The Rise of Secularism

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Proportion is the only logical way to make a comparison. When there are more people, the armies raised are larger; a few thousand years ago, a few hundred people might be considered an 'army.' Today, they're a footnote. Not because they don't matter as individuals, but because the total numbers are so much bigger.

In the days of inter-tribal warfare, a few men killed might mean victory or defeat for one side or the other; today, it might not even make the evening news. That's not because we're more secular today, but becaue the total numbers are so much bigger. If those tribes of thousands of years ago had tens of thousands of men to call on to fight their wars, they would have called on them and the numbers of dead would have been higher. The fact that the number of dead was smaller then is simply a factor of how many people there were to start with, not because people were less bloodthirsty.

@LKL

True. However, the total number of dead is itself an important value. As humans have become more numerous, so too has our capacity for violence. Just as the total number of humans today can have a greater impact upon the environment; the number of dead in the last century's wars also sets it apart in its profundity.



I would suggest to you that this says more about the evening news than it does about tribal warfare.



It might surprise you, but I agree with this statement. The fact of the matter is that those leaders did not have more people to call upon to fight their wars (though a plain reading of Plutarch might give one a differant impression ). The responsibility placed upon the shoulders of modern leaders is made greater through the numbers involved also. To the point where at least two people on this planet have the capacity to render the whole world unlivable for all of us. These things do increase the profundity of the responsibility. Just as the sheer number of casualties in our wars reflects the scale of the conflicts.

Essentially this sort of statement increases the importance of the individual human being in the past, at the expense of those who are now living. In order for something to be as violent today, many more times the number of people must be killed. This just seems obviously false. Everything in our modern experience has shown us the the sheer number of human beings only increases the scale of our responsibility and the profundity of our actions. The absolute proportional position appreciates not difference; hence my example of Cain and Abel. In such a situation a proportionality would have to claim that the killing of Abel was a more violent conflict than 100 holocausts. Do you really find this credible?



I would agree with this. However, I did not claim anything relating to the bloodthirsty nature of our ancestors. I merely stated that the 20th Century was the 'Bloodiest' century in human history; which is not itself an outrageous claim. There was more blood spilled in the 20th Century's wars and conflicts than in any other. Proportionally, it was the highest or nearly the highest level of dead of any century (though I find these statistics too easily manipulated) and it contained the largest amount of Genocide. From this I deduce that it was the most bloody century.

Wow. There is so much fail here that I don't even know how to address it.

You suck at math. That is not how percentages work.

OK, so traditional estimates for total war and genocide dead in the 20th century are in the area of 160 million. The world population at the beginning of the 20th century was about 1.65 billion. Divide those two numbers and you get 6.25%. That number is a massive over-estimate, because the world population was multiple times larger at the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning, and more people lived and died their normal lives in the course of the century than during any other period of human history. At the end of the twentieth century, the world population was 6.07 billion. This means at least 6.07 billion people lived in the twentieth century (a much greater number than that, actually, but I'm taking a convenient and massively conservative lower bound). That gets you 2.6% at the absolute maximum of the proportion of 20th-century humans who died in warfare.


Are we going to count witch burnings and routine capital punishment for relatively minor offenses in the death tally of previous centuries then? You're ridiculous.


No, it doesn't. You just don't know how to do arithmetic.


Clarify what you're talking about, and give specific numbers.


That is many times greater than the percentage of the people in the 20th century who died in conflict-related deaths, and it might be an underestimate of the numbers in the 17th century. But even the 17th century was comparatively peaceful compared to what preceded it.


You think that a community of 100 individuals getting involved in a conflict where 80 of them die is less bloody than a society with 100 million individuals getting in a conflict where 100 die?


I should have done that ages ago. It's obvious that you have no idea what you're talking about, and that you completely lack the capacity to reason. I'm just too stubborn to recognize a lost cause.

What the hell do you mean, "our capacity for violence?" The rate of violence is much lower; the average person is doing a lot less killing and raping and pillaging than they used to. The "capacity for violence" is obviously decreasing.


AG already called you on this being a complete weasel claim to make; if your claim is only about the total numbers of dead, it is utterly meaningless as a rebuttal to skafather about the alleged failures of secularism. And I already proved with the example of disease that it cannot possibly be used as a rebuttal to Skafather; clearly you meant that it actually was the bloodiest in real meaningful terms, were ignorant of the facts, and refused to admit your error.


No, it flatly was not. This is a simple matter of division. Apparently your stupidity extends to an inability to correctly punch numbers into a calculator.


