
Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now - onuralp
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3654
======
maldusiecle
The critiques of Pinker that I've found most convincing have focused on his
presentation of the Enlightenment's intellectual side. The review by John Gray
that Aaronson dismisses has some fairly convincing points, and it's
disappointing seeing him travesty Gray's case.

It should be pretty obvious to someone with reasonably good reading
comprehension that Gray is not saying, as Aaronson suggests he is, that Pinker
supports eugenics. Gray's point is that the thinkers who Aaronson presents as
defining "Enlightenment values" in fact had much more ambivalent positions.
The argument is that one cannot define "Enlightenment values" simplistically--
because the Enlightenment thinkers were in disagreement about basic
principles.

I don't agree with all of Gray's critique--I think Pinker's case that things
have improved over the last several centuries is reasonable--but I think this
part of his argument is difficult to answer. It's very easy to define
praiseworthy "values" if you keep them divorced from real-world arguments, and
that seems to be Pinker's approach. Any thinker who can present Enlightenment
values as simple and univocal is going to do a poor job understanding things
as they are today. Deny the disagreements of the past, and you're sure to miss
the substance of today's disagreements. Aaronson is happy to take the "classic
liberal" label. I wonder if he's familiar with the work of others who identify
as classic liberals right now; my guess, given what I've seen of his writing,
is that he'd disagree with many of them pretty strenuously.

~~~
csallen
Did Pinker ever say in his book that every Enlightenment thinker shared the
same exact set of values about which there was no disagreement? I seem to
recall him saying the opposite at times. The point of the book was not to
praise the thinkers of 2-300 years ago, but to identify a subset of the values
that really picked up steam around that time and to show how they have
contributed to significant progress since.

(EDIT: clarity)

~~~
maldusiecle
Of course he didn't say that literally every Enlightenment thinker shared the
exact set of values. Neither I nor Gray are claiming that. But his argument,
as I understand it, is that there are a certain determinate set of
"Enlightenment values" that these thinkers mostly shared, that Pinker himself
shares, and that society as a whole needs to share in order to make progress,
stay civilized, etc. Gray's point is that no such set of values exists, that
Enlightenment thinkers were always in contradiction with each other, and that
people who claim to hew to "Enlightenment values" today are likely to be in
fundamental disagreement with each other.

~~~
csallen
The way I read it, Pinker wasn't adamant about these values being determinate
and shared. Quite the opposite, he was aware that there was disagreement and
that things were messy. From the first chapter of the book:

 _> What is the Enlightenment? There is no official answer, because the era
named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies
like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed… The era
was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie
them together: reason, science, humanism and progress._

In other words, the themes are of Pinker's own determining, with the benefit
of hindsight.

More importantly, this is not a book about the history of the Enlightenment.
Out of the many thousands of paragraphs in this book, Pinker only devotes a
small handful to discussing the source of the values/themes he defends. I
don't think it's accurate to refer to their origin as _the_ argument Pinker
makes in the book. It would be more accurate to say that this is merely _one_
supplemental point he makes in the book, and that it's largely irrelevant to
his central thesis.

~~~
zasz
The thing is, how can you trust Pinker's interpretation of the Enlightenment?
Pinker thinks the Enlightenment was an important engine of 'progress,' but
John Locke was a tremendously influential Enlightenment thinker who argued in
defense of slavery, who owned shares in a slave-trading company.
([http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446...](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446?journalCode=ptxa))

Locke was also responsible for many of the ideas surrounding natural rights
that are now enshrined in the American Constitution, but from the perspective
of an African slave, Locke was not progressive.

Thomas Hobbes was even more illiberal than Locke. He didn't even believe in
natural rights at all, and he would have hated democracy.

