Steven Pinker makes case for human progress in ‘Enlightenment Now’
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
The overall thrust seems pretty damning (given how much technology improved recently, why hasn't that turned into more income and leisure time improvements for many?), enough to seriously dampen my interest in the book itself:
> The problem with the Brooks/Pinker story is that we expect the economy/people to get richer through time. After all, technology and education improve. In the ’50s, we didn’t have the Internet, cell phones and all sorts of other goodies. In fact, at the start of the ’50s, we didn’t even have the polio vaccine.
> The question is not whether we are better off today than we were 60 years ago. It would be incredible if we were not better off. The question is by how much.
> In the ’50s, wages and incomes for ordinary families were rising at a rate of close to 2 percent annually. In the last 45 years, they have barely risen at all.
-- from a bit later:
> Should we celebrate this reduction in poverty rates over the last 33 years? Well, the [child] poverty rate had fallen from 27.3 percent in 1959 (the first year for this data series) to 14.0 percent in 1969. That’s a drop of 13.3 percentage points in just ten years. The net direction in the last 47 years has been upward.
However, I think his main thesis still stands: humanism and science are winning strategies for human flourishing.
I think this his main idea (the benefits of science and humanism) is an idea worth exploring and defending, but I don't think collecting a bunch of measures of progress and saying "see, humanism + science works!" is the best way of doing it.
I'd rather see someone approach the problem by focusing on what is lacking, what are the major outstanding problems and then demonstrate that these problems persist because we have not attempted to tackle them using science to guide practice and humanism to guide our values.
This approach seems more mature and sophisticated than just saying "gee whiz! look at all the goodies we got now!"
> (the benefits of science and humanism) is an idea worth exploring and defending
He explores and defends those pursuits.
> I don't think collecting a bunch of measures of progress and saying "see, humanism + science works!" is the best way of doing it.
It's at the very least an objective method that doesn't rely on flimsier propositions. You use the phrase "measures of progress" which are a great way to measure progress...
> I'd rather see someone approach the problem by focusing on what is lacking, what are the major outstanding problems and then demonstrate that these problems persist because we have not attempted to tackle them using science to guide practice and humanism to guide our values.
He never disputes that there are still issues, he's just saying that if you only ever focused on things that are missing, you might lose an appreciation for the progress humanity has made.
If you only watched the news (which he specifically rails against), you'd think we were going to hell in a hand basket. Of course we still have issues, but to buy into the "end is nigh" mentality espoused by the media and plenty of people (and some commenters here!) would be to ignore a wide variety of indications that humanity's scientific and social progress are improving.
Anyways, that cuts both ways. If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
>If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
I guess you're not as big a fan of reason as Pinker is, then. It's the content of the review you need to look at if you want to figure out whether the book's any good or not.
In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia. You can easily find similarly snarky articles by Pinker himself.
True. Doesn't mean it's worth his time to read if the style is distracting. He's just hoping to find a better-written review.
A bit off topic, but that's terribly damning of academia! It's not often you get a concrete example of the "educated elite talking down to the proles" stereotype, but that review is it, in the flesh.
It's off-putting. Viscerally so. I've read bad restaurant reviews by professional critics that are less venomous.
If either of the criticism articles that I saw links to here were actually posted as comments on HN, dang would be asking them to reword their criticisms to be less hostile and aggressive.
I think that line ruined the review for me, that whole paragraph just chastises the notion of evidence
That's a semantic quibble which isn't really relevant to the point that Harrison is making in the rest of the quoted paragraph.
But yes, you can have misplaced faith in e.g. null hypothesis significance testing and other methods of data collection and analysis common in some of the social sciences.
Using faith and belief interchangeably seems disingenuous and ignores the religious context that is part of faith. Faith implies a lack of compromise, a concreteness, and unwillingness to change. Using that term to describe evidence based science, and the belief that evidence ought to be presented before a belief is held is an attempt to reduce science to dogma.
What you describe is more like fideism.
edit: the word "Scientism" is probably closer to the meaning here; science and rationality as a belief system in itself, as opposed to tools that help us understand physical processes. Faith in these tools to supply meaning and create a better society, often to absurd levels.
