The decline of violence as a lens for understanding effective altruism

My personal experience confirms that assertion.

The GWP is the summation of the GDP for each country. The GDP is then converted to USD for comparison sakes. GDP also is not average income, so it's not entirely accurate to assume that GWP per capita is the same as having $12,000 USD. The number is all about comparison and estimation.

I realize that this is a very crude number but I still think it is useful for recognizing that we do not yet produce enough to appease all basic needs equally.

Do you disagree with that statement? Are you suggesting that we do currently produce enough and all we need to do is redistribute?

Being richer, we are able to afford more of the things that we like - and people like violence.

People like defense. If defense is cheaper than offense, we shouldn't expect more wealth to lead to more violence.

Intra-nationally, wealthier states find it easier to shoulder formidable criminal justice systems.

The potential gains from co-operation (trade) have gone up much more than the potential gains from defection (violence) so we see more co-operation and less defection.

To be more concrete, one dynamic is a relative decrease in the economic returns to military conquest, because conquest tends to destroy everything that is more complicated than resource extraction.

If war isn't going to impoverish, why not invade the neighbouring country in search of honour, glory, religious orthodoxy, etc?

There seem to be contemporary counterexamples: You can easily find national pairings where one country could conquer the other at zero cost to the dominant country (as in, it can use outdated missiles and replace normal military training with the invasion, and still expect to win effortlessly). The largest cost would be disdain from other wealthy countries, but this disdain is exactly what we're interested in explaining: You don't see wealthy nations cooperating to use more than a negligible amount of their potential conquering ability over weaker states.

I agree. Most (maybe almost all) wars in history were constrained, ended, or decided by economic limitations, not by the lack of the desire to fight or the shortage of raw manpower.

I wonder how much of the decline is based on improved technology making it harder to get away with it.

The co-operation theory is certainly possible and active in the whole process. Co-operation can also be more than trade too, but increasing empathy as well. But does co-operation or empathy have more impact than our richness?

Your example of movies and video games: These things exist now as part of the latest iteration of technology. Now is also the time in which violence is lowest. You suggest movies and video games have replaced physical violence. This supports my theory that technology is the cause of decreased violence.

But I disagree that people inherently like violence. As I mentioned, I'm studying counseling and most of what I understand from this is that people behave violently when they feel threatened. If you remove the feeling of threat, you most often remove the violence with it. Thus, technology as a great power in reducing violence. When achieving food, shelter, and safety is hard and requires a lot of energy we tend to feel more threatened. When all of these things are easy to attain we feel less threatened. Technology makes all this easier.

Another amusing story has American researchers predicting the timing of the first orbital satellite based on nothing more than extrapolated trends in maximum rocket velocity. They dismissed the prediction, because they didn't think their research project was on track. But sure enough, the first satellite was launched just on time- by the Russians.

There was an article published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact around 1960 (after Sputnik, of course) which basically did this. The graph would lead you to conclude that we'd achieve faster than light travel before the year 2000.

Dismissing predictions like the one you describe was perfectly legitimate, even if it turns out to be wrong. Things that increase on a sigmoid growth curve will increase faster up to a point where they slow down again, and the predictor had no reason to assert that the curve would stay steep for long enough to get a satellite launched, any more than the Analog writer had a reason to assert that it would stay steep for long enough to get FTL.

I'm not sure your counter-example is that accurate either. This is a report for only recent time and so the historical accuracy is not guaranteed but from 2012 to 2014, individual violence outweighed group violence by about 9 times. http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/conflict_assessment_-_hoeffler_and_fearon_0.pdf. I think it is safe to assume that historically it's at least similar.

When we look at the total historical view of violence we can not limit ourselves to just "war" or "group violence", and this data was included in Pinker's presentation. Therefore, kings, presidents, and chiefs, (if we consider them the sole source of the conflict, which we shouldn't) only contribute approximately 1/9th of the total global violence.

Sure there's a correlation that increased substances increase violence, but that in no way suggests that historical increased violence is due to increased substances. I don't think we have any kind of data that shows that these substances have been steadily decreasing over the past 10,000 years the same way that violence has been decreasing over the last 10,000 years.

I certainly also recognize there are other factors, but I think they pale when compared against our technological advancements. Technology in terms of general human betterment is unparalleled. This planet can not sustain a population of 7 billion without technological means of food production. Refrigeration another huge boon for food. Advances in medicine mean more people survive childhood and general illness as well. Technology enables most of our sanitation efforts which is also massive towards the betterment of human life.

None of this can be duplicated with non-technological means. We can't pray our way to better sanitation. We can't even sacrifice our way to better sanitation on any meaningful scale. But pumps and plumbing do the job magnificently.

I then think all of this contributes to lower violence and now I'm trying to tease out how much the other factors contribute. One of the possible other factors is cooperation and/or easier empathy. Can either of these do more good for a group of people than improved plumbing? I personally, don't think so but I want to see if anyone has any good data that shows otherwise.

Income equality certainly does play a role. This is why I include the GWP stat as well. I don't think we're at a point where income equality fixes the problem. If we made all things equal, I think we'd end up short and more people would suffer. But that is only at the view of right now. If we increased our production output even more so that total equality would put every everyone at 4 times the poverty level, then I think this income equality issue would become the greater force in violence.

Technological advancement isn't like a policy. It changes everything. Just because you need to fix tons of problems to fix this doesn't mean technology won't. I don't think it will solve violence, but it will reduce it.

In fact, in Europe, the general trend of falling homicide rates even predates modern democratic states, ideological antimilitarism and the NAP's codification.

I don't know the context of the quote, but even with infinite resources we could have a fear-based society. A society where if you break some rule, you will be denied the resources you need. And the rules themselves could make you suffer if you obey them. Or the rules could be contradictory or otherwise impossible to follow.