Steven Pinker: Better Angels of our nature

Okay, time to try to review this before I pay more in fines than it'd cost to buy my own copy! If you haven't heard of this, it's Pinker's book stating and arguing that human on human (and to a degree, on animal) violence has decreased massively throughout history -- by up to three orders of magnitude -- and trying to get at the causes of why. Much (much!) shorter versions of this are in his 2007 Edge essay and his 2010 TED talk (transcript and video at link). My journal includes by those links this on falling homicide rates in England for the past 800 years. Note it's a log scale, so that line is an exponential decline in normal terms.

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There could be more, but that's enough.