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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined?
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Nope!
Far far less often.
Immediacy, more comprehensive reporting, and the complete lack of any kind of geographic filtration just make it seem like things are getting worse, when it is in fact the exact opposite. There's plenty of good statistical analysis to back it up, but the easier solution is to just pick up a copy of 'Better angels of our nature' by Stephen Pinker. It does a good job of breaking down the trends on different comparative perspectives, analyzing different interpretations of the data, and highlighting the most compelling conclusions we can draw from it: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
When I was growing up, we didn't really hear much about most murders or other violent crimes any further away than the next town over...
Se está interessado em se aprofundar no assunto de por que violência aumenta ou diminui. Sugiro ler esse livro do Steven Pinker que é referência mundial no assunto.
O livro foca mais no cenário global como um todo. Aonde a violência está diminuindo na média. Mas reconhece que em alguns focos na América latina violência está indo em direção contrária.
O livro é extremamente extenso, a explicação não é simples, são diversos fatores diferentes. Mas uma das teclas que ele bate bastante e nos parece bem familiar no Brasil, é um Estado ineficiente na área de segurança. Apesar de alguns políticos populistas estarem apelando pra sugestão de que deveria ser responsabilidade de cada indivíduo se defender sozinho. O que o livro mostra é que historicamente a evidência é bem forte de que quem faz segurança é a polícia. Os estados brasileiros aonde a polícia está mal paga, com greves, paralisações, é justamente aonde estão os piores focos de violência.
As someone left of center and an environmentalist.... Free markets and enlightenment values have lifted humanity out of squalor and superstition into modern day lives of plenty and comfort. Check out Steven Pinker's works if you don't believe me.
As long as we bring both to Mars with us, we'll be fine.
I'm sorry? Wars in the past were way more horrific and casualties were significantly higher than they are now, we are living in one of the most peaceful eras in history.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010
Here is a good book that discusses this exact subject.
Leia o livro "The Better Angels of Our Nature" do Steven Pinker
Foi indicado pelo Bill Gates em um Gates Notes. O impressionante é o cara mostrar, com dados científicos e históricos que no momento atual, mesmo com toda a merda que vemos diariamente e mundialmente, estamos em um dos momentos mais pacíficos possíveis.
I hope you won't mind a book recommendation. I suggest you get your hands on The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker. It's about how things are actually getting less violent and more cooperative over time... two things really drove this home for me. One was a comment, I forgot where I heard it, was that we used to mark battles with piles of human skulls, obviously that would be unthinkable today. The second was that Napoleon was once predicted to be the anti-Christ. If really made me realize how everyone finds a way to bend the bible to make it sound like THEIR time is the end-times, when sometimes it's not the anti-Christ, it's just a dude from Corsica with a massive ego.
For anyone who wants an in depth look at the history of violence. I highly recommend reading Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. It's a very long read because he goes through a shitload of data, but we'll worth your time if you like learning history.
TLDR we're living in what's BY FAR the most peaceful times in human history. No matter how bad you think it is reading this sub. It used to be literally orders of magnitude worse. But we didn't have good combat footage on demand.
Natural selection plays a role on selecting behaviors. In human society, it slowly weeds out violence. It’s covered in this book, https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010 . Romulan martial society will select for behavior traits like secrecy, against crime, etc.
I'd recommend you read Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker to learn about the history of wars and violence. It's a very long book, but it's the most complete pragmatic look at the topic, if you're really interested in learning.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
Civilizations thrived in spite of their atrocities, not because of them. And we actually are more civilized; check out Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" from your local library or bookstore. Death from violence of all forms--wars, homicides, gun violence, etc.--has been declining greatly over the decades and centuries. Although illicit human trafficking is still an issue, slavery has been outlawed everywhere.
And I would argue that the diplomats, those "weak" people who insist on talking things out, have saved countless lives that would have been wasted feeding some great leader's ego. Resorting to violence is easy; it takes strength to resist the urge to do violence against those you feel deserve it. And overcoming our animal instincts makes us stronger, more civilized, and more human.
>And it’s just strange to me to consider that a part of basic human fitness
I see what you're saying. It's probably our modern bias at work, because interpersonal violent conflict was part and parcel of most of human history, especially for men. (Source: <em>The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined</em>, by Steven Pinker.) Even when I was a kid, playground and alley fights bwtween two individuals were still a thing, and even if you lost, you were still expected to make a good showing.
I would highly recommend reading Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker
It's by far the most extensive study on the history of violence anyone has ever produced. If you are actually interested in "looking at every empire that has ever existed" as you claim. That's literally what he did. He results are very clear and it's the polar opposite of what you just said. Nation states are orders of magnitude more peaceful than pre-nation states. Becoming a nation state has been one of the best predictors of lowering violence.
So thousands of years of history says you are wrong.
But to be fair to you. That doesn't mean the guys you're responding to are right either. While the change from pre-nation states to nation state predicts lower violence. Change from nation state into larger nation state, does not.
You don’t understand generalizations?
The commenter reference that overall the world is more peaceful. That doesn’t mean war doesn’t exist anywhere.
Even all out war in Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen doesn’t come close to the level of WW2 on a global scale.
Actual research by world renowned academics suggests that we live in the most peaceful period in human history.
Here’s a book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=nodl_
Eh, they have a point though. The truth is, statistically speaking, fewer people were murdered in modern times than ever before.
Yes, industrial genocides happened, but low-level, everyday, "ordinary" murder and violence has declined so much that even when counting the industrial genocides, you were less likely to be murdered in the 20th century than ever before.
