7 ms·

Steven Pinker thinks your sense of imminent doom is wrong

43 points by edward 5y ago

jonnycomputer 5y ago
related: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/the-long-game/2021/09/14/humanity-is-doomed-494318 https://www.politico.com/newsletters/the-long-game/2021/09/1... and the survey: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955
- omegaworks 5y ago
  >That failing could amount to a form of child abuse, the report found, saying “the distress of climate anxiety could be regarded as cruel, inhuman, degrading or torturous.” So strange to hand the right-wing their next talking point. The way this is phrased, it looks like they're trying to gaslight people legitimately concerned about the future.
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your argument. This is the quote: >“Climate anxiety in children and young people should not be seen as simply caused by ecological disaster; it is also caused by more powerful ‘others’ (adults and governments) failing to act on the threats being faced,” researchers wrote. >That failing could amount to a form of child abuse, the report found, saying “the distress of climate anxiety could be regarded as cruel, inhuman, degrading or torturous.”
  - oconnor663 5y ago
    I don't think the marginal value of a talking point is much. Especially if you believe your political enemies are comfortable with lying anyway.
ogma 5y ago
And I think Steven Pinker is a boring fraud who tried to pass himself off as a linguist for a while.
jbay808 5y ago
A more accurate title would be "Stephen Pinker Thinks [the Author's] Sense of Imminent Doom is Wrong". He is refuting the author's sense that a cluster of crises implies imminent doom, not that there might be other reasons to have a sense of doom. > It’s not irrational to identify genuine threats to our well-being. It is irrational to interpret a number of crises occurring at the same time as signs that we’re doomed. It’s a statistical phenomenon that when events are randomly sprinkled in time they cluster.
- _jal 5y ago
  That's kind of his schtick, though, isn't it? To make a narrow argument phrased to imply it demonstrates far wider applicability than it does?
  - jbay808 5y ago
    It wasn't Stephen Pinker who wrote the headline, it was the NYT editors. And I guess they've decided that Stephen Pinker thinks you're wrong about X gets more of a reaction than Stephen Pinker thinks I'm wrong about X.
anthony_r 5y ago
It's probably because he doesn't understand that something that works only once in a lifetime, or even only once in a few generations, can actually be a very desirable trait from evolution/survival point of view. We (and all lifeforms really) are full of such traits, they're a burden 99% of the years and a blessing in that cursed 1% slice. Not that it's necessarily fun to have those traits (Selfish Gene etc.), but calling them "irrational" is often plain wrong. If you fail to explain something that doesn't mean it's not useful (or "irrational"), it might be your "rationality" that's too limited.
- wyager 5y ago
  AKA the “midwit effect”, close antagonistic relationship with “chesterton’s fence”.
- azangru 5y ago
  What's the something that works only once in a lifetime in this sentence? Sense of imminent doom?
  - nostromo 5y ago
    As an example: anxiety about impending winter was a very desirable evolutionary trait for northern populations. Every year you realized that if you didn't have enough food for winter you and your family might starve. Obsessing over all the things that could go wrong helped you survive -- planning for things like failed crops, losing livestock, early or late freezes. The "chill" people without that intense pessimism about the future often did starve and we're not descended from them. But in modern life, the intensity of anxiety about an uncertain future is misplaced. It's a good trait to have still -- yes -- but it shouldn't be taking over your mind.
  - kipchak 5y ago
    The US Civil War was much longer/bloodier than expected by both sides, and as late as 1861 was not seen as inevitable, even after succession began. I can't find a particularly great example of this other than Lincoln's March 4thinaugural address. A Virginian for example of a more anxious disposition might have packed up and headed west after the succession process began in December of 1860-February 1861 but before the war began in April of 1861. https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/domestic-affairs https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/domestic-affairs
yellow05 5y ago
A Jewish journalist in a Jewish newspaper shills another Jew with ties to Epstein.
bob229 5y ago
We’re such a stupid species that I’d be astounded if we survive the century. Good riddance
twg_jack 5y ago
Paywalled
fortuna86 5y ago
His bias is the same as the deniers, he has publicly stated his position and cannot recede from it for any reason, otherwise he'll look unserious.
- burntoutsophos 5y ago
  To summarize both viewpoints in a single clichéd-but-true-timeless quote: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ... it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. ~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- pinkman68419 5y ago
  His bias is just trying to distract from the fact he was on Epstein's flight logs
rzzzt 5y ago
A feeling that is constantly present will not be wrong at least for a portion of the time. Stopped clocks and all
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Not necessarily. If I have a constant sense that there is a giant dragon behind me, I am going to be wrong 100% of the time.
bko 5y ago
> One of the recurring criticisms of your ideas on progress is that our having an awareness of how much better the situation is for the impoverished today compared with the impoverished of the past doesn’t actually make anybody’s life better and, in fact, minimizes contemporary suffering. Is there a moral gap there? > Pinker: I think that’s a fallacy. It can be true both that there are fewer poor people, fewer oppressed people, fewer victims of violence and that there are still poor people, oppressed people and victims of violence. We want to reduce that suffering as much as possible. The fact that there has been progress helps us identify what drives down poverty and violence and illness. But there’s also a moral component, and that is: What actually dislodges us from fatalism? What gives us the gumption to try to reduce war further? Maybe you can eliminate it, or poverty? I think the bigger point of recognizing the progress that has been made is giving at least partial credit to the system of values and institutions that got us there. Many people want to burn it all to the ground. They think the natural order of things is progress and prosperity, when in fact the opposite is true.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  > recognizing the progress that has been made is giving at least partial credit to the system of values and institutions that got us there. Many people want to burn it all to the ground. Yes! An absurdly large proportion of people on the left and right believe that "the system" (capitalism, industry, democracy, power, whathaveyou) is broken and only radical or revolutionary change can make the world better. But, as a radical centrist, social-capitalist and believer in visionary incrementalism — I totally disagree. I'm super glad to live in this timeline.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    > An absurdly large proportion But this is _because_ the system has failed them. For example, I have a lower quality of life than my father despite going to university and being a senior engineer in some huge companies - just because the cost of housing has increased astronomically and we now have to pay back student loans too. He had a house, family and car at 25. I'm over 30 and can't afford even a car (mainly due to the lack of parking and high fuel prices make it not worthwhile). And I know lots of people who far worse off than I am, those who have been able to progress mostly inherited property from their family. When people see that working hard gets them nowhere, and those who inherit wealth and prestige are far better off, they lose faith in the system and support radical change.
