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Y’all need to read Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. Life is better than it ever has been, and there’s an embarrassing amount of data backing up that claim.
by camdenlock 7y ago
Y’all need to read Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.
Life is better than it ever has been, and there’s an embarrassing amount of data backing up that claim.
We’re depressed because our brains didn’t evolve to live in this kind of society, but that doesn’t mean our civilization is falling apart.
- patrick5415 7y agoYeah that book radically changed my perspective. I just laugh now when people talk all this doom and gloom.
- scottlocklin 7y agoI like Pinker, but his utility function is egregiously broken here. This sort of Panglossian thing is typical of the smug upper middle classes in the West who look at the lower orders in their own societies as being morally defective somehow; downstream fallout of the ideology of "meritocracy." It's a tale of the hero-bureaucrat; a very questionable story indeed -most of the actual progress we've experienced in recent years is made possible a handful of individuals, just as it has always been. Aka no fracking, no green revolution: things would look a lot different. If you're a descendant of an American factory worker, or one of the Gilets Jaunes who can't afford to have a normal life like your parents did, you really don't give a shit that many people in Asia have much better lives now, or that childhood immunizations are so much better. Worse, one ought to be suspicious of shrinking metrics collected by bureaucracies whose definition of success is shrinking metrics.