Think of it this way: Once upon a time, "do not murder" was a commandment that God had to actually give to all people. Today, that sounds almost superfluous, doesn't it? "Well of course I won't murder - who does that other than a few rare freaks, anyway?"
Not so long ago, practically all people carried weapons on them at all times when venturing outside their town or village, in case they got attacked and had to defend themselves. Today, it is possible to go an entire lifetime without ever touching a weapon - and many people do precisely that.
We have bigger genocides now, but individual murders are at an amazing historic low, and (according to Steven Pinker at least) this decline in low-level individual violence adds up to such numbers that they more than make up for the genocides.
I'm a bit of a glass-half-empty guy myself, but you need some Steven Pinker in your life!
It may not seem like it but poverty is down worldwide, as is violence, illiteracy, child mortality, and other metrics by which we measure actual progress.
First, thanks for the courteous replies.
The section you're looking for in Pinker starts on page 43 in my edition, and has graphs you may find relevant on page 49.
You can check out the preview on amazon for those pages if you that helps, but I recommend checking it out through a library or something if you are interested in paying for it.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010#reader_0143122010
>In other words, Pinker does not present evidence that state societies are inherently less violent than stateless societies. His primary empirical argument is that most contemporary states are less violent than all past societies, whether states or not.
I mean reading Pinker right now, I disagree with that reading of him pretty strongly. The section in the 40s compares to current stateless societies as well.
If I may ask a somewhat personal question, do you also study the history of mankind?
What I mean by that is more than just a list of facts in a book or the outlines of a Wikipedia article. I mean the way people lived their lives and how our ancestors viewed the world?
Because if you haven't, and there's nothing wrong or bad about that, then you'll see that our ancestors were much more violent than we are. Not all of them to sure, but significantly so. There are theories as to why, but us humans today literally view the world differently than those that did even 2 or 300 hundred years ago. We're more empathetic and compassionate than those who came before. Yes, I'm completely serious.
A book I can recommend about this is: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined by Steven Pinker. It's a fascinating read/listen.
I know it's not directly linked to your interest in serial killers, but if you find them interesting, then I you would find it this interesting as well. A 'history' of mankind's violence.
I agree that I would much rather have Italy over Iran.
I do t believe Canada is weak. Countries that spend much more on their military (Saudi Arabia) are not going to outlast a western country with a military alone.
I think the US needs to stop policing the world, and we need to bring people out of poverty to lower these birth rates ie subsaharan Africa, parts of Asia.
I would rather we avoid mass extinction of humans to reset though. I think if we give people democracy, they will demand more freedom. And since we use democracy in the west to further our economies, we will be stronger than any nation. Besides, even places like China are beginning to democratize (albeit very slowly). The good news for democracy is that you can’t really stop it if you want to your economy to sustain and expansive action.
But I don’t think we need more forcing of people to do what we do, only being safe, and even then we can’t fight or police the world. That’s how won the Cold War. We basically gave them the Beatles and Levi jeans. Now it’s iPhones and cars/Uber.
Here is a good book you may enjoy.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
Read “The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker. It’s an amazing book about the history of violence in societies and it’s steady decline. (I really recommend the audio book).
Steven Pinker argues quite convincingly that the trend has been overall positive for many centuries, even including the horrific violence of recent times.
Fascinating conversation. I can see the condescension inherent in declaring one's nation to be the "world police", but the fact remains that it works! The period since 1945 during which the US is a superpower is also called the Long Peace. Like it or not, the number of people per year who die in wars is far lower than before 1945. Source, Steven Pinker's great book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.
> I like your boundless unfounded optimism. :-D
I know you are joking, but you should really read Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature.. As hard as it is to believe, we really are becoming better all the time.
I find books like Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of our Nature" helpful in remembering this. It enumerates and explains exactly what the poster you're replying to said: that in so many ways, we're making the world a better, less deadly place.
Eh. Eh.
I really don't see it that way.
I will readily agree that how humans forms hierarchies is unfortunately a double-edged sword-- we simultaneously require leadership, or governing of some sort; while that very fact opens up the possibility of being taken advantage of. And that it has been a constant battle for all of human existence.
>there's very little to show that our system is going to produce anything different
I mean... dude, we actually have a functioning pluralistic society. I realize it doesn't feel that way a lot of the time, but we really do have one.
I feel like you're looking at all the shitty things right now, and maybe not contextualizing them with the last hundred years of our history... or thousands of years, for that matter.
I actually have a close friend who hedges towards the argument you're making more often than not. And tbh, I don't get it... because apathy is a totally viable option. I don't care about badminton. In fact, there are way more things I don't care about than things I do. In general, I think government and politics is something more people should be interested in... but I think that it's an unrealistic goal to think that all, or even most, people are going to care.
So why go through your finite days caring so much about something that you assume is terrible?
I mean, I don't know you, for all I know I'm talking to an international relations professor who can all but prove that we're doomed. But assuming that we're both just kinda folks who pay a reasonable amount of attention to the goings-on of things, it's one set of assumptions versus another.
The opportunities for doing things and changing things that we have now are unprecedented, and there is NO WAY to overstate that.
I don't know, man. This book I found to be very uplifting. I recommend you check it out :)
I'm not excusing violence around the world. I'm putting our foreign policy dominance into perspective. Just because a random sample of people believe the U.S. to be the greatest threat to world peace doesn't mean that the U.S. hasn't been the primary stabilizer for the period of the least violence, disease, poverty and hunger that the world has ever seen, ever.
