Steven Pinker

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Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

Hambrick and Christopher Chabris, “Yes, IQ Really Matters,” Slate, April 14, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/what_do_sat_and_iq_tests_measure_gen eral_intelligence_predicts_school_and.html. 233 professional moral philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, “The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors: Relationships Among Self-Reported Behavior, Expressed Normative Attitude, and Directly Observed Behavior,” Philosophical Psychology 27 (2014): 293–327. 234 Walter Mischel investigated For a review, see Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (Boston: Little, Brown, 2014). studies of exceptional altruists Abigail A. Marsh et al., “Neural and Cognitive Characteristics of Extraordinary Altruists,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): 15036–41. Steven Pinker has argued Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 235 Smith discusses the qualities Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2010), 130. studies run by Geoffrey Cohen Geoffrey L. Cohen, “Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 808–22. 236 Other studies have found Philip M.

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It’s reassuring to have these scholars on my side. Others have done the work of outlining empathy’s limits and of carefully distinguishing empathy from other capacities, such as compassion and a sense of justice. I’m thinking here of Jean Decety, David DeSteno, Joshua Greene, Martin Hoffman, Larissa MacFarquhar, Martha Nussbaum, and Steven Pinker. I am particularly impressed by the research of Tania Singer, a cognitive neuroscientist, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk—two scholars working together to explore the distinction between empathy and compassion. I’ve been influenced as well by a novelist, Leslie Jamison, and a literary scholar, Elaine Scarry, both of whom have fascinating things to say about empathy and its limits.

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When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.” I like this quote because it provides a nice illustration of how empathy can be a force for good. Empathy makes us care more about other people, more likely to try to improve their lives. A few years ago, Steven Pinker began a discussion of empathy with a list: Here is a sample of titles and subtitles that have appeared in just the past two years: The Age of Empathy, Why Empathy Matters, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, The Science of Empathy, The Empathy Gap, Why Empathy Is Essential (and Endangered), Empathy in the Global World, and How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. . . .

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

It is an intellectual tour de force, and may well shatter some of your cherished opinions or shift them to firmer scientific ground. It is easy to see why Pinker is in the top echelon of popular science writers today—his work combines scientific gravitas with a highly enjoyable style. Steven Pinker Born in 1954 in Montreal, Canada, Steven Pinker has degrees from McGill University and Harvard, where he obtained his PhD in experimental psychology. He is best known for his research into language and cognition. Other books include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Visual Cognition (1985), Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992), and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999).

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Laing The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness (1960) 34 Abraham Maslow The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971) 35 Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974) 36 Anne Moir & David Jessel Brainsex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women (1989) 37 Ivan Pavlov Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex (1927) 38 Fritz Perls Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951) 39 Jean Piaget The Language and Thought of the Child (1923) 40 Steven Pinker The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) 41 V. S. Ramachandran Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (1998) 42 Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (1961) 43 Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1970) 44 Barry Schwartz The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004) 45 Martin Seligman Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment (2002) 46 Gail Sheehy Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976) 47 B.

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We can pick up one of their titles today and still be entranced. Despite the difficulty of some of the concepts, people have a deep hunger for knowledge on how the mind works, human motivation, and behavior, and in the last 15 years there has been something of a new golden age in popular psychology writing, with authors such as Daniel Goleman, Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi fulfilling that need. Below is a brief introduction to the titles covered in 50 Psychology Classics. The books are divided into seven categories that, although unconventional, may help you to choose titles according to the themes that interest you most.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

We often think of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have killed around 650,000 people, but we rarely talk about the conflicts in those countries between 1979 and 1989, which killed more than two million people. War and violence used to be the natural state of humanity. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, on whose exhaustive research on the history of violence I draw heavily in this chapter, writes that the dramatic reduction in violence ‘may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history’.2 A tour through our cultural heritage, our myths, proverbs and even our language reveal how much of an everyday occurrence brutal violence was.

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Torture and mutilation have been regularly applied in all great civilizations, from the Assyrians, Persians and Chinese to the African kingdoms and the Native American tribes, but the medieval Christian culture was more creative than most, and some of that era’s best minds were occupied with coming up with ways of inflicting as much pain as possible on people before they confessed or died. As Steven Pinker summarizes it: Torture was meted out by national and local governments throughout the Continent, and it was codified in laws that prescribed blinding, branding, amputation of hands, ears, noses and tongues, and other forms of mutilation as punishments for minor crimes. Executions were orgies of sadism, climaxing with ordeals of prolonged killing such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, pulling apart by horses, impalement through the rectum, disembowelment by winding a man’s intestines around a spool, and even hanging, which was a slow racking and strangulation rather than a quick breaking of the neck.5 We know that torture is practised today as well, especially in dictatorships, but even in some advanced democracies like the United States.

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But human sacrifice was also abolished in all cultures, often at first replaced by animal sacrifice. It could be that knowledge of history and other cultures provides evidence to counter such beliefs. It could be that greater wealth, along with longer and more predictable lives, erodes fatalism and generally leads people to value the lives of others more. According to Steven Pinker’s sources, the average annual rate of violent death for non-state societies – and this includes everything from hunter-gatherer tribes to gold rush societies in California – is 524 per 100,000. If we add all the deaths from wars, genocide, purges and man-made famines in the twentieth century, we still don’t get a rate higher than 60 per 100,000 annually.6 The first step in the pacification process was associated with the early agricultural civilizations.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Spelke A Debate”, 16 May 2005, https://www.edge.org/event/the-science-of-gender-and-science-pinker-vs-spelke-a-debate 18 “Steven Pinker at Davos: excessive political correctness feeds radical ideas”, Big Think, 31 Jan. 2018, https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/steven-pinker-excessive-political-correctness-feeds-dangerous-ideas 19 Pinker, S., “Featured Reader”, Arts and Letters Daily, 26 Dec. 2014, https://www.aldaily.com/featured-reader/steven-pinker-2014-12-26/ 20 Szalai, J., “Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity Is Doing Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans”, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/books/review-enlightenment-now-steven-pinker.html 21 Pinker, S.