Fail. Just because you do not understand statistics, does not mean that those of us who do are manipulating them. A simple question of "What is the chance that someone living in this time will die a violent death, rather than from natural causes?" is not manipulating the statistics.


You have not supported this assertion.


When all of your facts are wrong, and your inferences from those "facts" are wrong, it is very seldom that you will arrive at a correct conclusion. This blind squirrel found a rock and broke his teeth.

The percentages were taken in relation to the total population at the time of the conflict. This gets one a great deal closer to the accurate accounting than the composition of the numbers done to the total number of people who lived in the century. Considering the amount of change in population the 20th Century experienced that is. To do it otherwise, would be to make the statistic open to the same criticism that you put forward against the 1913 one.

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What you do not seem to be understanding about the statistic derived from addition is that it only gives a total loss of percentages... not a total loss percentage. You are simply assuming that I am claiming the latter. In terms of what can be claimed useing proportional statistics, a total loss of percentages is about as much as you can produce if you want them to be comparable in a way that exists irrespective of population: Which seems to be what you wanted to produce in the first place.
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There is nothing inherently wrong in accounting the numbers in this fashion. It is certainly more accurate than doing it in relation to total population. One must account for the population shift in an accurate fashion. Counting forwards leaves the argument open to the charge that it does not reflect total population. Counting back does not account for the proportion at the beginning of the century; so adding percentages is necessary since we are referencing the same basic point. From this the numbers from the conflict at the time must be added to produce a correct response otherwise it will not compensate for the change in population. The fact of the matter is that both statistics I have given you are from peer-reviewed sources and do reflect the academic consensus.

What this is actually saying is that proportional statistics do not really work all that well. If it is impossible to account for an accurate figure in the 20th Century then how can you expect to base your argument against the total number of dead upon it? These statistics have gotten better, not worse, with age.



That does not account for the fact that the population has increased dramatically. You are essentially making the same mistake that you are accusing the raw figures of making. It seems to me quite interesting that you are prepared to accept this when it is in defense of your position.



We are talking about 160 million dead here Orwell. Are you really going to claim that it takes 33 people from 700AD to make one person today in terms of bloodshed? People back then must have had a whole lot of blood in them.



The issue here is that this 4% is derived in the same fashion as that of the 1913 Statistic. They are comparable since the 4% relates to the number from THE beginning of the 30 Years War (the biggest war of that century). It takes all deaths from the century in the same manner way that Prof. Brzezinski crafted his 10% of the total population in 1913. So I do not know what exactly it is you are complaining out here. It was in Brzezinski's view the only way that conflict period of 1914-1945 could be compared to the previous centuries. He does has a valid point here. The only other way the 4% from the 17th Century can be reached is through the additive percentages.



It means that the section of soldiers now days has access more firepower than a century of Roman soldiers. A company has access to more firepower than a legion. Certain submarines can unleash more death in a day than any war in human history. Even in comparison to the First World War. A platoon today has the same firepower as a company did then.



It relates to the same question of proportionality. If proportionality does not stand, then this one is correct by default.



I already said that my original comment was a relatively facetious statement in response to a simplistic statement. You however wanted desperately to debate the subject. For what reason I do not know; I am more than happy to raise the flag for the academic consensus for you on this issue. Though I tend to think AG engages in an to break down the individual and that you do it in an attempt to assert your own intelligence; though it does lead you to make some bonehead statements about JSF's et al. I can, however, respect a man for wanting to contribute, you however do it consistently at the expense of others; which has lead me to think that you might be an intellectual bully. Shall we continue?... I do not think this is going well for you.

The importance of an individual to his family and immediate peers now vs. then is the same; the importance of an individual to the overall population now is much less than it was then. The smaller a population, the more important for the long term survival of that population that any individual survive and reproduce and contribute to the society.
If there's one country doctor in the county, the community will suffer a lot more if he dies than if there are 50 doctors and one of them dies - even if the population seen by the 49 remaining doctors is 50x bigger than the population seen by the one former doctor.

@LKL

That statement is very close in logical form to the sort of retrospective probability that is inherent in a creationist argument.

Yes, there is: the fact that that is not how math works. There is no possible way the average value is greater than the maximum. That is a trivially obvious fact.

