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The limitations of Steven Pinker’s optimism

85 points by onuralp 9y ago

hprotagonist 9y ago
DFW put it nicely in "Authority and American Usage", and it's stuck with me as a pithy counterpoint to this kind of teleology. Describing pinker's thoughts on linguistic descriptivism: Steven Pinker's 1994 "The Language Instinct" is a good and fairly literate example of this second kind of Descriptivist argument, which, like the Gove-et-al. version, tends to deploy a Jr.-high-filmstrip SCIENCE: POINTING THE WAY TO A BRIGHTER TOMORROW-type tone... I think it's a lot closer to the truth to say that humans tend to be human throughout history, for both good and ill, and that this alone is why neither anyone's idea of utopia nor dystopia will ever really happen. We're always somewhere in the middle.
- khrakhen 9y ago
  Pinker is most certainly Whiggist in his historical outlook.
- chongli 9y ago
  We've already had plenty of dystopias: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea today... As for a utopia? Nobody can agree on what that would look like. When somebody claims to have a plan for a utopia, my first question is: "for whom?" How does any ideological utopia work without excluding anyone? I have yet to see a satisfactory answer. The paradox of tolerance would suggest that utopias are impossible, at least with human beings.
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    > How does any ideological utopia work without excluding anyone? https://www.amazon.com/Polystate-Thought-Experiment-Distributed-Government-ebook/dp/B00IM5EM7W https://www.amazon.com/Polystate-Thought-Experiment-Distribu...
  - truculation 9y ago
    I suspect your dystopias have in common that they all had utopian visions. Instead of focusing on real problems and making gradual progress they kept talking about building heaven on earth. Apparently they just needed to tear down existing institutions and kill a few people first...
    - chongli 9y ago
      Instead of focusing on real problems and making gradual progress That's a protopia [0], not a utopia. A utopia is a radical, top-down, planned society based on some ideology. [0] http://kk.org/thetechnium/protopia/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/protopia/
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    don't count modern day China out. supposedly they're maintaining 120,000 person concentration camps for their stubborn ethnic minorities in the western region. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-120000-muslim-uighurs-held-in-chinese-re-education-camps-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...
    - chongli 9y ago
      That's a very good point. We should interpret as a red flag the rhetoric around "harmony" put out by the communist party.
alexashka 9y ago
I can't believe Steven Pinker isn't met with outright ridicule. The cult of positive-think is strong - I imagine anyone criticizing him publicly would be seen as 'being negative'. Steven Pinker uses statistics to argue that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness are on the rise, both in the West and worldwide. It attributes these positive outcomes to Enlightenment values such as reason, science, and humanism. [0] Enlightenment values? Humanism? Did we not just live through 2 world wars, a cold war, etc? What is USA's military budget again? 597 BILLION USD in 2015? (Google 'usa military budget') Some humanist world power we have, it doesn't even provide health care for it's own citizens, while letting them buy guns! Some humanism that is... Shall we go down the list and discuss how humanist China is? The book concludes with three chapters defending what Pinker sees as Enlightenment values: reason, science, and humanism.[4] Pinker argues that these values are under threat from modern trends such as religious fundamentalism, political correctness, and postmodernism. [0] One of the top three concerns for humanity, according to Pinker, is political correctness... I don't even... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I blame it on the schools. Academia has a fetish for "dead shit", and the "enlightenment" was the most recent batch of dead shit within the average level of reading comprehension. It's not just Pinker. Both mainstream ideologies have been circling up around nth-order regurgitations of enlightenment thought for as long as I've been alive. "the best of all possible worlds"
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  >The cult of positive-think is strong - I imagine anyone criticizing him publicly would be seen as 'being negative'. Are the down votes on this comment a form of irony?
- MarkMc 9y ago
  > Steven Pinker uses statistics to argue that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness are on the rise, both in the West and worldwide. How do you feel about the statistics Pinker uses? Do you agree with his assessment about human progress?
valeg 9y ago
Interesting take on the new Pinker's opus by John Gray: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlight... >To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on “the right side of history”. >Judged as a contribution to thought, Enlightenment Now is embarrassingly feeble. With its primitive scientism and manga-style history of ideas, the book is a parody of Enlightenment thinking at its crudest. A more intellectually inquiring author would have conveyed something of the Enlightenment’s richness and diversity. Yet even if Pinker was capable of providing it, intellectual inquiry is not what his anxious flock demands. Only an anodyne, mythical Enlightenment can give them what they crave, which is relief from painful doubt.