Russia is undermining all of that in an attempt to compete with us, which they can only do after they bring us down to their level, that if a marginally strong regional power.
Not really. Genghis Khan razed down races of people, cities and empires, with no evidence left. There is still debate on whether WW2 was the bloodiest in history. You can read this acclaimed book- https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
Which uses statistics to argue how violence has decreased through the ages.
Don't fall into the trap of 'prepper' mentality. Doomsayers have been profitable for the entirety of human existence. Yet actual reality refutes their claims.
Is it going to be a rough 4 years, yes. Is it the end? Nobody knows, so keep on working towards positive solutions during the meantime.
The folks that feverishly sell doomsday only profit if you fall for their bullshit. And go actually take the time to read the two books I linked, instead of falling for the 'accidents' that draw your view on TV's lies. They are using your hard wiring to manipulate you, don't let them.
One thing that helps for me is to think how much I would like to see the future, and then I remember that we are living in the future of so many past lives. How many brilliant minds a hundred years ago wouldn't give anything to see the technology that we take for granted today. I think we're living in exciting times.
Your journey is unique. Thousands of years of humanity before you and hopefully thousands more after you won't be as lucky to say "I lived both before and after cell phones and internet".
And if you are looking for something more concrete to convince yourself that today is not that bad and to see the good in humanity (if you like to read long books), I recommend: The Better Angels of Our Nature Surely it doesn't do away with the all the bad things but it helps to put things in perspective.
It has been far worse in the past. We're given the illusion that it's getting worse all the time because of how pervasive media has become — every incident is televised and spread around on social networks. 50 years ago we wouldn't have heard a fraction of this stuff.
Good book on this subject: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker.
The world may not be headed in as negative a direction as it appears with a casual glance. See The better angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Steven Pinker for a scholarly look at this question.
The world is way more peaceful and prosperous than it has been at nearly any other point in human history. Take for instance Rwanda. Two decades ago it was engaged in one of the worst genocides in human history. Now it is run by a very efficient government that has banned tribalism and is presiding over some of the fastest gains in human development in the world.
That doesn't mean that there aren't areas where things are getting worse, but the overall trend is generally positive.
Edit: A lot of you are making valid points that there are some important trends moving in a negative direction: climate change, environmental degradation, the fraying of the international liberal order. While it is still true that humanity has never been more peaceful than it has today (this is objectively true across a wide variety of metrics), I agree that these are pressing problems that if not addressed quickly, threaten our survival as a species in the long-term. But, I want to push back against the deep despair that I know many of you feel, because humanity has survived worse.
Around 70,000 years ago, humanity faced the greatest crisis in its history. A volcanic explosion of gargantuan proportions caused global temperatures to drop as much as 20 degrees in many places. This change caused a massive decline in our population to as few as a few hundred or thousand individuals. But we endured, despite having virtually no recognizable technology to aid us. We bounced back and 60,000 years later, we were building cities and had colonized almost the entire planet. We are now facing the second greatest threat our species has ever seen, but now we have something we never had before: we have science. We have technology. And we have governments that can harness the wealth and intelligence of billions of people to serve our collective will, if we choose to use them. I am not saying that will be enough, but it is a much better starting point than that faced by our ancestors. If I were to make a bet, I'd bet on our survival at a minimum, as humanity has already survived worse with less. I'd even say that given all that we have to fight climate change, that we will probably suffer nowhere near as much as we did then.
Edit2: Thanks for the gold!
The world is getting less violent, it's mostly the media that makes it seem worse. Here's a book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
Absolute inte. Den som har en faktabaserad uppfattning av världen (för detta krävs källhänvisningar - någonting du inte ger) vet att tack vare fri handel kliver fler och fler folk in i den globala medelklassen. Inget annat politiskt och ekonomiskt system ger en så stor reduktion i fattigdom som demokratisk kapitalism. Sverige är ett exempel (under feodalsamhälle var vi fattiga). Under ingen tid före vår har så många människor klättrat ur fattigdom.
- https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty-lines
- https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
- https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2015/10/11/the-tricky-work-of-measuring-falling-global-poverty
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/are-we-nearing-the-end-of-poverty/
Vi lever också i den fredligaste tiden någonsin i vår arts historia
- https://www.good.is/articles/closer-to-peace-than-ever
- https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374610954&sr=1-1&keywords=the+better+angels+of+our+nature
- En go intervju https://youtu.be/VUDAdOdF6Zg
Om jag har fel, är jag beredd att övertygas. Är du?
I'm not sure about those "poor results"?
Violence is lower than ever. Unless you count exceptions like Baltimore, which we are not allowed to talk about.
I think abortion should be legal and widely available. But it's at an all time low. Birth control is getting better.
It's not a study so much as a thesis that analyzes many different studies, but I would highly recommend Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature as a jumping off point.
Adding for a further resource and reference, an excellent Ted Talk by Steven Pinker on the surprising decline of violence
Also, I cannot recommend highly enough his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature - Why Violence Has Declined If you want a book that is chock full of stats that can just straight up nuke the entirety of WT’s narrative about the state of the world, this is THE book for that.
Reported violent crime rate in the United States from 1990 to 2020
Renowned cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker wrote a book on the subject, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
>We can, but I think it's obvious that you weren't.
No, I assure you, I was being agnostic on the matter. I just had to push a little harder against your position because it’s the one you’re claiming true, but in the end I don’t see sufficient reason to accept any particular explanation as true, mine or yours. I provided one to see how you ruled it out.
