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No Wonder So Many People are Depressed

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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2018 1:08 pm
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David wrote:
...
As I said in my previous post, I think it’s a bit of a tiresome exercise to just pick holes in individual sentences. Maybe ... it’s a careless slip of the tongue, or maybe he’s using language manipulatively. You’ve said from the beginning that you’re trying to discuss the actual data presented and not merely attempting to discredit Pinker; so why bring such a trivial thing up?

Do you realize that the alleged "picking of holes" was also an "individual sentence" (the last sentence of the post http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1839344#1839344), which you have spent (parts of) two posts complaining about? It should also be clear that bulletin-board comments are far closer to an oral conversation, in which there really are "slips of the tongue" (as already emphasized in a previous post), than a printed claim in a published book.

This whole strand of the discussion was also started by your insistence that we be clear what he was claiming. The other "individual sentences" noted in that comment are saying basically the same thing as each other, which is his central thesis (well, one of two central theses), not some throwaway aside. Of course, we already knew what these were: I quoted them in the post http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1836211#1836211 . The reason for checking self-contained media articles was your complaint that certain graphs could have been used to make different points. On that matter, it seems highly unlikely that he would explicitly claim that a graph that starts at 1967 "proves that violence has decreased for the last three centuries". But what it is in effect is a bait-and-switch. You have a thesis, and you show supposed evidence for something else (evidence that may or may not even support that something else), thereby creating some vague impression for the inattentive that you actually have supported your grand thesis.

I'll also say that the claim that the graph in question is evidence that "popular notions of crime getting worse by the year are completely false" is simply addressing a straw man argument. In the Slate article, he and his co-author were doing exactly that. They quote several people who, clearly, never said that every measure of violence was the worst it'd ever been in human history. If some global-security talking head, say, is concerned about an alleged rise in the number of terrorists cells and the risk that one of them gets hold of nuclear weapons, how does throwing a domestic homicide graph at him refute his concerns?


For better or worse, Pinker has, in two books, discussed (badly) the exact topic of this thread, including the claim that notions of violence are simply a media beat-up. It is only natural, then, that his claims are subjected to scrutiny. In general, I do not discredit anyone. Some people discredit themselves through their own discreditable actions. While there are strong indications that he gets very little right, I'm tentatively assuming that his choice of chapter topics is at least reasonable and that debate about those topics might tell us something about the central questions. Likewise, the primary sources of the data are given, so we can actually go to the sources of those data and see what they may or may not tell us. And I actually would, for example, like to learn about the Enlightenment and to what extent it helped or harmed humanity, so if some historian of the Enlightenment, in the context of a book review, says something about that, then I'm interested to read about it --- and to write about it too.


Now, I hope to return to discussing the graphs...
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Fri Jun 08, 2018 7:49 am
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Addendum:

After I wrote the post above, Thomas Piketty's name and book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, came to mind as possibly relevant to this discussion. I hope that someone here has read it; I merely spotted it on the coffee table of a friend (a presumed capitalist, but maybe it was his wife's) I was visiting a few years ago.

Piketty's figures and tables from the book are at the following link:
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTablesLinks.pdf
(There are many of them, although they are probably mainly focused on inequality, so anyone who thinks inequality does not matter might not find them interesting.)

A long review of the book by Paul Krugman:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/05/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Fri Jun 08, 2018 8:29 am
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I haven’t read Piketty’s book closely myself, but I read several reviews of it and a few summaries of the argument and his proposals. It is clearly an important piece of scholarship on an important question of our time, and the digest of charts here is helpful. They surely reflect some big assumptions (eg global population growth rate from 1000-1500.... phew!), but taken at face value they are a good resource. Thanks, K
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Fri Jun 08, 2018 6:03 pm
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Back to homicide graphs... On the previous page, I showed

Pinker's homicides graph (2015) ( http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1839230#1839230 )

and asked

Question:

If you were forced to guess what the light blue US line looks like as you extend it backwards from 1967 for a few years, what line would you draw??



Answer:
[Note: if you are like me, you will need to be logged in to view this graph. I'll also have to continue the commentary after the post break.]

Asher's homicides graph:
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Fri Jun 08, 2018 6:18 pm
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As you can see above, Asher's graph starts from 1960, and if you guessed that the homicide rate around 1960-67 was relatively low, you guessed correctly.


But wait... There's more...

Pinker's homicides graph, US & Canada (2011):



Apparently, in Pinker's 2011 book there is the graph above, which starts from 1950. It looks like in the 50s, those Americans were also relatively non-homicidal. Oh, and those Canadians haven't exactly got less homicidal over time.


But wait again... There's more again...

Pinker's homicides graph, US & England (2011):



Apparently, in Pinker's 2011 book there is also the graph above, which starts from 1900. It looks like England's homicide rate over the century doesn't really budge. The US's homicide rate over the century goes up and down and up and down...


Question:

Why does the updated graph start from 1967 and not, for example, 1960 or 1950 or 1900?


[To be continued...]
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Fri Jun 08, 2018 8:16 pm
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The real point is that trauma management and medical technology should cause homicides to fall very dramatically across decades, yet in both the US and UK, the rate is more or less the same as it was in 1900.

Secondly, between the 1960s and 1970s the rate nearly doubled in both the Uk and the US. Welcome to the silent holocaust of the social and sexual revolution.

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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sat Jun 09, 2018 9:29 am
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Yes, the issue of improved medical capabilities is an important one, but I haven't seen any concrete stats on how that has affected survival rates in the course of the 20th century.

According to Eisner, Monkkonen "proposed to use information about the elapsed time from injury to death as a rough indicator of the potential impact of modern medical technology. He argues that most deaths occurring within the first one to two hours after the injury are probably not preventable even with modern medicine, while the vast majority of those occurring after twenty-four hours could be prevented by modern technology".