Pinker's getting a lot wrong that he can't cover for just by making a token
nod to the vagueness of exactly when the Enlightenment started. His poor
understanding of what the Enlightenment was, who was in it, and what they
actually believed means that whatever story he tells of human progress is
going to be fundamentally flawed.

~~~
csallen
Again, the point of the book is not to cover the history of the Enlightenment,
to praise or judge the Enlightenment thinkers themselves, or to defend some
"correct" interpretation or definition of what the Enlightenment entailed.
You're arguing against a strawman.

The point of the book is that reason, science, and humanism are valuable ideas
that have helped us progress as a species _since_ the Enlightenment, and that
they continue to drive progress today.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
If he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he writes
about, his book is useless. His earlier book, Better Angels Of Our Nature, was
also terribly wrong in presenting the hunter-gatherer state of humans as being
much more violent than archeologists and anthropologists think, just to
present his case that civilization is a good thing. So I don't have much faith
in this book, as he clearly starts with a certain idea (civilization is needed
because the human being is inherently violent) and looks for arguments to
support it instead of the other way around. He should probably stick to his
own field of psychology.

~~~
csallen
_> If he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he
writes about, his book is useless._

This makes zero sense. If I write a guide about how to use red paint to create
beautiful paintings, is my guide useless if it fails to acknowledge the
atrocities that may or may not have been committed by the inventor of red
paint? Of course not.

 _> Better Angels Of Our Nature, was also terribly wrong in presenting the
hunter-gatherer state of humans as being much more violent than archeologists
and anthropologists think_

He supported his position with loads of strong evidence. Your counterargument,
however, presents no evidence.

------
larsiusprime
The nature of the tension between the blessings of the Enlightenment and the
general fear of the future Scott expresses here might be rooted in the fact
that what modern science and technology has done is increase humanity's raw
power.

Take for example the case of Fritz Haber [1] -- who with one hand greatly
innovated in the use of poison gas for widespread use in war (later used by
the Nazis, and against his own people at that), condemning millions to death,
and with the other hand greatly innovated chemical fertilizers, arguably
saving millions from famine.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber)

We're more powerful as a species than ever before. That means we can do
wonderful things previously unimaginable, but it also means our destructive
powers have been equally magnified. Problems are solvable, but the big red
shiny buttons are redder and bigger and shinier than ever, too. And I'm not
just talking about the threat of nuclear war.

~~~
truculation
Tension, yes. The stakes have been raised but there's no going back. We need
increasing knowledge, technology and wealth to confront not only the problems
of today but problems we don't even know about yet. Any attempt to reverse
englightenment values or even just slow down the effects could only degenerate
swiftly into violence and make the fears come true. As Karl Popper put it:

 _" The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted –
except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite.
When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists’, this includes not only the
openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by
everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store.
Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil, but, rather, to fight for a better
world."_

