Friday, August 7, 2020
Tracking the PLA Rocket Forces
The Arms Control wonk podcast: Tracking the PLA Rocket Forces
Mapping the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force with downloadable map file.
The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say?
Study of the tails of violent conflict distributions.
The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say?
Abstract
We propose a methodology to look at violence in particular, and other aspects of quantitative historiography in general, in a way compatible with statistical inference, which needs to accommodate the fat-tailedness of the data and the unreliability of the reports of conflicts. We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, incompatible with fat tails and non-robust to minor changes in data formatting and methodologies. There is no statistical basis to claim that “times are different” owing to the long inter-arrival times between conflicts; there is no basis to discuss any “trend”, and no scientific basis for narratives about change in risk. We describe naive empiricism under fat tails. We also establish that violence has a “true mean” that is underestimated in the track record. This is a historiographical adaptation of the results in Cirillo and Taleb (2016).
Suggested Citation:
Cirillo, Pasquale and Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say? (November 27, 2016). The Nobel Foundation, Causes of Peace, Forthcoming, NYU Tandon Research Paper No. 2876315, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2876315 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2876315
The paper on arxiv.
The Missile War in Yemen
The Arms Control Wonk podcast: Lessons Learned from the War in Yemen
Discussing the CSIS Report: The Missile War in Yemen that covers an interesting data set on missile launches and defensive intercepts created from open source material.
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