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Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist who’s written a number of pop science classics: The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and more. In 2011, he waded into the culture (if not political) debates with Better Angels of our Nature, a text whose basic premise – that the world has been getting more peaceful for millennia, and that the advent of a powerful state can be credited here – has shaped this channel’s political thinking.
Although an excellent writer at his best, in 2014, he published a book about writing well – The Sense of Style – which was loaded with haphazard advice, and then 2018’s more explicitly political Enlightenment Now, a mixed bag that has the overall correct argument (the world gets better over time) but lots of overstatement, understatement, and poor framing of a number of issues. It also suffers from its straitjacket reliance on the Great Enlightenment as a thematic/unifying writerly tool, since Steven Pinker only superficially touches upon the movement, and ends the book with a bizarre attack on Friedrich Nietzsche as a Counter-Enlightenment anti-humanist.
In this video, we assess Steven Pinker’s claims and offer up some of our own. For example: if GDP is a sloppy way to measure human development, what does GPI say? Should we prefer one criminal cartel over another? Why HAS institutional trust eroded, anyway? And so on.
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ArtiFact #12: De-framing Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” | Alex Sheremet & Joel Parrish
Timestamps:
0:00 – Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct, Better Angels of our Nature, Blank Slate, Sense of Style; where Enlightenment Now fits into his oeuvre
16:15 – What does it mean when billionaires like Bill Gates want to blurb your book?
27:46 – How Steven Pinker misuses his two opening epigraphs
40:08 – Steven Pinker primes the reader early on for the book’s least plausible arguments
53:00 – Does Steven Pinker downplay the Enlightenment’s skepticism of reason?
01:06:08 – Yes, we’re more rational than ever, but what are today’s witches and werewolves?
01:10:50 – “Misfortune may be no one’s fault”: does Steven Pinker boost the status quo?
01:17:06 – Is it true that “justice” has killed more people than “greed”? How can we even know?
01:24:40 – Why has institutional trust eroded? Is Steven Pinker’s answer satisfying?
01:36:51 – De-framing + re-framing Enlightenment Now while still accepting its core claims
01:49:48 – Have we reached “peak stuff”?
02:10:05 – Study: GDP vs. GPI to measure human progress & wealth
02:16:04 – Alex goes OFF on the childish capitalism/communism debate & Western hypocrisy
02:37:45 – What Steven Pinker gets wrong about Korea and Taiwan
02:48:50 – Income inequality, colonialism, & post-colonialism: the Steven Pinker, Bill Gates, Jason Hickel, Branko Milanovic debate
03:53:06 – How Steven Pinker depends on Friedrich Nietzsche’s arguments, then misreads him
04:28:25 – Enlightenment Now is (mostly) correct about existential threats
04:35:12 – Steven Pinker offers remarkably thin political analysis
Read Alex’s latest essay: https://www.automachination.com/forever-war-how-politics-work-in-joe-bidens-america/
Read Alex’s essay on Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style”: https://alexsheremet.com/review-of-steven-pinkers-the-sense-of-style-the-thinking-persons-guide-to-writing-in-the-21st-century/
Twitter: @automachination
Tags: #StevenPinker, #EnlightenmentNow, #BillGates
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good video guys. Its crude of stephen pinker to try and paint Nietzsche as the court philosopher of the Nazi project. Nietzsche was indeed one of the marble heads of the Aryan ideology but like Wagner, we was also privately loathed by the nazi elite (too decadent, too homosexual, too jewish).the fact is both Wagner and Nietzsche's families were rabid opportunists and shamelessly tried to shmooze their way into the Nazi inner circle. So Nietzsche goes from being a philosopher of conflicted humanism to the evil genius of the Third Reich. How's that for tragedy? Meanwhile, the real authors of the Aryan ideology like Jorg Lanz Von Lieberfels fade into obscurity. Nietzsche becomes the scapegoat.
Karl Widerquist will kill these topics. Read and contact him.
Really great discussion, thank you so much for this. It's interesting to me that Pinker has in recent years flirted with the intellectual dark web, especially after learning about his stances in Enlightenment now. Apparently he's been pretty buddy buddy with Jordan Peterson the last couple of years, if that tells you anything.
5:00 – 6:00 getting a bad feeling from the gigantic number of "likes" and "y'knows" this guy says.
You really started nailing it when you got to capitalism and Communism.
I see 14 comments yet it says 17, and another reply of mine to rat is missing.
I see all 19 comments now but a longer reply to Rat is still gone- oh well.
It's not wat u know or how u know it but how u become aware of it n arranging of how about following the rightful path for your destiny everything that exist comes from the mind u have to b self rightful in heaven to have riches on earth
Pinker cites known grifters and oil company shills in his climate change chapter, and comes to some pretty pseudoscientific conclusions.
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Subscribe to the ArtiFact podcast on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3xw2M4D
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3wLpqEV
Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3dSQXxJ
Amazon Music: https://amzn.to/2SVJIxB
Podbean: https://bit.ly/3yzLuUo
iHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/3AK942L
Read the latest from the automachination universe: https://www.automachination.com
Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com