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Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907-1939): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective”, Zebrafish, 5(4), Dec. 2008, https://doi.org/10.1089/zeb.2008.0576 53 Snyder, T., Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Vintage Books, 2011), pg. 160 54 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, ch. 22. 55 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, pg. 408. 56 Gray J., “Steven Pinker is Wrong About Violence and War”, Guardian, 13 Mar. 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining 57 Burke, M., Hsiang, S.M., and Miguel, E., “Global Non-linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production”, Nature, 527, 12 Nov. 2015, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725. An interactive website can be found at https://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php 58 Mecklin, J.

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It’s That, but Way Way Weirder”, Vox, 18 Apr. 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained 36 Issac, M., “Mark Zuckerberg’s Great American Road Trip”, New York Times, 25 May 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/technology/zuckerberg-harvard-commencement-road-trip.html 37 “Steven Pinker on Genetically Re-engineering Human Nature”, The Nexus Institute, 2016, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/steven-pinker-genetically-reengineering-human-nature/ 38 Norberg, J., Progress, pg. 124 39 Ridley, M., The Rational Optimist, pg. 346 40 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, Ch 22 41 Plous, S., “The Nuclear Arms Race: Prisoner’s Dilemma or Perceptual Dilemma?”

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

., 168, PS14 Yiddish, 56, 170, 253, 263, 378 Yourcenar, M., 135 Yngve, V, 457 Zurif, E., 321 P.S. Insights, Interviews & More… About the author Meet Steven Pinker About the book On Writing The Language Instinct Frequently Asked Questions The Language Instinct Today Read on Author’s Picks: Suggested Reading Have You Read? More by Steven Pinker Notes to P.S. Material References to P.S. Material About the author Meet Steven Pinker © 2005 by Rebecca Goldstein THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT is dedicated to my parents, “who gave me language”; the ambiguity between nature and nurture was, of course, intentional.

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Last-minute addition: another excellent book on the science of reading. Have You Read? More by Steven Pinker WORDS AND RULES: THE INGREDIENTS OF LANGUAGE How does language work, and how do we learn to speak? Why do languages change over time, and why do they have so many quirks and irregularities? In this original and totally entertaining book, written in the same engaging style that illuminated his bestselling classics, The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker explores the profound mysteries of language. By picking a deceptively simple phenomenon—regular and irregular verbs—Pinker connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and the humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics; the attempts to create language using computer simulations of neural networks; what there is to learn from children’s grammatical “mistakes”; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the brain; and major ideas in the history of Western philosophy.

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—London Review of Books OTHER BOOKS BY STEVEN PINKER The Stuff of Thought: Language and Human Nature The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language How the Mind Works Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure Language Learnability and Language Development Credits Cover painting by Donna Coveney Copyright This book was originally published in 1994 by William Morrow and Company. P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers. THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT. Copyright © 1994 by Steven Pinker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

ISBN 978-1-108-48978-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. This book is dedicated to my friends Christopher Hitchens and Steven Pinker, peerless champions of liberty who have always given the devil his due … for our own safety’s sake. Contents Acknowledgments IntroductionWho Is the Devil and What Is He Due? Part IThe Advocatus Diaboli: Reflections on Free Thought and Free Speech1Giving the Devil His Due: Why Freedom of Inquiry and Speech in Science and Politics Is Inviolable 2Banning Evil: In the Shadow of the Christchurch Massacre, Myths about Evil and Hate Speech Are Misleading 3Free Speech Even If It Hurts: Defending Holocaust Denier David Irving 4Free to Inquire: The Evolution–Creationism Controversy as a Test Case in Equal Time and Free Speech 5Ben Stein’s Blunder: Why Intelligent Design Advocates Are Not Free Speech Martyrs 6What Went Wrong?

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When I argue that free speech is inviolable and sacrosanct, I mean this in the broadest sense, even while acknowledging that some restrictions are both legally and morally necessary, such as leaking the nuclear codes to an enemy nation, libeling someone in a way that damages their reputation and income, extorting others to give up money or freedom, and fraudulently stealing from others what isn’t rightfully yours through persuasion. But as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker explained, these exceptions must be strictly delineated and individually justified; they are not an excuse to treat speech as one fungible good among many. Despots in so-called “democratic republics” routinely jail their opponents on charges of treason, libel, and inciting lawlessness. Britain’s lax libel laws have been used to silence critics of political figures, business oligarchs, Holocaust deniers, and medical quacks.

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He coined the meme in a 1919 Supreme Court case that upheld the conviction of a man who distributed leaflets encouraging men to resist the draft during World War I, a clear expression of opinion in a democracy. And if you object to these arguments – if you want to expose a flaw in my logic or a lapse in my accuracy – it’s the right of free speech that allows you to do so.13 It is for these reasons – and many others – that this book is dedicated to my friends Christopher Hitchens and Steven Pinker, peerless champions of liberty who have always given the devil his due … for our own safety’s sake. Part I The Advocatus Diaboli: Reflections on Free Thought and Free Speech Chapter 1 Giving the Devil His Due Why Freedom of Inquiry and Speech in Science and Politics Is Inviolable Preamble This article was originally published in the November/December 2018 issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice as a “Special Issue on the Study of Ethnicity and Race in Criminology and Criminal Justice,” addressing a target article by the psychologist James Flynn on “Academic Freedom and Race,” dealing with the always-controversial topic of racial group differences in IQ scores.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Also, I love playing with babies, mostly staring at each other and smiling. Drooling is also involved, and sometimes it’s the baby. “If it’s already common knowledge, it’s probably too late to make a major contribution. If you’re the only one excited, you may be deluding yourself.” Steven Pinker TW: @sapinker FB: /Stevenpinkerpage stevenpinker.com STEVEN PINKER is a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, and is the author of ten books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and most recently, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