I even referenced fictional mythology right there in what you quote, and it was met with a whole bunch of critiques and things that did not involve substantiating your claimed evidence, not separating your view from mythology.
>Your expectation was clearly that God would intervene earlier.
My expectation is that if a true loving God exists that didn’t intervene earlier, that such a God would be capable of providing us non-fallacious evidence of why it didn’t.
>But that's exactly what you did, yourself!
The difference is I don’t accept my proposed explanation as true. You do accept yours as true. Again, I put one forth to see how you ruled it out.
>Now, I think it would be far more interesting to compare alternatives for how quickly God responds to humans doing evil, from preventing a stubbed toe to waiting until "the earth is filled with violence".
That would be very interesting. So how do we go about evaluating whether God has or hasn’t actually intervened in any particular case?
>”Consider a charged point particle hovering above an infinite sheet of uniform charge."—on the basis that it's unphysical.
There’s a big difference though, related to what I just bolded above… Let me use the ideal gas law - it assumes point particles with no molecular size or interaction - I can understand that to not be representative of any actual physical gas, while still being a very useful approximation of things we can indeed measure, and molecules that do exist. I can see that such a physics class is dealing with reality and not woo when it comes to actually compressing a piston of gas, even if the molecules take up space they the ideal law doesn’t account for. HOWEVER, I still can’t determine how to know if any claimed intervention of God is woo or not.
If that’s not clear enough, consider a thermodynamics class beginning with discussion of the caloric fluid (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caloric_theory) - if it came down to asking whether the caloric fluid actually exists, we now understand that the caloric fluid as a concept would fail. Turns out, we don’t have the evidence to support it existing, and what we thought it was doing is actually just motion of particles, move faster = hotter, not some different fluid with those properties. So in that case, in a modern context we can see it would be right to question the teaching pushing caloric theory on the class.
>A very different possible answer is that doing science & developing technology is easy, in comparison to fighting for & establishing justice, making sure that innovations don't wreck the lives of countless citizens, etc.
Depending on context we can make science seem very hard, and show the gaps we don’t yet understand much at all (like consciousness), and conversely we can point to how well functioning modern society is and how it’s probably the best time in human history to be born as any random person (see Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010). I’m just saying this can all be viewed in terms of relatives and spun one way or another.
>It's logically possible for God to give us crucial wisdom, but it's logically impossible for us to discern whether it came from God?
No I never said that, I’m fact my whole position is that an Omni-God would clearly be able to provide us information to discern what wisdom is and isn’t from it, is and isn’t valid, etc.
>If you make science the gold standard for "evidence of God's existence", then you very much do expect this
I’ve said multiple times I’m open to other standards. Science differentiates itself from woo, show me how we can assess an interaction of God to have occurred or not, so we can ensure it isn’t just a claim of woo and misattributing things to a non-existent God.
>So how can something work, without thereby being "grounded in truth"?
Science takes the required steps to ensure we aren’t fooling ourselves, as covered in the Feynman speech I cited many comments ago. If the cargo cultists make a bamboo headset and then get a supply drop, is that good evidence that the bamboo headset brought the planes to them?
Look, the rest of this, citing and asking me to explore various part of the Bible, I don’t really feel deserve the time to respond to right now until we cover the (already many) points here. I was raised Catholic and spent well over a decade reading and studying the Bible. I’m telling you I can’t distinguish it from woo, and asking how you propose doing that. If you address even just the one bolded section of my comment here maybe we can make some progress.
I wouldn't try to judge humanity as a unit, and I have no value for faith in the first place, so I wouldn't feel this need.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
If you do want data that you may find encouraging, however, you might check out Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, linked above.
Still, I'd warn against choosing a target hope and then trying to prop it up with evidence after the fact. I'd start with the evidence, and only hope for those things the evidence suggests is likely.
When the evidence does not suggest hope is reasonable, then I would endeavor to alter the situation, which would alter the evidence for future evaluations.
Again though, I don't need faith in humanity any more than I need faith in koala bears or faith in sharks or faith in pigeons. No species has a goal that I need to believe in.
Poverty is by far the number 1 source of violent crime and it's not even close. Fix rampant poverty, and violent crime disappears.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
Nice quote. It reminds me of why violence has declined for thousands of years.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122010/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_W0H228F6DCGZCWN23M0H
If anyone is interested in the missing context, I suggest reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
I don't know about evil and wickedness, but the book Better Angels of Our Nature presents a compelling argument that violence is going down across the board.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122010/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc_s4uRFbJSV39GR
Try harder.
I am seeing a lot of good recommendations in this thread. I would especially like to second Thinking Fast and Slow, since many of the ideas presented in that book (or rather the research on which they are based) are quite foundational to the rationalism community.
One author I would like to add though is Steven Pinker. I think The Better Angels of Our Nature is an important book to read. I also recently finished Enlightenment Now, which I also found, well, enlightening, although it is more of a synthesis of ideas rather than presenting anything original.
Another important author that I don't see mentioned is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He writes in a way that you only really need to read one of his books. I myself most enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, although The Black Swan seems to be the overall favorite.
I would also recommend Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, not necessarily because I agree with many of the conclusions offered in the book, but because it offers some interesting frameworks for thinking about technology and other subjects.
For more general science books which I think are interesting and/or important, but are less relevant to discussions on SSC/LW, I would like to recommend The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich.
But society isn’t crumbling. It’s getting better by almost all metric.
