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Comment by hntrader | Hacker News Reader

Which one should I read first? I read Taleb's critique, who comes off as a raving lunatic in this context, and Gladwell who must have some axe to grind since he doesn't actually address the concrete metrics that Pinker brings up.

Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too.

The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.

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I liked this critique of the history in one of his books (Better angels …): https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/07/24/steven-pinkers-...

Here are other links that concern another one of his books (Enlightenment …): https://historyforatheists.com/2016/11/the-dark-ages-popery-... (I haven't read any of these reviews though).

Honestly just google "Steven Pinker critique" and you'll find lots of good ones.

Jason Hinkel's are especially good: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1334072469091708929?l...

Jason Hinkel's article raises some good points but is hardly a valid rebuttal. It's extremely weak. I'm still firmly on the side of Pinker's narrative, which clearly fits the data far better.

(1) Hinkel falsely concludes that "The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981", using a graph of the number of people in poverty (which increases by ~31% between 1981 to 2013) as justification. The rate did not increase. The rate decreased according to his own graph! The population increased by 59% over that same time period, so the correct conclusion from his own data is that the poverty rate actually reduced over that same time period.

(2) Not only is poverty better, but almost every other meaningful metric (disease/mortality/war deaths/crime deaths) is also better, which he hand-waves away in a single paragraph after falsely asserting that the poverty rate has gone up!

It is borderline dishonest, or perhaps at best he is innumerate. If this is the best rebuttal then I am even more confident in the conclusion that things are getting better - MUCH better - aside from a number of existential tail risks that we need to mitigate.

Excluding China, the graph in [1] shows ~3pp decrease in poverty over 30 years, and a good portion of that time was above the starting point so it might just be random fluctuation.

Also,

> only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...

Excluding China is motivated reasoning - and even doing so still shows the opposite conclusion to the one he's clearly desperate to validate. What if I excluded Venezuela or North Korea in order to boost the conclusion that I've decided on a priori?

He explains why it makes sense to handle China differently -- basically because China hasn't applied the policies that Pinker advocates, so it shouldn't be used as evidence for them. China's policies have been very different. He should treat other countries the same way, as you suggest, though China's impact is likely larger than the others.

This is motivated reasoning on his part. If the question at hand is "is the world getting better?", then excluding China makes no sense in the pursuit of answering that question.

It's also ridiculous for him to say that China doesn't use policies that Pinker advocates for. That's absolutist and binary thinking. Pinker would advocate for the open market liberalising policies of Deng Xiaoping relative to Maoist economic authoritarianism, which helped to lift millions out of poverty in China, even though there's still a lot that he doesn't agree with China's system.

If Pinker doesn't like Putin's strongman behavior in the region should he exclude Russia from his statistics on improving world peace? If Pinker doesn't like the US healthcare system should he exclude the US from his statistics on childhood mortality?

This is a dishonest rhetorical strategy that Hinkel is employing. It's clear to me now that Hinkel is a bad faith salesman who has set out to demonstrate his hypothesis at all costs.

If the question is "is the world getting better?" then yes, treat everything the same. But that question isn't as useful as others that could be asked, such as "which policies make the world get better?"

Hinkel's argument is that Pinker uses "is the world getting better?" as a proxy for "are my preferred policies making the world better?". If policy evaluation is their goal, the ad-hoc exclusion of China is overly simplistic, but so is drawing policy conclusions from overall trends without examining what's driving the trends. Both Pinker and Hinkel should be measuring the degree to which various policies were applied and evaluate poverty-reduction against that quantity.

But policy evaluation isn't the goal. Hinkel has dishonestly shifted the goalposts.

I'm sure you can think of other dimensions in which things are worse than they used to be. (Not being snarky, I just think things are usually more complicated.)

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