Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pcstl 1947 days ago
Even if nature has about as much cooperation as competition, society seems to put a damper on the nastier effects of competition. While we can find amazing examples of cooperation in the record of human history and prehistory, we also find a lot of brutal behavior which seems to have become almost monotonically less frequent ever since we started organizing into complex societies.

(Also, as predicted by complex systems theory, when brutal behavior does erupt, it is much more catastrophic - the 2 world wars are good examples)

1 comments

Such as what? All civilization has done is systematize humanity's best and worst tendencies. It hasn't actively changed them. If anything, one could argue that it's much easier to cause harm and destruction than it has been at any time history.
Well, we are in the least violent period of human history, and we have a lot of evidence that violence has been decreasing almost continually for all of history. https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-s...