[extropy-chat] War Is Easy To Explain - Peace is Not

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 10:16 PM 3/13/2007 -0700, Lee wrote:
> 
> 
>>If you were to just
>>look at the wars between France and England over 500 years alone,
>>the advance of peace is relentless.
>>
>>Whereas you can scarcely pick up a history book on pre-literate peoples
>>without accounts of almost constant warring, or at least preparation for
>>war.
> 
> I don't have immediate access to numbers, or time to search for them, 
> but I suspect your scaling is misleading. Tribes and clans that make 
> "warfare" a bloody and deadly recurrent part of ordinary life are 
> very much smaller than nation states, even those of 500 years ago. 

Damien, I don't have a reference ready to hand, but IIRC the net chance 
of dying of violence in a hunter-gatherer society is pretty damned high. 
  Their warlikeness has not been exaggerated.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence