Effective altruism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, sometimes called effective altruists, may choose careers based on the amount of good that they expect the career to achieve or donate to charities based on the goal of maximising positive impact. They may work on the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.

Effective altruists aim to emphasize impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival of humanity over the long-term future.

The movement developed during the 2000s, and the name effective altruism was coined in 2011. Philosophers influential to the movement include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. What began as a set of evaluation techniques advocated by a diffuse coalition evolved into an identity. With approximately 7,000 people active in the effective altruism community and strong ties to the elite schools in the United States and Britain, effective altruism has become associated with Silicon Valley and the technology industry, forming a tight subculture.

The movement received mainstream attention and criticism with the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX as founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a major funder of effective altruism causes prior to late 2022. Within the Bay Area, it received criticism for having a culture that has been described as toxic and sexually exploitative towards women, which led to conversations inside the community about how to create an environment that can better prevent and fight sexual misconduct.

History

Peter Singer and William MacAskill are among several philosophers who have helped popularize effective altruism.

Beginning in the latter half of the 2000s, several communities centered around altruist, rationalist, and futurological concerns started to converge, such as:

• The evidence-based charity community centered around GiveWell, including Open Philanthropy, which originally came out of GiveWell Labs but then became independent.
• The community around pledging and career selection for effective giving, centered around the Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours organisations.
• The Singularity Institute (now MIRI) for studying the safety of artificial intelligence, the Future of Humanity Institute studying topics such as existential risk, and the LessWrong discussion forum, which focuses on rationalism.

In 2011, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours decided to incorporate into an umbrella organization and held a vote for their new name; the "Centre for Effective Altruism" was selected. The Effective Altruism Global conference has been held since 2013. As the movement formed, it attracted individuals who were not part of a specific community, but who had been following the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer's work on applied ethics, particularly "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), Animal Liberation (1975), and The Life You Can Save (2009). Singer himself used the term in 2013, in a TED talk titled "The Why and How of Effective Altruism".

Sam Bankman-Fried, the eventual founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, had a seminal lunch with philosopher William MacAskill in 2012 while he was an undergraduate at MIT in which MacAskill encouraged him to go earn money and donate it, rather than volunteering his time for causes. Bankman-Fried went on to a career in investing and around 2019 became more publicly associated with the effective altruism movement, announcing that his goal was to "donate as much as [he] can". Bankman-Fried founded the FTX Future Fund, which brought on MacAskill as one of its advisers, and which made a $13.9 million grant to the Centre for Effective Altruism where MacAskill holds a board role.

Notable publications and media

A number of books and articles related to effective altruism have been published that have codified, criticized, and brought more attention to the movement. In 2015, philosopher Peter Singer published The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically.^[20] The same year, the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill published Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.

In 2018, American news website Vox launched its Future Perfect section, led by journalist Dylan Matthews, which publishes articles and podcasts on "finding the best ways to do good".

In 2019, Oxford University Press published the volume Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, edited by Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer.

More recent books have emphasized concerns for future generations. In 2020, the Australian moral philosopher Toby Ord published The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, while MacAskill published What We Owe the Future in 2022.

In 2023, Oxford University Press published the volume The Good it Promises, The Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, edited by Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen.

Controversies

After the collapse of FTX in late 2022, the movement underwent additional public scrutiny.

Bankman-Fried's relationship with effective altruism has been called into question as a public relations strategy, while the movement's embrace of him proved damaging to its reputation. Some journalists asked whether the effective altruist movement was "complicit" in FTX's collapse, because it was convenient for leaders to overlook specific warnings about Bankman-Fried's behavior or questionable ethics at the trading firm Alameda.

However, several leaders of the effective altruism movement, including William MacAskill and Robert Wiblin, condemned FTX's actions. MacAskill emphasized that bringing about good consequences does not justify violating rights or sacrificing integrity.

Critiques arose not only in relation to Bankman-Fried's role and his close association with William MacAskill, but also concerning issues of exclusion and sexual harassment. A 2023 Bloomberg article featured some members of the effective altruism community who criticized the philosophy as masking a culture of predatory behavior. In a 2023 Time magazine article, seven women reported misconduct and controversy in the effective altruism movement. They accused men within the movement, typically in the Bay Area, of using their power to groom younger women for polyamorous sexual relationships. The accusers argued that the majority male demographic and the polyamorous subculture combine to create an environment where sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused or rationalised away. In response to the accusations, the Centre for Effective Altruism said that some of the alleged perpetrators had already been banned, and the organization would address the ones they were made newly aware of. The organization also defended itself by noting it is challenging to discern to what extent sexual misconduct issues were specific to the effective altruism community or reflective of broader societal problems of the exploitation of women. Propelled by the situation, members of the community discussed how to create an environment more capable of preventing and fighting sexual misconduct.

Philosophy

Effective altruists focus on the many philosophical questions related to the most effective ways to benefit others.^[44][45] Such philosophical questions shift the starting point of reasoning from "what to do" to "why" and "how". There is little consensus on the answers, and there are differences between effective altruists who believe that they should do the most good they possibly can with all of their resources and those who only try do the most good they can within a defined budget.

According to MacAskill, the view of effective altruism as doing the most good one can within a defined budget can be compatible with a wide variety of views on morality and meta-ethics, as well as traditional religious teachings on altruism such as in Christianity. Effective altruism can also be in tension with religion where religion emphasizes spending resources on worship and evangelism instead of causes that do the most good.

Other than Peter Singer and William MacAskill, philosophers associated with effective altruism include Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves, and Derek Parfit. Economist Yew-Kwang Ng conducted similar research in welfare economics and moral philosophy.

The Centre for Effective Altruism lists the following four principles that unite effective altruism: prioritization, impartial altruism, open truthseeking, and a collaborative spirit. To support people's ability to act altruistically on the basis of impartial reasoning, the effective altruism movement promotes values and actions such as a collaborative spirit, honesty, transparency, and publicly pledging to donate a certain percentage of income or other resources.