rocgf 5y ago
Haven't read the article because it's paywalled and I can't be bothered right now, but after reading Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" and "Enlightenment now", I just don't know where I stand on him. On the one hand, his books are definitely worth reading, well researched, very informative. On the other hand, he does seem to look at everything through pink glasses. I don't subscribe to the ideas that we will all literally perish within the next X decades, but it's not really idiotic to think that there are many things which can destroy our rare calmness bubble in history, either slowly, like climate change, or rather quickly, like a world war. I guess what puts me off, especially in "Enlightenment Now" is that he seems to treat these things like they are provably impossible to happen by just looking at the past and all the near misses we've had and how it was all okay in the end. Am I missing something?
- burntoutsophos 5y ago
  I echo your sentiments - That's precisely what I thought after reading those same books. I've speculated that his excessively positive stance might be - in order to cater to an uber-optimistic crowd of humans (high percentage of entrepreneurs in that cohort) similar to but exactly antithetical to any doomsday-prophet - a bloomsday-prophet, if you will. Nothing wrong with that, though I tend to prefer more balanced and thoughtful opinions that would think of multiple sides (even speculate on some partially-unknown stances)
debacle 5y ago
It's a balancing effect. Do you live in a abandoned silo in the middle of nowhere eating canned foods? Do you put yourself at ground zero in a pandemic situation with the other constituent effects still in full swing? Do you live as an ascetic? Do you amass wealth wantonly? How many kids do you have? How do you support them? There are a lot of different strategies for life, and many of us will change our mind as to which is best over time. What is best for one person might not be best for another, and what is right or best changes in time and space. I find Steven Pinker a refreshing voice.
programmarchy 5y ago
Wow, what's up with the lighting on that photo of him in the article? Very unsettling and seems like a terrible way to frame his positive message.
esarbe 5y ago
I really like Steven Pinker's work. And while I agree that quality of life has immensely improved over the last ten decades with reduced poverty and reduced child mortality and improved health, I just wish he could provide similar data when it comes to the general health of the ecosystem and climate change. Predatory ecosystem exploitation and climate change (or - as we oldsters love to call it - global warming) are _the_ defining crises of our times. And we're failing to master them. We're failing so hard that very likely reach 2°C or more by 2050. And that would be fatal for humanity. Not the earth, earth will be fine, give or take a few hundred thousand years. But humanity will be toast if it ever comes to that. Unfortunately all statistics on our precious ecosystem - in quite a contrast to the statistics about development, health and wealth - are pointing to a dark path.
ranma4703 5y ago
https://archive.is/a03Bc https://archive.is/a03Bc
ur-whale 5y ago
https://archive.vn/a03Bc https://archive.vn/a03Bc
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” -some Russian guy
ramblenode 5y ago
Skip this book. Pinker is not an historian or an anthropologist and AFAIK his views are not accepted by most in the field. He does produce some "data"--cherry-picked to support his straw-man hypotheses--but spends a lot more time filling in the gaps of his theory with anecdotes and his own idle speculation. Here is a taste from Ch 2 (p. 88): Recall, for example, Eckhardt’s claim that hunter-gatherers had "little to fight about." But organisms that have evolved by natural selection always have something to fight about. Hobbes noted that humans in particular have three reasons for quarrel: Yes, his response to another book on the same subject written by an actual historian is "natural selection" and Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes might be the most cited luminary in the entire chapter dealing with the paleolithic. Despite being a psychologist, Pinker seems to constantly fall prey to the availability heuristic, drawing considerable evidence from the last 100 years, and most evidence from the medieval to modern periods. Only cursory attention is given to humans pre-9000 BCE, despite this comprising over 95% of the modern human timeline. One piece of evidence he does bring up is the ~9000 BCE Kennewick Man, where he notes a possible spear wound. Unmentioned is that this man had very modern proportions, owing to a nutritious diet that would have rivaled that of most humans until 100 years ago. By limiting his scope to the period following the agricultural revolution, he misses that metrics of nutrition, disease, mortality, working hours, and inequality all declined with the rise of centralized states and have only recently recovered to paleolithic levels (not working hours) (for height proxy, see [0], for Y chromosome proxy of equality, see [1]). Pinker's proposed "civilizing" effect of states in reducing human violence is mostly taken from examples of inter-state violence without much consideration for intra-state violence and the power of states to control and extract work from their populations under the threat of violence. Indeed, his "better angels" message is ultimately authoritarian: our ancestors were savage but we are moral because powerful states give us no other choice. If you believe that you may be able to overlook his many logical leaps. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#/media/File:Human_heights_over_the_long-run,_OWID.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#/media/File:Human... [1] https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459 https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459
unmole 5y ago
I tried reading Enlightenment Now but I was put off for reasons I don't recall now. But I would very highly recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling which presents an evidence based case against doomist fatalism.

