[VladRussian]

>You may consider them the "top manifestations". I don't think many other people would. For my part, I'd put Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss higher up than Hitler on a list of top manifestations of the capacity for abstract thought.

you don't get it. Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss were just 4 people. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot were just leaders of millions. These millions were expressing and implementing abstract ideas who should be killed by doing actual killing. So, lets put it in easy way for you to understand - the top manifestations (number of people involved, total effort they put into it, including the ability for abstract thinking) are Inquisition, WWI, WWII, Khmer Rouge, ...

>And yet today the world -- especially the industrialized, wealthy parts of the world, which have benefited most from a sustained application of that ability for abstract thought -- is less violent and longer-lived than ever before.

this would sound so true right before WWI, and before WWII as well...

[gjm11]

So "top manifestations" now turns out to mean "manifestations involving most people" and "Hitler" now turns out to mean "WW2 and the Holocaust". Well, fair enough.

Now, why exactly should WW2-and-the-holocaust be regarded as a "top manifestation" of the capacity for abstract thought? I mean, sure, lots of people and lots of effort were involved, but that's just an artefact of the way you happen to have chosen to carve up the world -- with WW2-and-the-holocaust as a single item. If we take, say, "medicine" as a single item (which seems to me just as reasonable) then the number of people involved is very much larger, the net change in utility probably also much larger, and the amount of abstract thought involved also much larger.

In any case, why focus on single events? Imagine something that has the following consequences. (1) Two events, in each of which 1000 people die premature and nasty deaths. (2) A sustained change lasting for ten years, as a result of which 100000 people (independently, on separate occasions) avoid premature and nasty deaths. Then if you focus on "top manifestations" you might say that the top two are those two events in which people die. But the net benefit -- which surely matters more -- is large and positive. (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am not making any pronouncement on whether bringing this thing about would be morally justified, which is an entirely different question from whether on balance it's a good thing. No person brought about the human capacity for abstract thought.)

[VladRussian]

>that's just an artefact of the way you happen to have chosen to carve up the world ... >In any case, why focus on single events?

I just picked these noticeable acute periods from the _continuous_ history of human violence as mere illustrative examples.

While only few practice medicine, majority of the people do have ideas about what "valid and just" violence can be applied to what group of other people, and as result they either directly participate or support violence performed on their behalf. So in my view, major combined reasoning activity of human species brains, ie. performed activity integrated over participants (think "top" command), is the reasoning supporting the various acts of violence.

Vs. the actual consequences - my numbers look differently than yours. May be one Einstein or Mozart resulted in even more lives saved than medicine. It doesn't change the fact that for each hour of Mozart's brain developing music there are several orders of magnitude more hours cumulatively spent by others at the same time reasoning for violence.

An the reason being here is that human species got evolutionary advantage by being able to strike first with overwhelming power. Lions don't try to exterminate hyenas and hyenas doesn't try to exterminate lions. They peacefully coexist until paths of specific lions and hyenas cross over specific zebra. Humans are unique in their ability to reason that exterminating others they would potentially have more zebras to themselves and that the "others" may have the same reasoning, and thus "either we or they". Thus we have, again just for mere example, tutsi and hutu.

[gjm11]

> While only few practice medicine, majority of the people do have ideas about what "valid and just" violence can be applied [...]

Double standard. Most people also have ideas about medicine, if only to the extent that they have beliefs about what is and isn't good for their health. An apples-to-apples comparison would be, say, the number of medical professionals versus the number of military professionals. The country where I live (the UK) has, compared with other broadly similar nations, more military and fewer medical professionals, but it still seems to have more of the latter.

> for each hour of Mozart's brain developing music there are several orders of magnitude more hours cumulatively spent by others at the same time reasoning for violence.

It's the same double standard again! Either compare the time spent by Mozart on music with the time spent by, say, Hitler on "reasoning for violence"; or compare the time spent by everyone on music with the time spent by everyone on "reasoning for violence".

Anyway, I think this is becoming less and less productive (and also less interesting to others, if I can judge from the fact that no one seems to be voting us either up or down) so I suggest we leave it here.