See https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
you need this,
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
and watch this http://www.fallen.io/ww2/
we have problems but there has always have been problems and always will be problems.
The New York Times recently had a really good article breaking down how police officers in three areas (New Orleans, Montgomery County, and Sacramento) actually spend their time:
How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time?
Here's a graph from that article.
First few paragraphs from it:
>A review of publicly available data in three areas reveals that much of an officer’s job revolves around handling routine calls rather than violent crime.
>What share of policing is devoted to handling violent crime? Perhaps not as much as you might think. A handful of cities post data online showing how their police departments spend their time. The share devoted to handling violent crime is very small, about 4 percent.
And that's cities. The amount of violent crime in your typical NJ suburb is probably way less than even 4 percent.
So why are police in those towns making so much money? Besides the fact that NJ taxes are some of the highest in the nation to begin with, which means most government employees in these small towns make way more than other areas, I'd guess two reasons:
It's political suicide to run a campaign or pursue an agenda of limiting/reducing police budgets/salaries, because the police and their union will turn against you. So it reduces politicians to having to rubber stamp their requests without much of a fight, at least if they want to keep their job.
As the NYT article probably showed you, people still have a very inaccurate picture of what cops actually do and how much crime they actually have to deal with. Their ideas come from TV rather than real life, and so they think reducing cops' pay will result in serial killers popping out of every corner and crime sprees all over their town even though violent crime nearly everywhere is at the lowest its ever been in history (there's a whole book on this called <em>The Better Angels of Our Nature</em>.)
Do I think cops deserve to be paid well? Absolutely. Do I think they deserve to get paid at the levels they are now? Absolutely not. Those salaries do NOT reflect their actual risk levels, but rather how much their unions can muscle politicians and convince the public into paying whatever they ask for.
I know it seems bad. But we’ll get through this, like we’ve gotten through far worse periods before this. Recently, the civil unrest in the 60’s far far worse than how we have it. And that wasn’t as bad as the swine flu at the beginning of last century. Which pales in comparison to the Plague. The Civil War.
And guess, what? We’re still here. Are things going to change? Of course. But it will be fine. I think if there’s anything to be afraid of right now it’s the state of our democracy. I’m more worried about an outright oligarchy that restaurants going back to normal. But I’m even optimistic about that.
Look at some of the good things:
Technology has allowed our economies to stay afloat. Many people can work from home, and people can take classes from home. If this happened 30 years ago, we’d be fucked.
In the last 20 years the proportion of people living in extreme poverty worldwide, has almost halved.
Income per person doubled since year 2000
Female political participation is rising (more than doubled since 2000).
The installed capacity of renewable energy worldwide grew by 80% since year 2010.
80% of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease.
Global access to safe drinking water raised by 16% since year 2000.
Life expectancy grew from 53 years in 1960 to 72 in 2017.
in 2011, a 16-year-old boy from Holland had an idea on how to clean up the massive garbage patches in our oceans that are filled with plastic. Now, he’s the CEO of Ocean Cleanup, and is executing this plan (which is fucking genius, BTW).
Bad new drives ad revenues for the networks and news outlets. Here are some feel good stories to lift your spirits.
Also, since we have time on our hands these days (Well, I don’t. I’m busy as hell at work), why don’t you read Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature. If you can think of a way to get it anonymously, I’ll send you a copy.
>And suddenly these people around me shear off from everything they used to be and are born again slogan repeating automatons
The most important human (as opposed to tech) story of the last six decades is that of a species-wide slide toward the high end of the agreeableness scale: education, paternalist legalism, the popularity and increased prevalence of the state-as-care-taker, feminization of culture and politics.
This has had many & obvious benefits. But we've done very little homework on the trade-offs that come with so drastically minimizing, if not pathologizing disagreeableness.
TANSTAAFL, my ladies, gents and dudes. Along with the upside, we're reaping the whirlwind of three generations that have had the ability to withstand social pressure slapped out of them.
And so: pathological altruism, social mobbing-as-enforcement-mechanism, the thousand demons unleashed by demographic changes driven by tech, affluence and hypergamy, including immigration & the re-emergence of strong ethnic tribalism.
Perhaps the trade-offs are worth it. From a Rawlsian perspective, this is the best time it's ever been to be alive. But we haven't reached anything like an equilibrium, and most signs seem to point to costs mounting while the benefits wane.
My guess is that the next couple of decades will continue to be punctuated by long-belated realizations that Chesterton's fence is a warning, not a cute allegory.
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May I recommend this book?
I highly recommend The Better Angels of Our Nature if you want a generally optimistic book about the future. Some people (like Nassim Taleb) have expressed some skepticism about Pinker's view that war generally is declining (because if/when WWIII comes it could be very violent and very unpredictable). That said I still think it gives you a sense of how much violence has gone down globally.
As far as conspiracy theorist shootings - not really conspiracies but there were things like the Waco Siege. The Oklahoma city Bomber was apparently motivated by The Turner Diaries. Not to trivialize the pizzagate shooting but the Oklahoma City Bombing killed about 170.
Maybe creationism hasn't killed anyone directly but there's always some variety of quack medicine around. Snake Oil Salesmen are as old as the United States. Even someone like Steve Jobs died of Pancreatic Cancer in part because he chose to eat a bunch of fruit towards the end of his life rather than have chemo.