Impartiality

See also: Equal consideration of interests

Effective altruism aims to emphasize impartial reasoning in that everyone's well-being counts equally. Singer, in his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", wrote:

It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away ... The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society.

Impartiality combined with seeking to do the most good leads to prioritizing benefits to those who are in a worse state, because anyone who happens to be worse off will benefit more from an improvement in their state, all other things being equal.

Scope of moral consideration

One issue related to moral impartiality is the question of which beings are deserving of moral consideration. Some effective altruists consider the well-being of non-human animals in addition to humans, and advocate for animal welfare issues such as ending factory farming. Those who subscribe to longtermism include future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future by, for example, reducing existential risks.

Criticism of impartiality

The drowning child analogy in Singer's essay provoked philosophical debate. In response to a version of Singer's drowning child analogy, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in 2006 asked whether the most effective action of a man in an expensive suit, confronted with a drowning child, would not be to save the child and ruin his suit—but rather, sell the suit and donate the proceeds to charity.  Appiah believed that he "should save the drowning child and ruin my suit". In a 2015 debate, when presented with a similar scenario of either saving a child from a burning building or saving a Picasso painting to sell and donate the proceeds to charity, MacAskill responded that the effective altruist should save and sell the Picasso. Psychologist Alan Jern called MacAskill's choice "unnatural, even distasteful, to many people", although Jern concluded that effective altruism raises questions "worth asking". MacAskill later endorsed a "qualified definition of effective altruism" in which effective altruists try to do the most good "without violating constraints" such as any obligations that someone might have to help those nearby.

William Schambra has criticized the impartial logic of effective altruism, arguing that benevolence arising from reciprocity and face-to-face interactions is stronger and more prevalent than charity based on impartial, detached altruism. Such community-based charitable giving, he wrote, is foundational to civil society and, in turn, democracy. Larissa MacFarquhar said that people have diverse moral emotions, and she suggested that some effective altruists are not unemotional and detached but feel as much empathy for distant strangers as for people nearby. Ross Douthat of The New York Times criticized the movement's "'telescopic philanthropy' aimed at distant populations" and envisioned "effective altruists sitting around in a San Francisco skyscraper calculating how to relieve suffering halfway around the world while the city decays beneath them", while he also praised the movement for providing "useful rebukes to the solipsism and anti-human pessimism that haunts the developed world today".use prioritization

A key component of effective altruism is "cause prioritization". Cause prioritization is based on the principle of cause neutrality, the idea that resources should be distributed to causes based on what will do the most good, irrespective of the identity of the beneficiary and the way in which they are helped. By contrast, many non-profits emphasize effectiveness and evidence with respect to a single cause such as education or climate change.

One tool that EA-based organizations may use to prioritize cause areas is the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework. Importance is the amount of value that would be created if a problem were solved, tractability is the fraction of a problem that would be solved if additional resources were devoted to it, and neglectedness is the quantity of resources already committed to a cause.

The information required for cause prioritization may involve data analysis, comparing possible outcomes with what would have happened under other conditions (counterfactual reasoning), and identifying uncertainty. The difficulty of these tasks has led to the creation of organizations that specialize in researching the relative prioritization of causes.

Criticism of cause prioritization

This practice of "weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another" was criticized by Ken Berger and Robert Penna of Charity Navigator for being "moralistic, in the worst sense of the word" and "elitist". William MacAskill responded to Berger and Penna, defending the rationale for comparing one beneficiary's interests against another and concluding that such comparison is difficult and sometimes impossible but often necessary. MacAskill argued that the more pernicious form of elitism was that of donating to art galleries (and like institutions) instead of charity. Ian David Moss suggested that the criticism of cause prioritization could be resolved by what he called "domain-specific effective altruism", which would encourage "that principles of effective altruism be followed within an area of philanthropic focus, such as a specific cause or geography" and could resolve the conflict between local and global perspectives for some donors.

Cost-effectiveness

Some charities are considered to be far more effective than others, as charities may spend different amounts of money to achieve the same goal, and some charities may not achieve the goal at all. Effective altruists seek to identify interventions that are highly cost-effective in expectation. Many interventions have uncertain benefits, and the expected value of one intervention can be higher than that of another if its benefits are larger, even if it has a smaller chance of succeeding. One metric effective altruists use to choose between health interventions is the estimated number of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) added per dollar.

Some effective altruist organizations prefer randomized controlled trials as a primary form of evidence, as they are commonly considered the highest level of evidence in healthcare research. Others have argued that requiring this stringent level of evidence unnecessarily narrows the focus to issues where the evidence can be developed. Kelsey Piper argues that uncertainty is not a good reason for effective altruists to avoid acting on their best understanding of the world, because most interventions have mixed evidence regarding their effectiveness.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and others have warned about the "measurement problem", with issues such as medical research or government reform worked on "one grinding step at a time", and results being hard to measure with controlled experiments. Gobry also argues that such interventions risk being undervalued by the effective altruism movement. As effective altruism emphasizes a data-centric approach, critics say principles which do not lend themselves to quantification—justice, fairness, equality—get left in the sidelines.

Counterfactual reasoning

Counterfactual reasoning involves considering the possible outcomes of alternative choices. It has been employed by effective altruists in a number of contexts, including career choice. Many people assume that the best way to help others is through direct methods, such as working for a charity or providing social services. However, since there is a high supply of candidates for such positions, it makes sense to compare the amount of good one candidate does to how much good the next-best candidate would do. According to this reasoning, the marginal impact of a career is likely to be smaller than the gross impact.

Differences from utilitarianism

Although EA aims for maximizing like utilitarianism, EA differs from utilitarianism in a few ways; for example, EA does not claim that people should always maximize the good regardless of the means, and EA does not claim that the good is the sum total of well-being. Toby Ord has described utilitarians as "number-crunching", compared with most effective altruists whom he called "guided by conventional wisdom tempered by an eye to the numbers".