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Money Mustache David Lynch Nick Szabo Jon Call Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Feb. 3–Feb. 24, 2017) Dara Torres Dan Gable Caroline Paul Darren Aronofsky Evan Williams Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 10–March 24, 2017) Bram Cohen Chris Anderson Neil Gaiman Michael Gervais Temple Grandin Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 31–April 21, 2017) Kelly Slater Katrín Tanja Davíðsdóttir Mathew Fraser Adam Fisher Aisha Tyler Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: April 28–May 12, 2017) Laura R. Walker Terry Laughlin Marc Benioff Marie Forleo Drew Houston Scott Belsky Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: May 19–June 2, 2017) Tim McGraw Muneeb Ali How to Say No: Neal Stephenson Craig Newmark Steven Pinker Gretchen Rubin Whitney Cummings Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 9–June 16, 2017) Rick Rubin Ryan Shea Ben Silbermann Vlad Zamfir Zooko Wilcox Stephanie McMahon Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 23–July 7, 2017) Peter Attia Steve Aoki Jim Loehr Daniel Negreanu Jocko Willink Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: July 14–July 27, 2017) Robert Rodriguez Kristen Ulmer Yuval Noah Harari Some Closing Thoughts Breathe Recommended Resources The Top 25 Episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show Extended Conversations Mentor Index Question Index Subject Index Acknowledgments Sample Chapter from TOOLS OF TITANS Buy the Book About the Author Connect with HMH Footnotes Copyright © 2017 by Timothy Ferriss All rights reserved.

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“Most gifted” is lower risk, an easier search query (easier to recall), and implies benefits for a broader spectrum of people, which the idiosyncratic “favorite” does not. For the curious and impatient among you, here are a few books (of many) that came up a lot: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger If you’d like to see all of the recommended books in one place, including a list of the top 20 most recommended from this book and Tools of Titans, you can find all the goodies at tim.blog/booklist 2. What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Allum Bokhari, “Lawsuit: Google Instructed Managers That ‘Individual Achievement’ and ‘Objectivity’ Were Examples of ‘White Dominant Culture,’” Breitbart.com, April 18, 2018, http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/04/18/lawsuit-google-instructed-managers-that-individual-achievement-and-objectivity-were-examples-of-white-dominant-culture/. 30. Joshua Loftus, “Steven Pinker’s Radical Centrism and the ‘Alt-right,’” Medium.com, January 11, 2018, https://medium.com/@joftius/steven-pinkers-radical-centrism-and-the-alt-right-b261fde5a24f. 31. Twitter, January 9, 2018, https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/950794932066947072?lang=en. 32. Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett, “Charles Murray Is Once Again Peddling Junk Science about Race and IQ,” Vox.com, May 18, 2017, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech. 33.

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According to economics professors at Stanford and Brown, political polarization is taking place more for “demographic groups least likely to use the internet and social media.”19 Polarization seems to cross demographic boundaries, without reference to level of technological use.20 Finally, there’s the most basic argument of all: for whatever reason, human nature has kicked back in. We’re naturally tribal, naturally possessive, naturally angry. For a while, we suppressed those instincts; we called that the “Enlightenment.” Jonah Goldberg, in his masterful Suicide of the West, calls that overthrow of human instinct “The Miracle.”21 Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now, makes a similar case: he says that the Enlightenment changed everything—that it brought about science and humanism, reason and progress. Enlightenment thinking substituted rationality for irrationality, and the effect was the creation of the modern world.22 Goldberg, arguing that Enlightenment ideals are unnatural, says that our current dissolution looks like a reversion to our tribal, reactionary nature.

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If the new science had called into question the possibility of universal human truths, advocates of scientism were willing to overlook that, too. Instead, these neo-Enlightenment thinkers returned to the premises of the Enlightenment in the name of science: the same Enlightenment that had brought about scientific progress, they argued, had ushered in an age of universal morality as well. Take, for example, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now is a powerful ode to Enlightenment values. Where Wilson discards Kant as antiscientific, Pinker embraces Kant’s call to “understand.” He also endorses in glowing terms the power of reason: “The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. . . .

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

While experienced Lojbanists write without too much trouble, they seem to struggle in speech. What’s going on? One possibility is that Lojban does not fit the template of the kind of languages humans are supposed to learn. This is the “language instinct” hypothesis, whose most famous proponents are Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. They claim that all human languages share underlying features that the brain is primed to learn. This could be one reason why children speak so fluently by age five despite little instruction, and while highly intelligent adults seem to struggle mightily with Lojban: the brain doesn’t want inflexible predicates and arguments.

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Their stories, like Genie’s, come out as a mess of content words that give a clear gist but which do not form grammatical sentences. They are nonetheless comprehensible; Broca’s aphasia affects only language production. Indeed, sufferers often show frustration that they can’t express what is obviously clear in their minds. People can even solve complex intellectual problems without words. Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct, lists a host of scientists from Michael Faraday (electromagnetism) to James Watson and Francis Crick (the helical structure of DNA) whose breakthroughs were visual, not verbal. Pinker concludes with a quotation from Einstein, who described the thought experiments that led to some of his breakthroughs: “this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought – before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.”9 Of course, people do think in language sometimes.

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* Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage betrays its publisher’s mission: collecting citations of English in order to make ordinary dictionaries. And Bryan Garner’s Modern English Usage betrays its author’s main vocation, that of a lawyer. The final language tamer we turn to is perhaps the most surprising – although he shouldn’t be. Steven Pinker is an arch-descriptivist: an academic language scientist and psychologist who has spent decades criticising half-baked old shibboleths of writers like Gwynne. Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, objected to the sticklers’ appropriation of a beloved Yiddish word in calling themselves “language mavens”, saying “kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it!”

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

Theoretically there is no limit to the depth of embedding of relative and prepositional clauses within one another, although keeping track of deep, multiple embedding makes demands on the brain’s computational machinery. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct is a beautifully written, evolutionarily slanted introduction to such matters. *31 The seminal book on evolutionary psychology, with chapters by many of its leading practitioners, is the volume edited by J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, The Adapted Mind. Not long after this lecture was given, Steven Pinker’s masterly How the Mind Works appeared. Evolutionary psychology, for reasons I don’t understand, arouses incandescent hostility in quarters where I wouldn’t expect it.

…

Where do our twenty-first-century values come from, as opposed to the relatively nasty ones of earlier centuries? What has changed, such that in the 1920s ‘votes for women’ was a daringly radical proposal, leading to riots in the streets, whereas now to forbid women the vote is regarded as an obvious outrage? Looking back to earlier centuries, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature and Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc document inexorable improvements in our values. Improvements by whose standards? By the standards of modern times, of course – a line of reasoning which, although circular, is not viciously so. Think of the slave trade, think of killing as a spectator sport in the Roman Colosseum; of bear-baiting, burning at the stake, treatment of prisoners including prisoners of war before the Geneva Convention.

…

I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms’ (‘Evolution as fact and theory’, in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes). *4 Professors of ‘Women’s Studies’ are occasionally given to lauding ‘women’s ways of knowing’ as if these were different from, even superior to, logical or scientific ways of knowing. As Steven Pinker rightly said, such talk is an insult to women. *5 Quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 234. See also Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition, for a chilling collection and justifiably savage indictment of similar drivel including ‘Cultural Constructivism’, ‘Afrocentric Science’, ‘Feminist Algebra’ and ‘Science Studies’, not forgetting Sandra Harding’s ‘stirring assertion that Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophae Naturalis is a “rape manual” ’

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

As Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot observes, there has rarely been any admission from ‘the IMF or World Bank that the policies they advocated during the heyday of the so-called Washington Consensus – austerity, privatisation and financial liberalisation – have contributed to weak and unequal growth, with all the political discontent that this has caused.’17 The lack of institutional soul-searching at these organizations post 2008 is a sort of strategic ignorance, and in recent years, academics have published accounts of ‘institutional ignorance’ at the IMF.18 Goldin and Elliot’s criticism is controversial not due to the outlandishness of their statements (their criticisms of the IMF are quite mild), but because of a problem that, for want of any better framing I’ve seen, I label the Bannon–Pinker conundrum – after two figures who have amassed widespread public followings for different reasons: Steven Pinker and Breitbart mastermind Stephen Bannon. THE BANNON–PINKER CONUNDRUM Bannon is at the forefront of propagandist efforts to demonize what he calls a ‘globalist’ conspiracy to undermine the interests of western nation states and what he sees as a superior Judeo-Christian world outlook. His anti-foreigner views are deservedly condemned by centrist political thinkers including Steven Pinker, who has criticized Bannon’s ideas. But the Pinker–Bannon conundrum is this: although Pinker disavows racism, he also tends to imply that any criticism of globalization, no matter how reasonable or evidence-based, is ‘anti-progress’ as he puts it.

…

Also, the lives of Carnegie and Rockefeller are relevant for another reason: they help to explore why Adam Smith’s call to be ‘suspicious’ towards the self-serving activities of business merchants is neglected in mainstream economic theory today. Today is a good time to re-examine Smith’s attitude to profiteering among business merchants. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in his recent bestseller Enlightenment Now, also turns to the late 18th century, but I argue that he gets Adam Smith wrong, and also that his historical omissions are pregnant with meaning. What Pinker doesn’t say about Smith helps me to examine where the myth of America and Britain’s laissez-faire origins have come from, and why those myths still thrive today.

…

But there’s also another problem surrounding the treatment of Smith’s work today. His book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is widely viewed today as the most important modern economic text ever written. Smith is seen as the patron saint of the belief that economic self-interest will lead naturally to positive economic growth for all members of a community. Steven Pinker and others call this the ‘positive-sum’ or ‘shared prosperity’ thesis and they attribute it to Smith. The reality is different. It is true that Smith believed the pursuit of economic self-interest could be a force for moral and economic good by fuelling economic growth. But only when self-interest is restrained by just laws and prudent government regulation.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Recent years have seen the publication of a dozen high-profile books and a hundred TED talks devoted to the idea that everything in the world is steadily improving. They share not only a format (endless series of graphs showing centuries of decreasing infant mortality or rising income) but also a tone of perplexed exasperation that any thinking person could perceive the present moment as dark. As Steven Pinker, the author of the sanguine Enlightenment Now, explained, “None of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become.” People, he added, just “seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp and kvetch.”1 I’m grateful for those books because, among other things, they remind us precisely how much we have to lose if our civilizations do indeed falter.

…

Even compared to the twentieth century, violence is now far less likely to kill us—of the more than 55 million people who died around the world in 2012, war killed just 120,000 of them.2 Eighty-five percent of adults can read now, a staggering increase inside two generations.3 Women, with more education and at least a modicum of equality, have gone from having more than five kids apiece on average in 1970 to having fewer than two and a half today, probably the most rapid and remarkable demographic change the planet has ever witnessed. In the year 1500, humans managed to produce goods and services worth $250 billion in today’s dollars—five hundred years later, that number is $60 trillion, a 240-fold increase.4 The chorus of affirmation swells, from Steven Pinker insisting we’re in an age of unprecedented enlightenment to Donald Trump tweeting, “There is an incredible spirit of optimism sweeping the country right now—we’re bringing back the JOBS!” We’re quite accustomed to this idea of progress, so accustomed that some can’t imagine anything else: the former chief economist of the World Bank, Kaushik Basu, recently predicted that, in fifty years, global GDP will be growing 20 percent a year, meaning that income and consumption will be doubling every four years or so.5 There are, each day, more ideas hatched, more songs sung, more pictures taken, more goals scored, more schoolbooks read, more money invested

