The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say?

Abstract

Summary:We propose a methodology to look at violence in particular, and other aspects of quantitative historiography in general, in a way compatible with statistical inference, which needs to accommodate the fat-tailedness of the data and the unreliability of the reports of conflicts. We investigate the theses of "long peace" and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, incompatible with fat tails and non-robust to minor changes in data formatting and methodologies. There is no statistical basis to claim that "times are different" owing to the long inter-arrival times between conflicts; there is no basis to discuss any "trend", and no scientific basis for narratives about change in risk. We describe naive empiricism under fat tails. We also establish that violence has a "true mean" that is underestimated in the track record. This is a historiographical adaptation of the results in Cirillo and Taleb (2016). Preamble

Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences

“…Using extreme value theory to fit the fat-tailed data, they find that they cannot reject their model and conclude from this non-rejection that the data do not support a decline-of-war thesis. In a companion paper they go further, writing that 'there is no scientific basis for narratives about change in risk' (Cirillo & Taleb, 2016a). Cirillo & Taleb (2016b) helped to prompt renewed focus on the importance of fat tails in war sizes for the decline-of-war debate; however, they left several important issues unresolved.…”

Accurate bias estimation with applications to focused model selection

“…Such statements have since been a heated topic of discussion. See for example, Cirillo and Taleb (2016a, 2016b), Clauset (2018), or Cunen, Hjort, and Nygård (2020). When investigating claims like that of Pinker statistically, proper modeling is important.…”

Critica scientifica, popolarizzazione dell’etnografia ed etica dell’antropologo: sulla “controversia yanomami”, per esempio*

“…In base al ragionamento che essi propongono, al di là della generica affermazione secondo cui vi è un nucleo della "natura umana" condiviso dagli Yanomami nel loro "stato primitivo" e dagli abitanti "moderni" degli Stati Uniti, le componenti "migliori" (perché più "civili") di quest'ultima sarebbero in condizione di svilupparsi solo tra i secondi. È soprattutto questa tesi che ha suscitato forti critiche da parte di studiosi diversi per orientamenti e discipline di appartenenza, che hanno rilevato la scarsa consistenza del supporto empirico prodotto da Pinker, accusandolo di spacciare come studio scientifico un discorso ideologico che resta fondato su una posizione pregiudiziale (Cirillo, Taleb 2016;Corry 2013;Ferguson 2013;Lee 2014Lee , 2018.…”