"Usually I end up with a couple of studies that are themselves somewhat over-interpreted, and even then the authors don't even endorse the message that Elle has conveyed but rather something more modest." Can you give me an example of this because I'm frankly quite baffled.
Steven Pinker is, to be frank, kind of an idiot, so I imagine that's why Elle doesn't reference him. His infamous "chart" of violence only goes back 13k years - about 4% of human history, and while that certainly might indicate that things were a lot more violent than they are today, it says nothing at all about what things were like 20k years ago or 100k years ago - although he nonetheless tries to pretend that it does. Talk about someone who cherry picks data.... I could write an entire piece about how completely overrated that guy is. Fortunately, other people have already done it for me.
"It would be one thing if this all came down to a fight between the humanities disciplines and scientists, but some statisticians in 2016 had some interesting things to say about Pinker’s scientific procedures:‘at the core, Pinker’s severe mistake is one of standard naive empiricism – basically mistaking data (actually absence of data) for evidence and building his theory of why violence has dropped without even ascertaining whether violence did indeed drop. This is not to say that Pinker’s socio-psychological theories can’t be right: they are just not sufficiently connected to data to start remotely looking like science. Fundamentally, statistics is about ensuring people do not build scientific theories from hot air, that is without significant departure from random. Otherwise, it is patently “fooled by randomness”.’ii
These scientists also object at one point that ‘the way in which he [Pinker] reads and interprets the results of scholars like Richardson reveals an attempt of bending empirical evidence to his own theory.’iii This study not only eviscerates Pinker’s statistical pretensions, but also raises questions about his scholarly capabilities in a way that echo quite strongly the objections of many of the contributors to The Darker Angels of our Nature.
On his account of the Middle Ages in Europe, one contributor concludes that he ‘is wrong about the facts he has presented … This inattentiveness to the rules for assembling and citing evidence is troubling in a work that otherwise extols the virtues of Western reasoning’ (p.32). As a telling example of the many quite shocking errors that the contributors found in Better Angels, Pinker claimed an erroneously high number of deaths due to the Spanish Inquisition, while actually citing the book which disproves his statistic."
