Steven Pinker – Should we fear the future?

11 thoughts on “Steven Pinker – Should we fear the future?”

1. Is that a new Einstein robot from Hanson?

2. Psychologists have mastered the art of no contest. The most I can say is I disagree with his initial statement describing Intellectuals.

3. superb presentation from Steven Pinker

4. That first flowery sentence on the myth of progress… I feel sorry for the EU translators.

5. empirical data, biatches!

6. How comes he was even allowed into this dirty den of parasitic "progressivists"… travelling circus with no power (by design, not to disrupt the centralist totalitarians in the Comission) called Europarliament? Big balls to insult them in the first sentence, hahaha. No euromoney from grants for you, Mr. Pinker… (though I don't think he's ever applied for such criminal money… and there is this brexit thingy now anyway)

7. I can only concentrate on the hair

8. Yes, but are we really any *happier*? Happiness, to me, is the most fundamental marker of progress of all. Yuval Harari asserts, and I agree, that our expectations have risen more or less in tandem with our living standards, and that humans in even the most well-off nations are not any fundamentally happier than prehistoric tribal peoples.

   The problem is in the way our brains are wired. For instance, Pinker, while seeking to prove his own point about progress, actually reinforces Harari's when he mentions the negativity bias. That itself IS a serious problem with the way we process information.

   Indeed, hundreds of studies over the 20th Century have shown that self-rated levels of happiness and contentment rise in parallel with living standards until one's basic needs are met, and then there is no correlation. So all of these improvements are amazing, but not quite as amazing as Pinker wants us to believe. We can't expect happiness to increase in any significant way from now on, and it has risen far less in the last 200 years than we had hoped as a result of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

9. Fear not the future. Fear the empowerment of the delusional left and their dedication toward becoming a national wrecking ball.

10. n terms of progress, the critically important point is not the exponential growth in access to knowledge but the quality of knowledge and the extent to which useful knowledge is sought and accessed. This is the first consideration which provides context to how knowledge is internalized and processed. In previous comments on a related subject, I have argued that if one's language use is poor then one is bound to have a poor understanding of the environment and the universe in which one lives. Over my lifetime I have witnessed the constant degradation of language which has become so profound and all-pervasive as to render it useless as a means to understand important concepts of our time such as "consciousness, intelligence and mind of which exists in public discourse no useful definitions or descriptions.

    17:00

    The phrase "humans are getting smarter" is a good example of that stated above, in that "smarter" is a casual expression and denotes nothing of intellectual or analytical value. Pinker uses this term to qualify his use of IQ testing as a reliable indicator of healthy intellectual development which is absolutely converse to reality.

    16:30

    Spending time with ones (own) children does not constitute leisure time? If this is a general truth then this is an extremeley sad indictment of the state of the human species.

11. Is Pinker pissed here? LOL! He sounds lit.

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