A bit technical, but the paper on measure of concentration under fat tails –just finished — also mentions Pinker’s mistakes in “The Better Angel”, but dismissing Pinker’s thesis and conclusions from microscopic sample for fat tails doesn’t require more than one single sentence. We had to add two theorems so people don’t counter us with the use of unrigorous arguments and “opinions” a la Pinker & journalistic social scientists.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2434363On the Biases and Variability in the Estimation of Concentration Using Bracketed Quantile…In fat-tailed domains, sample measures of top centile contributions to the total concentration are biased, unstable estimators extremely sensitive to sample …
via A bit technical, but the paper on measure of… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.