Let me illustrate for you with an example. Let's say you have four bins of objects, one with 50 items, one with 100, one with 150, and one with 300. Out of the first bin you take 4 objects, out of the second 3, from the third 7, and from the last 9.
4/50=8%
3/100=3%
7/150=4.67%
9/300=3%
What percentage of items did you take? Certainly not 8+3+4.67+3=18.67%. That answer is obviously wrong, and I would expect any child to understand why. The total number (4+3+7+9)/(50+100+150+300)=4.6% is clearly a better measure. Now, if you want to take into account the different sizes of the bins, you can do a weighted percentage to eliminate the effects of a larger bin (population) at the end, so in this example we would adjust the values as such:
8%=8/100
3%=3/100
4.67%=7/150=4.67/100
3%=3/100
Now add them up, and you get 18.67/400=4.67%. Still nothing like 18.67%.


I just gave an example on how to do that. You would have to take the average death rate across every conflict, although this still gives an overestimate for the 20th century because it disregards long stretches of relative peace. But for your example where you estimated 10%, it would be more honest to take that number and divide by the number of conflicts that were involved in the calculation.


Honestly, the best simple measure would be total number of people who died in war during the 20th century divided by the total number of people who lived during the twentieth century. As such, it is entirely appropriate to consider the number of people alive at the end of the 20th century; all of them lived during the 20th century and did not die in warfare.


I gave an example of how to account for that in an honest manner.


Cite the papers. I know that social "scientists" are terrible at math, but it seems implausible that the academic consensus would actually accept something as ret*d as what you have put forward. 10% of 20th-century humans did not die in warfare. A much lower percentage of 20th-century humans than, say, 12th-century humans, died in warfare.


No, what it is actually saying is that you're a f*****g moron who doesn't understand basic arithmetic.


Um... it does account for the fact that population has increased. That is largely the point. A hell of a lot of people lived in the 20th century without getting killed in war.

To give another example: there are more Catholics today than at any other point in human history. Is the Catholic Church more dominant now than it was in 1450? Of course not; there are just a lot more people total.

Or I can follow your style of reasoning, and declare that since there are more Catholics now than ever before, and more people dying in the past century than ever before, that Catholicism is the cause of violence.



Unlikely, unless there were a whole ton of rounding errors by ignoring constant "minor" wars all around the world, and inappropriately comparing documented European casualties against rough estimates of the total world population.


160 million/1.65 billion = 6.25%. I don't know where you're getting 10% anywhere. Even if you go the completely and obviously inappropriate route of dividing total casualties by the relatively small population of 1900, you do not get 10%. Either you are misreading Brzezinski (quite likely, as I have never once seen you successfully interpret any source) or he's as bad at math as you are.


Ridiculous. You are probably misreading him. The obvious way of considering the question is "What percentage of people died a violent death?"


And yet they don't. So much for the failures and rampant violence of the modern world.


But proportionality does stand. And the simple number of genocides has been decreasing.


You are such a filthy weasel. No, you were attempting to "rebut" skafather, and you failed.


I simply pointed out that you were wrong; the subsequent debate arose from the absurdity of your responses and your constant weaseling around the issues.


It's somewhat pathetic that you think you're "winning" a debate where it's obvious that you simply don't understand the most basic questions involved. It is exactly like the debate over the problem of evil.

You are still assuming I am using the statistics to get to a statement of a total loss percentage. Instead I calculated a total loss of percentages. They are separate figures. Your complaint is moot because you are simply assuming I am attempting to derive the former. This is becoming quite common in your posting Orwell; this is exactly the sort of argument projection you have done in this thread, repeatedly and in the one with JWC. You need to read what is being said. I even put it in-between two bold lines for you.





Your logic is a failure. Firstly because you are attempting to derive a total loss percentage when I was attempting to do no such thing.

Secondly your demonstration fails because it is not really grasping the complexity of what is going on when one calculates total loss from violence. If you actually want to understand the situation through your bins example then you would need to also find a way of dealing with bins that grow in size over the time-frame you are attempting to calculate. When one attempts to add this to your example, the calculations break down in their ability to produce the sort of statement you are attempting to derive. This seems an obvious issue, I should think you should be able to at least produce a example even if you did not take the time to read my own.





This seems just logically wrong. Since if your attempting to compare proportional loss as a percentage of the population; which you have been from the beginning then you need to deal with the fact that at the beginning of the First World War, there was less than 3bn people. Calculating from the end of the 20th Century would not accurately account for the proportion of the loss, since you are working with two vastly different figures.

Now considering you have not read anything I have written. Can I at least assume that you have read what you have written?