43 points by edward 5y ago

related: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/the-long-game/2021/09/14/humanity-is-doomed-494318 https://www.politico.com/newsletters/the-long-game/2021/09/1... and the survey: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955

omegaworks 5y ago
>That failing could amount to a form of child abuse, the report found, saying “the distress of climate anxiety could be regarded as cruel, inhuman, degrading or torturous.” So strange to hand the right-wing their next talking point. The way this is phrased, it looks like they're trying to gaslight people legitimately concerned about the future.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your argument. This is the quote: >“Climate anxiety in children and young people should not be seen as simply caused by ecological disaster; it is also caused by more powerful ‘others’ (adults and governments) failing to act on the threats being faced,” researchers wrote. >That failing could amount to a form of child abuse, the report found, saying “the distress of climate anxiety could be regarded as cruel, inhuman, degrading or torturous.”
- oconnor663 5y ago
  I don't think the marginal value of a talking point is much. Especially if you believe your political enemies are comfortable with lying anyway.

ogma 5y ago

And I think Steven Pinker is a boring fraud who tried to pass himself off as a linguist for a while.

jbay808 5y ago

A more accurate title would be "Stephen Pinker Thinks [the Author's] Sense of Imminent Doom is Wrong". He is refuting the author's sense that a cluster of crises implies imminent doom, not that there might be other reasons to have a sense of doom. > It’s not irrational to identify genuine threats to our well-being. It is irrational to interpret a number of crises occurring at the same time as signs that we’re doomed. It’s a statistical phenomenon that when events are randomly sprinkled in time they cluster.