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Economists calculated that it would take twenty-six years for the island’s economy to get back to where it had been the day before the storm hit40—if, of course, another hurricane didn’t strike in the meantime. Or look at people living so close to the margin that small changes make a huge difference. I noted earlier that we’ve seen a steady decline in extreme poverty and hunger. “Our problem is not too few calories but too many,” Steven Pinker wrote smugly.41 But late in 2017, a UN agency announced that after a decade of decline, the number of chronically malnourished human beings had started growing again, by 38 million, to a total of 815 million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.”42 In June 2018, researchers said the same sad thing about child labor: after years of decrease, it, too, was on the rise, with 152 million kids at work, “driven by an increase in conflicts and climate induced disasters.”43 Those “conflicts,” too, are ever more closely linked to the damage we’ve done to the climate.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

It made my bull***t detector so sensitive that listening to well-marketed nonsense (by verbalistic people, especially academics) had the same effect as being put in a room with instances of randomly occurring piercing and jarring sounds, the type that kill animals. I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the “intellectual” profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park. It is under such an oversensitive bull***t detector that I have been writing this book. THE BOOK REVIEWERS And since we are talking about books, I close this introductory section with that one thing I’ve learned from my time in that business.

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The mean-field approach is when one uses the average interaction between, say, two people, and generalizes to the group—it is only possible if there are no asymmetries. For instance, Yaneer Bar-Yam has applied the failure of mean-field to evolutionary theory of the selfish-gene narrative trumpeted by such aggressive journalistic minds as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, with more mastery of English than probability theory. He shows that local properties fail and the so-called mathematics used to prove the selfish gene are woefully naive and misplaced. There has been a storm around work by Martin Nowack and his colleagues (which include the biologist E. O. Wilson) about the terminal flaws in the selfish gene theory.fn2 The question is: could it be that much of what we have read about the advances in behavioral sciences is nonsense?

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The IYI has been wrong, historically, about Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, trans-fats, Freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup), Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, marathon running, selfish genes, election-forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup), and p-values. But he is still convinced that his current position is right.fn1 NEVER GOTTEN DRUNK WITH RUSSIANS The IYI joins a club to get travel privileges; if he is a social scientist, he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the United Kingdom, he goes to literary festivals and eats cucumber sandwiches, taking small bites at a time; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that dietary fat was harmful and has now completely reversed himself (information in both cases is derived from the same source); he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity, and, when explained to him, he forgets about it soon after; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frédéric Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshott, John Gray, Ammianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadia Gaon, or Joseph de Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drinks to the point where he starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell sh**t from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; he has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

I very much hope that a new generation of leaders who understand the AI Control Problem and AI as the ultimate environmental risk can rise above the usual tribal, zero-sum games and steer humanity past these dangerous waters we are in—thereby opening our way to the stars that have been waiting for us for billions of years. Here’s to our next hundred thousand years! And don’t hesitate to speak the truth, even if your voice trembles. Chapter 10 TECH PROPHECY AND THE UNDERAPPRECIATED CAUSAL POWER OF IDEAS STEVEN PINKER Steven Pinker, a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He is the author of eleven books, including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and, most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

…

Max Tegmark: Let’s Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete We should analyze what could go wrong with AI to ensure that it goes right. CHAPTER 9. Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages Continued progress in AI can precipitate a change of cosmic proportions—a runaway process that will likely kill everyone. CHAPTER 10. Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless megalomaniacs. CHAPTER 11. David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment Misconceptions about human thinking and human origins are causing corresponding misconceptions about AGI and how it might be created.

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In the end, twenty-five people wrote essays, all individuals concerned about what is happening today in the age of AI. Possible Minds is not my book, rather it is our book: Seth Lloyd, Judea Pearl, Stuart Russell, George Dyson, Daniel C. Dennett, Rodney Brooks, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, Steven Pinker, David Deutsch, Tom Griffiths, Anca Dragan, Chris Anderson, David Kaiser, Neil Gershenfeld, W. Daniel Hillis, Venki Ramakrishnan, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alison Gopnik, Peter Galison, George M. Church, Caroline A. Jones, and Stephen Wolfram. I see the Possible Minds Project as an ongoing dynamical emergent system, a presentation of the ideas of a community of sophisticated thinkers who are bringing their experience and erudition to bear in challenging the prevailing digital AI narrative as they communicate their thoughts to one another.

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

“The police gave me a subtle nod of approval”: Fairless, Mad Blood Stirring, 1. “From an early age, small boys were taught to think much of their own honor”: Quoted in R. E. Nisbett, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996; Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2018), 2. As Steven Pinker has documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2012), ch. 3, 104. CHAPTER 8 “Tell Mrs. Coolidge”: James R. Wilson, Robert E. Kuehn, and Frank A. Beach, “Modification in the Sexual Behavior of Male Rats Produced by Changing the Stimulus Female,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 56, no. 3 (1963): 636.

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The government doesn’t pump pacifying chemicals into the water supply. The explanation presumably lies in the Singaporean culture, which is one of law-abidingness, strict discipline in families, and lack of poverty, plus harsh criminal penalties, among other factors. Rates of violent crime don’t vary just from country to country, they also vary over time. As Steven Pinker has documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the homicide rate in Europe fell astonishingly steeply from the thirteenth century on, from as much as 100 per 100,000 people per year, to the present rate of about 1 per 100,000. The explanation for the reduction in violence is not in changes in our genes but in centuries of large cultural and social changes, including the monopolization of violence by the state.

…

But we can also put roadblocks in the way. #MeToo is a movement that has made real progress, and hopefully that will continue. As I have emphasized throughout this book, to bring about changes in male behavior it is not necessary to depress testosterone. Changes in attitudes and culture can do that all by themselves. As Steven Pinker reports in his book Enlightenment Now, in the United States the “rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past.” Declining male T levels are not the explanation. Even though, as far as we can tell, men’s heightened desire for sex has not changed, what has changed (in some places) is the sense of entitlement of some powerful men.

You Are What You Read by Jodie Jackson

Brexit referendum, delayed gratification, Filter Bubble, framing effect, Future Shock, Hans Rosling, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, race to the bottom, Rutger Bregman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, yellow journalism

., BuzzFeed: The top 10 examples of BuzzFeed doing native advertising, Native Advertising Institute, 2018, assssssvailable at: https://nativeadvertisinginstitute.com/blog/10-examples-buzzfeed-native-advertising/ RESOURCES News organisations: ‘BBC World Hacks’ BRIGHT Magazine The Correspondent Delayed Gratification INKLINE Monocle News Deeply The Optimist Daily Positive News Solutions Journalism Network Sparknews ‘The Upside’ (by the Guardian) The Week ‘What’s Working’ (by the Huffington Post) YES! Media Books: The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity by Steven Pinker Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change by Michelle Gielan Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change by Rodger Streitmatter The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption by Clay A.

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I also owe thanks to the pioneering news organisations that value and practise solutions journalism. It is by learning from them and their audience that I have been able to craft a collective experience of my own. I would like to personally thank Danielle Batist, Michelle Gielan, Sean Dagen-Wood, Steven Pinker, David Bornstein and Ulrik Haagerup. It has been through your support, encouragement and example that I have found my voice in the conversation for a more constructive media. Thank you to everyone who has pledged for this book. When I set out to write it, I wanted to bring people together in the quest for a more constructive, healthy and balanced media diet.

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Cronin Massimo Curatella Richard D’Souza Neal Davies Joshua Davis Libby Davy Evan De Barra Maddie De Bois Jean Philip De Tender Jenny Demetriou Joanne Douglas Jonathan Dransfield Charlie Drayson Paul Driver Fiona Durkin Fiona Edgerley Henry Edwards Ruairi Edwards Ruhi Habib Edwards-Behi Terence Egalton Deborah Eleazar Will Ellner Thomas Emmet James Erskine Amélie Escudier Sue Finch Molly Flatt Darren Forrester Yasmin Forrester David Foster Aaron Fullerton Ariana Gabr Eva Gabr Nadia Gabr Tariq Gabr Hilary Gallo Philippa Garety Daisy Geddes Marion Gibbs Daniele Gibney Barrie Glibbery Fiona Gollan Katie Goodall Shukuri Graham Sarah Gray Miriam Great Giselle Green Paul Greengrass Gemma Greenwood Dave Gunn Rin Hamburgh Diana Hamilton Bunny Hankers Christine Hawe David Head Jack Hellewell Jenny Hitchens Matt Hitchens Amy Hobbs Linda Horsfield Simon Howard Val Hudson Ailsa Hughes Helle Ibsen Jonathan Irons Beata Ivarsson Alison Jackson Charlie Jackson Christopher Jackson Daniel Jackson Jemma Jackson Jonny Jackson Leila Jackson Josie Jacobs Caroline Jaine Dawn Jones Nicholas Jones Laura Keating Nick Keegs Nina Kelly Ella Kennedy Ebbie Khadem Mohsin Khan Dan Kieran Heidi King Hilary King Jenny King Mike King Charlotte Kirkham Janet Kirkham Andy Kitching Nick Koutsoudis Christi Kraft Anna Kunnenkeril Pierre L’Allier Elisa Lapenna Mauri Liebendörfer London School of Ecomonics LSE Jonathan Long Kyser Lough David Lush Elizabeth Lyons Lucy Lyons Séamus Mac An Airchinnigh Cassie Madge Paul Main Silvio Malvolti Karen McIntyre Ailsa McNab Juliet Menager Louisa Mercer Jane Mew Lottie Mew Dave Minchin Joseph Mishon Veronique Mistiaen Jeremy Mitchell John Mitchinson Christopher Moger Joanna Moncreiffe Sally Musgrave Jawwad Mustafa Carlo Navato Juliet Newth Gary Nicol Luke Niggemann Gabriela Nóra Johan Norberg Anthony Norton Anne-Sophie Novel Denis O’Keeffe Kate O’Connor Jenny Oakley CJ Obi James Ovenden Raquel Paiva Kirstin Papworth-Smyth Josh Parrack Sabrina Passos Pete & Irene Catherine and Karl Phillips Steven Pinker The team at piqd www.piqd.com Justin Pollard Ana Prudente Kathryn Puch Prudence Quicke Janakan Ratnarajan Valentina Recla Kate Reinecke Lucie Resteau Emily Reynolds James Richardson Sean Richardson Chloe Rigby Glynis Robertson JE Robins Lucy Robinson Stuart Robinson Justine Rose Tom Rose Ola Rosling Helen Rule Yann Say Cyndy Schlaepfer-Youker Stephanie Scott Megan Sheer Peter Silva-Jankowski Hasina Silvester Patricia Silvester Nicola Slawson Kirsty Sleep Bubs Smith Dr Mike Smith Jason Smith Nigel Smith Tim Smith Pippa Sophia Kirsten Sparre Caroline Sproule William Squire Kirsty Stanley Björn Staschen JP Stead Cathy Stewart Heather Stewart Daniel Strombom Jane Taylor Victor Temple Peter ten Wolde Grahame Terry Joe Thompson Graham Tomlinson Milly Toovey Kristen Truempy Truuli Property Sophie Turner Vicky Unwin Bart van der Vliet Chared Verschuur Lynda Vowles Connie Waddell Anna Wallace Howard Walters Yelena Walters James Warner Margaret Warren Frances Watson Amy White Jan Wifstrand Antonia Williams Helen Williams Jan Williams Seán Wood Carolanne Wright Jessie Zhu First published in 2019 Unbound 6th Floor Mutual House, 70 Conduit Street, London W1S 2GF www.unbound.com All rights reserved © Jodie Jackson, 2019 The right of Jodie Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

How Growing Rent-Seeking Is at the Heart of America’s Economic Troubles,” Journal of Public and International Affairs , https:// jpia .princeton .edu /news /something -nothing -how -growing -rent -seeking -heart -americas -economic -troubles.   74   “some kinds of social change” : Jennifer Szalai, “Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity Is Doing Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans,” New York Times , February 28, 2018, https:// www .nytimes .com /2018 /02 /28 /books /review -enlightenment -now -steven -pinker .html.   74   The Dawn of Everything : David Graeber and David Wendgrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).   74   problem with Pinker’s oft-quoted statistics : Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s Ideas Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why,” openDemocracy , May 21, 2018, https:// www .opendemocracy .net /en /transformation /steven -pinker -s -ideas -are -fatally -flawed -these -eight -graphs -show -why /.   75   “As we have seen” : Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin, 2018), 109.   75   “What we want … fast as you can” : “Dr.

