse and that nothing barring radical moves is acceptable. It’s what has brought us Trump. A belief that the world is falling apart and the current order is impotent to make anything better and actually complicit in making them worse. I think it’s important to see how much better things are getting and how bad things have been in the past to give us some perspective, and to show us that we are capable of making the world A LOT better though reasonable, adult approaches.
And then, of course, there’s the elephant in the room no one has yet brought up:
What makes you all think history is a straight line? I’m sure if you had asked the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Mayans, the Sumerians, the Çatalhöyük people, etc. etc., they would’ve told you the world is growing better all the time, too!
But then it didn’t, and they were all raped and murdered to death or perished through floods and droughts, followed by multiple dark ages.
The Pinker bros should put away his silly book and give Canticle for Leibowitz a good long read instead. History is not so much a straight line than a cycle. History repeats, and so does collapse.
The Mayans depleted their numbers even before the conquistadors wiped out the last vestiges of their empire by altering their local climate through massive deforestation. The Easter Island people likewise destroyed themselves through resource descent.
In a time where our fragile globalized industrial society is existentiall threatened by ACC and dwindling oil reserves, how can you seriously put your fingers in your ears and pretend things are looking just rosy?
I mean, it is kind of evidence that the world is getting better that cops that murder people are at least getting noticed and people are outraged by it.
It’s damning by faint praise, but since they don’t keep a record of any of this, I’d not be even remotely surprised if cops killed just as many innocent people 20 years ago, but it didn’t make headlines and no one outside of a much smaller social justice network and immediate family knew anything about the outrages, but Rodney King didn’t happen in a vacuum.
It strikes me that this whole debate in the US media is happening as a response to the rhetoric we have seen at the recent party conventions. The Trump Party is keen to make out that the world, or at least that bit of it sandwiched between Canada and Mexico, is getting worse and only they can make it better. The Democratic Party is putting out the opposite message – you’re great already and getting better, more of the same please.
I wonder whether the contributions of people like Pinker might not be helpful in this context – as voices to dispel the fearmongering of the Trumpists and their mouthpieces at Fox News. Is the message not “don’t run around like headless chickens and vote for the demagogues”, rather than “sit back and do nothing”? I can see that such messages might endorse complacency in certain circumstances, but from what I can tell the public conversation over there is far more likely to spill over into frantic poor decision-making than languid indolence at the moment.
When I remarked on yesterday’s Kurzweil thread that “This is similar to the thesis of that over-rated buffoon Pinker’s recent book, isn’t it?”, little did I know that Pinker is apparently still flogging the book’s thesis even though it’s been out for well over a year.
Can’t he find some new buffoonery to busy himself with?
Though my son-in-law’s special expertise is in Lenin (about whom he has published a number of books, based on a huge amount of archival research, including but not limited to reading many, many years worth of Pravda), he knows a lot about Stalin too (and has, again, a huge amount of archival research about Stalin under his belt, as well as translating one volume of Stalin’s letters). He has never found any evidence that Stalin actually ever wrote (or said) anything particularly like that phrase.
#22
I’m not intimately familiar with the attitudes of the other peoples you mentioned, but the Romans most definitely were not convinced that everything was fine and getting better. Quite the reverse in fact. A feeling that their own age was a corrupt, decadent and inferior one permeates almost all Roman writers from the middle of the second century BC. The classic formulation was that the wealth and foreign influences that winning their Empire brought in to Rome were destroying the good, stern, frugal, old-fashioned virtues of the Roman people.
Ironically the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon voiced the opinion, common among 18th century aristocrats, that Rome under the “five good emperors” in the 2nd century AD was the happiest and most prosperous period of all human history. A period in which Tacitus and Juvenal were penning bitterly cynical attacks on all that Rome had apparently achieved. Juvenal’s tenth satire pokes fun at the emptiness of all human aspiration in fact.
So no, a whiggish conviction that history is the story of inevitable cumulative progress is not a feature of all human societies.
PZ Myers @ 2
If we’re bending over backwards, the US isn’t an outlier. From 2009-2015 looking at the US and the 28 EU countries, the US ranked 11th per capita in mass shooting fatalities and 12th per capita in mass shooting frequency. LA Times op ed from gun rights advocate.
Ironically, the gun nut’s point is based on a valid point- the main reason the rate of US mass shootings is so anomalous is because we don’t categorize them as terrorism. The rate of both US homicides and US shooting homicides as a whole, however, remains double or triple similar countries and is closer to the rate of the countries it has destabilized in Latin America and the Middle East.
