Deathcounts are a quick but powerful way to highlight the human cost of an ideology. This encourages partisans to generate the highest possible estimates for their enemies. Unfortunately, that makes them nearly worthless for understanding the world.
Do you disagree? If so, then I think your ideology has a hypothetical death count equivalent of infinity--because for any number of deaths, there is an equally bad event comprised entirely of dust specks!
The Stalin deathcount post I made attempts to implicitly consider counterfactuals by subtracting civilian death rates from ITL/ITK/prison/SpP death rates (but not executions); the only counterfactual it's asking is "what if everything else was the same, but the people weren't imprisoned". (I think that's the appropriate counterfactual for type #2 and #3 deaths.)
Ok post. I think the "deaths from capitalism" infographics are useful as a response to BBOC or VOC estimates of "deaths from communism" but not on their own. They're also (both the examples you showed) clearly meant as a response to those specific things.
Thank you. I have to slightly disagree: The 1.6 billion infographic is, frankly, completely absurd.
The BBOC, for all its faults, only includes mass famine deaths (which it categorizes as #3) and and fairly-reasonable type #1 and #2 deaths. (I'm writing a post on this subject. ~90m of the BBOC deaths are Chinese famine of 1958-1960 ~60m, Soviet famine of 1932-33 ~6m, Soviet famine of 1921-22 ~5m, various Mao-era repressions ~10m, and various Stalin-era repressions ~4m.) It does use high estimates and the introduction does seem to (non-explicitly) include 5 million POW deaths. (If you've ever seen the "Nazi Victims of Communism", it's because the introduction total is 20m but the Soviet section total is 15m, so Courtois must've added *something*.)
But: The BBOC doesn't include deaths from bad public health (like 306 million cigarette deaths), or wars (like 85 million WW1 and WW2 deaths), on and on. (It also double-counts many events and uses absurdly high estimates for others -- for example, it attributes 7 million deaths to "Kulak policy and weather", which is 1 million more than 6 million attributed to the 1932-33 famine in the BBOC!) This infographic is just... really bad.
I'm not trying to spawn another argument -- glad you liked the post!
Deaths counts have killed 20 million people.
by papercuts alone!
Papercuts are worse than torture, if there are enough of them. https://benthams.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-wins-outright-part-336?s=w
oh god no, not this lesswrong dispute
Do you disagree? If so, then I think your ideology has a hypothetical death count equivalent of infinity--because for any number of deaths, there is an equally bad event comprised entirely of dust specks!
I'm close to a utilitarian, I am a speck hater
Do you have any good examples of deathcounts that include counterfactuals?
IIRC, the Stalins death count post you made on Twitter (that I quite like) doesn't include counterfactuals
The Stalin deathcount post I made attempts to implicitly consider counterfactuals by subtracting civilian death rates from ITL/ITK/prison/SpP death rates (but not executions); the only counterfactual it's asking is "what if everything else was the same, but the people weren't imprisoned". (I think that's the appropriate counterfactual for type #2 and #3 deaths.)
Thanks for helping me articulate why Im always annoyed by those death count posts. This was a good read
thank you! do you have any suggestions/improvements? :)
Ok post. I think the "deaths from capitalism" infographics are useful as a response to BBOC or VOC estimates of "deaths from communism" but not on their own. They're also (both the examples you showed) clearly meant as a response to those specific things.
Thank you. I have to slightly disagree: The 1.6 billion infographic is, frankly, completely absurd.
The BBOC, for all its faults, only includes mass famine deaths (which it categorizes as #3) and and fairly-reasonable type #1 and #2 deaths. (I'm writing a post on this subject. ~90m of the BBOC deaths are Chinese famine of 1958-1960 ~60m, Soviet famine of 1932-33 ~6m, Soviet famine of 1921-22 ~5m, various Mao-era repressions ~10m, and various Stalin-era repressions ~4m.) It does use high estimates and the introduction does seem to (non-explicitly) include 5 million POW deaths. (If you've ever seen the "Nazi Victims of Communism", it's because the introduction total is 20m but the Soviet section total is 15m, so Courtois must've added *something*.)
But: The BBOC doesn't include deaths from bad public health (like 306 million cigarette deaths), or wars (like 85 million WW1 and WW2 deaths), on and on. (It also double-counts many events and uses absurdly high estimates for others -- for example, it attributes 7 million deaths to "Kulak policy and weather", which is 1 million more than 6 million attributed to the 1932-33 famine in the BBOC!) This infographic is just... really bad.
I'm not trying to spawn another argument -- glad you liked the post!