After I blogged Cirillo and Taleb’s new paper on the long-term trend in war deaths, I read other commentaries on the debate (William Briggs, Dart-Throwing Chimp, STATS.org) and interacted with the authors. All that sharpened my thinking. Refinements:
- The paper is postured as a rejoinder to Steven Pinker. But I think if you are going use statistics to show that someone else is wrong, you should 1) state precisely what view you question, 2) provide examples of your opponent espousing this view, and 3) run statistical tests specified to test this view. Cirillo and Taleb skip the first two and hardly do the third. The “long peace” hypothesis is never precisely defined; Pinker’s work appears only in some orphan footnotes; the clear meaning of the “long peace”—a break with the past in 1945—is never directly tested for.