I got my info from Pinker's book. https://imgur.com/a/SIp8QnZ https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010#reader_0143122010
I evaluated the evidence in Prehistoric Myths. My first conclusion about paleolithic humans is that we don't know, and my second is that it's hard to kill people you've never met. Population density was extremely low during this period to the point where a tribe would probably only meet another tribe once every several years. Surging homicide right when agricultural societies start forming can't be a coincidence, but I would suspect that instead of one causing the other, it was probably high population density making traditional hunting/gathering unsustainable that caused both. Whatever happened historically, Pinker has anthropological evidence of existing primitive societies and still finds high rates of homicide.
Clearly the high rates of peacetime homicide, suicide, and starvation in modern societies shows there is a lot of room for improvement, but I think this is expected given population density. I find the idea that modern levels of population density would be able to avoid violence in the absence of state control/mass slavery laughable.
Your view is just factually incorrect.
> It's 2018, and we're here still fighting poverty and hunger.
If anything, the rate at which we've been eliminating extreme poverty has been accelerating. We've also been steadily decreasing world hunger.
> We should be well into finding ways to lengthen lifespan/eradicate diseases, etc.
Life expectancy has been increasing through human history and much of that is attributable to better nutrition and the eradication of infections diseases (through sanitation and vaccination).
> We have wars, slavery, religion, absurd political ideations, and the list goes on.
All of that is much less today than ever, and has been decreasing throughout human history. I'll just reccomend Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature
> What's even more disheartening is the effort to try to stifle scientists.
It's a little hard to have a good metric for science and technology but:
The rate at which new innovations have been adopted has been getting faster.
The number of patents issued is growing exponentially as is the number of Phd's (which presumably correlates with working scientists) and the amount of scientific output has been doubling every nine years.
I suppose you could say that these things would be happening even more absent politics and greed, but I don't know how you'd demonstrate that one way or the other. The main thing I notice is that these trends are remarkably consistent throughout history, regardless of who's in charge or what's happening.
Which seems to undermine the argument that we could do much of anything to speed it up, or that "greed and politics" is substantively slowing it down.
"The Better Angels of Our Nature" is a great book about this by Steven Pinker
IF people were inherently corrupt we wouldn't even have society in the first place. But they are not.
While there are still a small percentage that game the system and make it more difficult than it needs to be for everyone else, currently the majority of the .01%, but it is not all of them. But it's not just the rich that cause problems, the problem is there are much more repercussions because of their actions, than one person stealing one thing from one other person.
Anyhow, if you read Better Angles of our Nature or Abundance you will see that there is a possibility of a better society in our future. but I get the gloom and doom, as our current "news" feeds our 'rustle in the bushes' brains to pay attention to its scary attention grabbing uselessness, but it depends if we pay attention to what is happening as our society changes due to technological progress, which it has been written about, decades before.
Another good book along this line is The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
Pinker actually wrote a great book on this subject called The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Have you ever heard of the book The Better Angles of our Nature?
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
Just finished it. If you like your science filled with bloody history, this is your book.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
HES A PROFESSOR OF PSYCH AT HARVARD: https://stevenpinker.com/
Can you Google?
https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-good-or-bad-economy/
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/economic-benefits-immigration-5712.html
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-23/world-actually-safer-ever-and-heres-data-prove
https://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010
At the absolute worst, I'm this guy. There are many words I might use to describe him, but "pussy" certainly isn't one of them.
This isn't a case of me knowing the truth but being too afraid to admit it. We live in the age of the panopticon, where information from around the world flies directly to us, filtered for that which the media considers the most sizzling and dramatic. We live in an age where terrorism, imperialism, purges, and mass murder are all considered abnormal.
If our ancestors came to the present day, and we told them the news, they would probably be horrified - until we told them that that was all that was wrong with the world. If they asked us "So, who's at war in Europe?" and we said, "Nobody", they'd be shocked beyond imagining.
The world right now is doing better than it ever has before. No, really. The idea that we live in some kind of dystopian nightmare is an optical illusion, created by the fact that now we can see so much more of the horror that we used to comfortably ignore. We're winning. Please stop trying to ruin it.
Our own modern, global society. Seriously, endemic violence has been on the decline for centuries and - in spite of one or two hiccups - that trend continues.
I suggest The Better Angels of Our Nature for a broader perspective on that.
> do you really think large-scale conflicts like the 7 Years War or the Napoleonic Wars were any better than the medieval quabbles between lords?
Actually, yes. See https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
This is all based on an amazing non-fiction book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. This book will change your mind.
I'm currently reading the better angels of our nature by Steven Pinker and i think you may find it interesting and insightful.
> Sickle cell trait is not a disease, it's a very successful adaptation against malaria. > > Sickle cell anemia is a disease that's a direct byproduct of that adaptation.
I thought I worded that pretty clearly to say exactly the same thing. So, we're in agreement here.
> I'd need to read an article on the diabetes thing because I'm unfamiliar with it, but does every person with that genetic trait develop type 1 diabetes or do other environmental features combine with it in only some people to provoke type 1 diabetes?
As far as I know, though I haven't read anything on it recently, having the correct amino acid in one protein is the "normal" case. If one has any other amino acid in that slot, the odds of getting type 1 diabetes increase from 1 in 600 to 1 in 6. One must still get a virus in the pancreas that the body fights off and then continues to fight long after the virus is gone in order to get the disease. Again though, that is my understanding from an old article. There probably is more up to date information on the subject.
> I could see an argument where religion could be considered an adaptation and religious fanaticism could be considered a disease.
Hmm... Interestingly however, since the disease kills off people around those who have the disease, it is actually the disease that is the adaptation. Perhaps disease really is the wrong term. I think you may be convincing me.