Hey, August:
What if that death is yours?
How many of those 1.4/100,000 faced that oncoming bullet or falling bomb and said, “oh, well, my death doesn’t matter”?
qwints: did you just seriously cite John Fucking Lott as a source? You have got to be kidding.
If you actually want to improve everyone’s lives, you should not concentrate on the anomalous and extreme, but rather on the mundane and ignored. If you could magically eliminate either all individual homicides, or all mass killings, are you really saying you would pick mass killings? That is reprehensible (given the current statistics).
I understand that in the study of language development in children, Pinker is, or at least was, well regarded. Why that entitles him to spout off on other topics is beyond me. He is particularly entertaining, in a dubious kind of way, on the topic of women, where he appears to consider himself liberal and enlightened. (Spoiler alert: he’s not.) Enjoy this spirited defense of Larry Summers, just for instance:
https://newrepublic.com/article/68044/sex-ed
The analysis of his prejudices I leave an an exercise for the reader.
@PZ, yeah, as what a gun nut bending over backward could do with the statistics.
as actually practiced “the News” is not strictly about information it is about circulation, readers, listeners, eyeballs. It is not an objective study though some do try for objectivity.
It is highly selective in what it covers and how it covers it. If it bleeds it leads is a true thing.
What I hear this Professor guy and the other ivory tower fool saying is really leaning toward is advocating ignorance to we can have a rosier view because this is “the best of all possible worlds” and getting better all the time!
most of us the world population are in the same big boat we are racing some where some say it is some human Nirvana of long life and prosperity for all. The boat has a large hole in it and is leaking rather badly but if we keep the engine running flat out we can keep afloat until we reach that receding shore but we do not have an infinite fuel tank and we are still sinking slowly.
uncle frogy
chris61, #13
Which is the same as and just as bad as being shot at a traffic stop. What’s your point?
Also, vast majority of black people not being shot during traffic stops means nothing. The problem remains that black people are regularly shot by police. How generous of white supremacy to spare the lives of the vast majority of black people. Black people should be grateful police aren’t killing more of them!
By doing what? Reporting it?
Gee, Pinker wants nothing to change, because he doesn’t want problems reported. The only way for a problem to be solved is to face up to it, acknowledge it, and then fix it, with follow through to make sure the repair works. Which is what any quality system does.
Hiding the problems solves nothing, and the problems continue. But, by privileged logic, since it doesn’t effect you, the problems are meaningless.
He’s sounding like Dawkins on feminism: something’s not as bad as it was, so shut up about it. Last winter, our flat roof leaked, so we had it recovered. This stopped 95% of the leak, but it still dripped in heavy rain. Should we have not had another repair to fix the cracked wall? After all, it only leaked during storms.
I do think Pinker is right that the world, on the long term, has been getting better for the average person. But it’s not automatic, it only happens because we pay attention to the ways it is awful, and people fight against them. Just accept things are going in the right direction and they easily turn around.
To the point where I think the average trend may now be starting to get worse again, because we completely missed out with climate change and all the social pressures resulting from it.
@27, cartomancer:
Pfft, so what, conceited elites preach doom ‘n’ gloom, what else is new? How’s that any different from today’s conservative elites who bemoan the social degradation brought on by desegregationists/hippies/SJWs/etc.?
But what would be the consensus among the Roman plebeians had they had the Internet? Would we read exuberant posts about the wonders Rome brought to the world? “In the old days, it took so and so much time to cross Europe. With our streets it takes but a fraction of that!”
Humans are doing well enough that an acknowledgement or measurement of how well we are doing is a de facto demonstration that we have no excuse for not doing better than we currently are. We can imagine things being better, and there are no significant barriers to doing better. Or, as Bill and Ted said, “Be Excellent to Each Other”.
Wait, it’s Steve “the 20th century was really peaceful, just ignore WWI and II” Pinker?
PZ
That was my first thought as well. there are a lot of horrible things that can happen to you before death. Those traumatised refugee kids I had in class, should we say that their lives are much better now than some years ago because they live in good material conditions and are out of the warzone?
+++
Chris 61
The vast majority of black churches were not blown up in Alabama.
The vast majority of black men was not lynched.
The vast majority of women are not raped.
Sheeesh, why do people always need to complain?
+++
I agree that statistics are a good way to keep the big picture in mind. That’s why I’m still more afraid of drunk drivers than Isis and not afraid at all of any given muslim qua muslim. It still doesn’t mean things are fine.
