STEVEN PINKER – ENLIGHTENMENT NOW – Does Progress exist ? + Q&A

45 thoughts on “STEVEN PINKER – ENLIGHTENMENT NOW – Does Progress exist ? + Q&A”

1. Walkability in human settlements is key. It helps with emissions, obesity, social isolation, land conservation, and democracy.

2. Love Pinker to death, but the "uhs" get to me. How does someone with such an understanding of language abuse a verbal crutch so much?

3. Another satisfying dollop of pure reason from Steve Pinker….

4. Well, I dont know Steven. The economy would really need to change in its structure if we want to fix this planet. An agrarian society that works in tune with nature is necessary for the environment and for improving human culture. It's not directly related to GDP, but economics and culture are directly related to environmentalism.

5. very Star Trek like, but too right-winged
   you cannot just have wealth, you also need social economic equality, otherwise the environmental problems cannot be solved
   these charts do not show many things and is a little like cherry-picking
   equating enlightenment and progress is simplistic
   and are you sure 3rd world can manage nuclear reactors?

6. Many good points. Those interested should check out the various material on economics, development, growth, etc available from the Lyndon Larouche organization. Although I don't agree with all of his ideas, Larouche is a crucial thinker who can supplement this material with more fundamental ideas regarding those issues.

7. 2 in the pink, 1 in the stink. Pinker is a goddam pimp. Maximum respect.

8. I take issue with his nonchalant comment about Urban waterways improving consistently across the board, I actually work in aquatic monitoring and it's not better

9. Lake Erie has had increasingly toxic algal blooms and countless inland drinking water reservoirs have gone thru the same degradation

10. Very little data from the results of actual water quality monitoring ever makes it to the public ear

11. I agree overall, although he was very quick to skip over the declining work hours, which with a closer look have been on the rise since 1960 in the US and for some reason only went up to 2000: is it because they've risen since then, or just no figures available?

12. Why do speakers in Q and A sessions worry about "geographic diversity" across a room? The people at the back, up on the balcony or over on the left side of the room are not a disadvantaged group with uniformly different opinions.

13. True that violence has increased, but people are taking less chances as well. Most of us barely know our neighbors. I know I've talked to none of them. Actually. Although technology will continue to aid our march to progress, it's really the fact that we take less chances that make progress.

14. The Pope is not the only person who has said that human populations would be better off at about one billion. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis and father of the modern environmental movement (and avowedly NOT religious) has also said this. Pinker probably knows that, but…neglected to mention it.

15. Ok. There's the new book by Steven Pinker, 576 pages in Hardcover format or half the amount in Paperback. What is the difference between the two versions?

16. I don't know…most of the people I've debated who disagree with anthropogenic climate change don't know much of anything about the history of the climate, and most who do, DO have some knowledge. That could be just what shows up in debates, but I see it all the time.

17. This should have more than 13k views.

18. I'm not saying he's wrong about the statistics, because he's right. What will make him look as a fool to future historians, though, is the other side of the Seneca cliff: most of the progress that he charts, which has built up in 150-200 years, will be undone in three to four decades once the artificially inflated fake paper wealth evaporates in an economic crash and most natural resources (like oil) won't keep up with demand from growing population and growing standards of living. "Limits to Growth" was published in 1972, and 45 years later we're right smack on the path to catastrophic collapse by mid 21st century. Add human stupidity and nuclear weapons to the equation, and you'll excuse me for choosing realism over optimism.

19. What he talks about for libertarians has been quite obvious for quite a long time but he is a leftie and his book is for stupid lefties to catch up. I hope lefties will catch up that capitalism and technology are more friendly to environment than socialism or communism.

20. Jacob Bronowski left the strict science of mathematics to enter the study of humanities. He delivered 3 lectures at MIT that were later turned into a book "Science and Human Values" The 3 lectures were 1. the creative mind 2. the habit of truth 3. the sense of human dignity. Once past the hunter gatherer stage and it's many gods, man had time to become what man is, a thinker. JB wrote that the development of poetry and art in a creative sense were just as important as the science that followed in finding a likeness in nature. His thesis was that the true nature of science comes about because of civilized educated thinking man's human values. This man understands the value of churches in community good and bonding, but remains perplexed at the juvenile mythology's that hold it together. Science could not exist without human values, human values will not remain without science that has given us everything good we have, fighting ignorance, superstition and religion every step of the way.
    Sad that Steven appears to be a Clinton/Obama voter. As a conservative atheist many of my heroes remain blind to the fact that Trump had to win before he could fix anything. CAGW was changed to climate change for political reasons after all the models and predictions were wrong. Climate science remains a battlefield and it must be void of politics. So many academics writing so many books to and for each other. Meanwhile conservatives fight for the human good against a communistic democrat party. Communism always fails but has returned in the form of post modernists.