- taeric 9y ago
  If you are trying to signal to an out crowd that Pinker is misguided, ill informed, or otherwise wrong, provide evidence. If you are signaling to a crowd that they are right to ignore him for reasons they know, this is how you do it. With a broad grin and no effort to actually engage. :( That is, this seems to be setting up a battle of "elites" where the call to action is to loudly decry Pinker without having to read him. Is there more to this story than this? Was this just a particularly bad quote?
  - chickenfries 9y ago
    He's trying to "signal" that he wants you to read the article that he linked, and to entice you into doing so he has picked a few quotes that sum up the author's point of view. If you disagree, perhaps you should click and find out if the article is any good...
    - taeric 9y ago
      Apologies, my criticism was at the linked article. The quoted part was particularly bad. To the point that it really detracted from any point and only seems to exist for the signaling aspect.
khrakhen 9y ago
We can simply look at /Better Angels of Our Nature/ to know what a hack Pinker is. His thesis is only good for intra-civilizational violence on decline, which is true and fascinating. Not a cause for celebration, but for study -- he should take into account the purpose of study is to study, not celebrate. This failure cripples his work beyond his knowledge area (psychiatry, neuroscience). Anyhow, /Better Angels/ is the most messed up, sloppily cited, cherry-picked history of human civilization I may have ever read from an academic. There is a certain Eurocentrism deep throughout, but one does not have to read between the lines. His estimates of battle deaths are prima facie ridiculous. Ancient wars always take the highest estimates. It's a wonder humans did not go extinct millenia ago, given how they kept killing a quarter of the population on a regular basis. Modern wars like Iraq, even at his time of writing in 2010-11, had far, far more deaths than he counts. Maybe he does not want to count anything that isn't a uniformed combat death, but then he would have to admit something happened to cripple typical life expectancy. I was about to lose my mind at the incredibly racist portion on Polynesians and genetic predispositions to violence and cannibalism. I say "incredibly" literally. I cannot fathom how it got published and praised. I imagine the exorbitant length meant most reviewers stopped a third of the way through. And Pinker has been the head of the editing panel for the American Heritage Dictionary since the Fifth edition, a serious downgrade from the Fourth, by the way. Pinker is more than jack of all trades, master of none. He is a charlatan. It would be all the more tolerable if he had a sense of humor.
- ggm 9y ago
  Pinker is more than jack of all trades, master of none. He is a charlatan. It would be all the more tolerable if he had a sense of humor. No.. really: tell us what you think? Pinker is smart, and writes well, and holds opinions you don't agree with, but this is an eggregious take-down. Do you really question his chops on linguistics too? Or is it just that he chose to step outside his baseline and do work you don't want to respect or bond with? Put up better stats if you want to refute his numbers.
  - petermcneeley 9y ago
    If you have time please review my critique on his "group selection" article. http://darkcephas.blogspot.ca/2018/01/on-group-selection.html http://darkcephas.blogspot.ca/2018/01/on-group-selection.htm...
ghostcluster 9y ago
I thought David Brooks had a good take on Pinker and his latest book. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/steven-pinker-radical-honesty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/steven-pinker-rad... Pinker avoids addressing the social breakdown of families and the increased polarization and technology-driven personal atomization in the current mileau, whose undertow underlies a lot of the big issues today. Otherwise, an admiral figure from the elite academy.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  > Pinker avoids addressing the social breakdown of families Is it really a problem that families aren’t together? Previously (with some hold outs) there wasn’t much choice and families had to stay together due to issues around control through money, religion and social pressures. Go back further (hopefully, though this is still pretty grim in many areas) and domestic violence was also legal. “Breakdown” of families is a considerably better option than what was previously available. > the increased polarization and technology-driven personal atomization in the current mileau I don’t understand what this means, could you give an example?
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    > Is it really a problem that families aren’t together? if you care about the epidemic of loneliness, the negative medical consequences of social isolation, and the demographic sustainability of developed countries, yes.
    - jeoi2838 9y ago
