No Wonder So Many People are Depressed

[David]

I do own both books, yes! But I should stress that I am not here to defend Pinker and have no investment in doing so. And despite the slight ribbing intended by my last post, I don’t necessarily think that there’s anything wrong with reading criticism of a work you haven’t read. It just seemed to me that you’d made up your mind about Pinker, found a critique that backed up your view (rather than one of the many that praise his work, even with caveats, such as https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/peace-violence-and-the-species-steven-pinkers-the-better-angels-of-our-nature/ or https://www.nature.com/articles/478453a.pdf?origin=ppub) and then used it as a basis for asserting the flaws in his work and, more extremely, his total worthlessness as a writer (a significant charge to lay at the feet of someone based merely on a second-hand critique of their work). Likewise, you speak of experts and dilettantes; surely Pinker’s expertise in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics counts for something (as opposed to Kolbert, who is literally a staff writer, not that there’s anything wrong with that)? I apologise if I have misinterpreted your approach here.

Really, though, isn’t the question here less whether or not Pinker’s arguments or methods of presenting them as flawed, and more whether the general argument holds up? Surely, if so, we would have to cast our critique wider, for Pinker is far from the only one making this argument.

[K]

David, no, no, no. What you say is wrong. I'll have to explain later.

But a few quick points first. Pinker's expertise in "cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics", as you (or the back cover?) put it (he says "experimental psychology") counts when he's actually writing about those topics (only). Arguably, in his first one or maybe two popular books, he was doing that. In this decade, he has wilfully strayed far beyond the realms of his expertise. On these matters, he is definitely the dilettante. And in this context, both he and Kolbert are simply duelling pop non-fiction authors (yes, she's in on the act --- it'd be amusing if they have the same book agent --- and who is to say she did not do more secondary research for her books than he did for his?) arguing about things they are not experts in.* (I note, though, that Kolbert is on the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.) I have seen many reviews and was going to address all of them, but only one at a time.

I'm not sure what "worthlessness as a writer" means. It sounds like "lack of literary skills". That I take for granted with any non-literary author, and it's hardly cause for concern.# I think the reality is far worse than that. When I mentioned the existence of flaws, perhaps I should have explicitly stated that I was going to follow up with the what and why.

Yes, you do seem to have misinterpreted what I'm saying. And your last paragraph alarms me, which is part of the reason I think Pinker's books are potentially very harmful to both science and society. You seem to be conflating bad content with bad communication. (Both are undesirable but the former is more serious a problem than the latter.) And even a hypothetically correct conclusion would not wash away the sins of any incorrect reasoning used in obtaining it. But in reality, Pinker is claiming a lot more than the rather innocuous statement that science and technology have increased our standard of living.

I'll have to explain better (maybe a lot) later.


* I see Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction did get the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Its thesis seems to be at odds with Pinker's. (See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/25/the-sixth-extinction .) No wonder Pinker seems to hate her.
One can hardly claim the debate Kolbert vs. Pinker is unfair to him, because he has given himself the last word, a long written response to her book review that is notable for its hostility.


# Reading E.O. Wilson's description of a Kiwi finding an exotic ant in the Oz outback (and reading nothing else of Wilson) convinced me he is far superior to most of these plodding scientist-writers. I note (from a review of a different work) that Dwight Garner shares this opinion: "The sections about ants remind you what a lively writer Mr. Wilson can be. This two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction stands above the crowd of biology writers the way John le Carré stands above spy writers. He’s wise, learned, wicked, vivid, oracular."

[K]

Interlude -- from the NY Times

Jennifer Szalai on Pinker's Enlightenment Now (2018):

"When he published “The Better Angels of Our Nature” in 2011, he believed he unequivocally showed that modernity and liberal Enlightenment values had made people less violent, and so he was taken aback by skeptical reviews that had the temerity to question his research methods or his conclusions.

“I had thought that a parade of graphs with time on the horizontal axis, body counts or other measures of violence on the vertical, and a line that meandered from the top left to the bottom right would cure audiences” of their delusions and “persuade them that at least in this sphere of well-being the world has made progress,” he recalls...

"Besides, he has little patience for individual tragedy; it’s the aggregate that excites him. ...

"But life isn’t lived in the aggregate, and it’s crude utilitarian sentiments like this — a jarring blend of chipper triumphalism and unfeeling sang froid — that makes “Enlightenment Now” such a profoundly maddening book.

"Part of the problem is that Pinker succumbs to a version of the magical thinking he otherwise rails against. For all his intermittent disclaimers about how past performance doesn’t guarantee future results, he keeps slipping into messianic anticipation. ...

"Such defensiveness is puzzling. Not only is it unscientific; it’s gratuitous, and Pinker ends up undermining his own arguments with a tendency to overstate his case. He is so determined to keep the Enlightenment unsullied and pristine that he seethes at anyone who deigns to point out that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be...

"In one particularly tortured passage, Pinker goes so far as to downplay the harm of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study — which tracked syphilis in 600 African-American men, many of them poor sharecroppers, withholding information and proper treatment from them — on the grounds that the doctors “did not infect the participants, as many believe.” The study, a “one-time failure to prevent harm to a few dozen people” (as he breezily puts it) “may even have been defensible by the standards of the day.”

Why do this? ... Pinker’s book is filled with such fulsome apologias, which inadvertently suggest that the gains of the Enlightenment are so delicate that they require the historical gloss he compulsively provides."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/books/review-enlightenment-now-steven-pinker.html

[HAL]

Thanks for sharing your philosophy.

[David]

K, can I ask exactly what your angle is here? If you have an existing beef with Pinker, why not explain it in your own words rather than just posting other people’s criticisms?

