To get a clearer sense of what’s really going on, the statistician Pasquale Cirillo, working alongside Nassim Taleb of “The Black Swan” fame, did an analysis using extreme value theory — a branch of mathematics specifically designed for such problems. Looking at war data over 2,000 years, they found that violent conflicts have fatter tails than earthquakes and markets, suggesting an even more profound tendency to extremes. “History as seen from tail analysis,” Cirillo and Taleb conclude, “is far more risky, and conflicts far more violent than acknowledged by naive observation.”

Source: Is the World Getting Safer? Maybe Not

That has now changed. Just today, Taleb, writing with another mathematician, Pasquale Cirillo, has released a detailed analysis of the statistics of violent warfare going back some 2000 years, with an emphasis on the properties of the tails of the distribution — the likelihood of the most extreme events. I’ve written a short Bloomberg piece on the new paper, and wanted to offer a few more technical details here. The analysis, I think, goes a long way to making clear why we are so ill-prepared to think clearly about processes governed by fat tails, and so prone to falling into interpretive error. Moreover, it strongly suggests that hopes of a future with significantly less war are NOT supported by anything in the recent trend of conflict infrequency. The optimists are fooling themselves.

Source: Violent warfare is on the wane, right?