Book Review: Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now #StevenPinker #EnlightenmentNow #Progress
so recently finished stephen pinker’s
book
enlightenment now and this book
i think it’s really valuable i think
that more people should read it gives
them
an accurate understanding of reality
what’s going on in the world
the ways that society has progressed
over time so it brings up that people
are living longer lives than ever before
we have less disease we have some
serious diseases that were basically
eradicated
we don’t have as much suffering people
live more comfortable lives they have
running water
we have far less starvation
than ever before he enlightens uh or he
basically explains that the
enlightenment is responsible for a lot
of these
improvements in human uh standards of
living
in addition to those things there’s less
racism going on than ever before now
some someone might say that me being
white i shouldn’t
be able to say that because i don’t
really know but he
looks at statistics he looks at data
there
and objectively there is far less racism
than ever before
there’s some people that are dismissive
of many of stephen pinker’s ideas
and they say that he’s just being like
i understand some of these people that
are dismissive
of pinker and others like him they
are in the category of what you would
call critical theorists
it may be critical race theorists or
critical gender theorists in which they
divide the world up
into basically categories of the press
and oppressor
and they argue that
the entire system needs to be torn down
they argued that we needed
basically the balls capitalism abolish
our institutions and systems and then
i think it’s important to recognize that
these people don’t have another
legitimate alternative planned out it’s
like
they’re kind of flying by the sea of
their pants they’ll figure out what to
do once they get there once it’s
destroyed
but pinker brings up
these things that we’re experiencing the
high standards of living
the peace and prosperity the increases
in technology these aren’t natural these
weren’t happening for most of human
history
they’re happening because of ideas and
classical liberalism
ideas like equality maybe opportunity
equality before the law
especially not equality of outcome
equality before the law
and they’re happening because of the
scientific
revolution they’re happening because
we have a separation of church and state
and secularism and so it brings up
that this progress doesn’t just
naturally happen
it’s the product of basically
enlightenment with our laws
enlightenment
with the scientific method so i’ll go
ahead and
show you the show you a clip of stephen
pinker where he’s talking about those
who criticize his ideas
but this is definitely a valuable book
to read it would make people feel
more grateful there’s nothing wrong with
people feeling more grateful
even a poor person today is way better
off
than a poor person 200 years ago before
someone
even a poor person in the united states
is far better off than a poor person
or even a lot of like medium people in
developing countries and you have as
soon as you hear this argument this is
going to be
common with critical theorists they’ll
say yeah but
it’s all relative and they get to see
the wealth that people
are experiencing in the u.s so really in
some ways it’s worse that’s
that argument it’s not a good one
people should gain an understanding of
reality they should learn of people that
are in worse situations
because they’ll feel more grateful for
it they will stop feeling
picked on and stop feeling like
they are as big of a victim if they
learn hey i’m actually living
a better life than most people
throughout history
and i’m actually living a better life
than
most people that are living in other
countries i have electricity i have
running water i have a library that i
can go and get books i have
free k-12 public education where i can
try to increase my knowledge and
get better jobs and so these types of
ideas in my opinion
they should be taught to young kids they
should be taught even those that are
poor like hey
you are better off than 98
of humans throughout history let’s go
ahead and listen to sp
uh listen to stupid pinker now see what
he has to say
hey uh pangloss apollyanna you’re
a uh advocate of chamber of commerce
silicon valley
rah-rah boardroom uh optimistic
capitalism
uh but um as a matter of fact progress
um can be demonstrated quantitatively
and so i think there really is an uh
an issue as to why it is so often
denigrated and denied but first i just
want to
establish the premise that there is such
a thing as progress here are some
examples
uh if you plot war deaths per capita
since the end of uh world war ii it’s a
roller coaster with some ups and downs
but the overwhelming trend is
uh downward and a fraction of the number
of people
die in war compared to the 50s 60s
70s and 80s despite a lot of talk about
a democratic recession
and uh obvious cases such as turkey
and russia the overall trend of
democratization the
second wave is continuing not at the
