Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel like this was "The better angels of our nature, Vol. 2" (which in itself was more or less an extension of The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, but anyway). It sounds like, since his last book, he read Superforecasters, Thinking fast and slow, and he also wanted to update his message for the post-Trump election world, and, frankly, he sounds a tad more pessimistic in this one.

Having said that, his overall message still resonates. Things are much better now than ever before, by pretty much any metric, despite what we keep hearing.


Some of my notes:
We give punishments that are proportional to the crime not because of karma or anything, but because we want to deter, while not rendering people desensitized
Availability heuristic: 1st year med students interpret every rash as something serious. People have a fear of flying, because plane crashes make the news, although they make the news because they are rarer than car crashes, and almost no one has a fear of driving. 50 deaths per year in US from tornadoes. > 4,000 deaths per year due to asthma, but most people think tornadoes are more deadly.
"always predict the worst and you'll be hailed a prophet"
Genocide deaths (Odd chart. No spike for 2015? Nothing re: Syria?) - Compiled in 2008, but then why does it include later years on the graph??
War is now against the law. Since the UN, countries cannot just conquer others and gain new territory. A big exception is Russia and Ukraine. This only works if countries want to be accepted by international community, so recent turn against the intl community is damaging.
Japan didn't surrender bc of the nuclear bomb, but because the soviet union was entering the war (is this true??)
Jerry seinfeld, Bill Maher and Chris Rock are weary of performing on college campuses, because someone will be offended by a joke
You can't reason that there's no such thing as reason
Don't confuse pessimism with profundity.




View all my reviews