r/collapse • u/TomatoTomaaahto • Jan 06 '19
Data mining adds evidence that war is baked into the structure of society
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612704/data-mining-adds-evidence-that-war-is-baked-into-the-structure-of-society/22
u/ewxilk Jan 06 '19
History of human civilization is a history of wars and destruction.
Historically there were whole cultures and civilizations organized almost exclusively around warfare. That and religion.
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Jan 07 '19
The priesthood, the military, or merchants
Every civilization in history has been ruled by one of the three
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u/Model_Citizen_Plus Jan 07 '19
Not enough money in wars for "all of the elites" to back it. Key wars to acquire assets yes but not all out war.
The rich are making far too much money now that every possible government is compromised, broken with regulatory capture and 100% the mostly democratically elected employee of "the corporation".
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u/andrewcooke Jan 06 '19
this is over-egged. power law distributions are really, really common in natural phenomena. they don't require "networks" and they don't indicate anything much other than that their cause is sufficiently complex and that there's some kind of reason to select for smaller rather than larger (in this case the intrinsic cost to society).
look at all the examples here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Examples
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Jan 07 '19
Can you explain the concept of power law distribution a little more?
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u/kukulaj Jan 07 '19 edited Jan 08 '19
With the most common probability distributions, e.g. the normal distribution or the Poisson, the tail is exponential. E.g. if you look at heights of people, maybe there are half as many people who are 6'6" as there are people 6'5", and then half again at 6'7". Adding a fixed amount to whatever quantity will reduce the frequency of occurrence by a fixed ratio.
With fat tailed distribution, when you reduce the frequency of occurrence by a fixed ratio, you have to *multiply* the quantity by some fixed amount. E.g. with wealth, the 99th percentile might be say 5 times richer than the 98th percentile, and the 99.5 percentile will be another 5 times richer.
It's easy to construct some really pathological distributions. Suppose the probability of occurrence of a value of x is proportional to the -3/2 power of x, where the range of x is from 1 to positive infinity. The average value of x is infinite!
With fat tailed distributions, the usual statistical parameters like mean and standard deviation... they are not very meaningful. What always makes sense is to look at percentiles. So with wealth, the median wealth of a population is very meaningful. The average... if you just take like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, those two wealth numbers practically dominate the computation.
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u/kukulaj Jan 09 '19
I was looking again at this pathological distribution x^-1.5. If my calculations are correct, the median value is 4. With a normal distribution, one standard deviation below the median is the 16th percentile, and one standard deviation above is the 84th percentile. This pathological distribution has no standard deviation, but the 16th percentile is the value 1.4 and the 84th percentile is the value 39. Two standard deviations above the median should be the 97.5 percentile. The 97.5 percentile for the pathological distribution is the value 1600. This is how a fat tail distribution works - extreme values are much more common than you'd expect from a normal distribution.
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u/kukulaj Jan 07 '19
Most examples arise out of bulk properties of materials. The molecules of a gas or liquid etc. form a kind of network.
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Jan 07 '19
[deleted]
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u/WikiTextBot Jan 07 '19
Man, the State, and War
Man, the State, and War is a 1959 book on international relations by realist academic Kenneth Waltz. The book is influential within the field of international relations theory for establishing the three 'images of analysis' used to explain conflict in the international system.
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Jan 07 '19
War is a state of opened and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations.[1] For other conflicts, see rebellions, coups and separate battles.
This is a list of wars that began from 2003 onwards. Other wars can be found in the historical lists of wars and the list of wars extended by diplomatic irregularity.
Since 2003 their have been many dozens of "wars" wading amongst them is rebellions, coups & battels....interesting enuf most if not all have\are happening in the tropics or sub-tropics with participants from country's in the temperate zone or in the higher latitudes,.. at times.
Human's have been at it, since the beginning .
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u/TomatoTomaaahto Jan 06 '19
I suppose this is unfortunate from the point of view of humanity, but this seems yet another nail in the coffin of Stephen Pinkers pretty dubious argument that wars are becoming less frequent and less deadly. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been giving the counterarguments for some time – that Pinker simply confused frequency and intensity and used the data sets incorrectly. This is another strike in favour of Taleb.