same rate as in the 1980s but if you
add up the countries give them a
democracy score
subtract the autocracy score from the
democracy score it uh
continues to uh increase across the
world
homicides have been in a decline uh both
for the
united states uh and the uh
world life expectancy has gone up in
every region uh and so uh the
shortest lived part of the world um
africa uh people live longer than people
lived in the
longest live parts of the world just a
few decades ago
extreme poverty is uh
may even vanish in the lifetimes of uh
people in this room the world bank is
set a target
of uh 20 30 for the elimination of
extreme poverty by their definition and
that’s certainly the way the world is
going
uh 10 of the world now is estimated to
be in extreme poverty that’s still 700
million people
but as you can see not long ago it a
majority of the
world’s population lived in extreme
poverty
uh and this extends uh to many aspects
of
quality of the environment this is my
favorite graph
on the state of the environment i i got
it from the
epa website and uh turns out they kind
of distorted the axes to prove the point
but even if you uh
make the act re-linearize the axes you
see that
since uh the 1970s while gdp has
increased
number of vehicle miles traveled has
increases the united states
population energy has increased co2 has
started to level off
but during this entire time the five
major uh
pollutants have declined so the idea
that uh
you can have economic growth or you can
have uh environmental improvement but
you can’t have both is
uh directly negated by uh this graph
uh the proportion of the world’s surface
that is protected from
economic development and exploitation
has continued to increase
and uh the amount of carbon you have to
release in the
into the atmosphere per dollar of gdp
has uh has declined so those are some uh
some good signs
uh what makes progress possible um i in
a
forthcoming book called enlightenment
now the case for
reason science humanism and progress i
argue that there are two
big ideas that have propelled this
progress over the last couple of
centuries
one of them science and reason more
generally the idea that problems are
solvable given the right knowledge
and the other is humanism that we ought
to the problems that we ought to solve
are uh how to get as many people as
possible to live
long healthy uh prosperous and pleasant
lives
now given all of these positive trends
over the last 70 years how have they
been reflected
in the news well here’s one more graph
and this comes from a study of tone
mapping where
an algorithm simply counts up the number
of positive
words like improve good better versus
negative words like horrific catastrophe
crisis
uh worse and so on and uh the black line
shows the
positive versus negative tone of the new
york times
from 1945 to the present the uh
blue line shows a digest of news media
from across the world
and as you can see during me in decades
in which the world has been getting
better and better the news has been
getting
glamour and glamour so the question is
why
has the uh our depiction of the world
and our objective measures of the world
gone in opposite directions
uh why do intellectuals and journalists
uh
or so many of them deny progress uh
there are a couple of
psychological uh explanations
daniel kahneman and amos tversky many
decades ago proposed that
the human mind assesses risk via a
shortcut they call the availability
heuristic
namely the people estimate probability
according to how easily they can recall
examples
from memory if you can call to mind a
terrorist attack a belching smokestack
a an oil cup uh
there are definitely journalists who
subscribe to some of these critical
theories there are journalists that
want to push a certain message i am
personally convinced
based on my study that when it comes to
black lives matter
that the media when it comes to black
lives matters the media
definitely tries to push a certain
narrative
they were pushing the narrative hands up
don’t shoot with michael brown when in
reality
there’s evidence that he had tried to
rob the pakistani
convenience store they’re not saying he
deserves to be shot just because of that
but then he was wrestling with this
officer because of the gun his handprint
was on the gun
the media didn’t really go into the
nuance of it
they just focused on the hands up don’t
shoot narrative
you have people comparing him to michael
brown to emmett till
he’s absolutely ludicrous but there are
people
in the media does that again not all and
there are people
in academic institutions and not all
that are critical theorists and that
are trying to make it seem like
the us is no better today than ever
before that we’re
as racist as ever and as sexist as ever
and that we haven’t had progress they
don’t want any part of their narrative
they don’t want that bubble on their
narrative to pop they don’t want to
focus on any information so someone like
stephen pinker who’s a well-respected
academic who comes along and
promotes a message of look at all of
