Pinker tries to provide several complementary explanations for his thesis, including game-theoretic ones (asymmetric growth, comparative advantages and overall economic interdependence) which could be considered “not really nice reasons for measuring our (lack of) willingness to destroy each other”. Like SA said, Braumoeller seems to conflate ‘not very nice reasons to maintain cooperation’ with ‘our willingness to engage in war hasn’t changed’. And this is one of the reasons why Taleb et al. missed the point on Pinker’s thesis. To test if it’s business as usual, if our willingness, what ever that is isomorphic to, is the same, one needs to verify if State actors are more likely to adopt the risk dominant equilibrium than the payoff equilibrium or if there is intransitivity. There is a connection between the benefits of cooperation and the players willingness to coordinate. What if the inability to dominate places our future in a context where we see don’t see fat tails in deaths from deadly conflicts? What if the benefits of cooperation increases over time along with the the willingness to coordinate? What if it’s not business as usual?
Pinker tries to provide several complementary explanations for his thesis, including game-theoretic ones (asymmetric growth, comparative advantages and overall economic interdependence) which could be considered “not really nice reasons for measuring our (lack of) willingness to destroy each other”. Like SA said, Braumoeller seems to conflate ‘not very nice reasons to maintain cooperation’ with ‘our willingness to engage in war hasn’t changed’. And this is one of the reasons why Taleb et al. missed the point on Pinker’s thesis. To test if it’s business as usual, if our willingness, what ever that is isomorphic to, is the same, one needs to verify if State actors are more likely to adopt the risk dominant equilibrium than the payoff equilibrium or if there is intransitivity. There is a connection between the benefits of cooperation and the players willingness to coordinate. What if the inability to dominate places our future in a context where we see don’t see fat tails in deaths from deadly conflicts? What if the benefits of cooperation increases over time along with the the willingness to coordinate? What if it’s not business as usual?