      Research shows having a roommate is enough to combat feelings of loneliness. Marriage in and of itself isn’t shown to automatically increase happiness; most folks reported having maintained their baseline mood after the wedding Maybe this is just old definitions needing to be updated, but “family” in the traditional mom-dad-kids all visit grandma and the like, isn’t essential to the species. Socializing is, but not the traditional structures
  - 9y ago
warent 9y ago
Can someone help me understand this part? > Enlightenment advances were tied to empire building and the nascent Industrial Revolution, predicated not just on noble ideas and scientific curiosity, but also on slavery, genocide, exploitation and cultural triumphalism. Like the Renaissance, it ended in chaos and conflict, including the French revolutionary wars of 1792–99. > Both eras show that science and evidence-based thinking do not necessarily triumph over irrationality and ideology I can't tell if Ian is saying: 1) Science and evidence-based thinking are the direct cause of these eras "ending in chaos and conflict", and that "irrationality and ideology" could have been preferred, or 2) Science and evidence-based thinking were insufficient. If it's 1, I doubt that's really true and would definitely need evidence. If 2, then insufficient at what? Insufficient to act as a moral compass? Insufficient at convincing people to hold similar values in utilizing science and evidence-based thinking? Something else?
- westoncb 9y ago
  I think there's a '3' here: Science and evidence-based thinking are (relatively) orthogonal to the emergence of social chaos and conflict. If I'm not mistaken this is implied in Marxist thinking, so it is an idea that is 'out there' (in the sense of being available). I think the idea there is that our rational thinking largely serves as justification rather than being something very powerful on its own. The way I see it is that (at least much of) rational thought is the latest stage in 'elaboration' of lower-level mental/emotional processes. In which case, our rational thinking on subjects which impact real circumstances in which we're invested will be constrained and influenced by our goals, values, and something like coefficients for strength of influence of various emotions etc.
- MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  i think he is omitting a few words: he might want to say that science created the means for European powers to build empires by dominating people in far off places; these empires ran on slavery, racism & genocide in far off places (the colonies); much later in the twentieth century the violence & genocide came back to continental Europe in the form of two world wars (when the same weapons and ideologies that were developed to kill 'colored' people were turned on the Europeans). in the aftermath some people try to make sense out of this mayhem and they ask the question of 'what's the point of this project ? Are these ideas of enlightenment at fault of getting into such a mess? (or might it have been something else like how we applied them) ? and what can we do about it ?' . Is that correct ?
pbreit 9y ago
For a counterpart, it is Bill Gates' new favorite book: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  they co-produced a really nice video with some of the graphs from the book inlaid on giant physical glass plates: https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/967449421238579201 https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/967449421238579201
deleted 9y ago
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jochung 9y ago
His book seems to have both people on the left and the right complaining, so at least my interest is piqued that it says something real.
yters 9y ago
I'd say the huge moral innovation of the 20th century is scientifically showing the human fetus is neither human, alive, nor a person. In a previous era, society frowned on abortion and contraception due to the old fashioned Judeo-Christian moral views, and so we had over population and widespread violence and poverty. But, thanks to the moral innovation of fetal science, we've discovered that we can stop violence before it happens by eliminating fetuses instead. So, instead of millions of dead humans, we have millions of terminated fetuses. The great gift of 20th century science is an ability to define the problem away, in a sense. And today we are almost at the point where we can completely discard of morality altogether, which will bring about a true utopia on earth because then nothing will be wrong.
- rimliu 9y ago
  Yes, because letting grown up woman die because of someones believe in fairytales or forcing preteen rape victim to give birth is very moral. I think some should take more time and find out more what science is and what morality is.
  - yters 9y ago
    It looks like you agree...
truculation 9y ago
The review confuses psychological optimism with a problem-based definition of optimism: that problems are solvable (and hence progress is possible). As David Deutsch points out in The Beginning of Infinity, Winston Churchill was an optimistic leader and a fan of science and progress who nonetheless suffered from depression (the 'black dog') [1]. Whereas Thomas Malthus (mistakenly) predicted mass starvation due to population growth [2] and was therefore a pessimist who nonetheless was of a sunny disposition and the life and soul of dinner parties in London. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-o... [2] An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf
- olleromam91 9y ago
