Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now | Hacker News Reader

Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

scottaaronson.com

186 pointsonuralp109 comments

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.

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)

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

As long as critics keep making these arguments, they'll never even reach the beginning of a meaningful argument. It's like when someone tries to have a thread about, say, consciousness, and 90% of commenters want to argue about the definition of the word, again.

Given how hard it is to pin down the nature of consciousness, I can't imagine it would be productive to discuss consciousness without explicitly considering its definition. If you want to defend a position, you have to make clear what that position is. If you're writing about the Enlightenment, of course you have to know what it was.

My point is more that there will always be people who insist that a definition isn't clear or doesn't have a basic consensus. I think they're usually wrong in the very assertion. In any case it is negative-productive to discuss definitions if you never stop discussing them and move on to the real content.

I think that the opposite is true, at least much of the time. I think that many arguments are because the two sides have different definitions of a word, and neither side states the definition. This leads to arguments that are a complete waste of time.

I'm with psyc on this one. We study a lot of things, like consciousness, or intelligence, or life, because we don't have a convenient definition of them, because we want to know what they are. Instead we set up broad conceptual parameters that capture the right kinds of problems, the kind that, when solved, would bridge us from our current state of knowledge to a definition.

That's the real work, and some people who have this real work in mind pursue the problem in an open-ended way, that's the right shape of open-ended to fit the type of problem being considered. And then they get scolded for not having started with a definition.

> Gray's point is that no such set of values exists, that Enlightenment thinkers were always in contradiction with each other,

That's simply untrue on the face of it.

Even if every Enlightenment thinker disagrees with other Enlightenment thinkers on the majority of issues, you can take an average over their positions and see that as a group, their average position and the range of positions they take on a variety of issues is markedly different from pre-Enlightenment thinkers. You can do clustering.

Whether Pinker has convincingly shown that, I'm not sure, but you are setting the bar unreasonably high.

It would be like saying like there's no such thing as an overall 'hacker ethos' that differs from the general population's, just because we have disagreements on HN, or that there's no coherency to Christianity, because there are many denominations that disagree on theological and doctrinal questions. It's both possible and common for there wide diversity within an overall unity.

You can do clustering, but it might not be useful. Read Gray's article. If you take the "average position," you're likely to get to positions that Pinker and so on wouldn't find acceptable.

My point isn't that there's no possible way to define "Enlightenment values." Quite the opposite. There are many ways to define those values, and if you choose one you must 1) justify that choice, and 2) be aware that you've made a choice, rather than passing your idiosyncratic definition as the only possible definition.

Pinker's argument is compatible with the average being a position that is not acceptable. The assertion is that the average is progressing in what we view as progress to more acceptable positions. Pretty sure he even has quite a few sections discussing exactly this.

I confess this is mainly compatible with my world view, so I am likely giving it more leeway than I realize. I fully expect that 200 years from now, someone will easily be able to discern ridiculously backwards views that I maintain with a clear mind today. I don't think you'll have to wait that long, honestly. My children will be far more progressive than I am. That is progress.

To wit:

"Many Enlightenment thinkers have been avowedly or implicitly hostile to liberalism. One of the most influential, the 19th-century French positivist Auguste Comte – not discussed by Pinker – promoted a brand of scientism that was overtly anti-liberal. Human progress meant following the path of reason and moving from magical thinking to scientific inquiry. In a society based on science there will be no need for liberal values, since moral and political questions will be answered by experts.

"Comte admired the Middle Ages as a time when society was healthily “organic” and unified by a single orthodoxy; but the organic society of the future would be ruled by science, not monotheism. The superstitious faith of earlier times would be supplanted by what he called “the Religion of Humanity” – a rationalist creed in which an imaginary version of the human species would occupy the place of the Supreme Being. Comte’s core ideas – reason, science, progress and humanism – are precisely those that Pinker lists at the start of this book as the central values of the Enlightenment. Interestingly, neither of them mentions freedom or toleration.

"The link between the Enlightenment and liberal values, which Pinker and many others today assert as a universal truth, is actually rather tenuous. It is strongest in Enlightenment thinkers who were wedded to monotheism, such as Locke and indeed Kant. The more hostile the Enlightenment has been to monotheism, the more illiberal it has been. Comte’s anti-liberalism inspired Charles Maurras, a French collaborator with Nazism and the leading theorist of Action Française – a fascistic movement formed during the Dreyfus affair – in his defence of integral nationalism. Lenin continued the Jacobins’ campaign against religion as well as their pedagogy of terror."