I see no indication of how accurate this proposal is.

[Regarding earlier times, Eisner notes: "Most authors agree, however, that changes in medical technology are unlikely to have had any major impact on the chances of surviving a wounding before the late nineteenth century."]
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sat Jun 09, 2018 4:43 pm
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Homicide graph starting year: [ctd.]

I guess the first question is whether the impression the graphs above give is different because of the different starting points.

For me, the graph starting at 1967 never looked like a downward trend over the whole time period shown. The Asher graph going back to 1960 therefore didn't change too much, just confirming what the eye guessed.

Then we have the graphs starting at 1950 and 1900... I don't know how someone looking at the 1900-2000 graph can think the US homicide data show a long-term downward trend. It just reinforces the feeling that it's reasonable to expect smaller wiggles on smaller time scales and large wiggles on large time scales (e.g. half a century).
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:18 pm
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K wrote:
Yes, the issue of improved medical capabilities is an important one, but I haven't seen any concrete stats on how that has affected survival rates in the course of the 20th century.

According to Eisner, Monkkonen "proposed to use information about the elapsed time from injury to death as a rough indicator of the potential impact of modern medical technology. He argues that most deaths occurring within the first one to two hours after the injury are probably not preventable even with modern medicine, while the vast majority of those occurring after twenty-four hours could be prevented by modern technology".

I see no indication of how accurate this proposal is.


Some things cannot be readily quantified, and this seems at the tougher end of the spectrum, but a well-researched article in the impeccably respectable British Medical Journal in 2002 concluded that “murder rates would be up to five times higher than they are, but for medical advances in the last 40 years.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/

Given that murder rates represent the tip of the iceberg of violent crime, this is good evidence of the silent holocaust of revolutionary liberalism. Imagine if the twitter police, rather than sniffing the air for counter-revolution, had the capacity to think about evil, and its source and restraints. Their mob mind would explode.

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K 



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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 2:32 am
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The article above by Dobson in BMJ reports on work of Harris et al. in Homicide Studies. [Good find, Mugwump!]

Key quote:

"“Our lethality findings are strongly consistent with the hypothesis that progress in emergency medical care has converted an ever increasing proportion of homicides into non-lethal assaults and thus, by virtue of good intentions, ironically and unintentionally masked a continuing epidemic of violence in America.”

Key graph:
[again, you probably need to be logged in to see this]
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David Libra

I dare you to try


Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 4:28 am
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While it’s not necessarily the point of the current discussion, keep in mind what year that graph finishes (1997, with perhaps a stabilisation or downward blip occurring around 1994), and where the peaks start and end in the graphs with more recent data. My hunch is that the aggravated assault rate has decreased substantially again.
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:45 am
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By way of the Center for American Progress
( https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2012/06/19/11755/the-economic-benefits-of-reducing-violent-crime/ ):




Comments:

# Yes, there are peaks (as David alluded to).

# Yes, even with a recession from the peak, the aggravated assault rate in 2010 was almost three times what it was in 1960.

# The graph seems to support the Harris et al. linking of murder and aggravated assault (the former in some sense being regarded as a fraction of the latter, with that fraction influenced by trauma medicine expertise). You can see that the two curves are quite similar in shape, with the homicide line just shallower (though you could say the same thing of the rape curve).
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K 



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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 7:48 am
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Harris et al.:

"We start with the view that homicides (defined as murders + nonnegligent manslaughters) are neither no more, nor no less, than aggravated assaults with the outcome of the victim’s death...

From this viewpoint, an increasing aggravated assault rate would not necessarily lead directly to an increasing homicide rate. ...

A principal source of such variation in the lethality of violent assault also involves the delivery of health care...

Our analysis starts with an overall look at changes in the lethality of criminal assault in the United States from 1960 to 1999. We then assess the possible link between these changes and changes in weaponry. Finally, using national countywide data on the presence of physicians, hospitals, trauma centers, and membership in regionalized trauma care systems, we explore the link between lethality and the presence of medical resources. The analyses will show that, on a nationwide scale, there has been a continuous drop in lethality since 1960 and this drop is primarily attributable to developments in trauma care. A number of the alternative explanations of the decline in lethality will be examined and found to have, at best, a modest influence."
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 12:31 pm
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Have you seen any hypotheses for the post-1960 rise, K? Mugwump’s explanation is one possibility, but I suspect it is only one of many.
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K 



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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 8:21 pm
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Well, if it's a mountain, there's probably been more focus on the falling eastern slope than on the rising western slope. I don't know whether the putative or real reasons are the same in reverse for both. In either case, I think there are many hypotheses, all of them disputed.

Sociologist Claude Fischer (Berkeley) commented in 2010 that

"perhaps the more puzzling part of the story is the rapid upswing in violence from around 1960 to 1990 ... Two generations of scholars have yet (it appears to me) to satisfactorily explain why that happened. Some of the upswing in crime can be attributed to the baby boom: Put a lot more 15-to-25-year-old males into a society and you will get an upsurge of violence. Some of it has to do with what happened in the black ghettos of the North: The population grew rapidly just when the well-paying blue-collar jobs for men were disappearing. Some of it involved the growing drug trade. And perhaps some of the upswing reflected a short-term cultural shift — maybe the baby boom generation’s rejection of authority — that encouraged violence.

Whatever the reason, the latest news — that violent crime in the U.S., although still high by first-world standards, is trending downward — seems consistent with our longer history. It is the upsurge of violent crime starting in the early 1960s and now ending that remains the larger puzzle."


http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-declines-in-america/
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