> I think we'd be abusing the concept of disease just to take a swipe at theism at that point since radical Marxism would be the same disease in pretty much every measurable way.
Certainly non-religious ideologies such as Communism or Objectivism could cause the same effects. Communism actively kills people. Objectivism is more of a wasting away type of meme that just causes those who have the meme to lose all empathy for those who are wasting away.
> I don't think that theism, which developed as animism in the context of small band societies over tens of thousands of years, has much to do with the structure of organized religion, which is an absolutely typical social institution comparable to any other social institution based on a shared ideology about ethics, etc.
And yet, there was a lot of inter-tribe violence. Steve Pinker has now made a really good case that odds of dying a violent death have been steadily declining as we become a larger and more global society. He claims that even including the multiple genocides of the 20th century, on average for all people on the globe, odds of dying a violent death at the hands of one's fellow humans were actually lower than at any prior time in the history of our violent species. Ditto for the 19th as compared to the centuries before it and so on.
> "Religion is a disease!" sounds indistinguishable from saying "Government is a disease!" to me.
Yeah. You're starting to convince me.
> That the king actually exists and hands down laws and that Yahweh doesn't exist but his priests hand down laws in his name is a very small technical detail relative to the vast array of other functional details.
Priests (generically, not Catholic in particular, including rabbis, shamans, ministers, and whatever other titles we give them) are a very effective tool used by kings to maintain obedience from the masses. Kings and priests are often found working together for their common goals.
P.S. I wonder if this may have become a far more serious discussion than was intended by the OP.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined de Steven Pinker. É um calhamaço, mas vale a pena. Muito de história e psicologia.
> At the close of business yesterday GOOG was valued at $524.05 per share. The market made that decision. > If you don't like the phrasing 'the market made that decision' I don't really give a fuck because you know exactly what I mean and I know exactly how markets work. So you can respond to what I'm saying without the need for a 12-comment back and forth where you try to force me to phrase that as you want me to.
This is not an issue of semantics. You keep anthropomorphizing markets. This is a problem with your understanding of markets. I have no idea what you mean when you say a market decided X. That persons buying shares of google common stock thought that it was worth $524.05 as of 4PM EDT on some specific day says nothing about the state of the market.
I am not trying to force you to do anything. Reddit can not force a discussion, you are choosing to do this. If, however, you would like to make some kind of point or construct an argument we first need to agree on some definitions. 15 comments in (or wherever we are) we are still at that starting point.
>And how do they go about enforcing that? You can't not allow something without enforcement.
They enforce their views via a spectrum of options ranging from economic incentive to violence, like anyone else.
>So you're saying there could exist laws that nobody has the power to enforce. Those are not laws, then, in the traditional sense. They are basically religious beliefs.
You appear to be unaware of how deontological beliefs work, or of the philosophy behind natural rights.
>I'm referring to the collective and making statements about the collective and you are choosing to willfully misinterpret what I'm saying as applying to the individual.
There is no collective, so how could I interpret this any other way?
>In theory. On paper. On reddit. If it actually happened, these various classifications wouldn't mean anything.
How do you know? Why do you claim to understand an ideology when you continuously make false statements regarding it?
>If the free market got to decide whatever it wanted, it would decide whatever it wanted. If it morphed into a non-ancap society per some theories on mises.org, not a single fuck would be given by the market.
This is circular reasoning. Also your tone is becoming less civil. If you wish to continue a discussion with me you it will be civil (and preferably free of fallacious reasoning).
>This possible morphing into other classifications is not often addressed and it should be.
It is addressed, this is merely another manifestation of your ignorance of the subject.
>Every Black Swan would have been be called a just-so story if predicted a year before it happened. Crazy shit happens in reality. The Ancap view that crazy shit would not happen in Ancaptopia is absurd.
Rare events can not be predicted in this way. We do not live in the universe of Asimov's Foundation. Ancaps do not claim nothing 'crazy' would happen, rather the contrary in fact.
>Why does that matter?
Because the ecosystem for your economic experiment to favor child rape is not closed, so it must equilibrate with the world beyond the walls of your imagined seastead.
>How is that exactly?
People from outside ancaptopia exist, some of whom have the same or better abilities without the baggage.
>And I refer you back to the question in the OP. How do you think you know what hypothetical people would be intolerant of?
I make a claim about what hypothetical people will be intolerant of because I am aware of what real people are intolerant of (as are you). We can go further and put some science behind our prediction with things like this or more recently this, or I could simply appeal to deontology and self-selected communities again.
Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature. And Dawkin's God Delusion both have a lot of facts that were completely new to me. Unlike Bill Nye's book.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010
http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618918248
(fun fact, the audio book for God Delusion, as most Dawkin books, are narrated by himself + his wife)
Sure. But there is good reason to believe that there is causation here.
https://smile.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/
>A predicted a couple of things when I posted my previous reply. One was that you would only respond to my last point. And the other was that that point would trigger you to no end.
>
>Look, you're just one of those people who thinks their views are universal. The things your pointing out as evidence of a morally degrading society aren't anything new. There is evidence that we're living in the best time ever in the history of mankind.
>
>Let's look at you points:
You probably thought Hillary would win the election too, because of all the scientific polls done to prove she would win..
There is no arguing that we live in the best time to be alive, the entire point of my post, was that as we lose sight of religion we lose the actions that provided all of the prosperity you are pointing to. What is the source?
You are tearing down the building, then trying to use the bricks of that building to make a house..on sand....
