The paper's statistical results are at variance with prevailing claims of a "long peace", i.e. that violence has been declining over time.

This concerns the 2015 Cirillo–Taleb paper on the statistical properties of violent conflict. True if its results, as reported, show no statistical evidence of a decline in violence or war casualties (for example, the change since 1945 is consistent with random variation under fat tails, or inter-arrival times give no sign of a structural break) and the paper presents this as contradicting the 'long peace' thesis. Mostly true if the paper finds the long-peace claim statistically unsupported but frames the result as 'not detectable' rather than as clearly at variance, or if only some of its statistical analyses bear on the claim. Mixed if some analyses contradict the long peace and others are consistent with it. Mostly false if the paper's results are largely consistent with declining violence and only one narrow analysis differs. False if the paper's results support the long-peace claim.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 New Study: The world's a lot more violent than reported History News Network · 30 May 2015

   “Contrary to current discussions, all statistical pictures thus obtained show that 1) the risk of violent conflict has not been decreasing, but is rather underestimated by techniques relying on naive year-on-year changes in the mean, or using sample mean as an estimator of the true mean of an extremely fat-tailed phenomenon;”

2. E2 Cold numbers - Delta Delta (TU Delft) · 1 July 2015

   “they say that they find no trend away from large conflicts and no evidence that large wars cluster together like episodes of financial volatility are known to do.”

3. E3 This fascinating academic debate has huge implications for the future of world peace Vox · 21 May 2015

   “They also conclude that Pinker has underestimated the actual average casualty numbers in major wars by about three times, and that the real numbers don’t actually show a decline over time.”

4. E4 This fascinating academic debate has huge implications for the future of world peace Vox · 21 May 2015

   ““shows that we can’t infer that the risk has changed, but at the same time, it doesn’t prove that it hasn’t changed,””

E1 quotes the paper's own summary: "Contrary to current discussions, all statistical pictures thus obtained show that... the risk of violent conflict has not been decreasing." So the paper both reports no decline and presents this as contradicting prevailing views. E2 and E3, both independent, say the paper finds no trend away from large conflicts and that the real casualty numbers show no decline over time. E4 is an outside statistician's caveat about how far the finding can be pushed; it does not change what the paper reports or how it frames the result, and that is what the criteria ask about.