Cause priorities

The principles and goals of effective altruism are wide enough to support furthering any cause that allows people to do the most good, while taking into account cause neutrality. Many people in the effective altruism movement have prioritized global health and development, animal welfare, and mitigating risks that threaten the future of humanity. Global health and development.

The alleviation of global poverty and neglected tropical diseases has been a focus of some of the earliest and most prominent organizations associated with effective altruism. Charity evaluator GiveWell was founded by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 to address poverty, where they believe additional donations to be the most impactful. GiveWell's leading recommendations include: malaria prevention charities Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium, deworming charities Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and Deworm the World Initiative, and GiveDirectly for direct cash transfers to beneficiaries. The organization The Life You Can Save, which originated from Singer's book of the same name, works to alleviate global poverty by promoting evidence-backed charities, conducting philanthropy education, and changing the culture of giving in affluent countries.

Animal welfare

Improving animal welfare has been a focus of many effective altruists. Singer and Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) have argued that effective altruists should prioritize changes to factory farming over pet welfare. 60 billion land animals are slaughtered and between 1 and 2.7 trillion individual fish are killed each year for human consumption.

A number of non-profit organizations have been established that adopt an effective altruist approach toward animal welfare. ACE evaluates animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and transparency, particularly those tackling factory farming. Other animal initiatives affiliated with effective altruism include Animal Ethics' and Wild Animal Initiative's work on wild animal suffering, addressing farm animal suffering with cultured meat, and expanding the circle of concern so that people care more about all kinds of animals. Faunalytics focuses on animal welfare research. The Sentience Institute is a think tank founded to expand the moral circle to other species.

Long-term future and global catastrophic risks

The ethical stance of longtermism, emphasizing the importance of positively influencing the long-term future, developed closely in relation to effective altruism. Longtermists have proposed that the welfare of future individuals is just as important as the welfare of currently existing individuals, as the prioritization of the former is coextensive with the wellness of the latter. Toby Ord has stated that "the people of the future may be even more powerless to protect themselves from the risks we impose than the dispossessed of our own time".

Existential risks, such as dangers associated with biotechnology and advanced artificial intelligence, are often highlighted and the subject of active research. Existential risks have such huge impacts that achieving a very small change in such a risk—say a 0.0001-percent reduction—"might be worth more than saving a billion people today", reported Gideon Lewis-Kraus in 2022, but he added that nobody in the EA community openly endorses such an extreme conclusion.

Organizations that work actively on research and advocacy for improving the long-term future, and have connections with the effective altruism community, are the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Future of Life Institute. In addition, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is focused on the more narrow mission of managing advanced artificial intelligence.

Approaches

Effective altruists pursue different approaches to doing good, such as donating to effective charitable organizations, using their career to make more money for donations or directly contributing their labor, and starting new non-profit or for-profit ventures.

Donation

Financial donation

Many effective altruists engage in significant charitable donation. Some believe it is a moral duty to alleviate suffering through donations if other possible uses of those funds do not offer comparable benefits to oneself. Some even lead a frugal lifestyle in order to donate more.

Giving What We Can (GWWC) is an organization whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their future income to the causes that they believe are the most effective. GWWC was founded in 2009 by Toby Ord, who lives on £18,000 ($27,000) per year and donates the balance of his income. In 2020, Ord said that people had donated over $100 million to date through the GWWC pledge.

Founders Pledge is a similar initiative, founded out of the non-profit Founders Forum for Good, whereby entrepreneurs make a legally binding commitment to donate a percentage of their personal proceeds to charity in the event that they sell their business. As of April 2023, nearly 1,800 entrepreneurs had pledged over $9 billion and nearly $900 million had been donated.

An estimated $416 million was donated to effective charities identified by the movement in 2019, representing a 37% annual growth rate since 2015. Two of the largest donors in the effective altruism community, Dustin Moskovitz, who had become wealthy through co-founding Facebook, and his wife Cari Tuna, hope to donate most of their net worth of over $11 billion for effective altruist causes through the private foundation Good Ventures. Others influenced by effective altruism include Sam Bankman-Fried, as well as professional poker players Dan Smith and Liv Boeree. Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian billionaire founder of Skype, is known for donating to some effective altruist causes.

Organ donation

EA has been used to argue that humans should donate organs, whilst alive or after death, and some effective altruists do.

Career choice

Effective altruists often consider using their career to do good, both by direct service and indirectly through their consumption, investment, and donation decisions. 80,000 Hours is an organization that conducts research and gives advice on which careers have the largest positive impact.

Earning to give

Earning to give involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.

Founding effective organizations

Some effective altruists start non-profit or for-profit organizations to implement cost-effective ways of doing good. On the non-profit side, for example, Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster conducted randomized controlled trials in Kenya to find out the best way to improve students' test scores. They tried new textbooks and flip charts, as well as smaller class sizes, but found that the only intervention that raised school attendance was treating intestinal worms in children. Based on their findings, they started the Deworm the World Initiative. From 2013 to August 2022, GiveWell designated Deworm the World (now run by nonprofit Evidence Action) as a top charity based on their assessment that mass deworming is "generally highly cost-effective"; however, there is substantial uncertainty about the benefits of mass deworming programs, with some studies finding long-term effects and others not. The Happier Lives Institute conducts research on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in developing countries; Canopie develops an app that provides cognitive behavioural therapy to women who are expecting or postpartum; Giving Green analyzes and ranks climate interventions for effectiveness.  The Fish Welfare Initiative works on improving animal welfare in fishing and aquaculture; and the Lead Exposure Elimination Project works on reducing lead poisoning in developing countries.

