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Join Peter Cowhey, Dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy for an in-depth conversation with Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist and Johnstone Family Professor Psychology at Harvard University. In his new book, Enlightenment Now, Pinker makes a powerful argument that by every measure, the conditions of human life have been improving steadily for the past 200 years. This improvement can be attributed not just to the spread of eighteenth-century principles of enlightenment, but also to the evolved properties of the modern human mind. [6/2019] [Show ID: 34248]
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Pinker is a pseudo-intellectual fraud.
UCLA – you screwed up on this one.
I would argue with Dr. Pinker that humans have not changed in 30000 years to be morally better. Rather violence has just change form from physical violence to economic violence. For instance, I would rather have you break my legs, than take my house.
Vaccines are a psyop designed to wear you down to the authoritarian government that imported these Nazis after the war and used their research. Vaccines are just distilled water. If vaccines are real it won’t even matter when we can’t fight back from it mutating. Being pro-vax is a racist talking point. Vaccines were pioneered by racist “scientists”. Peer reviewed means nothing, it’s literally just 30 Bill Nye’s circle jerking statistics through a pro-vax agenda lens. Professor is just double speak for Indoctrinator. This anti-vax bias needs to stop. If everyone is vaccinated than nobody is. Logos rising. Your globalist fourth Reich will fail. Vaccines are violence.
“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Anti-vaxers, and I did no speak out. Because I was not a Anti-vaxer. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak out for me.” Nelson Mandela 1984
2:50
This massive increase of gross world product is basically the result of cheap oil, which we're running out of. The energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) has dropped from well above 100 (100 barrels of oil could be extracted for for the energy equivalent of 1 barrel, all the way down to around 10 (even less for alternative sources like shale and tar sands).
Elite white folks like Pinker perpetuate the myth, the big lie about progress. That we could create a perfect society. That human endeavours can make the world a better place while all evidence shows that it's become far worse. Simple folks seem to love Steven Pinker and his bourgeois eloquence, in place of the facts, reality and the sufferings of millions of human being that rises every year every day. His analysis is unplugged from reality.
The fuck is going on with the below comments? It's a really angry group down there. People can't stand the notion that they may just have a better life than those who came before us. They also find it very difficult to disentangle their perception of the world from the media's understandable tendency to report the most dramatic events; in other words, bad news stories.
The data tells the true story, not CNN, NBC, Fox News and the New York Times, who report the doom and gloom because good news doesn't sell papers.
Turkey democratic today lol.
In a divided society, the privileged can "afford sympathy", in a fully connected society isolated on one planet, empathy dictates personal responsibility.
The Global Village is the problem? So the above approach of reasonable and rational analysis of the evidence is to continue..
Pure brilliance! Indeed the ultimate positive affirmation. ❤️ we humans are amazing…
Pinker is truly dumb, and it's amazing he has a job in academia at all, let alone at Harvard.
The narrative of progress a statistically increasing average of 'good' things is misleading and not meaningful in the context of humans as a global species. If we are causing a mass extinction which might include ourselves so that a minority of individuals can have short term 'progress' I would say that is more like the progression of something negative like a disease makes progress. I believe progress should be defined by the elevation of the human mind such that we naturally stop doing the most self defeating and destructive things. I have seen no evidence of that on a large scale, there are i believe some pockets of progress.
There's a lot of criticism of Pinker in the comments without much evidence to back it up. Certainly nothing close to what he presents.
You sent an angry, mean and nasty response to someone that criticised your writing.
The temperature is correlate with sun activity , please stop play such stupidity .
Need to look at the cost of living like this though, hope he mentions this in a future book. It's all a bit rose tinted atm. Good to hear a positive view though 🙂 Need to take what we've learned from all spheres I think and head to ways that work for the whole of it not just us. Enlightenment is at the end of its era, there's been good and bad, next philosophies will perhaps shift away from the anthropocentric, away from the mind/us as god, to us as an integral part. Hopefully. Fill it all back up again, us too.
Pinker is definitely on the right track, unlike most commentators I see today. If you want say the world is falling apart, I believe he's saying your selective attention to sparse, negative facts IS the problem. Reassign our attitudes to one of problem-solving instead of problem-finding and our species will continue to flourish.
People in the comments section are embarrassing themselves.
Pinker merely skews data and pushes a globalist agenda…thanks, but no thanks. His opinions should be regarded as just that – opinions. He puts a positive spin on everything, but lists solutions to potential problems as being in line with new world order / globalist ideologies
I like this view of progress. Something people are missing when criticizing Steven Pinker is that the ideas and methods of getting there are open, but most importantly they all can fluctuate and have a give and take method. People are commenting and seemingly ignoring ALL of his elements to this argument
The jolly heretic has an enlightening review of pinkers work.
This is “Whig history” and it’s silly. Look up the term. Pinker is contradicting things he said in his earlier, better work.
Why Pinker have so much audience ? he read from inflated propaganda data. who is behind him beside him self ? that is the question.
Exponential growth and progress are hindered and purposely stunted by select groups choosing to assimilate amongst their own and favoured subgroups