history-society

Steven Pinker and the Better Angels of Our Nature In 2011, Steven Pinker published a 700-page argument that humanity was becoming less violent. The Better Angels of Our Nature marshaled data from archaeology, criminology, history, and psychology to make a case that seemed counterintuitive to a world recovering from 9/

Is Violence Really Declining? In 1945, two atomic bombs killed approximately 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 80 years since, nuclear weapons have killed no one in war. Zero. Is this evidence that humanity is getting better? Or are we just living in the gap between catastrophes?

Violence and Its Decline Are We Getting Better at Not Killing Each Other—Or Just Waiting for the Next Catastrophe? Here's a claim that sounds too good to be true: we live in the most peaceful era in human history. Not relatively peaceful. The most peaceful. Less war.

Synthesis: Designing Smarter Groups We've covered a lot of ground: the wisdom of crowds, prediction markets, superforecasting, groupthink, swarm intelligence, epistemic democracy. Now let's pull the threads together into practical principles for making groups smarter. The core insight is simple: collective intelligence is engineerable. Groups can

Epistemic Democracy: Voting as Knowledge Aggregation In 1785, the Marquis de Condorcet proved something remarkable about majority voting. If each voter is more likely to be right than wrong on a binary question—even just slightly more likely—then as the number of voters increases, the probability that the majority

Swarm Intelligence: Ants and Algorithms An ant has a brain smaller than a pinhead. It can't plan. It can't reason. It can't hold a map in its head. A single ant is, by any reasonable measure, unintelligent. And yet: ant colonies build sophisticated structures.