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Comment by rwj | Hacker News Reader

You should give Pinker a closer read. He does not say that progress is uniform in space or time. He certainly acknowledges there can be set backs. This is exactly why he emphases the importance of reason - to avoid the setbacks that would come from poor decisions.

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I've read both Enlightenment Now! and The Better Angels of Our Nature and agree. Pinker has never said progress is uniform, or even preordained, for that matter. Both books are more descriptive than prescriptive, relying on hard data instead of theories, and appeal to the values of the enlightenment, i.e., the use of facts and reasoning for solving the problems that inevitably come with technological progress.

I would encourage IceHegel to read the books more closely too.

I own and have read both. They are fine books, but they don't deal with the potential for violence with much depth. It's hard to know what "hard" data to use to estimate potential violence, but an economist isn't getting higher than a B- if they leave the term out of their regression entirely (as Pinker does).

Pinker also says repeatedly in both books that humans feel worse about the way things are than they should because our picture is anecdotal and distorted.

Maybe, but we might also dislike the present age because there are possible future worlds that appear much worse than the futures worlds imagined by past ages, even if those ages themselves were more violent/less educated/more unequal/etc. than our own.

I know we should not judge person and only ideas but it seems like all of Pinker's ideas are tok shallow for an academic. For example,

Also, Pinker wrote a book on how the mind works, which is very very wrong (my wife, who's a psychologist absolutely hates it). She asked me to read a small article called "That's not how the mind works" by some guy at MIT to explain.

Then I've also read his book on "How to write" and as an avid reader, I'd say we'd not have had Shakespeare if we followed his advice.

And now you're telling me that his other books are also very shallow? Does he not realize it?

Did you read Pinker's reply to Fodor, the "some guy at MIT"?

https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/so_how_does_the_...

Seems like a solid retort, however this field is not specialty.

Perhaps you read an excerpt… it's a 128 page book.[1] Also, Fodor was a Rutgers guy, out of Columbia and Princeton, though this was published by MIT Press.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Doesnt-Work-That-Computational/d...

Just like all of the edge.org/Epstein people (if you’re unaware, Pinker is accused of raping a 15 year old girl and spent extensive time with Epstein), he’s all smoke and no substance. In fact the “third culture” group has proven to be amoral and completely corrupt.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154826/jeffrey-epsteins-inte...

He's not trying to deal with the question of potential violence, though. As the parent comment said, his books are mostly descriptive and just lay out data pertaining to extant trends. It's not a book about possible existential risks or tail risks. These are important topics to address separately, and I don't think that Pinker would dispute that (although he is a little too dismissive of AI risks for my taste, but that's separate from those books).

You may wish to read his reply to Taleb's critique of these books, where he addresses the criticism that he ignores tail risks.

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