I can fill in a blank here—I don’t have a link but I distinctly remember Scott posting this years ago. Scott said that he had heard a counter argument to his murder rate argument—specifically that modern medicine has lowered the murder rate without lowering the “would have been murder” rate
he mentions this in his nrx faq! he specifically says he thinks it's probably not the case because the "assault" rate is not higher.
he is very very detailed and as far as i can tell the only way this is a "good fact" is that it got him a lot of attention on his blog, which i increasingly lean towards as an explanation
an inability to discern between "this thing is valuable" and "this thing got me a lot of attention on the internet" would explain many problems with many people
massive mistake for our brains to use dopamine for both reward and relevancy