That feels like "[citation needed]". What do you mean by "is human nature"? Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them.

It's also part of the nature of our close relatives, the chimpanzee. See "lethal raiding".

This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned)

We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori

Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.

I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up.

In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common.

Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape.

Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it.

Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime.

A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim.

It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon.

I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.

However, rape (no matter what definition) is not evenly spread, some groups of women are more likely to become victims then others. Perpetrators pick their victims in a sort of rational way - some are more vulnerable.

So if you bias the group the right way, you can get large numbers.

No, it's actually commentary on the fact that women themselves often cannot clearly state "I was raped." The article in question was trying to show that lots more women have been raped than will admit to it or claim it. But you can also read it the other way: It casts light on how difficult it is to define rape.

Rape hinges on the detail of consent. Even women who have been fed alcohol until they were incapacitated and then taken to someone's room will go online and say things like "I had sex with a friend last night. I'm in a relationship. I know I need to drink less..." and get a chorus of people saying "Honey, that was rape."

People imagine rape to be some clear cut crime. In reality women are often very unclear in their own minds whether or not they were raped.

If the crime hinges on the detail of consent and the woman in question can't state clearly whether or not she wanted it, much less whether or not she consented, then you have bigger problems in determining data than in how surveyors ask their questions.

Sorry, no. It was an article I read a long time ago.

Rape stats are an inherently difficult thing to measure well. I could, in all earnestness, argue for either much higher or much lower figures than the reported figures.

That's a discussion I don't care to try to have on HN at all, much less on two hours sleep.

It's easy to believe that it's "in our nature" because of the dynamics which you describe being so common in the most dominant society, which is the only society most people have experience of. But, as another idiot with ideals, I believe we should not view this trend as a fatalistic inevitability, that it will always exist no matter how hard we work to change things.

Most people are in a state of near constant existential threat, due to their impoverishment in artificial scarcity (so much wealth in the world but must of us have access to nearly none of it). So most people don't have the luxury of being nice, even if it's the right thing to do. That and the fact that most of us are victims of many-generation-long cycles of inherited abuse that can be so hard to get out of. We have in many ways only ever been taught to be cruel to each other.

If we all play along with the idea of this inevitability, as in the top level commenter's claims of human nature, we only make it more true and harder to escape.

There are cultures where a woman cannot accuse her husband of rape. If she is married, he has unilateral right to have sex with her as he sees fit, no permission required.

Rape is a really complicated topic and the detail of consent has only grown thornier in my mind over time.

While I was homeless, men were happy to offer me money for sex because it was obvious to them that I was very poor. Meanwhile, I was routinely told on HN "Get a real job" and basically quit my bitching that I can't manage to make adequate income from my writing.

I have six years of college and cannot manage to come up with an adequate income from "honest labor" but men are happy to offer me money for sex under circumstances that can be interpreted as taking advantage of my vulnerability.

There are women who argue that all heterosexual acts of intercourse are essentially rape because of the generally poor status of women's rights. If putting up with intercourse with some man is the only means a woman has of establishing an adequate income and the world will literally let you starve and say "Not my problem" if you aren't married well, dating him in specific, etc, is it really genuinely consenting to agree to sex to stave off starvation?

This is not a theoretical question for me. This is lived experience as an educated American woman still reeling with shock at how amazingly hard it is to get taken seriously as a person in need of an earned income and willing to work for pay while no one wants to pay me. They will take freebies from me, so they think what I do has merit, but when push comes to shove it doesn't lead to an adequate income for me.

It's not a thing I expect anyone here to understand or care about. I've been here long enough to know that commenting on it doesn't get me sympathy. It just pisses people off who would like to think of themselves as nicer than that, so pointing this out isn't going to be met with people going "Oh. I didn't realize that. Let's fix that. That's wrong."

It will be met with a chorus of "You are just doing it wrong." and no rebuttal on my part will ever be sufficient to have the issue taken seriously. I know because I've tried for years to put this issue into words and that's how it goes every time, without fail.

So if I were to cave and finally sleep with a man for his money after a decade or more of dire financial problems and failing to find any other remedy, is that really, truly consenting sex?

I don't think it is. It's not the kind of sex I'm interested in ever having.

I've had better. I know what better looks and feels like.

But my words fall on deaf ears and make no difference. So I have grown more sympathetic to strident feminist views, though I don't fundamentally agree with them and don't even self-identify as a feminist.

The murder rate has declined by about 50x thanks to modern society.