this progress look at how society’s been
improving over time
a lot of media figures
who subscribe to
these critical theories they don’t like
that they want scene thinker to go away
they don’t like that message
they’d rather focus on things are bad
those images stay with you and that’s
how you
uh judge how the state of the
environment the state of crime the state
of war
if you combine that with the nature of
the news
the cliche is if it bleeds it leads and
there are actually studies that
show that that is uh accurate that is if
you give
a sample of newspaper editors uh
possible stories with the content held
constant but
with a positive or a negative spin they
will
um this is i i uh interacts with a
another
part of our psychology sometimes called
the negativity bias summarized in the
slogan bad
is stronger than good losses uh hurt
more than gains uh buoy us up criticism
stings
more than uh praise uh flatters
trauma has more lasting effect negative
effects then good fortune has positive
effects
uh and so on and i think that the
uh negativity bias uh creates a kind of
gravitas market namely that we are
vigilant for things that go wrong
opening up a niche for people to remind
us of things that have gone wrong that
we may not have noticed
tom lehrer the uh great philosopher
social critic
and a satirical songwriter said always
predict the worst and you’ll be healed
as a prophet
the result i think has mixed there it is
obviously
a good thing if people are aware of uh
problems and
that can motivate them to uh to solve
them and i have
many examples where simply putting a
uh hitherto neglected social problem on
the agenda
can lead to measures that uh that
improve it
violence against women as an example
that became a
public issue starting in the 1970s and
indeed rates of sexual assault rates of
domestic violence
went steadily downward in the decades
since on the other hand it can also lead
to
a kind of cynicism that the system is so
corrupt so evil so dysfunctional
that we may as well smash the machine
we should drain the swamp there’s no
hope of improvement it is
corrupted beyond redemption and
some evidence that that may have had an
effect in recent political events comes
from this
graph that plots the support for
three populist movements the
votes for donald trump votes for brexit
and a composite of votes for european
populist parties as a function of birth
cohort so this is not
time across the x-axis time in which the
survey was taken
this is year of birth and as you can see
populism is an old man’s movement by old
man i mean
baby boomers and older but the younger
the cohort the
lower the support unfortunately young
people don’t vote
if young people voted even a few
percentage points
higher rate of participation than they
did the results of these
elections would be very different and so
uh there are many explanations but uh
one of them i think is
the widespread feeling that the system
is just so
broken that um there’s no difference
among candidates that uh hillary clinton
donald trump what’s the difference there
they’re they’ll both
just shore up a a rotten system and
uh and so you have a large percentage of
uh especially younger people
who either don’t vote or vote for third
party
candidates who have no hope of winning
there is
an alternative which i argue for in the
book that uh three laws that i
took from the physicist david deutch
from his book the beginning of infinity
not as don’t get the blood
pumping as much as a charismatic author
authoritarian leader but if we could
find a way of
bringing this into people’s
consciousness as the way to approach our
problems i think we’d be better off and
that is problems are inevitable
uh problems are solvable solutions
create new problems
uh which can be solved in their turn uh
i
don’t think that this would easily fit
on a bumper sticker or a
lapel button but if we uh
took this attitude towards the state of
the world i think we would be better off
thanks very much so again a lot of these
ideas
summaries in his book enlightenment now
i just want you to understand
that a lot of the benefits that we enjoy
they come through the enlightenment they
come through the scientific method
and just because they were used by
western
heterosexual men that doesn’t make them
less valid an idea is not less valid
based on who it was promoted by
and so just want that
the idea out there an idea is not
diminished because it was promoted by
someone from a group that happened to be
in power
critical theorists there are some that
want to get rid of the ac
sat because they say that they’re biased
tests
there’s some that want to get rid of
our current grading system because
sometimes minorities don’t do well with
it
and just know that
that’s not going to help us be more
competitive as a country that’s not
going to help us
continue to improve in advance we need
science math
reason and we need to believe that there
is objective truth even if that
objective truth isn’t religion
we need to look at it as being the
scientific
method the scientific process thanks for
watching