_jal 5y ago
That's kind of his schtick, though, isn't it? To make a narrow argument phrased to imply it demonstrates far wider applicability than it does?
- jbay808 5y ago
  It wasn't Stephen Pinker who wrote the headline, it was the NYT editors. And I guess they've decided that Stephen Pinker thinks you're wrong about X gets more of a reaction than Stephen Pinker thinks I'm wrong about X.

anthony_r 5y ago

It's probably because he doesn't understand that something that works only once in a lifetime, or even only once in a few generations, can actually be a very desirable trait from evolution/survival point of view. We (and all lifeforms really) are full of such traits, they're a burden 99% of the years and a blessing in that cursed 1% slice. Not that it's necessarily fun to have those traits (Selfish Gene etc.), but calling them "irrational" is often plain wrong. If you fail to explain something that doesn't mean it's not useful (or "irrational"), it might be your "rationality" that's too limited.

wyager 5y ago
AKA the “midwit effect”, close antagonistic relationship with “chesterton’s fence”.
azangru 5y ago
What's the something that works only once in a lifetime in this sentence? Sense of imminent doom?
- nostromo 5y ago
  As an example: anxiety about impending winter was a very desirable evolutionary trait for northern populations. Every year you realized that if you didn't have enough food for winter you and your family might starve. Obsessing over all the things that could go wrong helped you survive -- planning for things like failed crops, losing livestock, early or late freezes. The "chill" people without that intense pessimism about the future often did starve and we're not descended from them. But in modern life, the intensity of anxiety about an uncertain future is misplaced. It's a good trait to have still -- yes -- but it shouldn't be taking over your mind.
- kipchak 5y ago
  The US Civil War was much longer/bloodier than expected by both sides, and as late as 1861 was not seen as inevitable, even after succession began. I can't find a particularly great example of this other than Lincoln's March 4thinaugural address. A Virginian for example of a more anxious disposition might have packed up and headed west after the succession process began in December of 1860-February 1861 but before the war began in April of 1861. https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/domestic-affairs https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/domestic-affairs

yellow05 5y ago

A Jewish journalist in a Jewish newspaper shills another Jew with ties to Epstein.

bob229 5y ago

We’re such a stupid species that I’d be astounded if we survive the century. Good riddance

twg_jack 5y ago

Paywalled

fortuna86 5y ago

His bias is the same as the deniers, he has publicly stated his position and cannot recede from it for any reason, otherwise he'll look unserious.

burntoutsophos 5y ago
To summarize both viewpoints in a single clichéd-but-true-timeless quote: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ... it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. ~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
pinkman68419 5y ago
His bias is just trying to distract from the fact he was on Epstein's flight logs

rzzzt 5y ago

A feeling that is constantly present will not be wrong at least for a portion of the time. Stopped clocks and all

cortesoft 5y ago
Not necessarily. If I have a constant sense that there is a giant dragon behind me, I am going to be wrong 100% of the time.

bko 5y ago

> One of the recurring criticisms of your ideas on progress is that our having an awareness of how much better the situation is for the impoverished today compared with the impoverished of the past doesn’t actually make anybody’s life better and, in fact, minimizes contemporary suffering. Is there a moral gap there? > Pinker: I think that’s a fallacy. It can be true both that there are fewer poor people, fewer oppressed people, fewer victims of violence and that there are still poor people, oppressed people and victims of violence. We want to reduce that suffering as much as possible. The fact that there has been progress helps us identify what drives down poverty and violence and illness. But there’s also a moral component, and that is: What actually dislodges us from fatalism? What gives us the gumption to try to reduce war further? Maybe you can eliminate it, or poverty? I think the bigger point of recognizing the progress that has been made is giving at least partial credit to the system of values and institutions that got us there. Many people want to burn it all to the ground. They think the natural order of things is progress and prosperity, when in fact the opposite is true.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
> recognizing the progress that has been made is giving at least partial credit to the system of values and institutions that got us there. Many people want to burn it all to the ground. Yes! An absurdly large proportion of people on the left and right believe that "the system" (capitalism, industry, democracy, power, whathaveyou) is broken and only radical or revolutionary change can make the world better. But, as a radical centrist, social-capitalist and believer in visionary incrementalism — I totally disagree. I'm super glad to live in this timeline.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  > An absurdly large proportion But this is _because_ the system has failed them. For example, I have a lower quality of life than my father despite going to university and being a senior engineer in some huge companies - just because the cost of housing has increased astronomically and we now have to pay back student loans too. He had a house, family and car at 25. I'm over 30 and can't afford even a car (mainly due to the lack of parking and high fuel prices make it not worthwhile). And I know lots of people who far worse off than I am, those who have been able to progress mostly inherited property from their family. When people see that working hard gets them nowhere, and those who inherit wealth and prestige are far better off, they lose faith in the system and support radical change.