@35 36 41
Clearly none of you actually read the Pinker interview. (bolding below is mine)
Pinker: I certainly think publishing manifestos, videos, photos, and having endless analysis and discussion is encouraging [violent actors]. News should not be repressed, but there should be a sense of proportionality in terms of what the human cost is.
Pinker: Pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. While we have to be realistic about changes both up and down in rates of violence, we have to remind ourselves that violence is a problem we can deal with, that we have dealt with, and what’s important is to look at it realistically. To keep track of when it goes up, when it goes down, and what causes it to go up and go down and do more of what causes it to go down. We know over the last couple of years that it has gone down, so we should figure out what we did to achieve that and do more of it.
Pinker:There is a concern over the phenomenon of depolicing — of police being less willing to intervene in potentially violent incidents out of a fear they’ll be accused of racism. There’s reason to think that this phenomenon, post-Ferguson, has been one of the contributors to the increase [in violence] from 2014 to 2015
and finally
Pinker:If I were to give advice to politicians — it would be to seek some balance, and to not allow there to be an impression that the country is falling apart or that we’re in the middle of a crime wave, because we’re not. They should acknowledge that there has been a small change in a bad direction and make sure it doesn’t get out of hand — and therefore to balance the dangers of police shooting innocent people, which really has to be reduced, but at same time not to let that turn into a push back on policing.
And today on Newsradio 4: There has been another mass shooting at the shopping mall. Police report 5 dead, 12 injured. Steven Pinker would like you to remember that there were also 4 people today who died in homicides, 7 in car crashes and 2 from work related accidents. One person fell into the river playing Pokemon Go. Also 96 people died from cancer, 196 form cardiovascular disease and 374 from being plain old. The overall human cost of mass shootings is therefore negligible.
I’m pretty sure we’ll get empirical evidence about “depolicing” in a country that locks up more people than anybody else and where you can be arrested for things the police in other countries don’t even bother writing tickets for any minute now.
If the police are being overly aggressive, as they are in the USA, how do you get them to become social workers rather than guns for hire?
Either provide an alternative, or you have nothing.
Explain away this problem. Castile had a license to carry a gun. It was never shown to the police officer. Why was he shot, and the Chief saying there wasn’t a problem?
Link. A dead man due to being black with a legal gun being shot dead is being defended? The Chief should be in jail for aiding and abetting a criminal act….
Open carry laws are going to give police a lot of excuses to shoot more people.
No, this is a good point with some research backing it up. It’s like the suicide contagion effect, but with copycat mass murders. The solution isn’t a lack of reporting, it’s just that you don’t spend so much damn time talking about the murderer. Don’t publish his name. Don’t publish his life story. Tell us about the victims instead.
Also, I really agree with Pinker’s point that newspapers focus too much on negative events. It would be nice to see more reporting about what communities have done to reduce problems. Just as an example, I remember a good article about housing-first advocates in Utah and a nice one about drug treatment courts in Colorado. More of that please!
PZ, with due respect, that graph was created by the gun lobbyists to make the US look better than it is. They have drawn on outliers to make the US look better. The reason Norway runs so high is that even though they have had only one mass shooting in that time frame (cf. 133 in the US), it was a particularly nasty one with 77 fatalities, and then by making it per capita, it says more about Norway’s small population (5.2 million). If Breivik had caught a plane and gone in his rampage in Germany instead of Norway, the same number of deaths would only have counted as 0.09 per 100K, and which is 40% less than the US rate.
A far better indication can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/upshot/compare-these-gun-death-rates-the-us-is-in-a-different-world.html?_r=0
Which clearly shows how bizarrely off the scale the US is on gun violence.
We won’t get there by telling ourselves that we can and should talk about it less as the number gets smaller. What puzzles me is why you seem to think that Pinker is implying that we should do this. I read the entire interview and I did not take away from it that Pinker was saying that we should not work to or do little to reduce the numbers even further.
We need to have a balance in the reporting that allows for reporting on the trends, which do in fact indicate that the world is overall less violent than in the past. Without this, do we not allow for a distorted image that provides the fuel used by demagogues like Trump to successfully play upon peoples fears and whip them up based on these fears, which are themselves based on the false view that things are so terrible that extreme measures are necessary?
So, in short, if a black person is gunned down by police, that’s OK, because we’re a lot better than 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years ago, when dinosaurs were around and we weren’t or something.