Keep in mind faith has a specific meaning as a belief in something you yourself can't prove. IE, you aren't repeating these experiments, thus you take it on faith they are correct - a critique of science originally put forth by Richard Feynman the Nobel Prize winning physicist.
An example:
The ultimate import of his graphs is to demonstrate some kind of inexorable and progressive historical law (although he doesn't admit as much).
Where to begin with something as inane as this? The reviewer makes up a silly interpretation of what Pinker has provided, claims without any evidence that this is what Pinker really means, because he obviously knows better, and then faults Pinker for this silly interpretation. Hmm..
He goes on:
In Pinker's history, it seems as though there are no real contingencies - no prospect that the battle of Britain might had been lost, no prospect that the cold war might have turned into nuclear catastrophe, and for the future, no real sense of a potential calamity produced by climate change or a trigger-happy Kim Jong-Un (or his U.S. counterpart, for that matter). This is an almost providential view of history.
Again, the reviewer completely misses the point: we have always had potential calamities. But the real calamities have decreased dramatically, and life has improved so incredibly that it is not even funny. This really hit me when I was on a tour at the Neue Palais in Potsdam, a palace/guest house built by Frederick the Great to impress his neighbors. This palace has a bunch of apartments for royal guests. Even the poorest households in Western countries today live better. Much better.
We. Are. Living. Like. Kings.
No: better than kings of even a few centuries ago.
So yeah, Pinker is right.
How is that not an almost providential view of history? I don't see how the charge is misplaced.
In about every conceivable way?
"Providential" means that there is some divine guidance or care, so it is (a) about the cause of what happened and (b) that this cause is somehow divine in nature.
Saying that "real calamities have decreased dramatically" is not saying anything about causes, it is simply making an empirical observation about the world. Which could certainly be wrong, but even then it is not saying anything about divine causes.
Of course, Pinker does say something about causes, but these are about as far away from "divine intervention or guidance" as possible. In fact, it is about as secular as you can get.
Of course, you may be of an opinion that such a "lucky streak" so to say is so highly improbable that it must be divine intervention, but that is purely you, because it isn't luck and it isn't divine intervention. The entire argument is that we have found something that works really well, empirically.
Unless of course you change the definition of "almost" to be "the exact opposite of".
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
And of course politicians have also been at it for some time. See Adam Curtis's excellent The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
That's not to say multicultural societies can't be successful, with discipline and genius it can be done. For example Lee Kuan Yew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew) did a great job with Singapore.
I mean, I think you're wrong. But more than that, I think you're not saying something well-defined. What does it mean that "cultural power interests that are interested in stability" (paraphrased) are pushing the book in a way that's more than just marketing? Who exactly is doing this? Is this coordinated? Is this more than just "some people like this book so are talking about it", which is a much more innocuous way to phrase that?
> slating for reviews, inclusion on top lists, discussions on television shows, interviews with author etc.
Are you suggesting there are specific people who are actively pushing this book, who are not directly tied to the marketing of the book?
> yes
since they are "power interests" or some such
> Are you suggesting that power is not a legitimate criterion of social analysis? Just to understand the quotations
What does it mean that "cultural power interests that are interested in stability" (paraphrased) are pushing the book in a way that's more than just marketing?
> It means they are doing it because they don't care about the sales, they care about the message being spread widely.
I'm not saying it's coordinated. I'm not saying it's some sort of conspiracy. But yeah, it's clearly more than "some people like this book"
Assuming it's not coordinated or a conspiracy, how is it different than "some people like this book"? I mean this sincerely - I really don't understand why people liking this book and talking about it doesn't completely explain what we're seeing. That's what explains pretty much every other book that people talk about a lot, which is a lot of books.
Meta: This is just an FYI, but I'm pretty sure the standard way of quoting and answering a previous comment is to put the original text after the ">", and the reply or whatever else you want to write without the ">". The way you did it is the reverse of this, and kinda makes your comment hard to parse.
Our biggest problem right now is intellectual laziness and "being on the team.". We need more speech, not less. We should be reading and listening outside of our comfort zones. Let's started engaging with the strongest arguments of each side! Steelman over strawman!
Do we really want everyone to answer with a list of their favorite books every single time someone mentions a book that they like? Is that advancing the conversation in any way?