Incremental versus systemic change

While much of the initial focus of effective altruism was on direct strategies such as health interventions and cash transfers, more systematic social, economic, and political reforms have also attracted attention. Mathew Snow in Jacobin wrote that effective altruism "implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place". Philosopher Amia Srinivasan criticized William MacAskill's Doing Good Better for a perceived lack of coverage of global inequality and oppression, while noting that effective altruism is in principle open to whichever means of doing good is most effective, including political advocacy aimed at systemic change. Srinivasan said, "Effective altruism has so far been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through largely conventional means, but it is at least in theory a broad church." Judith Lichtenberg in The New Republic said that effective altruists "neglect the kind of structural and political change that is ultimately necessary". An article in The Ecologist published in 2016 argued that effective altruism is an apolitical attempt to solve political problems, describing the concept as "pseudo-scientific". The Ethiopian-American AI scientist Timnit Gebru has condemned effective altruists "for acting as though their concerns are above structural issues as racism and colonialism", as Gideon Lewis-Kraus summarized her views in 2022.

Philosophers such as Susan Dwyer, Joshua Stein, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have criticized effective altruism for furthering the disproportionate influence of wealthy individuals in domains that should be the responsibility of democratic governments and organizations.

Arguments have been made that movements focused on systemic or institutional change are compatible with effective altruism. Philosopher Elizabeth Ashford posits that people are obligated to both donate to effective aid charities and to reform the structures that are responsible for poverty. Open Philanthropy has given grants for progressive advocacy work in areas such as criminal justice, economic stabilization, and housing reform, despite pegging the success of political reform as being "highly uncertain".

Psychological research

Main article: Psychological barriers to effective altruism

Researchers in psychology and related fields have identified psychological barriers to effective altruism that can cause people to choose less effective options when they engage in altruistic activities such as charitable giving.

Other criticism of the movement

While originally the movement leaders were associated with frugal lifestyles, the arrival of big donors, including Bankman-Fried, led to more spending and opulence, which seemed incongruous to the movement's espoused values. In 2022, the Centre for Effective Altruism purchased the estate of Wytham Abbey for the purpose of running workshops.

Other prominent people

Businessman Elon Musk described MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future as "a close match for my philosophy".

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has publicly stated he would like to bring the ideas of effective altruism to a broader audience.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has called effective altruism an "incredibly flawed movement" that shows "very weird emergent behavior". Effective altruist concerns about AI risk were present among the OpenAI board members who fired Altman in November 2023.

Factfulness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness

Author	Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling
Genre	Non-fiction
Publisher	Flatiron Books (US) Sceptre (UK)
Publication date	April 3, 2018
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	341
ISBN	978-1-250-10781-7
Website	Gapminder: Factfulness (the book)

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think is a 2018 book by Swedish physician, professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and statistician Hans Rosling with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund. The book was published posthumously a year after Hans Rosling died from pancreatic cancer. In the book, Rosling suggests that the vast majority of people are wrong about the state of the world. He demonstrates that his test subjects believe the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it actually is, attributing this not to random chance but to misinformation.

Rosling recommends thinking about the world as divided into four levels based on income brackets (rather than the prototypical developed/developing framework) and suggests ten instincts that prevent us from seeing real progress in the world.

Bill Gates highlighted the book as one of his suggested five books worth reading for summer 2018, offering to purchase a copy for any 2018 college graduate upon request.

Summary

(Left to right) Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling discuss their book Factfulness in 2016.

Four income levels

Rosling criticizes the notion of dividing the world into the "developed world" and the "developing world" by calling it an outdated view. He shows that today most countries are "developed" and the others are not how developing countries were when the term became popular. Instead, he offers a four category model based on income per person (adjusted for price differences):

1. Level 1: less than $2 a day
2. Level 2: $2–$8 a day
3. Level 3: $8–$32 a day
4. Level 4: $32+ a day

He says that the majority of the countries in the world are on Level 2 or Level 3. A select few countries are on Level 1 and Level 4.

World getting better

The book also stresses that many people think the world is getting worse when, in fact, it is not. Early in the book the authors describe a survey in which 10,000 recipients were polled for their views on the state of the world. They interpret the survey’s results as showing that 80% of recipients knew less about the world than "chimps" would have, i.e. that they did worse than random guessing. This, the authors claim, shows that the media systematically skew data and trends and select stories to make people think that the world is getting worse.

Rules of thumb

Ten rules of thumb helping to avoid overdramatic interpretations

Number	Dramatic instinct	Example	Rule of thumb	Example
1	Gap instinct	'Look at the gap!'	Locate the majority	'Is there really a gap?'
2	Negativity instinct	'It's getting worse!'	Expect negative news	'Would improvement get attention?'.
3	Straight line instinct	'It just continues!'	Imagine bending lines	'Why would this line not bend?'
4	Fear instinct	'It's scary!'	Calculate the risk	'Is it really dangerous?'
5	Size instinct	'It's big!'	Check the proportions	'Is it big in comparison?'
6	Generalization instinct	'They're all the same!'	Check your categories	'How are they different?'
7	Destiny instinct	'It never changes!'	Notice slow changes	'Isn't it always changing slowly?'
8	Single-perspective instinct	'This is the solution!'	Use multiple tools	'What other solutions exist?'
9	Blame instinct	'That's the bad guy!'	Resist pointing fingers	'What system made this possible?'
10	Urgency instinct	'It is now or never!'	Take small steps	'Can we take decisions as we go?'

Reception

Jim O'Neill, reviewing for Nature, described the book as "a fabulous read, succinct and lively", and believed Rosling's use of multiple-choice questions throughout the book "enlivens the chapters". Criticism was directed towards it not being comprehensive, with O'Neill noting ongoing challenges such as antimicrobial resistance being omitted. He concluded that "a just tribute to this book and the man would be a global day of celebration for facts about our world."

Christian Berggren, a Swedish professor of industrial management, has questioned the authors' claims and suggested that Rosling's own thinking shows a bias towards Pollyannaism. Particularly, Berggren criticized the authors for understating the importance of the European migrant crisis, the environmental impacts of the Anthropocene, and continued global population growth. Furthermore, Berggren remarks that "Factfulness includes many graphs of 'bad things in decline' and 'good things on the rise' but not a single graph of problematic phenomena that are on the rise." It "employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth." Berggren raises concerns that the simplistic worldview this book offers could have serious consequences.