But, Kent State was unacceptable, as they were white students.
Mass shootings are OK, as long as it isn’t the professors writing the report’s families, see point(ish) 1.
Rather than try to improve, we’re better now than 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years ago, before the sun lit up.
Or something.
Excuse me, I have to prepare for my rampage.
Fortunately, it shan’t involve violence, it’ll involve an empty pantry, nearly empty freezer and nearly empty refrigerator, so I’m going to rampage those store shelves and deplete my debit card by a great deal.
Of course, by their standards, my empty pantry and fridge are OK, as a month ago, the shelves were all full and hence, empty doesn’t count, as that’s an occasional thing.
Or perhaps, we should invite these gentlemen over to my house on Saturday and I won’t go shopping, but will lock them in to share a bowl of ramen soup and we can talk about ignoring outlier situations.*
*My food stocks are in such a deplorable state due to a recent injury that made it too painful to go shopping and my wife is disabled and unable to shop.
But, that shouldn’t be mentioned, as it’s a rarer thing than when I’m able and hence, doesn’t count.
Or something.
@49
Because then we’d be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The level of cop violence against minorities are indeed so terrible that radical measures are needed, as is the level of innocent civilians we murder every year for being born in the wrong country, for example.
No, history is no more a cycle than it is a straight line. Some types of event occur multiple times in much the same way, others are truly novel. Population increase and technical advance, while not absolutely monotonic, have been very nearly so on the global scale for the last few tens of thousands of years at least. Collapse, when it occurs, has always been local or regional. With the twin possibilities of catastrophic climate change and nuclear war, we finally have the real possibility of a global anthropogenic collapse. With the advance of scientific and technical knowledge, we also have the real – if considerably less likely – possibility of a decent life for all.
Rats ! So close !
leerudolph @26: thanks for the correction.
chris61, #42
The dude is oozing privilege from every pore.
Also, he’s just saying vague obvious shit.
“We have to control crime and police violence, but let’s not get carried away.”
Woah, deep insights there, Steve. And thanks for the specific detailed plan.
Actually read what Pinker has said and don’t use the least charitable reading of his thesis. This is kinda basic and the only way to have a useful discussion. Many people are going by hear say and motivated reasoning. I have his book on the shelf and he is not an idiot claiming that we don’t have to work hard to overcome the problems of our time. He’s simply trying to map out developments over time using the data he thinks is the best. Attack him on this if you find it lacking, he deserves to be taken as the serious scholar he is. This sort of anti-intellectual lazy thinking should be unacceptable whit in a free-thought context.
The things people are talking about on this tread, the problems of police violence in an american context, falls outside of the scope of his book and he makes no explicit claims about it. Claiming that statistics doesn’t matter to how you experience reality is beside the point. That is the material which he works whit and he can’t be expected to explain every nuance of every situation whit his material now can he? Can we get beyond this useless bipolar thinking?
Has anyone else noticed this strange property shared by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven Pinker? Nothing they write is to be taken at face value, as the plain words written on the screen: they must be interpreted charitably, and with a goodly dose of inferred, imposed assumptions about their intent, because what they plainly say is so patently horrible that we should know they can’t possibly mean it.
Honestly, I did not find Pinker’s message to be insensitive as you describe. Do I think he could have worded his thoughts better? Absolutely. Nonetheless, I did not get the sense that he was callous to all homocidal deaths currently occurring. Also, I don’t think he was advocating a “do nothing” attitude given the global reduction in violent deaths. I think he was spot on in being critical of the media hyper-sensationalizing a mass shooting or terrorist incident. He was trying to place matters into perspective instead of diminishing the pain and suffering of even a single Syrian being killed.
I can’t remember where I read this but if current CO2 emission rates continue, we will reach a point of no return in regards to water shortages worldwide due to drought. And the Middle East will be among the regions most severely effected. Think of the fallout as many thousands of Syrians and others perish (i.e. Starvation, thirst, malnutrition, disease) due to lack of clean drinking water. That will not be breaking news tonite on Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room. More people will likely painfully die via climate change than from all terrorist acts and US homocides combined. Pinker should have stated this in order for his message to better resonate with us.
Pinker’s thesis also seems to have yielded an unexpected positive message. If global violence is on the decline, that has to imply that nurture has and is shifting the moral zeitgeist. We are treating each other better and this will progress further. This totally contradicts Pinker’s commitment to a rigid human nature fixed by our genes. His evo-psych arguments seems to have been flushed away.