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These Eight Graphs Show Why,” openDemocracy , May 21, 2018, https:// www .opendemocracy .net /en /transformation /steven -pinker -s -ideas -are -fatally -flawed -these -eight -graphs -show -why /.   75   “As we have seen” : Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin, 2018), 109.   75   “What we want … fast as you can” : “Dr. Jordan Peterson Makes the Case for Capitalism,” YouTube video, July 5, 2020, 10:05, https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v =uWeDnN0O _xA.   76   Extrinsic rewards … intrinsic rewards : Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Kenneth Thomas, “The Four Intrinsic Rewards That Drive Employee Engagement,” Ivey Business Journal , December 4, 2017, https:// iveybusinessjournal .com /publication /the -four -intrinsic -rewards -that -drive -employee -engagement /.   76   “vile despoilers” : Pinker, Enlightenment Now .   76   Bezos has a yacht : Allison Morrow, “Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht Is So Big It Needs Its Own Yacht,” CNN , May 10, 2021, https:// www .cnn .com /2021 /05 /10 /business /jeff -bezos -yacht /index .html.   77   “there is a growing loss” : Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti , sec. 13, https:// www .vatican .va /content /francesco /en /encyclicals /documents /papa -francesco _20201003 _enciclica -fratelli -tutti .html.   78   Nietzsche’s sister : Sue Prideaux, “Far Right, Misogynist, Humourless?

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

Within economics my key influences have been the writings of George Akerlof through his innovative ideas on identity, and Frédéric Docquier for his rigorous investigation of the migration process, and especially discussion with Tony Venables both on economic geography and as a sparring partner for the model that is the analytic workhorse of this book. In social psychology I have drawn on discussions with Nick Rawlings and the works of Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and Paul Zak. In philosophy I have learned from discussions with Simon Saunders and Chris Hookway and from the writings of Michael Sandel. The book is an attempt to answer this question: what migration policies are appropriate? Even to pose this question requires a degree of courage: if ever there was a hornet’s nest it is migration.

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In a violent society the rule of law keeps getting overridden: households and firms must divert effort into safety, and in the limit they seek safety through choosing to remain poor so they are less of a target.5 The capacity to cooperate is fundamental to prosperity: many goods and services are “public goods” that are most efficiently supplied collectively. So the social foundations of peace and cooperation matter for growth and are not direct corollaries of formal institutions. Steven Pinker has convincingly suggested that norms concerning violence have evolved quite radically in distinct steps over many centuries.6 An early step is the passage from anarchy to centralized power: a passage that Somalia has yet to make. Another is the passage from power to authority: a step that many regimes have yet to manage.

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Noncooperation can be reinforced by its own moral code of honor: the vendetta, in which wrongs are repaid with wrongs. Vendettas are a normal aspect of clan-based societies. Historically, clans have been the most common basis for social organization, and in many poor countries they continue to be so.4 As Steven Pinker shows, vendettas are reinforced because wrongs are systematically exaggerated by victims and minimized by perpetrators, so that the retaliation regarded as justified by victims of the initial wrong creates a fresh wrong in the eyes of the new victims.5 Vendettas only end once the entire moral code of honor is abandoned.

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Marek Kohn, Visiting Fellow at the School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, author of A Reason for Everything, As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind, The Race Gallery, and other books. Randolph M. Nesse, Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, author of Why We Get Sick and other books. Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and other books. Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy, Ruby in the Smoke, and other books. Andrew F. Read, Professor of Natural History, Edinburgh University.

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Thus the knowledge-laden structures are big, in the multiverse, while many of the objects, such as galaxies, that have large-scale structure in any one universe, have little or none in the multiverse. It is only the ‘neo-Darwinist’ version of evolution theory that has turned out to illuminate other fields in this way. That is smoking-gun evidence of a good explanation. Deep commonalities between life and mind Steven Pinker US television talk-show host Jay Leno, interviewing a passerby: How do you think Mount Rushmore was formed? Passerby: Erosion? Leno: Well, how do you think the rain knew to not only pick four presidents—but four of our greatest presidents? How did the rain know to put the beard on Lincoln and not on Jefferson?

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We need to be, and are, superb intuitive psychologists. Poor psychologists would rarely have got to be parents of further inept judges of character, emotion, intention. Many of the typical problems of human life are demanding in similar ways, yet we respond effortlessly and successfully to most of those challenges. Steven Pinker and his allies suggest that we can do this because we have evolved a collection of special purpose cognitive machines, each of which is innately equipped to solve demanding but repeated and predictable problems of human life; he develops this view in his How The Mind Works.2 As Pinker reads the human story, we are good intuitive psychologists because we have built into our minds a human psychology program—a system designed to read the thoughts and intentions of others—on which we rely as we navigate our way through the storms of our social world.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Regarding Skype, see “Skype Update Translates English and Spanish in Real Time,” Christian Science Monitor, 15 December 2014. Economists Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane . . . Levy and Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton University Press, 2004). Steven Pinker observed in 2007 . . . Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature (Penguin Books, 2007). Yet iRobot soon thereafter . . . For product descriptions, see www.irobot.com. And yet, in 2014, when I asked Dominic Barton . . . Personal interview, 24 September 2014. Judges make parole decisions . . .

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Kung San were as bloodcurdlingly violent as any culture you’ve ever heard of. Years of research by psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and others has pretty well sunk the blank-slate view. The full scope of the argument is beyond our needs here (it is elucidated brilliantly in the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature), but it’s worth our while to examine a list of “human universals” compiled by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown and published in 1991. These are, Brown said, “features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions.”