Bill Gates has cited Factfulness as "one of the best books [he's] ever read." In an interview with Time, Gates states that Factfulness "offers clear, actionable advice for how to overcome our innate biases and see the world more factfully." In particular, Gates found the four income levels framework a "revelation". Of the ten rules of thumb given in the book, Gates worries most about the blame instinct, not for creating scapegoats, but for turning people into heroes. In June 2018, Bill Gates offered free copies, to all new graduates of U.S. colleges and universities.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature 

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. The book uses data simply documenting declining violence across time and geography. This paints a picture of massive declines in the violence of all forms, from war, to improved treatment of children. He highlights the role of nation-state monopolies on force, of commerce (making other people become more valuable alive than dead), of increased literacy and communication (promoting empathy), as well as a rise in a rational problem-solving orientation as possible causes of this decline in violence. He notes that paradoxically, our impression of violence has not tracked this decline, perhaps because of increased communication, and that further decline is not inevitable, but is contingent on forces harnessing our better motivations such as empathy and increases in reason.

Thesis

The book's title was taken from the ending of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address. Pinker uses the phrase as a metaphor for four human motivations – empathy, self-control, the "moral sense", and reason – that, he writes, can "orient us away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism."

Pinker presents a large amount of data (and statistical analysis thereof) that, he argues, demonstrate that violence has been in decline over millennia and that the present is probably the most peaceful time in the history of the human species. The decline in violence, he argues, is enormous in magnitude, visible on both long and short time scales and found in many domains including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, criminal justice, and treatment of children, homosexuals, animals and racial and ethnic minorities. He stresses that "The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue."

Pinker argues that the radical declines in violent behavior that he documents do not result from major changes in human biology or cognition. He specifically rejects the view that humans are necessarily violent, and thus have to undergo radical change in order to become more peaceable. However, Pinker also rejects what he regards as the simplistic nature versus nurture argument, which would imply that the radical change must therefore have come purely from external "(nurture)" sources. Instead, he argues that: "The way to explain the decline of violence is to identify the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand."

Pinker identifies five "historical forces" that have favored "our peaceable motives" and "have driven the multiple declines in violence". They are:

• The Leviathan – the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary "with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force", which can defuse the [individual] temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge and circumvent self-serving biases.
• Commerce – the rise of technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners, so that other people become more valuable alive than dead and are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization.
• Feminization – increasing respect for the interests and values of women.
• Cosmopolitanism – the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media, which can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.
• The Escalator of Reason – an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs which can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won." Pinker credits Peter Singer for the metaphor "escalator of reason".

Outline

The first section of the book, chapters 2 through 7, seeks to demonstrate and to analyze historical trends related to declines of violence on different scales. Chapter 8 discusses five "inner demons" – psychological systems that can lead to violence. Chapter 9 examines four "better angels" or motives that can incline people away from violence. The last chapter examines the five historical forces listed above that have led to declines in violence.

Six trends of declining violence (Chapters 2 through 7)

1. The Pacification Process: Pinker describes this as the transition from the anarchy of hunting, gathering, and horticultural societies to the first agricultural civilizations with cities and governments, beginning around five thousand years ago which brought a reduction in the chronic raiding and feuding that characterized life in a state of nature and a more or less fivefold decrease in rates of violent death.
2. The Civilizing Process: Pinker argues that "between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a tenfold-to-fiftyfold decline in their rates of homicide." He attributes the idea of the Civilizing Process to the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributed this surprising decline to the consolidation of a patchwork of feudal territories into large kingdoms with centralized authority and an infrastructure on commerce.
3. The Humanitarian Revolution – Pinker attributes this term and concept to the historian Lynn Hunt. He says this revolution "unfolded on the [shorter] scale of centuries and took off around the time of the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries." Although, he also points to historical antecedents and to "parallels elsewhere in the world", he writes: "It saw the first organized movements to abolish slavery, dueling, judicial torture, superstitious killing, sadistic punishment, and cruelty to animals, together with the first stirrings of systematic pacifism."
4. The Long Peace: a term he attributes to the historian John Lewis Gaddis's The Long Peace: Inquiries into the history of the Cold War. Pinker states this fourth "major transition" took place after the end of World War II. During it, he says, the great powers, and the developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.
5. The New Peace: Pinker calls this trend "more tenuous", but since the end of the Cold War in 1989, organized conflicts of all kinds – civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, and terrorist attacks – have declined throughout the world.
6. The Rights Revolutions: The postwar period has seen, Pinker argues, "a growing revulsion against aggression on smaller scales, including violence against ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. These spin-offs from the concept of human rights – civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, gay rights, and animal rights – were asserted in a cascade of movements from the late 1950s to the present day."

Five inner demons (Chapter 8)

Pinker rejects what he calls the "Hydraulic Theory of Violence" – the idea "that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence." Instead, he argues, research suggests that "aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurological basis, and their social distribution." He examines five such systems:

1. Predatory or Practical Violence: violence deployed as a practical means to an end.
2. Dominance: the urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power. Pinker argues that dominance motivations can occur within individuals and coalitions of racial, ethnic, religious, or national groups.
3. Revenge: the moralistic urge toward retribution, punishment, and justice.
4. Sadism: the deliberate infliction of pain for no purpose but to enjoy a person's suffering.
5. Ideology: a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.

Four better angels (Chapter 9)

Pinker examines four motives that can orient [humans] away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism. He identifies:

1. Empathy: which prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own.
2. Self-Control: which allows us to anticipate the consequences of acting on our impulses and to inhibit them accordingly.
3. The Moral Sense: which sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture. These sometimes decrease violence but can also increase it when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical.
4. Reason: which allows us to extract ourselves from our parochial vantage points.

In this chapter Pinker also examines and partially rejects the idea that humans have evolved in the biological sense to become less violent.