Ultimately, if the most that we can establish from this is that Pinker’s methodology is flawed, I’m not sure what that tells us about the original topic: we know that the news makes many people think the world is getting worse by the minute, whereas some writers (including Pinker) contend that it’s getting better. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between the two poles; perhaps the glass-half-full types are right in some ways but have overegged their case in others. You seem eager to discredit Pinker, but I’m not sure how much you’re actually engaging with the argument.

[K]

David, be patient. I said I would explain later (more than once). I did, on the other hand, write something not entirely brief (a "few quick points") that did reply to some of your statements. Are you unhappy with something there, within its limited extent?

What exactly do you regard as "the argument"? Do you mean this thread's discussion scrubbed clean of any reference to Pinker? His book is arguing that the world is better and claiming a reason why, so I'm not sure how it is not relevant, especially since you have both books, have read one, and presumably at some point will read the second. And you did actually ask me about my objections to Pinker's book(s).

If someone wants simply to claim the world is "better" now, in the sense that it now matches more closely his own social, political and moral ideologies and prejudices, then that is okay. When he claims that science and data prove his case, when they do not, then that is not okay. (And it's not okay when it seems he has more facts wrong than right.) This is true in general, but even more so when it is science and reason that the author thinks he is championing as the drivers of the supposedly better world. If that sentiment is what you call "having a beef", then yes, I have a beef.

The data displayed in his plots do not make his case at all. I already gave some explanation of why previously (though that was just the tip of the iceberg). That has nothing to do with "other people's criticisms". Other people's criticisms may alert me to the contents of those plots, but I do not need or want them to judge or interpret those plots for me. You seem determined to draw wild conclusions from the fact that I have quoted other people's reviews. I started this part of the thread by quoting Pinker himself, and I will quote Pinker and others again in the future. So? It doesn't mean I necessarily agree, or necessarily disagree; it means I think it is noteworthy and relevant to the discussion.

[K]

David, it occurred to me that you may not fully realize the following. Pinker makes two main claims. For the first of these claims, in Pollanesque terms,

the argument is the graphs.

I'm undecided whether that would have been better stated the other way around:

the graphs are the argument.

[K]

Given that the graphs are the argument, let's briefly start discussing them.

Here are Pinker's 2015 updated graphs (for clarity, I note that none of the data are actually "his" --- he just collated other people's work, sometimes interpreting them differently from the people who actually produced them):
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2015/sep/11/graphic-evidence-steven-pinkers-optimism-on-trial

The majority of them don't even pass the eye test as supporting his claim of a trend in the direction of improvement. Look at the first one: "Genocide and other mass killings". The second thing that hits you about these bubbles is how little data there is, only spanning 1990-2013. But the first thing that hits you is that it just looks like randomly sized bubbles: there's a huge bubble in 1994, the sizes go up, they go down, they go up again, they go down again... Does your eye even long for a trend here, let alone truly believe in one? If I told you these were my football betting winnings, you'd probably believe it and conclude that I was neither an extraordinarily good nor an extraordinarily bad sports punter.

TBC.

[David]

The criticism that possibly holds most water is the variation in time periods, which may lend weight to accusations of goalpost-shifting. This could be a case of selective interpretation of data – but if this is what Pinker were doing, why not avoid the Rwanda outlier and start the “genocide” graph at 1995 or 1996, which would have been even more persuasive? Is some of the variation, instead, simply a reflection of the limitations on data available? Either way, if we can at least say that the murder rate has substantially declined since 1980 and the rate of intimate partner violence has declined since 1993, are not these each things to celebrate?

Otherwise, within each of the data sets presented, I think a trend would be apparent to any casual observer.

[K]

It's (presumably) just what data is available (i.e. the data available are insufficient to support any claimed long-term trends). You really want that genocide data going back a lot further in time. But what there is is simply consistent with random fluctuations over time. The fact that there are some 1s at the end rather than the 2s and 3s at the beginning of that short period is not significant at all, especially when you consider that those are obviously not 1s, 2s, 3s, etc., but have been rounded to the nearest whole numbers (so the 1s could be 1.49s and the 2s could be 1.50s, for example). All you're left with is the observation that the rate was high in the period 1994-99 and (relatively) low on either side. It's amazing that he cannot find data earlier than 1990.


You're reading too much into the homicide data. These also do not support a long-term trend. Presumably you're happy to concede the England and Wales rate is not budging. But the US line is basically a few mountain peaks on a horizontal horizon. Sure, the top of the mountain peak is higher than the end of the mountain range to the right. But it looks like that's also true of the missing end of the mountain range to the left. It's amazing that he cannot find data earlier than 1967.


To claim more from these graphs is to go chasing noise. Don't forget either that the claimed ongoing improvement is over recent centuries.

And a couple of the graphs are particularly problematic for many reasons [to be described later --- have a long look at the executions graph for starters].

TBC

[stui magpie]

This conversation is making me depressed.

[HAL]

What does "this" refer to?

[K]

I was going to post about the multiple problematic aspects of Pinker's executions graph I mentioned above...
But then, it occurred to me another reason why Pinker's "genocide and other mass killings" graph (discussed above) is bad, so I thought I'd post about that first...
But then, I realized that, with pictures in hand, there was more I should say about the highly dubious reading of the murders graph, comparing it with the war graph, and even the "rape, sexual assault and violence" graph... so maybe I'll post about these first.

Actually, the graph with the most flaws and importance is probably the "battle deaths" graph. Perhaps that should be last, then...

[Pies4shaw]

What is this thread now about? Is it pro-Scharenberg or anti?

[K]

^ This thread is about all aspects of ([perceptions of] the time variation of) human (and possibly non-human) evil and suffering.