[godelski]

2024 is not relatively peaceful for the 21st century is indeed accurate. But relatively peaceful in terms of (the explicitly stated context) of human history is unambiguously accurate. There are multiple wars in the 19th century that have death tolls greater than all global conflicts since 2000.

I'm not sure what you are trying to argue or if you're just trolling or being flippant. No one is trying to dismiss the wars in Ukraine or Israel/Palestine. No one is trying to even diminish the atrocities in these conflicts in any way. But you are in fact being dismissive of the tens of millions who passed away in just the 1800s and even more in the other centuries. We can compare things without diminishing things and not recognizing the successes and failures of the past will only lead to greater intensity in the future.

If you cannot recognize context nor qualifying words, we are done here. Engage in good faith or not at all.

[p1esk]

If we look at 1800s, and take any single year in terms of causalities, how would it compare to 2024? Would 2024 be closer to the top or bottom ten deadliest years of 1800s?

[godelski]

> Would 2024 be closer to the top or bottom ten deadliest years of 1800s?

Top 10? It's _maybe_ in the bottom of the top 50...

Forgive me, but I'm going to make a simplification because I don't feel like spending the time to dig deeper. But I think that's fair because you're not even willing to spend the effort to go to wikipedia. So the simplification is just looking at the war casualties instead of singular years. Fair? If not, I'll leave it to you to gather the data. I'll even give a decent estimate by averaging some but don't think all wars started in January and ended in December.

Either way, it won't matter because the 19th century is so much bloodier

  War                                     Estimated Casualties
  Palestine–Israel War (2023-)                 41,529–51,418 (let's say ~9mo, so 55k-68.5k/yr)
  Russian-Ukranian War (2022-)                 Wiki says 300k+ other sources say that's just Russia (let's say 2.5yrs, so 120k+/yr)

So let's say 2024 is (projecting) 175k-190k

Here's a reduced version of the wikipedia entry. I'll let you guestimate for each year to figure out where exactly 2024 sits.

  Saint-Domingue expedition (1802-1803)        135k+
  Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)                  3.5M - 7M (290k - 583k/yr)
    Peninsular War (1808-1814)                   1m+
    French Invasion of Russia (1812: <6mo)       540k+
  Spanish-American Indep (SPWI) (1808-1833)    600k - 1.2M (24k - 48k/yr)
    Colombian Independence (1810-1823)           250k - 400k+
    Venezualan Independence (1810-1823)          228k
  Mfecane (1810s-1830s)                        1M - 2M (~50k - 100k/yr)
  Carlist Wars (1820-1876)                     200k+
    First (1833-1840)                            111k-306k+ (15.9k - 43.7k/yr)
    Third (1872-1876)                            7k-50k
  Greek Independence (1821-1831)               170k+
  French Colonization (1830-1895)              110k+
  French Algerian Conquest (1830-1903)         600k - 1.1M
  Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864)                20M - 30M (1.43M - 2.14M/yr)
  Crimean War (1853-1856)                      356k - 615k
  Red Turban Rebellion (1854-1856)             1M+
  Miao Rebellion (1854-1873)                   4.9M (258k/yr)
  Punti-Hakka Clan Wars (1855-1868)            500k - 1M+ (38k - 77k/yr)
  Panthay Rebellion (1856-1873)                890k - 1M+
  Indian Rebellion (1857-1858)                 800k - 1M+
  American Civil War (1861-1865)               650k - 1M+ (162k - 250k/yr)
  Dungan Revolt (1862-1877)                    8M - 20 M (533k - 1.33M/yr)
  Paraguayan War (1864-1870)                   300k - 1.2M
  Austro-Prussian War (1866)                   40k+
  Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871)              433k+
  Cuban Independence (1895-1898)               362k+

So it doesn't even break the top 10. In fact, the first 15 years of 1800s had a higher death toll than 2024. All of the 1850's, 1860's, and 1870s was even bloodier. So 2024 might make it into the top 50.

It's even worse if you consider that the global population was only a billion (compared to the 8 billion today)[1]. 1808-1815 was breaking 300k/yr which was 0.03% of global population while the current conflict is 0.0023%. More than a whole order of magnitude greater when normalizing to population. If we look at the 1850s when there were a whopping 1.2bn people, we'll guestimate 1854 as being nearly 0.17%-0.24% of the global population being killed. Whole providence in China were nearly wiped out during those decades. The Taiping Rebellion was the third bloodiest conflict in history (the second was the Ming-Qing transition, in the 17th century)

So... I hope you can see why I'm calling you out. Again, this doesn't mean the current atrocities are anything less than atrocities. It has no relevance to them at all and I think it's dumb to compare if we're concerned with morality or human lives. All this data says is that past humans were very blood thirsty. You shouldn't be using it to make any meaningful statements about the current atrocities. So... don't bring it up next time. Especially if you're unwilling to do... literally a google search... It suggests you care more about signaling that you care than your actual care of those lives. I hope the signal is wrong.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Mod...

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

[p1esk]

Thank you. I did not realize old wars were so devastating in terms of lives lost, especially considering much smaller total population.

It’s incredible that modern governments, being so incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional, are still a lot better than how they were in the past.

[somenameforme]

It's more that nukes are preventing modern governments from behaving how they otherwise would. A quick glance at that list shows lots of wars that simply could never happen in modern times because of nuclear weapons. It's the same reason the Cold War isn't called WW3. And this applies not just on an international level, but also domestic.

For instance the US Civil War with nuclear weapons spread all around would have quite difficult to imagine consequences. To say nothing of all the biological and other weapons being developed in secret that would absolutely be unleashed if one side or the other came close to defeat. It seems a reasonably likely outcome would have been a fairly quick truce and the relatively peaceful splitting of the US into two countries.

If and when the nukes start flying, that conflict will make every other conflict, combined, look like little more than a schoolyard fight.

[godelski]

> It's more that nukes

I'm sure that this is part of "long peace" but we can't discount globalism. At the end of the day a lot of war is about economics. When countries become highly dependent upon one another, including enemies, it becomes much harder to actually go to war with one another. And as you point out with the nukes argument, that cost for going to war has also increased. So it's often far easier to war via economic means rather than physical.

There's also an (much more debatable) argument to be made that the so called "world police" does not have neighboring land that it covets. America doesn't have much need or want to grab land from Canada or Mexico, and doing so wouldn't have huge economic impacts on it. But such a situation is by no means true for Europe (and arguably Russia or China). I mean this is why Europe was fighting for the last... well however long humans have been in Europe (same being true for east Asia and really most of the Eurasian continent).

[p1esk]

Off topic, but I would like to hear your opinion on the impact of the AI progress on jobs, globally. Let’s assume, for simplicity, that GPT5 will actually be significantly better (eg similar improvement as what we had with 3.5 —> 4). And another assumption - it will be possible to put GPT5 level model into a humanoid robot, and train it to do a variety of basic physical tasks.

If we assume all that, and I realize it might not happen any time soon, same like with self driving cars progress, but *if* there’s strong and quick progress, what will happen to job market, unemployment, economy, and the society as a whole?

[godelski]

> It’s incredible that modern governments, being so incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional, are still a lot better than how they were in the past.

It is baffling to me as well. But the likely answer is that humans in the past were just even more incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It makes a lot of sense if you start looking at how things were done in medieval times. Often rumors/disinformation would travel faster between cities than a horse could.