Influences

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the book, Pinker uses a range of sources from different fields. Particular attention is paid to philosopher Thomas Hobbes who Pinker argues has been undervalued. Pinker's use of "un-orthodox" thinkers follows directly from his observation that the data on violence contradict our current expectations. In an earlier work, Pinker characterized the general misunderstanding concerning Hobbes:

Hobbes is commonly interpreted as proposing that man in a state of nature was saddled with an irrational impulse for hatred and destruction. In fact his analysis is more subtle, and perhaps even more tragic for he showed how the dynamics of violence fall out of interactions among rational and self-interested agents.

Pinker also references ideas from occasionally overlooked contemporary academics, for example the works of political scientist John Mueller and sociologist Norbert Elias, among others. The extent of Elias's influence on Pinker can be adduced from the title of Chapter 3, which is taken from the title of Elias's seminal The Civilizing Process. Pinker also draws upon the work of international relations scholar Joshua Goldstein. They co-wrote a New York Times op-ed article titled "War Really Is Going Out of Style" that summarizes many of their shared views, and appeared together at Harvard's Institute of Politics to answer questions from academics and students concerning their similar thesis.

Reception

Praise

Bill Gates considers the book one of the most important books he has ever read, and on the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs he selected the book as the one he would take with him to a deserted island. He has written that "Steven Pinker shows us ways we can make those positive trajectories a little more likely. That's a contribution, not just to historical scholarship, but to the world." After Gates recommended the book as a graduate present in May 2017, the book re-entered the bestseller list.

The philosopher Peter Singer gave the book a positive review in The New York Times. Singer concludes: "[It] is a supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline."

Political scientist Robert Jervis, in a long review for The National Interest, states that Pinker "makes a case that will be hard to refute. The trends are not subtle – many of the changes involve an order of magnitude or more. Even when his explanations do not fully convince, they are serious and well-grounded."

In a review for The American Scholar, Michael Shermer writes, "Pinker demonstrates that long-term data trumps anecdotes. The idea that we live in an exceptionally violent time is an illusion created by the media's relentless coverage of violence, coupled with our brain's evolved propensity to notice and remember recent and emotionally salient events. Pinker's thesis is that violence of all kinds – from murder, rape, and genocide to the spanking of children to the mistreatment of blacks, women, gays, and animals – has been in decline for centuries as a result of the civilizing process... Picking up Pinker's 832-page opus feels daunting, but it's a page-turner from the start."

In The Guardian, Cambridge University political scientist David Runciman writes, "I am one of those who like to believe that... the world is just as dangerous as it has always been. But Pinker shows that for most people in most ways it has become much less dangerous." Runciman concludes "everyone should read this astonishing book."

In a later review for The Guardian, written when the book was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, Tim Radford wrote, "in its confidence and sweep, the vast timescale, its humane standpoint and its confident world-view, it is something more than a science book: it is an epic history by an optimist who can list his reasons to be cheerful and support them with persuasive instances.... I don't know if he's right, but I do think this book is a winner."

Adam Lee writes, in a blog review for Big Think, that "even people who are inclined to reject Pinker's conclusions will sooner or later have to grapple with his arguments."

In a long review in The Wilson Quarterly, psychologist Vaughan Bell calls it "an excellent exploration of how and why violence, aggression, and war have declined markedly, to the point where we live in humanity's most peaceful age.... [P]owerful, mind changing, and important."

In a long review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, anthropologist Christopher Boehm, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California and co-director of the USC Jane Goodall Research Center, called the book "excellent and important."

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, in The Wall Street Journal, called the book "a masterly effort to explain what Mr. Pinker regards as one of the biggest changes in human history: We kill one another less frequently than before. But to give this project its greatest possible effect, he has one more book to write: a briefer account that ties together an argument now presented in 800 pages and that avoids the few topics about which Mr. Pinker has not done careful research." Specifically, the assertions to which Wilson objected were Pinker's writing that (in Wilson's summation), "George W. Bush 'infamously' supported torture; John Kerry was right to think of terrorism as a 'nuisance'; 'Palestinian activist groups' have disavowed violence and now work at building a 'competent government'. Iran will never use its nuclear weapons... [and] Mr. Bush... is 'unintellectual.'"

Brenda Maddox, in The Telegraph, called the book "utterly convincing" and "well-argued".

Clive Cookson, reviewing it in the Financial Times, called it "a marvelous synthesis of science, history and storytelling, demonstrating how fortunate the vast majority of us are today to experience serious violence only through the mass media."

The science journalist John Horgan called it "a monumental achievement" that "should make it much harder for pessimists to cling to their gloomy vision of the future" in a largely positive review in Slate.

In The Huffington Post, Neil Boyd, Professor and Associate Director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, strongly defended the book against its critics, saying:

While there are a few mixed reviews (James Q. Wilson in the Wall Street Journal comes to mind), virtually everyone else either raves about the book or expresses something close to ad hominem contempt and loathing... At the heart of the disagreement are competing conceptions of research and scholarship, perhaps epistemology itself. How are we to study violence and to assess whether it has been increasing or decreasing? What analytic tools do we bring to the table? Pinker, sensibly enough chooses to look at the best available evidence regarding the rate of violent death over time, in pre-state societies, in medieval Europe, in the modern era, and always in a global context; he writes about inter-state conflicts, the two world wars, intrastate conflicts, civil wars, and homicides. In doing so, he takes a critical barometer of violence to be the rate of homicide deaths per 100,000 citizens... Pinker's is a remarkable book, extolling science as a mechanism for understanding issues that are all too often shrouded in unstated moralities, and highly questionable empirical assumptions. Whatever agreements or disagreements may spring from his specifics, the author deserves our respect, gratitude, and applause."

The book also saw positive reviews from The Spectator, and The Independent.

