I'm tempted to dismiss the Taleb paper as "lies, damned lies, and statistics". It has to do some rather complicated things to reach its conclusion, which correlates well with massaging data to fit an argument, and seeing as there's an academic dispute motivating that argument, there's a circumstantial-evidence case to be made for giving it no further thought.
I've read it, and it can't be actually called a refutal, more "here's why I don't think so":
"Better Angels goes out on a limb and speculates that the chances of all-out nuclear Armageddon were higher during the height of the Cold War than they have been since the Cold War ended. Perhaps that is statistically naïve; I don’t think so."
"Taleb is surely right to urge us to think about the magnitude of events with non-negligible probabilities, and to caution us about our inability to assess such probabilities with confidence. Yet he does not acknowledge the problems with his own suggestion that “the emphasis should be on the weapon” ..."
And then Pinker compares the warning of the possibility of the "worst case" (which would be a nuclear war or even a new conventional large-scale war, now that the world population is much bigger) with the "bloated American military budget" and the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.
So on one side we have the nukes "on the short fuse" always ready to launch, in spite of the known errors (and who knows how many unknown ones):
and the response is, to paraphrase, if we'd worry about the worst case, we're doing the same error as the US going to war in Iraq.
It has no sense, as us taking steps to do something against the fatal threats would be exactly to remove the most dangerous paths for the fatal use of weapons by the very military structures that Pinker also recognizes as being ready to make much more damage than possibly necessary.
I don't think anybody can claim that our amount of care shouldn't be proportional to the scale of consequences that an error can produce.
I hope I have been clear enough, I don't consider that Pinker technically "refuted" Taleb, and I wrote in the previous post why. At least the Pinker's response appears to be quite honest, not trying to hide that it's more based on a general attitude than on facts or statistics.
Eh. The total cost of its program ($35.6 billion) almost came to exactly $1 billion per death incurred by accidents during its testing from 1991-2000(36 fatalities). All that money and life spent on a somewhat functional newly minted freedom boner.
I don't think "death per budget" is a meaningful metric, unless talking about weapons or serial killers. You can't just take two numbers we want to minimize, divide one by another, and claim significance.
Is $35 billion a lot of money? We did get a step forward in engineering. The lessons learned advanced our knowledge forever. The money spent in actual wars for little things like air conditioning, for example, cost more:
Ahh such an evasive phenomenon! I live in Santa Barbara for 6 years now and watch the sunset close to every evening and have yet to witness this occur. I am definitely slowly losing my eyesight trying to see this though.
I lived in Pismo Beach for a year and for one week-long period I think I saw it every day. It's subtle and hard to differentiate from just going blind looking at the Sun.
I have been lucky enough to see the green flash myself recently, having been on the lookout for something like 20 years. It was definitely not subtle. It was a bright green flash, startling and breathtaking, lasting for a couple of seconds. If you have seen it, you know you have seen it.
Not being able to start a sentence with "And" is actually quite common and is found in vast amounts of professional writing. And if that wasn't true this sentence wouldn't make sense.
Lived in MN for 18 years now in Southern California. If and when you can afford to leave MN, you do it. I pay the same amount that I would for an entire house per month in MPLS for a single in Santa Barbara and that would put people off. But to me, I get to scrap that whole 5-9 months worth of Siberian weather and inevitable seasonal depression and have an inspiring environment.
People who have never lived in MN and read these articles with even the slightest interest in moving to the state are simply out of their minds. My opinion of course.
80% of my peers are MPLS millennials working for Target Corp., Best Buy, and slew of start-ups and marketing firms and there isn't one person I know that would even blink at the price difference if they had the opportunity to move to a coastal region. If you have the chance to leave MN you do.
Tax me out the ass, increase my rent, and inflate my prices, I do not care, as long as I get to see blue skies for more than 2 months a year (If you're lucky).
I am simply an MN ex-pat hater but I find that the coastal cities are bustling and expensive because the $$ is worth your sanity.
I lived in Mpls for about 28 years, recently moved to Seattle and don't regret it. It doesn't mean I won't come back, my family is there and I love northern Minnesota (cabin country!).
The cold didn't bother me much.
Things that bother me on the coast are the insane traffic, the seemingly lack of aid and/or housing for large homeless populations, yes the high cost of living. But it's mostly awesome.
I'm missing a lot of useful points here, just some ad-hoc thoughts.