There's obviously no need for freedom if science and reason can tell you the right answer, no?

Gray in his review doesn't establish that enlightenment thinkers had no common values. He only points out that some of them had wrong conclusions. The leap from that to implying that they lacked any common values is entirely illegitimate.

I have looked at both Gray and Pinker but have not read this book or any of Gray's. If Pinker doesn't articulate historically defensible core enlightenment values, that is a valid criticism, but doesn't deeply undermine his thesis.

I'd very much like to see a sympathetic exploration of the question "What exactly are enlightenment values?" That is a potentially deep question in the history of ideas but not the one Pinker was trying to answer. I don't think Gray is a trustworthy guide in exploring that question -- way too tendentious.

I don't disagree that Gray is tendentious, but I really can't reconcile your first paragraph with what I read in his essay. Among other things, Gray points out that Voltaire and Bentham advocated "enlightened despotism." If that's not a difference of values, what is?

This review is also very good: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/02/20/enlighte...

> 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.

That's a silly reason to distance yourself from a legitimate ideology. A few newcomers cherry picking parts, bastardizing it, or misusing it should not be reason to abandon it. Especially if it's fundamentally sound.

For example, if Hitler adopted x socialist or capitalist policy that shouldn't be a reason to dismiss it simply because he held other awful views/ideologies. It should only be dismissed on the grounds that it directly contributed to something bad and had y outcome.

Dismissing ideas merely because some bad people happen to have embraced it as part of their wider ideology is anti-intellectual.

Not only that, but considering the above he shouldn't even have to defend claiming himself 'classically liberal' either, as it should be apparent to any unbiased mind what it is and what it isn't. The only ones who seek to blur that distinction tend to be politically motivated...

>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.

I think it would be reasonable to say that there were disagreements within the Enlightenment, but that they were generally smaller than the disagreements between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, for instance, Locke versus Rousseau would be a smaller disagreement than either versus Nietzsche.

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

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.

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."

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.

>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).

Of course there’s going back, and the history of progress is rebuilding, growth, advancement, entrenchment, stagnation and collapse. In the past that involved people with swords and spears or muskets, today it involves CBRN weapons.

We can go back, we’d just damned well better not, because the only way back is disaster.

> 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.

this presumes enlightement values are correct, primarily/solely responsible for the current state of affairs, that the current state of affairs is in fact the best of all possibilities of the moment, that no other proposed philosophical/ethical system is superior, and a whole host of other things..

No no. In the dark days people believed various things were true because authorities said so - authorities such as the Church, Plato, Aristotle, whoever. People confused truth with source and also believed that some ideas were certain or self-evident. The Englightenment was a rebellion against these attitudes. In reality we are fallible and we now expect that some of what seem to be our best ideas are in fact wrong, including our current values. If this weren't the case, progress would not be possible, as I think you rightly acknowledge.

Roughly half of the current world population [1] depends on artifical fertilizers. So it is rather billions of people than millions.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and...

Yes indeed. CRISPR is a big shiny red button.

However I don't think there's any better option than pursuing enlightenment values to address this problem. Complaining that we can't always get that right (as Gray does) is not helping to solve the problem.

What better options do we have? I'm open to changing my values if there's strong evidence that others are better.

But complaining is helping. That's the core of scientific method.

What doesn't help is patching entrenched worldviews for the sake of it, designing experiments to detect aether while refusing to acknowledge critics and problems they point to.

A lot of times I think people don't understand that the statements, "the vast majority of people have had there lives demonstrably improve because of science and technology" and "because of science and technology there are huge risks that all of that progress could reverse" can both be true.

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.

> 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.

>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?

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.

>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.

Enlightenment was long political struggle to push ideas forward. Voltaire was imprisoned. The actual social change when it happened included blood and death. If you want to find contemporary analogies, maybe people in countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia have may have same level of difficulty when trying to push new ideas into reality. Europe was similar mix of theocracy and aristocratic rule back then.

Today's liberal democracies allow easier transformations without spilling so much blood. Intolerance to new ideas is several orders of magnitude smaller than it was during the enlightenment.