So.. Pinker’s argument is something along the lines that, since domestic terrorists only killed 3 more people (I think that was the number, 45 versus 48?) than Muslims (in the time frame this statistic comes from), but it took them 3 times as many attempts, we should remove the term “successful” from the statistical analysis of domestic terrorism? Or, what exactly? Since, I mean, statistically having to try 3 times as often to do the same damage isn’t terribly “successful”, right? Its not the number of attacks that matter, just how many people got killed, per attack, right, right? By the same token, why worry about an increase from around 50 militia groups, to 276 of them over the last 8 years, or the fact that it seems like this is a reaction to the GOP pandering to the bloody batshit nuts people in the country, then failing to stop the gays, impeach the president, or anything else they claimed they would do, once they had the house, or congress, or… if Trump gets in office, almost certainly the presidency either. Yep.. those statistics are meaningless. and not at all scary, Just how “successful” the freaks are, or not.
Aargh!
ragdish
I agree thought i don’t think that he has ever really denied the role of nurture. He has found himself in a position in which he thinks that he has to push hard on the biological foundations of our psychological make up. I think he has a point, but for me that is a personal experience after working whit violent people, having endless talks about morality whit inmates makes it difficult to think that people “really” choose to be how they are in any simple way.
But people are capable of change in fundamental ways (i have seen it), we just don’t really know enough about how to help them do that. And people are different and have different needs. Some need medication and deep soul searching. Some sadly seem to lack the basic neurological makeup which would allow them to function smoothly in a complex social environment. People are working on these questions seriously, most people just never read about them.
Kagehi
That is not Stevens conclusions from his work, that is your lazy interpretation. I’m sorry to say so but you have to put some time in to it and meet the arguments on it’s own premises. He is just a guy whit some data and a conclusion, it’s truth or falsehood lies in the actual arguments and the material he uses to back it up.
One should view Pinker as a slightly higher brow Malcolm Gladwell. Just deep enough for a Ted talk, not deep enough to read.
That plus a catchy name goes a long way. Chomsky also criticized The Better Angels of Our Nature in his talk with Krauss.
PZ interprets Pinker’s comment about shooters as “Pinker’s solution seems to be to not talk about the problems”.
But Pinker doesn’t say anything like that.
Pinker says “less”, not “none”. And I don’t mean “less talking about problems”. I mean less talking about one problem VS another thing that is also a problem. Pinker says: “it’s not clear why the mass shooting gets 100 times more coverage than individual homicides”
And Pinker also says: “I do think events have to be reported, but the coverage should be in greater proportion to the actual human cost. […] News should not be repressed, but there should be a sense of proportionality in terms of what the human cost is.”.
Ok. To be fair, my, and to some extent, PZ’s view on the matter was.. somewhat simplistic. All I can say is, I am used to the quality of the people usually discussed here. lol
That said, trying to get the press to spend less time reporting “some” things compared to others would be like trying to get an evangelical to spend less time talking about the Bible. There seems to be a presumption inherent in the expressed solution, i.e., reporting events with accurate representation of the human cost, which suggests that news agencies, papers, etc. are… excuse me while I laugh… not “biased” politically, or financially, etc. in favor of certain narratives. Sadly, the fact is, almost none of the mainstream media, if any of them, (and, ironically, Palin is only right for the wrong reasons, and in entirely the wrong directions on this, to use one example of people talking about it), is interested in representing the entirety of the facts, never mind, as you say, “in proper proportion to the real effects”, at all, in any way shape or form.
Some are absolutely blatant about it, cough, FOX, cough. Others.. just flat out won’t mention people, companies, or situations which might cause issues with their funders and advertisers. Still others simply are too lazy to question the existing narrative, and/or focus on the same things, purely as a defense mechanism – if everyone is talking about it, it must be important. If no one is talking about it, then its probably not worth looking into.
Knowing the problem exists, recognizing that it needs to be fixed, and even knowing the causes, do jack all, to be frank, to provide and idea about how to actually fix it.
Well, save for the obvious – the main media sources are dying from this foolish way of doing things, to be replaced with alternatives, most of them on the internet. Unfortunately, some of those presenting these alternatives are, if anything even **less** interested in the accurate representations, real facts, or proportional representation of human costs. Some seem to actually have a damned agenda, or something, which actively denies any of these things, when it serves them. And, they are more than happy to claim that blogs like this one are doing the same thing they are.