This was one of the only studies, data in recent times to leave me feeling hopeful. As surprising as it sounds, especially after watching news, there has been a drastic decline in violence and violent acts among us, the human animal. Although one nuclear war would blow that data out of the water
3 Reviews
It's a miss. Half of the main violence research is ignored.
JurijFedorov1 October 2020
Lots of pseudoscience mixed in with the good social science Pinker actually uses in his books. Not sure why they had a need to include all these extra hypotheses that are in the outskirts of social science or even just wrong.
Unfortunately PBS still uses ideological talking heads and they still mess up their documentaries by including flimsy evidence and guesswork. I don't recommend any talking heads PBS documentaries at all anymore until they fix this issue. Their 90's docs are mostly good but since around 2015 they have started to let the people they interview decide what to tell and when it's mediocre researchers it can ruin a story. They just don't make sure to avoid quacks for their interviews. Pinker only has a few minutes in the documentary. After that you have a mixture of political activists, laymen and young researchers who don't really understand the data or maybe don't even know about it.
Some of the things mentioned as "facts" here are so preposterous and unrealistic that I was waiting for counter-claims. But no, once someone says something the documentary tries to follow it up with some video of an event supporting the claim. For example, one female social worker said that "crime is caused by people who are hungry". She was largely explaining why black Americans commit crime, they supposedly want money for food to survive. That's not science, it's her opinion based on no evidence. Yet the documentary just supports her claim by having a few follow up scenes and interviews kinda supporting her. With zero evidence presented at any point here. This is not how to present social science research. You stay humble. You introduce data then very carefully make a few hypotheses based on the data. You don't claim that crime is caused by hunger without evidence. That's not science.
Another female professor/social scientist said that testosterone only causes men to be more violent than women because they as fetuses experienced a higher degree of it. She doesn't even explain how it works or what happens to whom and how. Yet according to her differences in violence between some people are explained by this loose assumption that is not even presented. So testosterone anyone may experience in adulthood is supposedly not influencing anything. Which then would mean that no one would use it for anything as it couldn't increase your strength in adulthood. This is counter to the evidence we have on the area. It's not a placebo drug it's banned in competitions for a very good reason: it works.
There are a ton of these pseudo claims in the doc. Another claim is that if you read about other people you will become less violent and this is how you make societies nonviolent. No other explanation is brought up by this researcher. This is her full theory about violence without any buts or ifs. Again I'm perplexed by these talking heads just stating things as facts without any evidence and without being careful about their assumptions. At least some men at the very start presented some charts and actually showed evidence and didn't present any huge theory about why violence declined. Yet later a lot of researchers without any evidence seemed to understand the world fully. We know that heritable traits like IQ and personality predict crime. We also know that most theories about training a trait is often pseudoscience blank slate thinking, which I'm sure Pinker wouldn't support. At least make sure to show that no heritable trait creates this reading and nonviolence correlation. If you don't show that then we may as well use Occam's Razor and just assume it's some heritable trait instead of some larger unexplained effect. It's not a bad hypothesis, it's just something that we already can explain by several heritable traits yet the doc doesn't even mention IQ or OCEAN. It's a doc that's not really exploring pretty much 80% of research on the area and instead largely uses social workers to make pseudo claims.
Near the end they also have some anti-gun hypotheses where gun-bans are assumed to cause a decline in violence overall. This seems weird as they made a huge deal out of saying that terror attacks are rare. Yet they are fearmongering about school shootings and showing crying teens on screen to tell us that school shootings are extreme violence and something we all should fear so we must ban guns. They don't understand that this is exactly like terrorist attacks - rare events. I also feel like a gun ban case is something PBS should do in documentaries about that specific topic. They constantly put these liberal political ideas into all their docs. I'm not saying they are all bad ideas. A gun ban is for sure an interesting topic. But it's politics, not science, and you shouldn't mix this stuff.
Unfortunately PBS still uses ideological talking heads and they still mess up their documentaries by including flimsy evidence and guesswork. I don't recommend any talking heads PBS documentaries at all anymore until they fix this issue. Their 90's docs are mostly good but since around 2015 they have started to let the people they interview decide what to tell and when it's mediocre researchers it can ruin a story. They just don't make sure to avoid quacks for their interviews. Pinker only has a few minutes in the documentary. After that you have a mixture of political activists, laymen and young researchers who don't really understand the data or maybe don't even know about it.
Some of the things mentioned as "facts" here are so preposterous and unrealistic that I was waiting for counter-claims. But no, once someone says something the documentary tries to follow it up with some video of an event supporting the claim. For example, one female social worker said that "crime is caused by people who are hungry". She was largely explaining why black Americans commit crime, they supposedly want money for food to survive. That's not science, it's her opinion based on no evidence. Yet the documentary just supports her claim by having a few follow up scenes and interviews kinda supporting her. With zero evidence presented at any point here. This is not how to present social science research. You stay humble. You introduce data then very carefully make a few hypotheses based on the data. You don't claim that crime is caused by hunger without evidence. That's not science.