It's easy to lose the sense of proportion and exaggerate today's difficulties.

(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&

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-...

i always felt that Hans Roslings message was similarly coopted by the same libertarian right - to the detriment of the world's poorest and the non human inhabitants we share the planet with. it behoves us a to have the bigger picture - the state of humanity must also include our inhabitat, which is in trouble.

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

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.

His work is not sensible.

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...

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

Don't forget Taleb. Not sure if he's optimist or pessimist, but he's definitely not rational.

Why is he not rational? I like his highlighting of hidden risk. It's hard to make rational decisions if you don't have all/enough information and there are plenty recent examples of unbounded optimism ending badly.

I think it is because Taleb uses hard statistics to make counter arguments. A pop rationalist will tell us how things have become awesomely awesome over last few hundred years.

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.

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.

Yes. I think we've all experienced and been perpetrators of this. Its so base and natural to want to maintain your own viewpoints that everyone does this naturally. The way I try to get around it for myself is actually imagine I am that person and seeing the world through their eyes. This does give you a very bad emotional feeling that you have to fight against, but it does help, it especially gives you better prodding questions that are genuinely for understanding and not malicious.

Pinker often frustrates me, I think he has an unpleasant tendency to only entertain one explanation of any given event. But he's certainly an interesting writer, and his work prompts more fascinating discussions than almost anyone else I can think of.

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

It seems to me you're ignoring the irrational people who respond to Pinker's writings. That's a reasonable thing to do, but there sure are a lot of them...

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?

Bingo. Almost as if a philosophy of property rights and political autonomy for the white male bourgeoisie is a byproduct of the rise of the bourgeoisie as an economic class, rather than its cause.

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

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

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

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism#18th_centu...

    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.

> 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.

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.

In his mind, as I see it, the Enlightenment is about this special group, whose membership is defined by doing enlightenment things for us all.

Some of the 2m apps on Google Play are written to achieve some goal for you and not interrupt you or grab your attention. I think the people who write such apps are great, and do something very good in a small way. Now, who are these people? That set of people is defined by the good thing they do.

Saving 100m people's lives is a bigger act than writing a good smartphone app. The principle is the same: The membership of the group is attained by doing.

> "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!"

Even when society was drowning and burning them to death for heresy? There are a multitude of examples of this, if you care to read histories of the Inquisition. I will give you a starting point—Google "Giordano Bruno"

> "They need to accept that maybe something in their (enlightenment) ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem."

> "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."

The reasonable answer is because they're highly ideologically motivated, not nearly as intelligent and certainly not as ethical as Pinker.

burning them to death for heresy

Do you have any examples of actual burning? Of someone who was going around enlightening and got burned for science.

Only example I know, Giordano Bruno was as much a scientist as today's theologians and Templeton-sponsored cosmologists; got on the hook for spreading pantheism. Galileo and Copernicus besides not being burnt were also wrong. Church decided to shun them not because of their philosophy (unlike Bruno they were doing surprisingly little theology for the ire that met them), but calculations rightly evaluated to be wrong. In case of Galileo also obnoxious activism asking for persecution. The heresy part came in because of dogma that proper science is god-inspired and thus should be at least somewhat reasonable, which this stuff wasn't at the time (recall, Newton was an alchemist first, the first scientist a second). I can perfectly imagine stuff like this going on in today's groupthink grant system, between suicides of tenured faculty and Prasher turned taxi driver despite Nobel-grade work.

ideologically motivated

Do you realize that this is tautological? Where do you think ideologies come from if not from reason? Do you, in your arbitrary intelligence, realize that every presumption came to be for a reason? Phenomenon of tradition illustrates that pretty well, even if original reasoning was lost.

There is a difference between empiricism, as in testing ideas, and ideologically motivated behavior that involves only seeking only information that can buttress one's current beliefs.

> Only example I know, Giordano Bruno...

You know this example because I just pointed it out to you. There are many others, but I'm done doing your homework for you.

"...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!"

Anyone care to imagine what the results of the industrial revolution would have been without the Luddites and unionized workers fighting against "progress"? It's hard to think of anything more dystopian than technocrats (or whatever your favorite term for the "special people") given the complete power to shape the future they way they would like.

I have the same kind of ambivalence to the "mistranslation" issue.

This is a direction of thought I find quite interesting. And I'd like to ask you what you think would have happened if it were the technocrats who shaped or world.