  But if a would be problem solver is not psychologically optimistic...what happens to the odds that the problem will be solved?
  - joaomacp 9y ago
    They go down. But so do the odds of him being disappointed by failure.
js8 9y ago
I still have to read the book, but I am a bit worried that it will have a similar fate to Fukuyama's End of History.. It's interesting to compare Pinker and Chomsky. IIRC, in some interview Pinker said that he has much more skeptical view of human nature than Chomsky.. And yet, regarding the humanity as a whole, he seems to be more optimistic than Chomsky, who considers (and rightfully so, I think) global warming and nuclear war as two grave dangers. Although Chomsky also often states that things are somewhat getting better when it comes to human rights and so on.
- jhbadger 9y ago
  I think "The End of History" gets a bad rap. People say the rise of China (for example) is a counterexample to his theory, as it is becoming economically successful without being a democracy, but with all the clever wordplay Chinese citizens are using online to get around attempts of censorship, it is really questionable how long China's educated and technologically sophisticated populace can be controlled by a one party state.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    I think Tianimen square and it’s afterma is a counter example to this.
  - hsljekskfh 9y ago
    it persists, it's the most populous country in the world, and it's had the biggest growth in economic production over the last 50 years of any nation state in history. i don't see why you would question whether a one party system would work without in the same breath questioning whether a two party system like the us has would work, or whether a several party system like european countries have would work.
wsxcde 9y ago
Genuine question: what values count as enlightenment values? And who gets the credit for coming up with these values? I heard Pinker on Ezra Klein's podcast and he seemed to imply that Gandhi/MLK's non-violent movements were the product of the enlightenment. Isn't that a patently ridiculous claim? I looked up wikipedia to see who the intellectuals of the enlightenment were and it seems many of these people are racists, slave-owners and colonizers who literally thought that Gandhi/MLK were sub-human. Their military philosophy seems to boil down to might is right and their values AFAICT are pretty close to Richard Spencer's. Sure, some of these people were great scientists and politicians, but I'm having a hard time seeing them as moral exemplars.
- psyc 9y ago
  The enlightenment's values and luminaries are enumerated in any number of sources on the subject. The rest of your comment appears to be a dubious framing, with numerous distortions caused by feats of time-travel within your modern, progressive mind. Within the past 5 years, it has become a necessity - an emergency - to disassociate oneself as far as possible from people, their ideas, their friends, and their friends' friends, at the faintest hint of la problématique. I like to imagine Gandhi and MLK were more mature, and better able to handle the cognitive dissonance in the human mind. 'Outing' Benjamin Franklin is not even a tiny bit like outing Harvey Weinstein, and 'outing' historical figures as racists and sexists is practically content-free, since it's no secret. If social justice enthusiasts continue down the path you seem to be alluding to, you'll wind up burning every book written before 1970, and plunging us into another dark age. If this is not the answer you wanted, my only suggestion is to try to pose your question more thoughtfully.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Afaik, there were big discussions about slavery and racism all the time concepts existed. The discussion about some past actors being more racist then others or even actively pushing for slavery while others were not should not be taboo. It is relevant that someone writing about freedom conveniently did not counted whole groups as deserving that freedom in the first place. It is much easier to be for free speech for example, when the group of people most likely to oppose you dont count. Edit: by this logic, you cant critize Robespierre. Or Lenin/Stalin, because they were product of time and built an imperium anyway. It is also relevant that nice sounding definition of freedom was used to defend the slavery or that the rational science at the time was actually exercise in motivated reasoning convenient to speaker (whether practically or just made him feel good and superior) - but not really result of fair unbiased cold look at world.
MichaelMoser123 9y ago
Optimism is good, but it could have turned for the worse: we are lucky that we had the 'nuclear taboo' ; nukes are kept strictly as a weapon of last resort. If nukes were to be used in 'limited conflicts' then we all would life in quite shitty place. (in the real world nukes kept Europe safe and prevented big wars between regional/superpowers) I think we should be thankful for our extreme luck. You never know how the next advance in science & technology will change the pace and character of human conflict.
tim333 9y ago
You can get a reasonable 20 minute summary of the books ideas from Pinker's recent talk "Be Positive, The World Is Not Falling Apart" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s2qyYQIRQE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s2qyYQIRQE

