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Interesting. I found the empiricism shallow. Its like Pinker is looking at a stock chart in a bubble and believing it will always go up. The issue is that the c

• csallen 9y ago
  > Its like Pinker is looking at a stock chart in a bubble and believing it will always go up. Pinker has often explained that he's not doing this. He has never denied that there can or will be a next "disaster" and that he would have no ability to predict it. But there is a big difference between a bubble bursting and a centuries-long trend reversing. It's the difference between saying, "I am going to fail this class tomorrow," and "I will fail to become a wiser and more educated human being throughout the course of my lifetime." It's the difference between saying, "The tech bubble is going to burst," and "Technological progress will stall and we'll spend hundreds of years at the level we're at today if not worse." Even if the former happens, you haven't made any headway whatsoever in demonstrating that the latter is likely to happen. --- > So long as we can believe other humans are worthless, disgusting and categorise them as a disease worthy of eradication, every evil is on the table. I'm not sure we have progressed to make us less likely to do that. For example, are we even more vulnerable to combination of high and low tech to stir up hate? e.g. a social media led ideology that could lead crowds going house-to-house with machetes. Your counterargument simply boils down to: it's possible for things to get worse. Well yes, that's true. It's possible. In fact, it's trivially easy to develop a hypothetical example of how things might get worse. But that's not convincing, because you haven't provided any evidence at all of underlying reasons why your hypothetical is likely to come true. Pinker on the other hand has built quite a strong case demonstrating that the underlying reasons that lead to human violence, suffering, and misery are largely changing for the better.
  • duncanawoods 9y ago
    The stock chart example is not arguing that calamity is likely. Its a skeptical argument to illustrate the limits of the type of empiricism that observes and extrapolates the path of a complex system without understanding it. You might want to claim Pinker is not making a prediction, but he uses terms like "progress" that imply future states insead of neutral past-tense language that could equally apply to a random walk. > Your counterargument simply boils down to: it's possible for things to get worse. Not really. Rieman's counter-argument is that the source of human violence is human-nature which has not changed and that looking at some metrics is the wrong way to reach a conclusion. I believe Rieman's argument is that we are seeing the emergence of the next form of facism. He is not saying calamity might happen but this it is beginning to happen. I believe he thinks that the remedy for the darkness of human-nature is culture/humanism that has regressed with the decline of organised religion and concentration on science above humanities.
    • csallen 9y ago
      > The stock chart example is not arguing that calamity is likely. Its a skeptical argument to illustrate the limits of the type of empiricism that observes and extrapolates the path of a complex system without understanding it. You should read The Better Angels of Our Nature, or at least a summary of it. The entire book is an attempt to "understand the complex system," as you put it. It's an attempt to understand the underlying causes of violence. It does not involve merely looking at charts and extrapolating that they will go up or down based on their previous trends. Pinker himself criticizes that type of lackluster "analysis". > Rieman's counter-argument is that the source of human violence is human-nature which has not changed and that looking at some metrics is the wrong way to reach a conclusion. "Looking at some metrics" — again, this is total strawman that can only honestly come about by failing to read Pinker. His argument is not and has never been, simply, looking at metrics and extrapolating. Instead, he's analyzed the sources of human violence, and found that Rieman is quite wrong — it is not so simple as "human nature". In actuality, there exist systems and institutions that are external to human nature that drastically and predictably influence the levels of violence we feel compelled to inflict upon each other. For example, we have police for a reason. Because, by and large, they work! I don't know any well-read people who advocate returning to a pre-police society and think it will make us safer. And that's just one of many dozens of advancements in institutions that's led to a much less violent world, despite human nature remaining what it always has been. Is it possible for violence to still exist with police? Of course! But it's also a likely bet that, overall, it will be lessened. The vast majority of refutations of Pinker unfortunately fall into one of two camps: (1) Arguing against the strawman claim that Pinker bases all of his conclusions on statistical extrapolation, which is simply false. (2) Arguing against the strawman claim that Pinker thinks it is impossible for things to ever get worse in unpredictable ways, which he repeatedly denies.
• tim333 9y ago
  >Its like Pinker is looking at a stock chart in a bubble Having looked at a few stock charts of bubbles it's not like that - the bubble charts you chose a decade or two out of the 200+ year of stock trading and think that's how it will continue. Pinker's analysis is much more like that in Stocks for the Long Run where you look at all available data and figure stocks have averaged like 7% over the 200 years. It doesn't prove it will continue but is quite a fair representation of what has happened so far.