ProgressumTV
Steven Pinker appeared on the Bill Maher Show where they discussed his rosy views on human progress (which I debunked in my book) as well as his new book Rationality, as if we needed yet another book to stoke the egos of internet logic lords. In this video I debunk Pinker’s nonsense while also poking fun at Maher who quite frankly comes off as a total dufus.
Oh yeah, the book: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-glass-half-empty-debunking-the-myth-of-progress-in-the-twenty-first-century/
Source
Steven pinker…. Jeffrey epsteins wonderful friend
Steven Pinker 🤮
A homeless person makes more than 1.90$/ day. Easily!!
Bill Maher always leaned right, but now he has lost his damn mind. He is just another out of touch boomer that got lucky in life.
LOL at the ideological leftist calling out ideologues
Congrats on totally missing the point bud! Focusing on where the poverty line is drawn clearly indicates a bad faith effort here. The point is that regardless of where the poverty line is, these extremely unfortunate people are still better off than before. That is progress. I understand your ideology prevents you from accepting that any progress has actually been made on anything but maybe try a little harder next time.
At least Pinkerton has the decency speak in a neutral tone, Maher comes off so damn smug. Like not only is he going to tell you you're complaints are stupid, he's also going to pat himself on the back for doing it.
Bernie Sanders supports Seattle city council member Kasama Sawant. Among her many ideas, she proposed changing the Everett Boeing plant from making planes to instead making buses. Ideas like that would require burning down the system. Norway population is 5 million has a mostly homogenous population racially, linguistically, culturally and is isolated geographically. To compare the US to Noway on almost anything is absurd.
I think you've got it the wrong way round. The pre-requisite for being an “ideologue” (in the negative sense) is irrationality. Then some feedback loop occurs. Thinking, Fast and Slow isn't the only book on critical thinking we should read. There are many others.
Everyone should start with:
“Chapter 10: A Dream of Socrates” and “Chapter 1: The Reach of Explanations” in the book “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform The World” by David Deutsch.
Then Steven Novella's video/audio course “Your Deceptive Mind”.
Babbling. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Wait sorry if this is an ignorant question but could you please elaborate a bit on your comment about Naomi Klein towards the end of the video? I was under the impression she was a pretty big advocate for leftist causes but you seem to not like her and I'm interested in knowing why.
Otherwise thanks for the video! I'll add your book to my reading list. 🙂
This is the worst critic ever. Please get your arguments together, you sound like a fool.
This angry guy really wants you to buy his book….he tells you to do so over and over again. Having listened to this episode, I would recommend that if you do read his book (which I haven’t), that you also read Steven Pinker’s book. This guy clearly does not want you to….he really, really hates Steven Pinker. In a nutshell, Pinker’s central point is that humans are naturally prone to mistakes of cognition, and that principles of reason rather than superstition are humanity's best bet to correct those mistakes. This guy is a vastly inferior intellect who tries very hard to attribute ulterior motives to Pinker that are simply not there.
Got to 6:57. Had to stop. I will watch the entirety but have to say that you sound like a bitter ex girlfriend.
It's a bit in the somewhat correct and somewhat fallacious realm of straw-manning the argument which Pinker makes. Quite clearly, going by any standardised life, health, quality measurement there has been an overall trend of notable improvement from 500 years ago to today, which holds true for 400, 300, 200 and 100 years ago compared to today. Certainly this applies, as well, to poverty in general and extreme poverty. Now, does this mean there aren't huge problems with poverty today? Nope. Does this mean everything is super duper better than yesterday. Nope. Then again, it's not really what Enlightenment Now (or Hans Rosling) are arguing. So, Pogressum, you appear ironically unaware of this off-the-mark arguing you are doing, and your own bias about the subject
.
As Pinker himself responded to arguments a la Jason Hickle-comparables involved in the above 'debunk':
1. The massive fall of global extreme poverty is not a claim advanced by me, Bill Gates, or people who go to Davos, but every politically neutral observer who has looked at the data, including the Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton in The Great Escape, the United Nations (which declared its Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty as having been met five years ahead of schedule), and other experts in global development (who bolster their data with observations they have made while they spent time in the poorest countries), such as Stephen Radelet, Charles Kenny, and the Roslings. A comprehensive overview can be found (as always) in Max Roser’s Our World in Data in the entry on Global Extreme Poverty.
2. The level at which one sets an arbitrary cutoff like “the poverty line” is irrelevant — the entire distribution has shifted, so the trend is the same wherever you set it.
3. It’s not just China, or even China plus India — many poor countries have seen spectacular poverty reductions, including Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Mongolia, Mozambique, Panama, Rwanda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. This is on top of rich countries that not so long ago were dirt-poor, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.
4. Hickel’s picture of the past is a romantic fairy tale, devoid of citations or evidence, and flatly contradicted by historians such as Fernand Braudel who have examined contemporary accounts of life in previous centuries, and economic historians such as Angus Maddison and his students who have tried to quantify it using wills, government records, and other data.
5. The drastic decline in extreme poverty is corroborated by measures of well-being other than income that are correlated with prosperity, such as longevity, child mortality, maternal mortality, literacy, basic education, undernourishment, and consumption of goods like clothing, food, cell phones, even beer—all have improved.
6. It’s also borne out by a sanity check from people who have actually spent time in poor countries and have observed what life is like in them—not just development experts, but also biologists I know who have visited their field sites in Africa annually for many decades, and who have remarked on changes that can be seen with the naked eye: stores that have food, kids that wear shoes, people that are overweight rather than starving, shanties replaced by cinderblock, poor people with bicycles and TVs.
7. The political agenda of Hickel and other far leftists is obvious: it’s humiliating to their world view that the data show massive improvements due to markets and globalization rather than an overthrow of capitalism and global redistribution (see the quote by David Graeber in “Enlightenment Wars,” and the back story on Hickel’s radicalism in this article, originally published in The Telegraph).