Another female professor/social scientist said that testosterone only causes men to be more violent than women because they as fetuses experienced a higher degree of it. She doesn't even explain how it works or what happens to whom and how. Yet according to her differences in violence between some people are explained by this loose assumption that is not even presented. So testosterone anyone may experience in adulthood is supposedly not influencing anything. Which then would mean that no one would use it for anything as it couldn't increase your strength in adulthood. This is counter to the evidence we have on the area. It's not a placebo drug it's banned in competitions for a very good reason: it works.
There are a ton of these pseudo claims in the doc. Another claim is that if you read about other people you will become less violent and this is how you make societies nonviolent. No other explanation is brought up by this researcher. This is her full theory about violence without any buts or ifs. Again I'm perplexed by these talking heads just stating things as facts without any evidence and without being careful about their assumptions. At least some men at the very start presented some charts and actually showed evidence and didn't present any huge theory about why violence declined. Yet later a lot of researchers without any evidence seemed to understand the world fully. We know that heritable traits like IQ and personality predict crime. We also know that most theories about training a trait is often pseudoscience blank slate thinking, which I'm sure Pinker wouldn't support. At least make sure to show that no heritable trait creates this reading and nonviolence correlation. If you don't show that then we may as well use Occam's Razor and just assume it's some heritable trait instead of some larger unexplained effect. It's not a bad hypothesis, it's just something that we already can explain by several heritable traits yet the doc doesn't even mention IQ or OCEAN. It's a doc that's not really exploring pretty much 80% of research on the area and instead largely uses social workers to make pseudo claims.
Near the end they also have some anti-gun hypotheses where gun-bans are assumed to cause a decline in violence overall. This seems weird as they made a huge deal out of saying that terror attacks are rare. Yet they are fearmongering about school shootings and showing crying teens on screen to tell us that school shootings are extreme violence and something we all should fear so we must ban guns. They don't understand that this is exactly like terrorist attacks - rare events. I also feel like a gun ban case is something PBS should do in documentaries about that specific topic. They constantly put these liberal political ideas into all their docs. I'm not saying they are all bad ideas. A gun ban is for sure an interesting topic. But it's politics, not science, and you shouldn't mix this stuff.
Some interesting facts, but presented in a nonsensical way
roffles-263-18448917 November 2021
The idea behind this program is fascinating, which I guess why I watched it - has violence dropped over time? Why?
In practice the program presents individual bits of interesting science / history, but connects them in nonsensical ways. For example we learn that testosterone levels in human males have dropped over the past 200,000 years, as demonstrated by changes in facial structure. Only a minute or so later we're looking at a graph showing how US homicides have dropped between 1990 and 2015, but the narrator seems to be trying to get us to link the two data points as 'violence dropping over time'. This problem of conflating processes happening over wildly different timescales is present throughout the program, and there's very little attempt to bring the historical data we see presented in dribs and drabs together.
We then have a range of diversionary investigations into little case studies such as 'violence interruptors' in Baltimore, or bringing people together through sport. While these are sometimes interesting, and assert things about violence, they really aren't linked in to any overall coherent argument or narrative.
There is also basically no discussion of possible differences in factors leading to violence at individual, local, or national levels.
Basically, this is a program that started with an interesting idea, but then decided to throw a few factoids and case studies at the wall to see what stuck. Doesn't really address what it sets out to, and felt very unscientific.
Also, despite using his name as a draw to this programme, Steven Pinker really has a very minor role, and the majority of it is not presented or narrated by him.
Disappointing.
In practice the program presents individual bits of interesting science / history, but connects them in nonsensical ways. For example we learn that testosterone levels in human males have dropped over the past 200,000 years, as demonstrated by changes in facial structure. Only a minute or so later we're looking at a graph showing how US homicides have dropped between 1990 and 2015, but the narrator seems to be trying to get us to link the two data points as 'violence dropping over time'. This problem of conflating processes happening over wildly different timescales is present throughout the program, and there's very little attempt to bring the historical data we see presented in dribs and drabs together.
We then have a range of diversionary investigations into little case studies such as 'violence interruptors' in Baltimore, or bringing people together through sport. While these are sometimes interesting, and assert things about violence, they really aren't linked in to any overall coherent argument or narrative.
There is also basically no discussion of possible differences in factors leading to violence at individual, local, or national levels.
Basically, this is a program that started with an interesting idea, but then decided to throw a few factoids and case studies at the wall to see what stuck. Doesn't really address what it sets out to, and felt very unscientific.
Also, despite using his name as a draw to this programme, Steven Pinker really has a very minor role, and the majority of it is not presented or narrated by him.
Disappointing.
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