85 points by onuralp 9y ago

DFW put it nicely in "Authority and American Usage", and it's stuck with me as a pithy counterpoint to this kind of teleology. Describing pinker's thoughts on linguistic descriptivism: Steven Pinker's 1994 "The Language Instinct" is a good and fairly literate example of this second kind of Descriptivist argument, which, like the Gove-et-al. version, tends to deploy a Jr.-high-filmstrip SCIENCE: POINTING THE WAY TO A BRIGHTER TOMORROW-type tone... I think it's a lot closer to the truth to say that humans tend to be human throughout history, for both good and ill, and that this alone is why neither anyone's idea of utopia nor dystopia will ever really happen. We're always somewhere in the middle.

khrakhen 9y ago
Pinker is most certainly Whiggist in his historical outlook.
chongli 9y ago
We've already had plenty of dystopias: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea today... As for a utopia? Nobody can agree on what that would look like. When somebody claims to have a plan for a utopia, my first question is: "for whom?" How does any ideological utopia work without excluding anyone? I have yet to see a satisfactory answer. The paradox of tolerance would suggest that utopias are impossible, at least with human beings.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  > How does any ideological utopia work without excluding anyone? https://www.amazon.com/Polystate-Thought-Experiment-Distributed-Government-ebook/dp/B00IM5EM7W https://www.amazon.com/Polystate-Thought-Experiment-Distribu...
- truculation 9y ago
  I suspect your dystopias have in common that they all had utopian visions. Instead of focusing on real problems and making gradual progress they kept talking about building heaven on earth. Apparently they just needed to tear down existing institutions and kill a few people first...
  - chongli 9y ago
    Instead of focusing on real problems and making gradual progress That's a protopia [0], not a utopia. A utopia is a radical, top-down, planned society based on some ideology. [0] http://kk.org/thetechnium/protopia/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/protopia/
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  don't count modern day China out. supposedly they're maintaining 120,000 person concentration camps for their stubborn ethnic minorities in the western region. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-120000-muslim-uighurs-held-in-chinese-re-education-camps-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...
  - chongli 9y ago
    That's a very good point. We should interpret as a red flag the rhetoric around "harmony" put out by the communist party.

alexashka 9y ago

I can't believe Steven Pinker isn't met with outright ridicule. The cult of positive-think is strong - I imagine anyone criticizing him publicly would be seen as 'being negative'. Steven Pinker uses statistics to argue that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness are on the rise, both in the West and worldwide. It attributes these positive outcomes to Enlightenment values such as reason, science, and humanism. [0] Enlightenment values? Humanism? Did we not just live through 2 world wars, a cold war, etc? What is USA's military budget again? 597 BILLION USD in 2015? (Google 'usa military budget') Some humanist world power we have, it doesn't even provide health care for it's own citizens, while letting them buy guns! Some humanism that is... Shall we go down the list and discuss how humanist China is? The book concludes with three chapters defending what Pinker sees as Enlightenment values: reason, science, and humanism.[4] Pinker argues that these values are under threat from modern trends such as religious fundamentalism, political correctness, and postmodernism. [0] One of the top three concerns for humanity, according to Pinker, is political correctness... I don't even... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

jstewartmobile 9y ago
I blame it on the schools. Academia has a fetish for "dead shit", and the "enlightenment" was the most recent batch of dead shit within the average level of reading comprehension. It's not just Pinker. Both mainstream ideologies have been circling up around nth-order regurgitations of enlightenment thought for as long as I've been alive. "the best of all possible worlds"
RobertRoberts 9y ago
>The cult of positive-think is strong - I imagine anyone criticizing him publicly would be seen as 'being negative'. Are the down votes on this comment a form of irony?
MarkMc 9y ago
> Steven Pinker uses statistics to argue that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness are on the rise, both in the West and worldwide. How do you feel about the statistics Pinker uses? Do you agree with his assessment about human progress?

valeg 9y ago

Interesting take on the new Pinker's opus by John Gray: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlight... >To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on “the right side of history”. >Judged as a contribution to thought, Enlightenment Now is embarrassingly feeble. With its primitive scientism and manga-style history of ideas, the book is a parody of Enlightenment thinking at its crudest. A more intellectually inquiring author would have conveyed something of the Enlightenment’s richness and diversity. Yet even if Pinker was capable of providing it, intellectual inquiry is not what his anxious flock demands. Only an anodyne, mythical Enlightenment can give them what they crave, which is relief from painful doubt.