>Has that happened? Has Miley Cyrus been nude on TV? But that's not important. Almost 70 years ago, people were saying "Marilyn Monroe is showing her cooter!" (who talks like that anyway?).
Have you seen any of her live performances at award shows? She might as well be fully naked...I mean come on could you be any more pedantic?
>Horrible, or course. But not new. Remember when people used to drag people behind their truck until they were dead?
I won't need to remember, because I will be seeing it again in this lifetime the way things are going...
>Not true, but poverty isn't new.
>
>You can't be older than me, and I'm not even close to "kids these days" as you are. Here's a relevant quote:
>
>“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
>
>Who know who said that? Socrates. 2500 years ago.
You know the funny thing about Socrates right? He didn't have Jesus either! So funny the problems he was encountering then in a rational advanced society without Jesus, is the same things happening to us as we lose Jesus! Super cool point thanks for making that.
Great thing all those Greek people converted to....Christianity!!! here is a wonderful excerpt from the Urantia book. The Greek Scholar Rodan of Alexandria. I suggest you read the entire chapter on him in the book, and then the next chapter titled "Further discussions with Rodan"
But the greatest of all methods of problem solving I have learned from Jesus, your Master. I refer to that which he so consistently practices, and which he has so faithfully taught you, the isolation of worshipful meditation. In this habit of Jesus’ going off so frequently by himself to commune with the Father in heaven is to be found the technique, not only of gathering strength and wisdom for the ordinary conflicts of living, but also of appropriating the energy for the solution of the higher problems of a moral and spiritual nature. But even correct methods of solving problems will not compensate for inherent defects of personality or atone for the absence of the hunger and thirst for true righteousness.
160:1.11 (1774.3) I am deeply impressed with the custom of Jesus in going apart by himself to engage in these seasons of solitary survey of the problems of living; to seek for new stores of wisdom and energy for meeting the manifold demands of social service; to quicken and deepen the supreme purpose of living by actually subjecting the total personality to the consciousness of contacting with divinity; to grasp for possession of new and better methods of adjusting oneself to the ever-changing situations of living existence; to effect those vital reconstructions and readjustments of one’s personal attitudes which are so essential to enhanced insight into everything worth while and real; and to do all of this with an eye single to the glory of God—to breathe in sincerity your Master’s favorite prayer, “Not my will, but yours, be done.”
You know I predicted a few things too.
- You wouldn't be able to see any sense in anything I say because your reality is crooked.
- You would argue even the most basic simple obvious worldly truths, or try and conflate them to meet your narrative.
Edited to reference who was talking in the quote.
Steven Pinker wrote a book about exactly this!
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
I got this from this source. As you point out, "44 countries criminalize [now]"
The second world war, despite Steven Pinker's efforts to argue otherwise, was the greatest catastrophe in history, killing perhaps fifty million people, and leaving millions maimed, homeless or starving. Churchill's coalition dictatorship contributed to that war - but Chamberlain was a worse criminal, in that he threatened to declare war on Germany if it invaded Poland, which it did. Oddly enough, Russia invaded Poland too, but that wasn't a casus belli with Russia.
Here is what I have heard is a very good book on the topic:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010
I told you, quite clearly I thought, that I got my information from this from a scholarly book written by a Harvard scientist - not from the partisan press.
Here's the Amazon link to the book..
Incidentally, the same work explains how capitalism may well have contributed to the decline of violence throughout history. Countries that trade together tend not to fight each-other.
Maybe it's just me, but I think that one of the best received science books of the past decade is likely less partisan than 'The Black Book of Capitalism".
Edit: I can't even find 'the Black Book of Capitalism' on Amazon. The first reference I could find using Google was on some Marxist website.
> I meant it (slavery) was a moral crime/atrocity/evil, then and now.
I agree.
> I'll be the first to agree the ancient Greeks and Romans shouldn't be thought of as beacons of enlightenment...They were, on the whole, brutal warrior/slave societies in a constant state of warfare with everyone and everything around them.
And so was most everyone else. Humans are an obviously violent species and for the simple reason than that violence is supremely effective. Humans have been abusing both other humans and other forms of life since there was a thing called humans. The idea that you will find a human community free of violence is an absurdity because if a society like this existed, they could simply be dominated by a more violent society.
However, I for one am comforted by the fact that the human species as a whole has been becoming less violent as civilization moves forward and I am confident that this trend will slowly continue. All the steps forward in civilization from Sumerian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, Arab, and so many other cultures should all be considered beacons of enlightenment, or perhaps better thought of as ladder rungs, in our ever expanding circle of ethical progress.
Of course my time in existence is vanishingly small but there is good reason to think that there will be less suffering 5000 years from now just as there is less suffering now then 5000 years ago.
Reminds me a bit of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature. Worth a read for anyone interested in the role of governments and violence prevention.
Yes, it is a lot of people killed in a war: no one would argue otherwise. However, here is another look at global modern violence in the 20th century
But comparing changing religion to people killed in war??? WTF. Sad stuff.
You're confusing "not perfect" with "not good". You're utterly delusional about the direction that society is headed. And, further, you don't even seem to know what "first world problems" are.
Like I said if you are seriously interested in the subject it is far better to read a relevant book on psychology rather than making stuff up as you go along. Whatever your hypothesis are you can be damn sure someone else has already had it and either disproven it or confirmed it so start with what we already know.
You aren't looking at the big picture, and you are limiting your scope to individual military conflicts. Getting into the math is beyond the scope of a reddit post, but there a good 'for general audiences' analysis of this by Steven Pinker.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
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