The only type of scenario that comes to my (not very well-read) mind is the one in A Brave New World, which is in my opinion one of the most benevolent possible dystopias. What is it that you have in mind? And how much worse is it, especially compared to the other forms of human suffering we're facing?

A Brave New Worldis pretty good, as an end state, but here's the question: Who are you going to tell, "We're going to engineer your children to be content, healthy slaves without the ability to perceive their own chains?" Do you tell them beforehand? Might as well pick someone you don't like, right?

STEMmies are also big supporters of the flavor of the month club. Every vein of inquiry gets hopped on as The Truth until it plays out and something new comes along.

Scientists and engineers are as political as anyone else and more than happy to put their own goals above anything else. Really, the problem of technocracy is that it is the same as any other semi-totalitarianism, except that it is coated in a veneer of "reason" that you cannot argue with.

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

You are sidestepping the question, engaging in practice of irrelevance you highlight. Is debating the mistranslator 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm sure that "odium" isn't too far wrong, but I believe the word you intended was "onus".

One should probably not conflate mathematical proofs and empirical evidence in this context. Mathematics allows for certain proofs, where no belief is required, but this is not true for any empirical science. I wouldn't recommend ever betting against the laws of thermodynamics, but at some point you have to take a leap of induction, if not of faith.

Thanks for that way of putting it. It articulates my feeling when I couldn't do it for myself.

ALSO note that what you propose is an "enlightenment compliant" way of proceeding. Unfortunately much argument (especially in the less analytical disciplines) shirks this level of responsibility -- and is allowed to shirk it by the relevant professional community.

I'd like to see evidence that Pinker thinks it is about "this special group of people". What I have read in the book doesn't support this. He of course gives examples of the most remarkable people but goes on to say they depended on an immensely larger group of collaborators. For example the process of eliminating smallpox depended on hundreds of thousands of people including health workers, government functionaries and the patients themselves.

Regarding the motivations of the mistranslators: I think those commentators are frustrated romantics who actually reject the enlightenment view that people can understand and improve their world. Look at John Gray's books on Amazon; he argues that progress isn't possible -- he's quite passionate about that!

I have had discussions with people who take this position -- typically very intelligent academics. They rely on "anecdata" -- a blizzard of examples of bad stuff. Something like Pinker's blizzard of data and charts would naturally make them very very angry -- as much because of the reliance on statistical thinking as because of the subject.

As to why these people are so passionately devoted to romantic (anti-enlightenment) values: I'm not at all sure. I think they have a visceral dislike for analytical treatments of human issues, but I don't have a deeper sense of why that is.

I think it's because the fruit of the Enlightenment proved to be dehumanizing (despite the humanism in the Enlightenment itself).

We got the clockwork universe - the universe as a machine. That was all right. But out of it we got machines (computers) that changed everything, including society. Some of the ways that society changed made it less personal - less real human contact. For some people, that's a real loss. They miss the past form of society. One could call that a romantic longing.

Then we started putting humans into the "machine" category. That's also a loss of a romantic (or romanticized) past, but now the loss is intellectual or philosophical.

It's not about a special group of people. It's about a cluster of ideas whose time had come. Some attack 'the enlightenment' by attacking its luminaries. Attacking people is facile. People are hypocritical and contradictory. Critiquing the people leads nowhere. Critique the ideas instead. The main idea is reason (usually in contrast to superstition or traditions not motivated by truth). Some have attacked harmful applications of reason. Again, facile. People want to do bad things. Critique the applications and the motives for them before critiquing reason.

Why intelligent people misread things isn't a tough question. 1) They have an ideological agenda. 2) They are intelligent-clever, not intelligent-wise. Intelligent-clever people can generate an infinite stream of intelligent-sounding doubt. It's mostly noise and a waste of time to engage with.

I've seen Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the near necessity today of preempting misinterpretation by explicitly explaining what you're not saying. I believe it was during an interview with Sam Harris that's available at least in part on youtube.

The reality is that it works to some degree with people who are just in a hurry and might be inclined to misunderstand your argument due to carelessness. In the case where someone is using your work as a prop and they could just as easily be using someone else's work in its place, that sort of writing or speaking does not provide much protection.