taeric 9y ago
If you are trying to signal to an out crowd that Pinker is misguided, ill informed, or otherwise wrong, provide evidence. If you are signaling to a crowd that they are right to ignore him for reasons they know, this is how you do it. With a broad grin and no effort to actually engage. :( That is, this seems to be setting up a battle of "elites" where the call to action is to loudly decry Pinker without having to read him. Is there more to this story than this? Was this just a particularly bad quote?
- chickenfries 9y ago
  He's trying to "signal" that he wants you to read the article that he linked, and to entice you into doing so he has picked a few quotes that sum up the author's point of view. If you disagree, perhaps you should click and find out if the article is any good...
  - taeric 9y ago
    Apologies, my criticism was at the linked article. The quoted part was particularly bad. To the point that it really detracted from any point and only seems to exist for the signaling aspect.

khrakhen 9y ago

We can simply look at /Better Angels of Our Nature/ to know what a hack Pinker is. His thesis is only good for intra-civilizational violence on decline, which is true and fascinating. Not a cause for celebration, but for study -- he should take into account the purpose of study is to study, not celebrate. This failure cripples his work beyond his knowledge area (psychiatry, neuroscience). Anyhow, /Better Angels/ is the most messed up, sloppily cited, cherry-picked history of human civilization I may have ever read from an academic. There is a certain Eurocentrism deep throughout, but one does not have to read between the lines. His estimates of battle deaths are prima facie ridiculous. Ancient wars always take the highest estimates. It's a wonder humans did not go extinct millenia ago, given how they kept killing a quarter of the population on a regular basis. Modern wars like Iraq, even at his time of writing in 2010-11, had far, far more deaths than he counts. Maybe he does not want to count anything that isn't a uniformed combat death, but then he would have to admit something happened to cripple typical life expectancy. I was about to lose my mind at the incredibly racist portion on Polynesians and genetic predispositions to violence and cannibalism. I say "incredibly" literally. I cannot fathom how it got published and praised. I imagine the exorbitant length meant most reviewers stopped a third of the way through. And Pinker has been the head of the editing panel for the American Heritage Dictionary since the Fifth edition, a serious downgrade from the Fourth, by the way. Pinker is more than jack of all trades, master of none. He is a charlatan. It would be all the more tolerable if he had a sense of humor.

ggm 9y ago
Pinker is more than jack of all trades, master of none. He is a charlatan. It would be all the more tolerable if he had a sense of humor. No.. really: tell us what you think? Pinker is smart, and writes well, and holds opinions you don't agree with, but this is an eggregious take-down. Do you really question his chops on linguistics too? Or is it just that he chose to step outside his baseline and do work you don't want to respect or bond with? Put up better stats if you want to refute his numbers.
- petermcneeley 9y ago
  If you have time please review my critique on his "group selection" article. http://darkcephas.blogspot.ca/2018/01/on-group-selection.html http://darkcephas.blogspot.ca/2018/01/on-group-selection.htm...

ghostcluster 9y ago

I thought David Brooks had a good take on Pinker and his latest book. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/steven-pinker-radical-honesty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/steven-pinker-rad... Pinker avoids addressing the social breakdown of families and the increased polarization and technology-driven personal atomization in the current mileau, whose undertow underlies a lot of the big issues today. Otherwise, an admiral figure from the elite academy.

lostlogin 9y ago
> Pinker avoids addressing the social breakdown of families Is it really a problem that families aren’t together? Previously (with some hold outs) there wasn’t much choice and families had to stay together due to issues around control through money, religion and social pressures. Go back further (hopefully, though this is still pretty grim in many areas) and domestic violence was also legal. “Breakdown” of families is a considerably better option than what was previously available. > the increased polarization and technology-driven personal atomization in the current mileau I don’t understand what this means, could you give an example?
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  > Is it really a problem that families aren’t together? if you care about the epidemic of loneliness, the negative medical consequences of social isolation, and the demographic sustainability of developed countries, yes.
  - jeoi2838 9y ago
    Research shows having a roommate is enough to combat feelings of loneliness. Marriage in and of itself isn’t shown to automatically increase happiness; most folks reported having maintained their baseline mood after the wedding Maybe this is just old definitions needing to be updated, but “family” in the traditional mom-dad-kids all visit grandma and the like, isn’t essential to the species. Socializing is, but not the traditional structures
- 9y ago