21. Strings of positives are all well and good but what about
    (1) obesity
    (2) Use of anti-depressants
    (3) nuclear proliferation.
    (4) Islamic fundamentalism
    (5) dysfunctional families
    (6) Autism
    (7) New drugs
    (8) The decline of participation in the work place.
    (9) loneliness
    (10) Birth rate decline in developed societies.
    All is not well – Just change the metrics

22. If you like him, you will love Julian L. Simon's book "The Ultimate Resource" that came out almost 40 years ago. Go read it. Everything Pinker discusses here, Simon discussed it 40 years ago!!!

23. I've long considered the neo-luddite wing of environmentalism to be a sort of secular eschatology. So it is unsurprising that a religious leader like the Pope can tap into that intuition.. Some of the comments further support this position.

24. But, the world's animal and echo systems are in decline, as is the environment as a whole.

25. Ridiculous optimism. Not a word about the sixth mass extinction.

26. I love when the Left eats its own. There are as many slaves today as their were in 1860. They are just all white sex slaves in the west and black slaves in Africa and Asia.

27. Good job.

28. http://www.worldometers.info

29. This is a gross misrepresentation of environmentalist thinking, in which Steven Pinker has carefully cherry picked to create a false straw man argument to argue against using the straw man logical fallacy. Self-evidently Pinker has absolutely no understanding of the challenges we face, which is not surprising given this lies outside his field of expertise and he knows nothing about it.

30. Nice tie.

31. talk about flawed premises, "this new insecticide really kills the pests," ddt circa 1939. "this new nationalism really is bringing the nation together after that last defeat," germany circa 1939. "why is life expectancy and quality of life in western culture in freefall?" circa 2018.

32. Wonderful!

33. I see pessimism (to an extent) as a tool to encourage growth and solutions that we can be proud of. I think that a certain amount of pessimism is important in order to encourage solutions and growth because if you are simply optimistic about all facets of society and the human race, you may overlook issues in society. However, I think it is important to be optimistic about the solutions and accomplishments we can achieve. I think that it is important to balance both pessimism and optimism so that we aren't swallowed by one or the other.

34. I figure cultural/moral advancement FOLLOWS technological advancement.

35. As countries get richer, they export more of their problems. That can't go on forever.

36. Is this guy a bed-time lullaby for the globalists? When we left a cottage industry, the family bond and sustainability went with it as we leaped into the industrial revolution. Give a man an acre of land and tell GDP to go to hell.

37. Thank you thank you thank you for editing and re-uploading the video. The video has increased my happiness by decreasing my anxiety.

38. Capitalism and Global Warming is a Nemesis on
    any optimism these days.

39. 48:07 – Pinker likes to jump off the cliff and learn to fly on the way down. It's entertaining to see his typical pattern of verbiage in the freefall stage; those first 5 seconds in which his corpus callosum is inundated with conflicting arguments. Its like witnessing a falcon stumble on a unexpected gust of wind.