rocgf 5y ago

Haven't read the article because it's paywalled and I can't be bothered right now, but after reading Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" and "Enlightenment now", I just don't know where I stand on him. On the one hand, his books are definitely worth reading, well researched, very informative. On the other hand, he does seem to look at everything through pink glasses. I don't subscribe to the ideas that we will all literally perish within the next X decades, but it's not really idiotic to think that there are many things which can destroy our rare calmness bubble in history, either slowly, like climate change, or rather quickly, like a world war. I guess what puts me off, especially in "Enlightenment Now" is that he seems to treat these things like they are provably impossible to happen by just looking at the past and all the near misses we've had and how it was all okay in the end. Am I missing something?

burntoutsophos 5y ago
I echo your sentiments - That's precisely what I thought after reading those same books. I've speculated that his excessively positive stance might be - in order to cater to an uber-optimistic crowd of humans (high percentage of entrepreneurs in that cohort) similar to but exactly antithetical to any doomsday-prophet - a bloomsday-prophet, if you will. Nothing wrong with that, though I tend to prefer more balanced and thoughtful opinions that would think of multiple sides (even speculate on some partially-unknown stances)

debacle 5y ago

It's a balancing effect. Do you live in a abandoned silo in the middle of nowhere eating canned foods? Do you put yourself at ground zero in a pandemic situation with the other constituent effects still in full swing? Do you live as an ascetic? Do you amass wealth wantonly? How many kids do you have? How do you support them? There are a lot of different strategies for life, and many of us will change our mind as to which is best over time. What is best for one person might not be best for another, and what is right or best changes in time and space. I find Steven Pinker a refreshing voice.

programmarchy 5y ago

Wow, what's up with the lighting on that photo of him in the article? Very unsettling and seems like a terrible way to frame his positive message.

esarbe 5y ago

I really like Steven Pinker's work. And while I agree that quality of life has immensely improved over the last ten decades with reduced poverty and reduced child mortality and improved health, I just wish he could provide similar data when it comes to the general health of the ecosystem and climate change. Predatory ecosystem exploitation and climate change (or - as we oldsters love to call it - global warming) are _the_ defining crises of our times. And we're failing to master them. We're failing so hard that very likely reach 2°C or more by 2050. And that would be fatal for humanity. Not the earth, earth will be fine, give or take a few hundred thousand years. But humanity will be toast if it ever comes to that. Unfortunately all statistics on our precious ecosystem - in quite a contrast to the statistics about development, health and wealth - are pointing to a dark path.

ranma4703 5y ago

https://archive.is/a03Bc https://archive.is/a03Bc

ur-whale 5y ago

https://archive.vn/a03Bc https://archive.vn/a03Bc

OneEyedRobot 5y ago

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” -some Russian guy

ramblenode 5y ago

Skip this book. Pinker is not an historian or an anthropologist and AFAIK his views are not accepted by most in the field. He does produce some "data"--cherry-picked to support his straw-man hypotheses--but spends a lot more time filling in the gaps of his theory with anecdotes and his own idle speculation. Here is a taste from Ch 2 (p. 88): Recall, for example, Eckhardt’s claim that hunter-gatherers had "little to fight about." But organisms that have evolved by natural selection always have something to fight about. Hobbes noted that humans in particular have three reasons for quarrel: Yes, his response to another book on the same subject written by an actual historian is "natural selection" and Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes might be the most cited luminary in the entire chapter dealing with the paleolithic. Despite being a psychologist, Pinker seems to constantly fall prey to the availability heuristic, drawing considerable evidence from the last 100 years, and most evidence from the medieval to modern periods. Only cursory attention is given to humans pre-9000 BCE, despite this comprising over 95% of the modern human timeline. One piece of evidence he does bring up is the ~9000 BCE Kennewick Man, where he notes a possible spear wound. Unmentioned is that this man had very modern proportions, owing to a nutritious diet that would have rivaled that of most humans until 100 years ago. By limiting his scope to the period following the agricultural revolution, he misses that metrics of nutrition, disease, mortality, working hours, and inequality all declined with the rise of centralized states and have only recently recovered to paleolithic levels (not working hours) (for height proxy, see [0], for Y chromosome proxy of equality, see [1]). Pinker's proposed "civilizing" effect of states in reducing human violence is mostly taken from examples of inter-state violence without much consideration for intra-state violence and the power of states to control and extract work from their populations under the threat of violence. Indeed, his "better angels" message is ultimately authoritarian: our ancestors were savage but we are moral because powerful states give us no other choice. If you believe that you may be able to overlook his many logical leaps. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#/media/File:Human_heights_over_the_long-run,_OWID.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#/media/File:Human... [1] https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459 https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459

unmole 5y ago

I tried reading Enlightenment Now but I was put off for reasons I don't recall now. But I would very highly recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling which presents an evidence based case against doomist fatalism.