Criticism

Statistician and philosophical essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb was the first scholar to challenge Pinker's analysis of the data on war, after first corresponding with Pinker. "Pinker doesn't have a clear idea of the difference between science and journalism, or the one between rigorous empiricism and anecdotal statements. Science is not about making claims about a sample, but using a sample to make general claims and discuss properties that apply outside the sample." In a reply, Pinker denied that his arguments had any similarity to "great moderation" arguments about financial markets, and stated that "Taleb's article implies that Better Angels consists of 700 pages of fancy statistical extrapolations which lead to the conclusion that violent catastrophes have become impossible... [but] the statistics in the book are modest and almost completely descriptive" and "the book explicitly, adamantly, and repeatedly denies that major violent shocks cannot happen in the future." Taleb, with statistician and probabilist Pasquale Cirillo, went on to publish an article in the journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications that proposes a new methodology for drawing inferences about power-law relationships. In their reanalysis of the data, they find no decline in the lethality of war.

Following the publication of Cirillo and Taleb's article, a growing literature has focused on the claims about the decline of war in Better Angels. In a 2018 article in the journal Science Advances, computer scientist Aaron Clauset explored data on the onset and lethality of wars from 1815 to the present and found that the apparent trends described by Pinker, including the "long peace", were plausibly the result of chance variation. Clauset concluded that recent trends would have to continue for another 100 to 140 years before any statistically significant trend would become evident. A team of scholars from the University of Oslo and the Peace Research Institute Oslo, led by mathematician Céline Cunen, explored the statistical assumptions underpinning Clauset's conclusions. While they reproduced Clauset's result when the data on the lethality of war were assumed to conform to a power-law distribution, as they typically are in the conflict literature they found that a more flexible distribution, the inverse Burr distribution, provided a better fit to the data. Based on this change, they argued for a decrease in the lethality of war after about 1950.

In the first book-length response to Pinker's claims about trends in the data, political scientist Bear Braumoeller explored trends in the initiation of both interstate wars and interstate uses of force, the lethality of wars, and the impact of other phenomena commonly thought to cause conflict. The latter tests represented a new statistical implication of Pinker's claim – that the causes of war in the past had lost their potency over time. Braumoeller found no evidence of consistent upward or downward trends in any of these phenomena, with the exception of interstate uses of force, which steadily increased prior to the end of the Cold War and declined thereafter. Braumoeller argues that these patterns of conflict are much more consistent with the spread of international orders, such as the Concert of Europe and the liberal international order, than with the gradual victory of Pinker's "better angels".

R. Brian Ferguson, professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University–Newark, has challenged Pinker's archaeological evidence for the frequency of war in prehistoric societies, which he contends "consists of cherry-picked cases with high casualties, clearly unrepresentative of history in general." To Ferguson,

[b]y considering the total archaeological record of prehistoric populations of Europe and the Near East up to the Bronze Age, evidence clearly demonstrates that war began sporadically out of warless condition, and can be seen in varying trajectories in different areas, to develop over time as societies become larger, more sedentary, more complex, more bounded, more hierarchical, and in one critically important region, impacted by an expanding state.

Ferguson's examination contradicts Pinker's claim that violence has declined under civilization, indicating the opposite is true.

Despite recommending the book as worth reading, the economist Tyler Cowen was skeptical of Pinker's analysis of the centralization of the use of violence in the hands of the modern nation state.

In his review of the book in Scientific American, psychologist Robert Epstein criticizes Pinker's use of relative violent death rates, that is, of violent deaths per capita, as an appropriate metric for assessing the emergence of humanity's "better angels". Instead, Epstein believes that the correct metric is the absolute number of deaths at a given time. Epstein also accuses Pinker of an over-reliance on historical data, and argues that he has fallen prey to confirmation bias, leading him to focus on evidence that supports his thesis while ignoring research that does not.

Several negative reviews have raised criticisms related to Pinker's humanism and atheism. John N. Gray, in a critical review of the book in Prospect, writes, "Pinker's attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith."

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, while "broadly convinced by the argument that our current era of relative peace reflects a longer term trend away from violence, and broadly impressed by the evidence that Pinker marshals to support this view", offered a list of criticisms and concludes Pinker assumes almost all the progress starts with "the Enlightenment, and all that came before was a long medieval dark."

Theologian David Bentley Hart wrote that "one encounters [in Pinker's book] the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt." Furthermore, he says, "it reaffirms the human spirit's lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood, not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them." Hart continues:

In the end, what Pinker calls a "decline of violence" in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about "progress" or "Enlightenment" or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.

Craig S. Lerner, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, in an appreciative but ultimately negative review in the Claremont Review of Books does not dismiss the claim of declining violence, writing, "let's grant that the 65 years since World War II really are among the most peaceful in human history, judged by the percentage of the globe wracked by violence and the percentage of the population dying by human hand", but disagrees with Pinker's explanations and concludes that "Pinker depicts a world in which human rights are unanchored by a sense of the sacredness and dignity of human life, but where peace and harmony nonetheless emerge. It is a future – mostly relieved of discord, and freed from an oppressive God – that some would regard as heaven on earth. He is not the first and certainly not the last to entertain hopes disappointed so resolutely by the history of actual human beings." In a sharp exchange in the correspondence section of the Spring 2012 issue, Pinker attributes to Lerner a "theo-conservative agenda" and accuses him of misunderstanding a number of points, notably Pinker's repeated assertion that "historical declines of violence are 'not guaranteed to continue'." Lerner, in his response, says Pinker's "misunderstanding of my review is evident from the first sentence of his letter" and questions Pinker's objectivity and refusal to "acknowledge the gravity" of issues he raises.

Professor emeritus of finance and media analyst Edward S. Herman of the University of Pennsylvania, together with independent journalist David Peterson, wrote detailed negative reviews of the book for the International Socialist Review and for The Public Intellectuals Project, concluding it "is a terrible book, both as a technical work of scholarship and as a moral tract and guide. But it is extremely well-attuned to the demands of U.S. and Western elites at the start of the 21st century." Herman and Peterson take issue with Pinker's idea of a 'Long Peace' since World War Two: "Pinker contends not only that the 'democracies avoid disputes with each other', but that they 'tend to stay out of disputes across the board...' This will surely come as a surprise to the many victims of US assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings, and invasions since 1945."