40. If one has a confirmed bias that we don't need to change our lifestyles or just have an irrational faith in imaginary futuristic technology then Pinker's bizarre arguments will satisfy you. For a talk that's about reason (one key tenet he points out is not relying on anecdote) to start out with "Intellectuals hate progress and progressive intellectuals really hate progress" doesn't bode well. Evidence for this? I think that might be what is called an unsubstantiated anecdote.
    He uses cherrypicked data, see work hours going down when in fact (even on his selective graph) US hours are increasing (as are UK).
    "The world is getting wealthier and as a result the people are getting happier." He offers no hard evidence for this assertion. He elsewhere uses anecdotal happiness self reporting for his data. And even if you do accept this data the global happiness index does not correlate to individual countries' economic wealth (Denmark and Finland are top, presumably because they are also the most egalitarian…it's the dreaded social democracy that creates happiness not wealth).
    There is a peculiar disconnect with happiness as depression rates have skyrocketed at the same time as higher self reported happiness. In the UK, for instance, depression rates have increased by over 100% since 2006.
    While the world getting wealthier might APPEAR positive there has been a huge growth in inequality beyond anything seen since WWII. Social mobility is at it's lowest levels since the war in the UK and US.
    Quoting Stewart Brand he suggests "Pessimists sound like they're trying to help you. Optimists sound like they're trying to sell you something." Which is weird (or is he being ironic?) as he is indeed selling us his new book.
    "Can we have an enlightened environmentalism?" asks Pinker. Huh? Environmentalism isn't enlightened?
    "There's a lot of earth pessimism. I think of this as 1970s greenism," says Pinker then talks about this environmental movement he's invented as if it's real.
    And who be head of this imaginary movement? Why of course THE environmental scientist of our age. Jorge Bergoglio. Better known as Pope Francis. As straw men go this is the best since Ray Bolger in the Wizard of Oz.
    Pinker then tells us that environmentalists are all misanthropes by way of his invented 70s greenism: “This is a philosophy that has an indifference to human suffering: starvation, disease, extreme poverty.” Clearly mixing up environmentalism with the Catholic Church. Haven't we all at some point?
    Pinker's other environmental target is the relatively obscure Paul Watson, who was primarily active in the 1980s carrying out direct action against seal killing.
    Watson suggested population should be scaled back to less than one billion and likens decimating population numbers to curing a cancer. Pinker tells us "when your rhetoric starts to sound like a Nazi it's time to rethink your messaging." Which is a bit rich from someone who endorses The Bell Curve and A Natural History of Rape in his book The Blank Slate. But much worse than this, Pinker in his new book describes "the mainstream environmental movement" as "laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens and cancer." So taking one perhaps fairly reasonable comment by an obscure environmentalist Pinker extrapolates that to all environmentalists. Considering the human population was 1 billion at the turn of the 19th Century and is now 7 billion Bill Hicks maxim of humans being a virus with shoes seems pretty rational.
    Pinker suggests this Nazi green thinking "encourages a kind of fatalism. We will all suffer an horrific apocalypse unless we immediately take extreme measures which we have no chance whatsoever of taking."
    That's just rational. Look at the evidence. Environmental CO2 is increasing, it's above the dreaded 400ppm that environmental scientists once argued was the tipping point. We are screwed.
    So Pinker's evidence that things are ok and they'll be ok:
    "Industrialization has brought many gifts."
    Yep, great. But the economic growth charts exactly mirror rates of CO2 emissions. We get wonderful stuff in the short term but the long term effects are indeed catastrophic.
    "Economic development is good," argues Pinker. Not if the net effect is global warming. That is counter intuitive. He backs up this by suggesting "Richer countries can afford to pay for a cleaner environment.” Except they do exactly the opposite. The US produces 15% CO2 but has 4% population.
    "I think we have seen that if people are given the choice between having electricity at the cost of some air pollution and doing without electricity they'll opt for the electricity at the cost of pollution but if they can afford to spring for a little bit extra to have the electricity without the pollution they'll spring for that extra amount."
    Evidence? Pinker offers none because this is simply not true. Where? In the UK green energy companies account for less than 1% of the market.
    But don't worry we'll all be saved by imaginary "technology advances."
    Densification. Except he offers no evidence because 'inconveniently' "precision farming, tree plantation" are exactly the opposite to clearing rainforests for animal feed and palm oil, killing off bees with pollutants, overgrazing, water shortages because of animal farming etc.
    "We CAN create pollution control technologies."
    That my friends is called faith and it's not reasoned.
    "Dematerialization." Except our world economy is based on consumption. That's just nonsense.
    I have more to say…

41. Pure reason,… or straw man warrior? http://www.monbiot.com/2018/03/09/contrary-to-reason/ "Under-researched and over-claiming, deferring to authority rather than data, sloppy and derivative, Pinker insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend."

42. Prof Pinker could also show in numbers that… antisemitism is going down 😉 Well, this could be one bridge too far :-))) even for a respected professor….

43. Thank you Charles!

44. GTFO: now they want to start speaking some truth’ you lames, it’s to late for that, your done, been indoctrinating kids for 35-40 years’ now you switch up’ good one, but you know what you have done’ piss off you have lied, mislead, and probably cost a lot of people there futures, go to hell’ keep sniffing you farts, for another 50 years or so’ this new renaissance’ will be know forever as’ ALT.RIGHT inspired, WHITE Supremacy bitch’ know that for ever, What Socialism lost its thrill.?. so now you cuck out.?.
    Piss off..
    leftist scumbags, School of thought! is weak ass (((postmodernism))) to deconstruct, our nation and especially, our way of life, it’s so week! it’s not based in truth, the main weapon, that they use’ witch confuses most normal’ people born after 1950, with only a trap’ they can’t defend’ the tactic? is to use a modern lens, to criticize your nation/history/culture/race, past’ as a way to demoralize anyone into’ what seems like a lost cause, because there goal is destruction through anti-positivity and anti-truth, call them out’ as soto science, false conspiracy dealers,
    for the future, of you and America..

45. This guy is a joke lol. Simplistic, reductive nonsense starting with a straw man caricature of “intellectuals”

Comments are closed.