~~~
larsiusprime
The problem is what constitutes "enlightenment values"? -- I'm sure Haber saw
himself as an heir to the enlightenment, meticulously unlocking nature's
secrets and bending them to the will of man. But many of the men who's will
his inventions fulfilled were evil. As you say, we indeed need power to solve
problems, but we must be deeply skeptical of anyone who dismisses or minimizes
the importance of critiquing power.

~~~
truculation
_> what constitutes "enlightenment values"_

I think Pinker defines these as science, reason and humanism. Couldn't agree
with you more about the importance of criticism. Perhaps the most important
feature of the enlightenment was in establishing a _tradition of criticism_.
This is the engine of progress, which, as David Deutsch points out, is kind of
the opposite of how most traditions work (they keep things the same).

------
d_burfoot
A lot of people, including Pinker, seem to make too much of the connection
between Good Ideas about philosophy and politics, and the resulting benefits
to humanity. On the one hand, sure, good ideas lead to benefits. But good
ideas aren't scarce and probably never have been. Anyone who spends some time
surfing the internet will find dozens of good ideas that would probably lead
to dramatic improvements in human welfare.

The limiting factor is the political willingness to try out new ideas. What's
special about the Enlightenment era is not that the ideas were good, but that
the political systems were willing and able to implement the ideas. Our
current political system can't or won't contemplate even small changes to the
Way It's Done. And this intolerance to new ideas is not just an unfortunate
misrepresentation of the Will of the People: most people really don't like new
ideas about politics and will often scream at you for suggesting them.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> What's special about the Enlightenment era is not that the ideas were good,
> but that the political systems were willing and able to implement the ideas.

I'm not sure that's true. It seems to me more that the people were grabbing on
to some Enlightenment ideas, and were willing to implement them over the dead
bodies (sometimes literally) of the political system.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
>It seems to me more that the people were grabbing on to some Enlightenment
ideas, and were willing to implement them over the dead bodies (sometimes
literally) of the political system.

What makes this seem true to you?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The times those ideas were implemented were often revolutions. Certainly the
American and French Revolutions, but also the revolutions of 1848.

One could argue that England didn't have that, and still wound up with
Enlightenment ideas changing their political system. That's true (though the
American Revolution was certainly an impact on England). But for almost
everywhere else, it seems that there was at least one revolution along the
way.

------
amsilprotag
_(Pinker lists the following medical researchers and public health crusaders
as having saved more than 100 million lives each: Karl Landsteiner, Abel
Wolman, Linn Enslow, William Foege, Maurice Hilleman, John Enders. How many of
them had you heard of? I’d heard of none.)_

The first 94 pages are available on Google Books. Here is a link to the page
with a table of these researchers' accomplishments and approximate lives
saved.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&](https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&)

------
FabHK
I'm curious why nobody seems to have compared Pinker's book to Julian Simon's
1996 tome _The State of Humanity_. It's also full of statistics and graphs
showing the vast improvements in human life over time leading up to now.

Simon's book has been co-opted by the libertarian right (Cato Institute etc.)
to show that all is peachy and no government intervention is needed - that's
lamentable.

However, the underlying facts marshalled and documented in the books of Simon
and Pinker - that life is measurably getting better on so many fronts - ought
to be better known.

EDIT to add: Here's a short article by Simon summarising the message of the
book: [https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/state-
humanity-...](https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/state-humanity-
good-getting-better)

~~~
dredmorbius
I don't think co-opted is the accurate term. Simon was of the libertarian
right.

~~~
FabHK
I think you're right. Maybe better to say that he and others (Cato) used his
(largely sensible) empirical and historical work to support conclusions that
don't follow and libertarian policies that I disagree with.

~~~
dredmorbius
His work is not sensible.

------
RoutinePlayer
To paraphrase Gate, this is my new favorite review of this book :-). The other
is [http://quillette.com/2018/03/11/steven-pinkers-counter-
count...](http://quillette.com/2018/03/11/steven-pinkers-counter-counter-
enlightenment/)

It's simple. Responses to Pinker's writings can be divided into two groups:
The rational pessimists and the rational optimists.

~~~
mannykannot
Both of these reviews bring up the matter of irrational responses, in the form
of what Aaronson calls 'hostile mistranslation', the willful misinterpretation
of the work in order to build whatever straw man the reviewer wants to attack.

~~~
thraway180306
This matter being itself a cliche in these circles. Rationalist forums are
full of denouncing _uncharitable_ critics who _intentionally misunderstand_
what is obviously innocuous and infallible if you would just _understand_
(presumably by god-given charity). I think this knee-jerk reaction is itself
irrational.

In the above review for example the reviewer builds a straw-man that the
critics are anti-science. Calling out religious features of arguments
bordering on scientism (it does even have a church!) is not denouncing
scientific method.