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a critical review in The New Yorker, to which Pinker posted a reply. Kolbert states that "The scope of Pinker's attentions is almost entirely confined to Western Europe." Pinker replies that his book has sections on "Violence Around the World", "Violence in These United States", and the history of war in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Japan, and China. Kolbert states that "Pinker is virtually silent about Europe's bloody colonial adventures." Pinker replies that "a quick search would have turned up more than 25 places in which the book discusses colonial conquests, wars, enslavements, and genocides." Kolbert concludes, "Name a force, a trend, or a 'better angel' that has tended to reduce the threat, and someone else can name a force, a trend, or an 'inner demon' pushing back the other way." Pinker calls this conclusion "the postmodernist sophistry that The New Yorker so often indulges when reporting on science."

Ben Laws argues on CTheory that "if we take a 'perspectivist' stance in relation to matters of truth would it not be possible to argue the direct inverse of Pinker's historical narrative of violence? Have we in fact become even more violent over time? Each interpretation could invest a certain stake in 'truth' as something fixed and valid – and yet, each view could be considered misguided." Pinker argues in his FAQ page that economic inequality, like other forms of "metaphorical" violence, "may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It's not that these aren't bad things, but you can't write a coherent book on the topic of 'bad things'.... physical violence is a big enough topic for one book (as the length of Better Angels makes clear). Just as a book on cancer needn't have a chapter on metaphorical cancer, a coherent book on violence can't lump together genocide with catty remarks as if they were a single phenomenon." Quoting this, Laws argues that Pinker suffers from "a reductive vision of what it means to be violent."

John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School criticized the book in Foreign Policy for using statistics that he said did not accurately represent the threats of civilians dying in war:

The problem with the conclusions reached in these studies is their reliance on "battle death" statistics. The pattern of the past century – one recurring in history – is that the deaths of noncombatants due to war has risen, steadily and very dramatically. In World War I, perhaps only 10 percent of the 10 million-plus who died were civilians. The number of noncombatant deaths jumped to as much as 50 percent of the 50 million-plus lives lost in World War II, and the sad toll has kept on rising ever since".

Stephen Corry, director of the charity Survival International, criticized the book from the perspective of indigenous people's rights. He asserts that Pinker's book "promotes a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward 'Brutal Savage', which pushes the debate on tribal peoples' rights back over a century and [which] is still used to justify their destruction."

Anthropologist Rahul Oka has suggested that the apparent reduction in violence is just a scaling issue. Wars can be expected to kill larger percentages of smaller populations. As the population grows, fewer warriors are needed, proportionally.

Sinisa Malesevic has argued that Pinker and other similar theorists, such as Azar Gat, articulate a false vision of human beings as being genetically predisposed to violence. He states that Pinker conflates organised and interpersonal violence and cannot explain the proliferation of war, genocides, revolutions and terrorism in modernity. Malesevic argues that organised violence has been on the rise since the formation of the first states (10,000–12,000 years ago) and this process has accelerated with the increased organisational capacity, greater ideological penetration and ability of social organisations to penetrate the networks of micro-solidarity.

A 2016 study in Nature found that lethal violence caused 2% of human deaths around the time of human origin, an estimated six times higher than the rate of mammal death around the time of mammal origin, and rose higher at times (such as the Iron Age) before falling to less than 2% in modern times. Douglas P. Fry of the University of Alabama at Birmingham stated that "recent assertions by Steven Pinker and others that violent death in the Paleolithic was shockingly high are greatly exaggerated. On the contrary, the findings show that social organization is critically important in affecting human violence." Pinker stated the Nature study confirms his book's claims that humans have a natural tendency to engage in lethal violence, that lethal violence was more common in chiefdoms than in prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands, and is less common in modern society.

In March 2018, the academic journal Historical Reflections published the first issue of their 44th volume entirely devoted to responding to Pinker's book in light of its significant influence on the wider culture, such as its appraisal by Bill Gates. The issue contains essays by twelve historians on Pinker's thesis, and the editors of the issue Mark S. Micale, Professor of History at the University of Illinois, and Philip Dwyer, Professor of History at Newcastle University write in the introductory paper that

Not all of the scholars included in this journal agree on everything, but the overall verdict is that Pinker's thesis, for all the stimulus it may have given to discussions around violence, is seriously, if not fatally, flawed. The problems that come up time and again are: the failure to genuinely engage with historical methodologies; the unquestioning use of dubious sources; the tendency to exaggerate the violence of the past in order to contrast it with the supposed peacefulness of the modern era; the creation of a number of straw men, which Pinker then goes on to debunk; and its extraordinarily Western-centric, not to say Whiggish, view of the world.

David Graeber found Pinker's claims to be founded on false accusations of false-dilemma thinking, and also argued that Pinker, through these very accusations, was culpable of false-dilemma assumptions himself. In particular, Graeber criticized Pinker's simultaneous claims that strivings towards utopia would cause violence while Pinker's fear of things getting worse would not. To Graeber, the latter belief's believability lay strongly in its absence of overt utopianism: Pinker merely did not say that the systems he endorsed were perfect. Graeber wrote that Pinker failed to note that the historic political systems which Pinker rejected did not overtly promise utopia in the first place as well. Pinker, to Graeber, dogmatically presupposed a single linear scale, and thereby charged any contrarians thereof of rejecting all linear scales and adopting "black and white thinking". Pinker thereby purportedly constructed a false dilemma between false-dilemma-fraught utopianism, and Pinker's own endorsements.

Awards and honors

• 2011 New York Times Notable Books of 2011
• 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlist
• 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, shortlist
• 2012–2013 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh
• 2015 Mark Zuckerberg book club selection, January

Media

"Prof. Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity" on YouTube. The 2013 Gifford Lecture at the University of Edinburgh.

Pinker discusses The Better Angels of Our Nature with psychologist Paul Bloom on bloggingheads.tv, December 8, 2012.

Pinker debates why violence has declined with Economist Judith Marquand, BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson and BBC broadcaster Roger Bolton at the Institute of Art and Ideas.