1) There is something green about "quant" @Michael_Spagat and this paper
(cont)https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1029092945088131072 …
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Replying to @nntaleb @Michael_Spagat
Limiting to “battle deaths” seems rather arbitrary as the nature of warfare has entirely changed due to technology in the last century.
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Replying to @JordanTSack @nntaleb
Hi. Of course, it would be great to do similar analyses on other concepts of war deaths. However, the only data sets I'm aware that are really useable to analyze war sizes over the last two centuries are battle deaths datasets.
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The reason for this is that battle deaths are basically the lowest common denominator of information about war deaths that can be extracted with some degree of consistency, hence comparability, over all wars going way back in time.
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However, check out the huge pdf of documentation of their coding decisions. Peruse it for just 15 minutes and it should become clear just how how fragmentary the record is and how much judgment must be brought to bear to code the data.
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Unfortunately, there is not a long history of tracking tracking war death numbers closely over two centuries. It's not at all simple to pull out two centuries worth of data on any concept of war deaths that you like.
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But for the foreseeable future, and maybe always, it will be hard to do anything other than to be aware of weaknesses in the data and to make caveats about what can be concluded from flawed data.
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Everyone would have to agree that the risk of total annihilation has risen exponentially in the last century due to nuclear/other tech advances in war. +gmo, crispr have the potential to alter life as we know it. So we can say war deaths have gone down, but it has to stop there.
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