warent 9y ago

Can someone help me understand this part? > Enlightenment advances were tied to empire building and the nascent Industrial Revolution, predicated not just on noble ideas and scientific curiosity, but also on slavery, genocide, exploitation and cultural triumphalism. Like the Renaissance, it ended in chaos and conflict, including the French revolutionary wars of 1792–99. > Both eras show that science and evidence-based thinking do not necessarily triumph over irrationality and ideology I can't tell if Ian is saying: 1) Science and evidence-based thinking are the direct cause of these eras "ending in chaos and conflict", and that "irrationality and ideology" could have been preferred, or 2) Science and evidence-based thinking were insufficient. If it's 1, I doubt that's really true and would definitely need evidence. If 2, then insufficient at what? Insufficient to act as a moral compass? Insufficient at convincing people to hold similar values in utilizing science and evidence-based thinking? Something else?

westoncb 9y ago
I think there's a '3' here: Science and evidence-based thinking are (relatively) orthogonal to the emergence of social chaos and conflict. If I'm not mistaken this is implied in Marxist thinking, so it is an idea that is 'out there' (in the sense of being available). I think the idea there is that our rational thinking largely serves as justification rather than being something very powerful on its own. The way I see it is that (at least much of) rational thought is the latest stage in 'elaboration' of lower-level mental/emotional processes. In which case, our rational thinking on subjects which impact real circumstances in which we're invested will be constrained and influenced by our goals, values, and something like coefficients for strength of influence of various emotions etc.
MichaelMoser123 9y ago
i think he is omitting a few words: he might want to say that science created the means for European powers to build empires by dominating people in far off places; these empires ran on slavery, racism & genocide in far off places (the colonies); much later in the twentieth century the violence & genocide came back to continental Europe in the form of two world wars (when the same weapons and ideologies that were developed to kill 'colored' people were turned on the Europeans). in the aftermath some people try to make sense out of this mayhem and they ask the question of 'what's the point of this project ? Are these ideas of enlightenment at fault of getting into such a mess? (or might it have been something else like how we applied them) ? and what can we do about it ?' . Is that correct ?

pbreit 9y ago

For a counterpart, it is Bill Gates' new favorite book: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now

ghostcluster 9y ago
they co-produced a really nice video with some of the graphs from the book inlaid on giant physical glass plates: https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/967449421238579201 https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/967449421238579201

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jochung 9y ago

His book seems to have both people on the left and the right complaining, so at least my interest is piqued that it says something real.

yters 9y ago

I'd say the huge moral innovation of the 20th century is scientifically showing the human fetus is neither human, alive, nor a person. In a previous era, society frowned on abortion and contraception due to the old fashioned Judeo-Christian moral views, and so we had over population and widespread violence and poverty. But, thanks to the moral innovation of fetal science, we've discovered that we can stop violence before it happens by eliminating fetuses instead. So, instead of millions of dead humans, we have millions of terminated fetuses. The great gift of 20th century science is an ability to define the problem away, in a sense. And today we are almost at the point where we can completely discard of morality altogether, which will bring about a true utopia on earth because then nothing will be wrong.

rimliu 9y ago
Yes, because letting grown up woman die because of someones believe in fairytales or forcing preteen rape victim to give birth is very moral. I think some should take more time and find out more what science is and what morality is.
- yters 9y ago
  It looks like you agree...

truculation 9y ago

The review confuses psychological optimism with a problem-based definition of optimism: that problems are solvable (and hence progress is possible). As David Deutsch points out in The Beginning of Infinity, Winston Churchill was an optimistic leader and a fan of science and progress who nonetheless suffered from depression (the 'black dog') [1]. Whereas Thomas Malthus (mistakenly) predicted mass starvation due to population growth [2] and was therefore a pessimist who nonetheless was of a sunny disposition and the life and soul of dinner parties in London. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-o... [2] An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf

olleromam91 9y ago
But if a would be problem solver is not psychologically optimistic...what happens to the odds that the problem will be solved?
- joaomacp 9y ago
  They go down. But so do the odds of him being disappointed by failure.