Why do you think, considering this complaint, that the statistic becomes anymore accurate when dealing with the century from the other end? You have already shown some appreciation for the fact that we are talking about different population levels, perhaps you could at least be consistent with your own posting.



Dominance is a different term to bloody. I am being quite flexible with you in relation to the term 'bloody'; if I took it literally, then more blood would make the 20th Century the obvious winner. I will not however let you shift the meaning of bloody to something as subjective as 'dominance' in the same way you attempted to move it to 'peaceful'.



Check it out yourself... 'War and peace in the 20th century and beyond' Pg 25... I checked it is available on Google books.

I also request that you turn down the insults. If you do not, I will report you to a mod. This is the second time I have asked you.

Last edited by 91 on 17 Mar 2011, 10:55 am, edited 2 times in total.

91, don't even try to weasel your way around numbers. Orwell is really good at math. You've went from the frying plan into the fire by going from semantics to numbers which are more cut and dried and have less room for weaseling. I am horrible at math, but you are statistically illiterate. I don't even think you would've passed my data management class in high school. Obviously proportionality stands, why do you think the most dangerous cities in the US are measured by murder rates rather than just the sheer number of murders? If murder rates in cities are measured per capita, then it would be logical to measure genocides in proportion to their population.

Well no s**t, if you didn't use the actual meaning of bloody then it would prove you wrong. For God's sake, the word itself is much more specific than a word like disorderly or tyrannical. How figurative can you get with a word that literally refers to blood?

You've said bloody is less open to interpretation than the word peace, and now all the sudden you're using it loosely. Here's a better idea: Find a word that is more fitting than "Bloody" if you aren't referring to physical violence that sheds blood. Why use a wrench to take care of a nail when you could use a hammer?

I've seen you use this exact dirty trick in the guns thread

My statement was something like "Why isn't Switzerland drowning in a blood bath if less gun control leads to more murders?", and then you show me a statistic showing Switzerland's high gun deaths. After I proved that the statistics failed to differentiate between gun deaths and gun homicides which proved that the number of gun homicides are ridiculously low, you tried to weasel around it and say you weren't just talking about gun homicides, you were also talking about gun deaths. Well guess what? You responded to a statement that not only used the word "blood bath", but also referred to homicides so overall gun deaths (which is mostly made up of suicides) would be irrelevant if I'm talking about homicides.

@AceOfSpades

Some people use the word 'semantics' to describe the point they didn't bother to appreciate. You sir, are one of them.

However, my position is not based on raw figures alone. Please READ what is in the thread. What THREE metrics did I base my position on Ace? I will give you a hint. It is where I said 'these three figures overcome the argument from proportionality'. If you are derriving from this that I am saying that proportionality is useless then you are projecting since I did not say that. I criticized proportionality for two reasons, one, that it was impossible to establish a figure that accurately takes into account population change and the second was on the grounds that the older statistics were not a reliable basis for determining proportionality.

If Orwell wants to argue against me, he needs to give me a century that at least killed a greater proportion of the population under the system used by academics to derrive the figures. The subsequent hissy fit that followed has been because he cannot do that and he has attempted to weasel out of it.

Also as a terms of proportionality, the 20th Century is still just about the best contender. What are you trying to say?



It was my original wording. The wording Orwell chose to oppose and I have been pretty flexible in his bending of the definition. I have been letting him use 'deaths from war related conflict' as the basic definition. I will not let him move it any further than that though.

I tried to search for the phrase "these three figures overcome the argument from proportionality" in all pages and I haven't found it. Can you quote what you're referring to?

Do you even know what projecting means? It means attributing your own traits and feelings to someone else. I said proportionality matters, so if I was projecting then I would project the importance of proportionality onto you. It makes no sense to say I am projecting the uselessness of proportionality on you. Why would it be impossible to account for population change if you're talking about longitudinal statistics? Wouldn't change be accounted for by intervals?

And here's a REAL example of projection. You used semantics to take his Catholic church analogy out of context.

A great offense is a great defense right? That's right, accuse him of what he accused you of.

What did he bend the definition of the word bloody into? His example about Catholics was an analogy, it doesn't pertain to physical violence at all. The analogy was meant to make a point about the importance of proportionality when it comes to statistics. It wasn't meant as an example of violence.

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 17 Mar 2011, 12:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The issue is not my failure to read. It is that what you attempted to do is not a meaningful measure of anything. That is just not how percentages work; crudely adding them up like that doesn't mean anything. And even if it did, it wouldn't actually give you a higher percentage than for any previous century if you actually counted every minor war that occurred. Since (in eg the 17th century) we lack specific records of wars in Africa, the Americas, etc, counting only European war dead and then dividing by an estimate for the total world population is obviously ridiculous.


