Decline of War Debate – Aaron Clauset Edition

Hi. This is just a quick note to draw attention to a new blog post I've done with One Earth Future. My piece is a comment on an interesting new paper by Aaron Clauset which is part of the decline-of-war debate that has featured prominently on the blog.

Pinker versus Taleb: A Non-deadly Quarrel over the Decline of Violence

As promised, I've just posted the slides of the talk I gave yesterday at York University (with some overnight modifications). You can get background with links for further background here. Somewhat bizarrely, Steven Pinker's 2011 book was rocketing to the top of the Amazon best seller list due to a Bill Gates Tweet right when I was …

Secret Data Sunday – Nassim Nicholas Taleb Edition

When data are central to scientific discussions, as is typically the case, then the relevant data should be open to all. OK, we don't have to be totally rigid about this.  People may sink a lot of effort into building a data set so it's reasonable for data builders to milk their data monopoly for …

One Last Exchange of Letters in Significance with Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Significance Magazine is now hosting its final-exchange-of-letters on the future of war.  Once again, it is Steven Pinker and I dueling with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo.  You can judge for yourselves whether the four of us have hit a common groove. If you feel sad because you have not followed all the twists and turns of …

Department of Corrections: Mike Spagat – Edition 2

I've just gone through and corrected this post. The present post is, therefore, a follow up to this earlier one which, weirdly, was about correcting the claim that Keynes had claimed that he always corrected himself when he's wrong.  It seems that Keynes didn't actually say this although he did correct himself when wrong. Anyway, I …

A New Graphical Manoeuvre (not Recommended)

Correction.  The first part of this post argues that an anomaly in a published graph is an error that has some substantive implications.  However, an alert reader, Ben Prytherch,  proposed a benign explanation for the anomaly.  I checked with the authors of the graph and it turned out that Ben is right.  So this is …

Forecasting World War III – An Exchange of Letters

I'm sure that this reminder of my article in Significance  will awaken warm memories in many of you. In it, I used an article of Pasquale Cirrilo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb to help me make my case.  I think that the Cirillo-Taleb paper is quite interesting.  However, it is not in any way a shoot-down of …