------
yedava
It should be noted that enlightenment era ideals failed to include many
classes of the members of homosapiens. Enough credit is not given to those
classes who actually fixed the ideals and made them what they are today -
universally applicable rights and principles. Slaves had to prove they are
humans by spilling their own blood and lives. Women had to prove that they are
capable of participating in a democracy and they deserve same rights as men.
Colonial subjects had to prove they deserve autonomy, again by suffering
violence. Because these members of these groups have remained mostly unknown,
haven't we taken the lazy path of showering praise on some specific eras, and
some specific set of intellectuals whose writings have been recorded? So how
justified is Pinker on laying the foundations of progress on the enlightenment
era norms?

~~~
michaelkeenan
If we trace an idea (like abolition or gender equality) back to its
beginnings, we'd expect to find that the idea was controversial. It must take
time for an idea to persuade people, even others of the same movement (who
might be primarily focused on other aspects of the movement).

So I think it can make sense to praise Enlightenment-era anti-slavery thinkers
and attribute their anti-slavery to their ideals (especially if that's their
explicit reasoning), even if not every Enlightenment thinker was anti-slavery.
Wikipedia's article on the Age of Enlightenment lists eight major figures[1].
Of those, four are notable for their opposition to slavery[2].

That method shows less support for gender equality being traceable to the
Enlightenment. As far as I can tell, none of the eight major figures supported
gender equality. A few of Wikipedia's longer list of Enlightenment
intellectuals[3] did (e.g. Marquis de Condorcet, John Locke and Mary
Wollstonecraft). If they were the first-ever feminists on the path that led to
modern feminism, that's evidence that Enlightenment ideals sparked that. But
if the base rate of feminist thinkers was similar in the period before the
Enlightenment, then it wouldn't appear that the Enlightenment helped. I don't
know the answer to that, though for what it's worth, the Wikipedia article on
the history of feminism[4] has a whole section called 18th century: the Age of
Enlightenment, so it seems that the writers of that article thought the
Enlightenment was relevant.

[1] Beccaria, Diderot, Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and
Voltaire -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment)

[2] Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Voltaire

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intellectuals_of_the_E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intellectuals_of_the_Enlightenment)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism#18th_centu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism#18th_century:_the_Age_of_Enlightenment)

------
taeric

        So my advice is this: buy
        Pinker’s book and read it.  
        Then work for a future where 
        the book’s optimism is justified.
    
    

I personally hope most get to the conclusion of this review and take it's
advice.

------
whatyoucantsay
> _I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile
> mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around
> and says, “and here’s what I’m not saying”—and then proceeds to ward off
> five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but
> then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there
> the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how
> much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them._

> _I’m depressed, more generally, that for centuries, the Enlightenment has
> been met by its beneficiaries with such colossal incomprehension and
> ingratitude. Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect a
> return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism._

~~~
scandox
I'm very sympathetic to Aaronson's position in this review, but I think these
two comments reveal the problematic aspect of his position:

* In his mind (and that of many others) the Enlightenment is about this special group of people who bestowed gifts on normals. I'm sure he'd challenge that characterisation, but I think that's what it amounts to. So instead of this idea being inclusive it becomes an us and them, in which the us is constantly expecting gratitude, while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!

* That aggressive mistranslation explains away the other POV. I think there is mistranslation but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction. And there is something in that because consider the tension Aaronson feels: he agrees with Pinker that what happened in the past is good, but feels it is leading to disaster. So - if it was so good - why have we ended up in such a bad place? Enlightment people cannot simply say: "it's not our fault we've tried to stop this". They need to accept that maybe something in their ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem.

~~~
mannykannot
I do not see how those two quotes imply a particular opinion of how the
enlightenment happened - as far as I can tell, they merely say that the
enlightenment (however it occurred) has benefitted a lot of people, yet some
of beneficiaries can't stop complaining about it.

As for the hostile mistranslators, if they cannot find the presumed dangerous
subtext within the work, they should honestly recognize that they cannot find
it (which would not prevent them from stating their concerns, just as Aaronson
stated his pessimism), rather than pretend that it is there. Ultimately, doing
the latter merely reflects badly on both their critical analysis skills, and,
to a degree, their ethics.

~~~
thraway180306
If I were to make a mathematical argument sloppy enough to be open to _hostile
mistranslators_ and then on top of that address reviewer's psychology instead
of holes she might tried to poke, text would get outright desk rejection on
resubmission.