This is what I mean when I say that these actions are human nature. Only because of the state Leviathan and modern cultural zeitgeist have we been able to change this behavior from very common (in some cases more likely than not) to rare.

What's the murder rate of the Moriori? Is it less than 5 per 100k per year?

If modern society were to disintegrate, the murder rate should increase by 50x roughly as we trend back to our raw nature without these artificial attenuating forces.

> This is what I mean when I say that these actions are human nature.

That carries an assumption that modern society restricted that side of human nature. An alternative: modern society enables us to act according to human nature and not resort to actions necessary for survival in previous societies.

If modern society disintegrated, there wouldn't be a lack of society influence. It would be a different society. That's why we have the whole nature-vs-nurture debate which is not trivial. That's why I objected to the original claim. (Although as Doreen mentions, some behaviours are much more common than others)

To establish this, we just need to ask the question of what would happen if the explicit state punishments for murder, rape, etc were removed. The rates would increase significantly, implying that the existence of these measures is attenuating behaviour that's otherwise rather natural.

If chimps received an electric shock each time they tried to murder another chimp, would they murder less often? Yes, because that shock is attenuating their true nature.

Admittedly, "human nature" is a rather fuzzy concept and isn't a scientifically precise term.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev...

Take Jason Hickel's critique, where he lies about the poverty rate increasing (when in fact it's decreasing according to his own data) and then hand waves away all the other metrics that Pinker discusses in a single paragraph.

Take Nassim Taleb's (who I usually respect) critique, where he comes off as a raving lunatic, accusing Pinker of inadequately addressing tail risks when the objective of his work is mostly descriptive and not pertaining to possible existential risks. I recommend you read Pinker's hilarious dismantling of that rambling nonsense.

Or the debate between Pinker and Gladwell where Gladwell totally ignores all the actual metrics that Pinker discusses and instead waxes poetic in narrative form, discussing single anecdotes.

Now I'm half way through this Guardian piece and I already had to stop. Just because some Enlightenment thinkers had truly backwards ideas - and I'm sure that Pinker would agree that they're extremely backwards - says zero about Pinker's thesis. It's a borderline straw man to think that that's relevant to his thesis. If the latter part of the article has a better argument, let me know.

Maybe you got that from the Wiki article on bonobos which includes a deceptive quote of a 2014 Nature article. What the article actually says is that bonobos have a genetic adaptation due to historic evolution in environments with abundance which either allows for phenotypic variation in response to current environment, or which has resulted in biological evolution to less violence as a general policy (which would indeed be "nature"). Personally I'm strongly inclined towards the latter hypothesis because it's the most parsimonious and fits observation better, ie the number of observed bonobo murders is near zero despite varying environments. If we find modern bonobos living in some scarcity who take up murder as a result, then I'll change my mind.

Chimps on the other hand are believed to be violent because it confers genetic fitness (as per that same Nature article), and things such as the age and sex of their victims is predictive suggesting they murder in order to eliminate competition. This is their nature in the sense that this behavior is significantly impacted by their genes.

Past research suggesting this kind of thing -- like the single study of a single tribe that you are giving us with your argument -- has been debunked by more nuanced, modern (and less colonial/racist) research. There are far more peaceful societies known to us than violent ones, though unfortunately we are mostly forced to participate in one of the latter.

Here's a study on middle ages Croatia where 20 percent of skeletons showed cranial fractures (which doesn't even include murder by flesh wounds):

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083

Here's a study on London cemetaries which found a 7 percent rate (again this excludes murder by other methods):

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288

"e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers"

Demonstrably wrong in the case of the Waorani. It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So yes, a Leviathan would've stopped it.

https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.h...

So culturally preserved hatred (which became an outlier over a period of time where other cultures preserved less hatred), not much different than the Hatfields & McCoys.

If instead you want evidence for the more general claim, you can look at some of the studies I've referred to in this thread (e.g. the one about London or Croatia), or just look up anthropological surveys of hunter gatherer societies that show murder rates 50x higher on average.

But, what you brought up is a very small part of world. And that small part of world has own governance structure too. They dont have social "state", but they do have some kind of social structures, culture, hierarchy, traditions and unwritten laws.

Also, how do you know those are murders and not wars or executions? Murder is specific thing, killing members of other tribe over resource is not going to be considered murder. Raising child to adult is expensive on food among other things, you do that to other people and you do that less to own.

Yet, we give Nobel prizes to murderers.

An interesting book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Pinker

Only in some case, in other case, we justify it by naming it something else, like taxes, prison/capital punishment, national interest.