I see the same phenomena in response to Sam Harris. I would blame shortened attention spans for the misreadings (which seems the fashionable scapegoat today) but even other academics spout nonsense with regards to Pinker and Harris.

  I am, I confess, deeply puzzled by the responses I read and hear about these two (and a few others).

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.

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.

> 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_...

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

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

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

"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.

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.

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.

"Just Read"

I just reloaded the page and did reader view and it makes a huge difference. Thank you for that.

It's a nice reminder of just how far the web still has to go as far as typography is concerned.

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

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.

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.

The rich 0.01% can’t own everything in a free market because they still need to profit by selling their products and services to the rest of humanity. And for that to happen, the rest of humanity still needs to be earning money. The market will solve this by itself, if governments don’t fuck it up.

If everything is owned by a small group of people (which communists say it’s the government) that’s communism not capitalism. Capitalism requires people making transactions in order to achieve the main goal of generating profits.

The majority of humanity can work for subsistence level wages. The primary economic activity of the rich can be gambling, which typically takes the form of repeated inflation of asset and financial instrument bubbles. The rich can also make money selling luxury goods to one another and to an upper middle (professional) class. That class would still exist but would be relatively small like the priestly and knight classes of feudal Europe.

This isn't optimal from an economic perspective nor does it result in the greatest wealth for the rich or anyone else, but it seems to be how things unfold. All we need is powdered wigs and merkins and we'll be in 17th century France.

The problem is that the rich are human and humans don't respond to Skinner boxes any differently from rats. The lower classes generally can't lose themselves in Skinner boxes because they must engage in something resembling productive work to survive. The rich on the other hand are untethered from this demand and will naturally find whatever Skinner boxes present themselves. Financial speculation, literal gambling, hedonism (Trump with his porn stars etc.), and palace intrigue (which in the modern age takes the form of political maneuvering or media/celebrity drama) are all Skinner boxes that deliver those dopamine hits with escalating spacing between doses that we're wired to become addicted to. Super-wealthy people who engage in productive work (e.g. Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk) are so notable because they're rare. Maybe they have some inborn or conditioned resistance to Skinner boxes that most people lack.

-> 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.

Really? Is the democratic socialism practiced in most of Europe totalitarian and authoritarian?

I think his point is that if you have entrenched inequality, the two proven ways of eliminating it are via war and via revolution. I don't think he's saying that all democratic socialist states are authoritarian, or that democratic socialism can't prevent inequality.

aggregate statistics everything is getting better

Is that something to brag about? I just realized that in aggregate things might have been getting monotonically better in every period of aggregate civilization. Enslaving by the Romans was not without benefits. Fall of the Roman Empire meant a dip, but given wider distribution onto Germans, Huns, Vandals &c. I don't think it's unreasonable to argue most people were better off.

About inequality I think HN's own @pron nails it: the issue is power and disempowerment. Solutions aren't known, but neglect by reframing the issue as lesser evils as you just did is a sure way to discontent and violence.

  > 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.

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?

But think of the children. I've heard all these metrics tend to correlate with infant mortality rates, so they all must be good.

Never mind the affluent US which should be the reference of wealthy, has these things decoupled with mortality increasing.

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?

Mu.

Depends on where you live. In developed nations there are now more people living in poverty. There's more unemployment, more people with no savings, more people in too much debt, and in the USA at least declining life spans among working class Americans.

A lot of people in the developed world are going to see books like this as a lot of out-of-touch "why do they not eat cake?" and self-congratulation by educated elites who don't have to work two jobs to afford the ever-increasing rent. Keep in mind that anyone making over $80-$100k is "elite" by global standards. That would include probably 80% of the users on this board.

Aggregate statistics can be extremely misleading. To give a wild example: if our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics is correct the entire universe is increasing in entropy. Does this imply that trees can't grow, cells can't divide, and factories can't operate? Aggregate trends do not imply much of anything at all about specific outcomes at a smaller scale.

Hogwash.

His spiel is not "don't worry". His spiel is "don't despair, don't be paralysed. Things have gotten better, and with determination and sensible policies we can hopefully keep making it better."

You are right that there are "intellectuals" whose spiel is doom and despair, and Pinker demonstrates (as others before him have) just how misguided they are.

Your misinterpretation is one of many that Pinker explicitly anticipates and answers, for example here:

> The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax.

> So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself. Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure that the decline of violence continues.

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