In science the odium lies on the philosopher to put forward his idea robustly.
Not on the reviewers to understand it in the most favourable light and then...
believe?

~~~
mannykannot
The scope of mistranslations is boundless, so this will not work - and what
principle absolves the willful mistranslators of this obligation, anyway?

~~~
thraway180306
So you advise to scope on the reviewer hypothetical beliefs and personality
next time? That is bound to succeed and show my analytical prowess? Even in
uncharitable (and possibly mistranslated by me being critiqued!) case her
points are baseless and manufactured?

~~~
mannykannot
Too much willful misinterpretation defeats the purpose of critical analysis,
and where would that leave the humanities? - it would leave them wallowing in
irrelevant self-referentiality, where everyone is talking past everyone else.

~~~
thraway180306
You are sidestepping the question, engaging in practice of irrelevance you
highlight. Is debating the mistranslat _or_ a becoming reply? Moreover you
said them making a case somehow casts shadow on the critic's analytical
powers, where in fact starting debates around their intents bypassing the
issue put forward points the exact opposite.

~~~
mannykannot
On the contrary, you are sidestepping the issue. There is a difference
between, on the one hand, discussing what troubles you about a work, and on
the other, attributing that which troubles you to that work (and its author),
without justification.

On the subject of sidestepping the question, you have still not explained why
responders are absolved from the burden of precision that you have put on the
creators of original works.

~~~
thraway180306
I didn't notice you posing this problem. Frankly I don't understand the
difference you announced you'd be trying to make. 1) Discussing a critique, 2)
attributing critique to a work being criticized and its author without
justification? What was your point?

About the equal standards. You would be shaken to discover reviewers are not
held to the them by the journals and this is by design. Because, as I first
said, the burden of making the argument robust is on the original work, not on
the critics to robustly scrutinize beyond all doubt. I think you ignored what
I started with, and then mistranslated me sidestepping anything.

~~~
mannykannot
There's an amusing irony here - you are claiming that I have mistranslated
you, but by the claim you made in your first post in this thread, that would
be because you have been too sloppy in your statement of your position. In
this one case, I might agree with you.

~~~
thraway180306
That's only because I choose to be illustrative with that last sentence.
Without me making parallel with that sloppy logic of mistranslation, you'd be
just convoluted and shown wrong by the previous ones, and I might as well rest
my case on that.

------
geodel
I find the linked review by John Gray more reasonable and mostly because
unlike Pinker he does not seems too eager to please affluent with all great
things happening around.

------
lowbloodsugar
Reviewers conclusion: "So my advice is this: buy Pinker’s book and read it.
Then work for a future where the book’s optimism is justified."

Please.

------
vanderZwan
> _As I read Pinker, I sometimes imagined a book published in 1923 about the
> astonishing improvements in the condition of Europe’s Jews following their
> emancipation. Such a book might argue: look, obviously past results don’t
> guarantee future returns; all this progress could be wiped out by some freak
> future event. But for that to happen, an insane number of things would need
> to go wrong simultaneously: not just one European country but pretty much
> all of them would need to be taken over by antisemitic lunatics who were
> somehow also hyper-competent, and who wouldn’t just harass a few Jews here
> and there until the lunatics lost power, but would systematically hunt down
> and exterminate all of them with an efficiency the world had never before
> seen. Also, for some reason the Jews would need to be unable to escape to
> Palestine or the US or anywhere else. So the sane, sober prediction is that
> things will just continue to improve, of course with occasional hiccups (but
> problems are solvable)._

> _Or I thought back to just a few years ago, to the wise people who explained
> that, sure, for the United States to fall under the control of a racist
> megalomaniac like Trump would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Were such a
> comic-book absurdity realized, there’d be no point even discussing “how to
> get democracy back on track”; it would already have suffered its extinction-
> level event. But the good news is that it will never happen, because the
> voters won’t allow it: a white nationalist authoritarian could never even
> get nominated, and if he did, he’d lose in a landslide. What did Pat
> Buchanan get, less than 1% of the vote?_

But the Nazi's were defeated, anti-Semitism isn't solved but _still way less
than it used to be_ , and US citizens _are_ actively fighting Trump & Co.

