Dreaming of Political Bayescraft

A lot of the customs and ideas that my ingroup thinks are obviously inherently good, aren't actually what I want now that I understand more

So if my attitude is already this, can I skip the pain and the expense? :-)

you should downvote it

Downvoting has been disabled for some time.

then use that knowledge to engineer new institutions that do a better job of being powerful, stable, and protecting human values

Yeah, Asimov called that psychohistory :-) Marxists were doing precisely that: they thought they understood how and why the social order evolved and they used that knowledge to engineer new institutions. How did it work out?

However "engineering" is not enough. So you come up with new institutions -- you still need power to implement them. How are you going to acquire this power?

But this is just me thinking out loud.

That's a good thing. Discussion is good, punishing wrong-thinkers is bad.

Oh, you meant "might made right".

Steven Pinker

Yes, I think he is the primary proponent of the violence-is-declining argument and his book served as the focus for these discussions.

So we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up.

That's a valid point, but it applies only to the violence between the state and its subjects. There is also inter-state violence which tends to account for most of the corpses plus raiding/predation by the state outside of its own borders (see the recent American adventures in the Middle East after the Iraq war).

Plus there is also the commonly-ignored distinction between showing that a historical trend existed and making a forecast: saying that this trend will continue in the future. Given that we live in interesting times, I would be wary of assuming that historical trends will just extrapolate.

Steven Pinker [...]

I have seen it suggested that Pinker's alleged observation of declining violence is something of a statistical artefact -- violent death has a heavy-tailed distribution, so the usual methods of estimating trends may fail badly.

we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up

That may be true, but the context here is a discussion of whether we should see joy in crushing one's enemies as an essential and stable part of human nature. I think there's an important difference between joy in crushing one's enemies and the practical expedience of threatening to crush one's enemies, from that perspective.

I would be interested to know why the argument doesn't apply equally to unicellularity.

I apologize for a misunderstanding. My argument was not that one should "expect [their] successors to return to skullcrushing." It is that, as skull-crushing was an essential part of our evolution, it makes sense that we still have that latent impulse. Think sex.

I ... have never crushed anyone's skull for power and wealth ... and I'm not sure I know anyone who has

The people who actively "skull-crush" for power and wealth are largely tribes of people in the third world. This is occurring in many parts of Africa and some parts of the Middle East. This is where they do not enjoy the same quality of a first-world life as you or I do. Sure, you may not do any skull-crushing. You live a life which is pleasant enough, and the propagation of your lineage is guaranteed enough (and if you do not wish to bear fruit, so to speak, this is another indicator of the pleasantries of the first world). This is missing the point.

So at least within my nice liberal middle-class bubble -- which is, y'know, actually a pretty big bubble, encompassing a substantial fraction of the population -- the "joy of crushing one's enemies" seems not to be much of a thing any more.

First, it's not a large bubble given total human population. It is in fact quite a small bubble standing on the shoulders of violent giants. Maybe we should leave this bubble from time to time.

Second, the joy of crushing you enemies is still innate, as you state yourself ("if you allow for metaphorical crushing ... then there's more of it about"). Just as sexual reproduction leads to competitively viable organisms, leading to our innate desire for sex (even without the explicit desire to reproduce - another wonder of our first world) , violent competition led us to the point we are now. Can you say that you do not enjoy your doses of "metaphorical crushings"? Would you say that, in a doomsday-scenario, the use of violence would be a competitive advantage? If so, then surely some are utilizing it. They would have the advantage. They would reproduce (whether consensual or not - yet again a modern world invention). And we return to our forebears, and the latent spirit of violence lying beneath the surface of our civilized lives...

I digress. I'm not implying that all acts of our ancestors are needed today. I am stating that, no matter one's personal experience with violence, their existence has benefited from previous acts of violence. To state that these impulses have left us is false.