js8 9y ago

I still have to read the book, but I am a bit worried that it will have a similar fate to Fukuyama's End of History.. It's interesting to compare Pinker and Chomsky. IIRC, in some interview Pinker said that he has much more skeptical view of human nature than Chomsky.. And yet, regarding the humanity as a whole, he seems to be more optimistic than Chomsky, who considers (and rightfully so, I think) global warming and nuclear war as two grave dangers. Although Chomsky also often states that things are somewhat getting better when it comes to human rights and so on.

jhbadger 9y ago
I think "The End of History" gets a bad rap. People say the rise of China (for example) is a counterexample to his theory, as it is becoming economically successful without being a democracy, but with all the clever wordplay Chinese citizens are using online to get around attempts of censorship, it is really questionable how long China's educated and technologically sophisticated populace can be controlled by a one party state.
- garmaine 9y ago
  I think Tianimen square and it’s afterma is a counter example to this.
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  it persists, it's the most populous country in the world, and it's had the biggest growth in economic production over the last 50 years of any nation state in history. i don't see why you would question whether a one party system would work without in the same breath questioning whether a two party system like the us has would work, or whether a several party system like european countries have would work.

wsxcde 9y ago

Genuine question: what values count as enlightenment values? And who gets the credit for coming up with these values? I heard Pinker on Ezra Klein's podcast and he seemed to imply that Gandhi/MLK's non-violent movements were the product of the enlightenment. Isn't that a patently ridiculous claim? I looked up wikipedia to see who the intellectuals of the enlightenment were and it seems many of these people are racists, slave-owners and colonizers who literally thought that Gandhi/MLK were sub-human. Their military philosophy seems to boil down to might is right and their values AFAICT are pretty close to Richard Spencer's. Sure, some of these people were great scientists and politicians, but I'm having a hard time seeing them as moral exemplars.

psyc 9y ago
The enlightenment's values and luminaries are enumerated in any number of sources on the subject. The rest of your comment appears to be a dubious framing, with numerous distortions caused by feats of time-travel within your modern, progressive mind. Within the past 5 years, it has become a necessity - an emergency - to disassociate oneself as far as possible from people, their ideas, their friends, and their friends' friends, at the faintest hint of la problématique. I like to imagine Gandhi and MLK were more mature, and better able to handle the cognitive dissonance in the human mind. 'Outing' Benjamin Franklin is not even a tiny bit like outing Harvey Weinstein, and 'outing' historical figures as racists and sexists is practically content-free, since it's no secret. If social justice enthusiasts continue down the path you seem to be alluding to, you'll wind up burning every book written before 1970, and plunging us into another dark age. If this is not the answer you wanted, my only suggestion is to try to pose your question more thoughtfully.
- watwut 9y ago
  Afaik, there were big discussions about slavery and racism all the time concepts existed. The discussion about some past actors being more racist then others or even actively pushing for slavery while others were not should not be taboo. It is relevant that someone writing about freedom conveniently did not counted whole groups as deserving that freedom in the first place. It is much easier to be for free speech for example, when the group of people most likely to oppose you dont count. Edit: by this logic, you cant critize Robespierre. Or Lenin/Stalin, because they were product of time and built an imperium anyway. It is also relevant that nice sounding definition of freedom was used to defend the slavery or that the rational science at the time was actually exercise in motivated reasoning convenient to speaker (whether practically or just made him feel good and superior) - but not really result of fair unbiased cold look at world.

MichaelMoser123 9y ago

Optimism is good, but it could have turned for the worse: we are lucky that we had the 'nuclear taboo' ; nukes are kept strictly as a weapon of last resort. If nukes were to be used in 'limited conflicts' then we all would life in quite shitty place. (in the real world nukes kept Europe safe and prevented big wars between regional/superpowers) I think we should be thankful for our extreme luck. You never know how the next advance in science & technology will change the pace and character of human conflict.

tim333 9y ago

You can get a reasonable 20 minute summary of the books ideas from Pinker's recent talk "Be Positive, The World Is Not Falling Apart" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s2qyYQIRQE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s2qyYQIRQE