I share the feeling that at some point, we're going to see a mass genocide
thanks to either CRISPR-based targeted viruses or hard-to-stop drones being
much too easy to weaponise by a single nutcase. The world is always resource
constrained, and technologies do enable ever more efficient ways of killing
ourselves. These are real things to worry about.

But the WWII and Trump examples came about because of a different reason: mass
communication. What seems to be missing from Aaronson's review at the
_societal_ level, is the insight from Clay Shirky into what enabled both of
these things to happen:

> _So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into
> circulation? (...) When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was
> going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well,
> obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that
> allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on
> elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The
> telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no
> world peace. Not yet._

> _Even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce
> Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was
> Martin Luther 's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the
> Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world
> peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into
> circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what
> happens next._

Shirky then continues to discuss that he believes that the reason we stil
think of these technologies as _good_ is because it effectively forced us to
become better at arguing. His example is that it enabled things like the
scientific revolution[0].

I have yet to read Pinker's newest book, or Better Angels for that matter, so
perhaps he addresses these aspect too. I expect him to since he discusses one
aspect of this in his earlier language-oriented work: _mutual knowledge_.
Better communication means an improvement in mutual knowledge. And if there is
a lot of trauma, resentment and injustice in society, an increase in mutual
knowledge brings instability[1]. For example, Shirky's does not explicitly
mention what the flaw in the reasoning of the Catholic Church was: it was
oblivious or ignorant to the huge injustices in their system. The current
craziness is coming about because the existing structures turn out not to be
working out so well, and need to be changed. But that will be hard and messy
process.

[0]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&t=7m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&t=7m40s)

------
8bitsrule
A Mar 2018 Long Now seminar podcast (with discussion) can be DL'd directly at
this link.
[http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml](http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml)

------
zerostar07
So, if you’re already an optimist, this book is useless

------
mcguire
" _Or I thought back to just a few years ago, to the wise people who explained
that, sure, for the United States to fall under the control of a racist
megalomaniac like Trump would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Were such a
comic-book absurdity realized, there’d be no point even discussing “how to get
democracy back on track”; it would already have suffered its extinction-level
event. But the good news is that it will never happen, because the voters
won’t allow it: a white nationalist authoritarian could never even get
nominated, and if he did, he’d lose in a landslide._ "

I'm not exactly a fan of Trump, but the sheer mass of hyperbole in this
article is more irritating than the fiery radiation of a thousand giant
elliptical galaxies. I get it, Steven Pinker is the smartest being who has
ever lived, evah, but he's blinded by his own beatific, deified optimism and
cannot see that we are all well and truly fuck'd, and for the good of the
general universe (it's far too late for the mere Earth; " _...the very thought
of the earth gone desolate—its remaining land barely habitable, its oceans a
sewer,..._ ") we should all commit hiri-kiri.

But, seriously, if the United States' system of government cannot withstand a
single, or even a series, of really poor decision, then it doesn't deserve to
survive. (And given what I know about some of the historical presidencies, I
hope I can be forgiven for thinking it already has.)

Global climate change is _bad_. But it's not so bad as do leave nothing behind
but cockroaches and algae. It may leave the state of Florida as an archipelago
of levy-surrounded cities (and cause massive destruction and death in the rest
of the world) and destroy the agriculture of the central United States (but
that was going to happen anyway, when the Ogalala aquifer runs out of water
and the Great Plains returns to being the Great American Desert). It's going
to cause a lot of problems, possibly even including the fall of Western
Civilization, or at least those countries that make up Western Civilization.
But "barely habitable?" Don't get above your station, Scott.