I was giving a simplified example to make things easier. If you would prefer me to bring integrals into it, I can, but you have already shown you can't handle addition; why would I expect you to understand calculus?


No, it is the obvious correct way of doing it. Proportion of people killed in war = (total number of people who lived) / (total number of people who died in war). I don't see how that is hard to understand. Obviously this proportion will end up being somewhat skewed by the massive numbers of people who lived in basically peaceful times for the past 60+ years... but that is kind of the point.


Which is why I used different-sized bins, and showed an example of how you could normalize the values to account for that.


Calculating from the end of the 20th century is actually still an overestimate of the proportion. If we take the total number of people who died in war, divided by the total number of people who lived in the course of the 20th century, we get the average rate of death from warfare across the century. That rate was decreasing the entire century.


I have read what you write, but most of it is incoherent garbage.


I explained why. That you don't understand speaks volumes. I have not been inconsistent here.


It's the same as my disease example. Your point in "rebutting" skafather was clearly to claim that violence is much more common in modern times than it was in the past. I have demonstrated that this is false.


Drivel. He makes the same mistake of dividing by the 1913 population (and uses a higher estimate than I've ever seen for the war dead, but I'll let that slide). That approach would only make sense if you were assuming that all the 20th century war dead were from the generation that was alive in 1913.

Anyways, his general point is refuted by Pinker's TED talk.

He had a three-part argument for why the 20th century was the bloodiest in history, all three of which were wrong. I will summarize his claims:
1) There were more deaths in the 20th century. (I have demonstrated this to be irrelevant sophistry at best)
2) There was more genocide in the 20th century. (Incorrect, for the same trivial reasons as 1)
3) The wars of the 20th century featured greater ideological opposition than wars in previous centuries.

Now, 3 is completely irrelevant to the question of "bloodiest," completely unquantifiable, and almost certainly completely false. There was one major ideological war in the 20th century (WWII) and even that was based largely on non-ideological factors. The Cold War, by virtue of being "cold," saw very few casualties, and also had plenty of non-ideological considerations. WWI had next to nothing to do with any ideology. And it would be ridiculous to claim that the constant religious wars of the preceding millennia were not ideologically motivated. So... of his three points which "overcome" the argument from proportionality, all are simply wrong, and one is also meaningless.


That is one appropriate way of doing it, hence the "bins." Of course, this will tend to disregard the near-zero proportion of deaths during stretches of relative peace, eg 1900-1913, the 1920s, and almost everything since 1945.

?

I think I have identified precisely where you are going wrong. This is exactly the same grounds upon which you reject the 1913 figure. The 1913 figure is well accepted in the literature. It has a sure way of dealing with population shift. So it is quite useful.

Establishing the proportion of people who lived in the 20th Century from all of those who lived in it would essentially skew the statistics beyond what is reasonable. If you calculate back from the end, due to the massive numbers of people who have lived in the second half of the century you will not accurately account for the proportion of dead. Using your example, the level of the risk of being killed in war during the First World War would be less than three percent. However if you lived in 1913, you would have around this chance of getting through the War.

The way one deals with the skewed nature of these results is to take the three percent and assign it as a value. The literature calls it a percentage, but lets call it just a score of 3. Giving each war a score relating to the individual's chance of making it through and then taking that score together gives the 20th Century a score of 9. This is the accepted method of arriving at a meaningful conclusion that separates from the change in population.

From this, the 20th Century, with a score of 9 is most likely the most violent century in terms of dead from war.

If however, you have a different metric that accounts for the population shift, put it forward.



Not really. Pinker deals mostly with tribal situations and the post-WW2 world. He does not really attempt to push his stats back to 1900 and derive the sort of statement that you are. Pinker's work is essentially on a totally different track to the subject we are talking about. The total of his claim is that civilized times kill less people than non-civilized. His model however, cannot really be used to make a statement about deaths in war though, since tribal conflict is not really taken to mean warfare in the sense the other academics have based the mainstream literature on; since it is defined as war between states. Also, he has not done his reading, anyone who thinks that Hobbes favored a democratic institution as his leviathan is high.

@LKL

I said that because you are assigning a retrospective importance on the value of the past in terms of the present. It is how creationists calculate the probability of their having existed.

Last edited by 91 on 17 Mar 2011, 5:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.