As for the Nazis? Bah! Sure, they were bad, but the sum of deaths from WWII,
the Soviets, Chinese Communists, and a stack of other genocides don't even
seem to be noticeable on the graph of population growth in the 20th century.
Humanity in general doesn't really seem to have cared and certainly the rest
of the universe doesn't. And the Nazis weren't " _a desperate, failed attempt
to turn back the ratchet of cosmopolitanism and moral progress, by people who
viscerally understood that time and history were against them;_ " they were a
follow-on to WWI, which ate the economies and civilian governments of Europe.
If not them, Germany could have gone soviet. Or a corporal from France (or
England) could have risen to right-wing totalitarian power.

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criddell
Offtopic, but I found the right justification made that kind of hard to read.
The big mid-sentence spaces read like pauses in my head.

~~~
p3llin0r3
If you use Firefox, you can use the "Reader view" to center align and dark-
mode the page contents. I use it constantly, great feature.

If you use Pocket, it will do the same thing.

I'm sure there is a chrome plugin that does something similar.

~~~
FabHK
Reader View in Safari makes it left aligned, right ragged, which I personally
find most pleasant (unless it's professionally typeset justified).

------
ebbv
Pinker has found a fun niche like many authors before him; write books that
only the well off and mostly content folks will buy and read and tell them
what they want to hear. (Gladwell and many other authors popular among upper
middle class and wealthy people play the same game.)

And I'm not saying Pinker lies or anything, but he just gives a point of view
that is comforting if you're wealthy. His spiel comes down to; "Everything's
mostly great, it's not just you, don't worry so much about how great you have
it vs the suffering of others. Everything is getting better just as it is."

I know that's very reductionist, but to me it's kinda what it boils down to.

Gladwell pulls the "The complex issues that people around you tell you are
complex? Well they have easy secret answers!" game.

I find it all very anti-intellectual and it's disappointing to me that these
authors are so popular and widely praised.

~~~
api
I've heard them called "court intellectuals."

The problem with Pinker's optimism isn't that it's wrong. If you look at
aggregate statistics everything is getting better. The problem is that the
_distribution_ of that wealth is shifting toward an extreme hockey stick. A
rising tide no longer lifts all boats. Those realities don't show up in
aggregate statistics. You get what you measure.

In fact it's even worse than that. In certain cases a rising tide sinks many
peoples' boats. Case in point: exploding asset prices. The savings of the
extremely wealthy are re-invested in issuing more private debt, which in turn
inflates the cost of things like real estate and college tuition which makes
these basic things less affordable to ordinary people. One person can't afford
a house because someone else's money has been parked in real estate.

Then there's the fact that advancing technology keeps raising the bar for
entry level labor. Eventually the bar gets raised so high that someone with a
merely average IQ or who is too young to possess the required experience is no
longer profitably employable, leading to mass youth and lower class
unemployment.

Basically it doesn't matter if everything is getting better for someone else.
It matters if it's getting better for you.

The trouble is that all the solutions we have to wealth inequality are
totalitarian and generally against the grain of enlightenment humanism. The
most effective economic levelers are authoritarian socialism and warfare. The
latter creates a huge amount of stimulus spending that creates a lot of jobs
and effectively redistributes wealth to the working class. Without either
forcible redistribution or war, wealth seems to just accumulate at the top due
to network effects until the richest 0.01% own everything.

~~~
lhnz

      > The problem with Pinker's optimism isn't that
      > it's wrong. If you look at aggregate statistics
      > everything is getting better. The problem is
      > that the distribution of that wealth is shifting
      > toward an extreme hockey stick. A rising tide no
      > longer lifts all boats.
    

There are fewer people living in poverty.

~~~
danharaj
The definition of poverty is decided by people who have an incentive to say
poverty is declining. It changes over time.

Why do people take these definitions at face value without examining what they
actually mean?

~~~
toasterlovin
So your position is that here _has not_ been a massive, species-wide reduction
in poverty (and pretty much every other negative outcome) over the last 250
years?

~~~
danharaj
Mu.