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Murnane, in an excellent 2004 book called The New Division of Labor, explain how driving a vehicle involves such a mass of sensory inputs and requires such complex split-second judgments that it would be extremely difficult for a computer ever to handle the job; yet Google introduced its autonomous car six years later. Steven Pinker observed in 2007 that “assessing the layout of the world and guiding a body through it are staggeringly complex engineering tasks, as we see by the absence of dishwashers that can empty themselves or vacuum cleaners that can climb stairs.” Yet iRobot soon thereafter was making vacuum cleaners and floor scrubbers that find their way around the house without harming furniture, pets, or children, and was also making other robots that climb stairs; it could obviously make machines that do both if it believed demand was sufficient.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

DEDICATION To Marvin Minsky CONTENTS DEDICATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE: THE 2015 EDGE QUESTION MURRAY SHANAHAN Consciousness in Human-Level AI STEVEN PINKER Thinking Does Not Imply Subjugating MARTIN REES Organic Intelligence Has No Long-Term Future STEVE OMOHUNDRO A Turning Point in Artificial Intelligence DIMITAR D. SASSELOV AI Is I FRANK TIPLER If You Can’t Beat ’em, Join ’em MARIO LIVIO Intelligent Machines on Earth and Beyond ANTONY GARRETT LISI I, for One, Welcome Our Machine Overlords JOHN MARKOFF Our Masters, Slaves, or Partners? PAUL DAVIES Designed Intelligence KEVIN P.

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Only when more sophisticated AI is a familiar part of our lives will our language games adjust to such alien beings. But of course by that time it may be too late to change our minds about whether they should be brought into the world. For better or worse, they’ll already be here. THINKING DOES NOT IMPLY SUBJUGATING STEVEN PINKER Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; author, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Hobbes’s pithy equation of reasoning as “nothing but reckoning” is one of the great ideas in human history. The notion that rationality can be accomplished by the physical process of calculation was vindicated in the twentieth century by Alan Turing’s thesis that simple machines can implement any computable function, and by models from D.

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We don’t yet know how to program human-level intelligence and creativity into these computers, but in twenty years desktop computers will have the power of today’s supercomputers, and the hackers of twenty years hence will solve the AI programming problem long before any carbon-based space colonies are established on the moon or Mars. The AIs, not humans, will colonize these places instead, or perhaps take them apart. No human, no carbon-based human, will ever traverse interstellar space. There’s no reason to fear the AIs and human uploads. Steven Pinker has established that as technological civilization advances, the level of violence decreases.2 This decrease is clearly due to the fact that scientific and technological advance depend on free, nonviolent interchange of ideas between individual scientists and engineers. Violence between humans is a remnant of our tribal past and the resulting static society.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

And thanks to everyone else who’s helped out in one way or another, either with the book itself or with my thinking on these topics, including Pat Barclay, Chloe Bradley, Andrew Clark, Jerry Coyne, Oliver Curry, Greg Dingle, Céline Durassier, Martie Haselton, Adam Hooper, Stephanie Huitson, Toko Kiyonari, Danny Krupp, Claire Lehmann, Andrew Loughnan, James McKellar, Stewart McWilliam, Randy Nesse, Nikki Owen, Adam Perrott, Steven Pinker, John Podd, David Schmitt, Delia Shanly, Christina Hoff Sommers, Phil Tucker, Alison Walker, Abigail Walkington, Lee White, Barbara Williams, and Brian Williams. Last but not least, thanks to John Anderson for the plant genitals joke (see the Alien’s Report). 1 The Alien’s Challenge This book is about the strangest animal in the world – the animal that’s reading these words and the animal that wrote them: the human animal.

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The critics have failed to distinguish the ultimate from the proximate, the evolutionary mode of explanation from the psychological. The generalized form of this error is the idea that, according to evolutionary psychologists, people have an innate motivation to pass on their genes, and that we’re all constantly scheming about how we might achieve this. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out, though, “If that’s how the mind worked, men would line up outside sperm banks and women would pay to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile couples.”30 Rather than having a very general motivation to propagate our genes, humans have a portfolio of more specific motivations – motivations to eat and drink, to run away from predators, to have sex and care for our young.

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By the way, as you might already have noticed, the spillover hypothesis doesn’t just explain our fondness for cute animal videos. It also hints at an explanation for a much older and more pervasive phenomenon: our habit of keeping pets. There’s another way to cash out the by-product hypothesis – one that may prove useful in solving the alien’s dilemmas. This is Steven Pinker’s strawberry cheesecake hypothesis.74 Cheesecake is one of the world’s most popular desserts. Unless we’re watching our weight, most of us would choose it over fruit. This is curious, though, because we evolved to eat fruit but we didn’t evolve to eat cheesecake. The explanation, of course, is that, like much of our food today, cheesecake is a supernormal stimulus: an artificial concoction that presses our evolved buttons more strongly than any natural substance, and that therefore packs more of a punch.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

., Continental Philosophy of Science (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), pp. 211–223, http://www.alcoff.com/content/foucphi.html. 49 See Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio and Simon Willis, “Planetary Skin: A Global Platform for a New Era of Collaboration,” March 2009, http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/pov/Planetary_Skin_POV_vFINAL_spw_jc_2.pdf. 50 Interview with Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio, March 17, 2010. 51 Interview with Timo Hannay, February 12, 2010. 52 Interview with John Wilbanks, December 14, 2009. 53 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2009). 54 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xvii. 55 “Climate of Fear,” Nature 464, no. 141 (March 11, 2010), DOI:10.1038/ 464141a, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7286/full/464141a.html. 56 See Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Fight Grows More Misguided,” Salon, January 6, 2011, http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/06/jenny_mccarthy_autism_debate. 57 Steven Pinker, “Mind over Mass Media,” New York Times, June 10, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/opinion/11Pinker.html. For a rebuttal, see Nicholas Carr’s blog post, “Steven Pinker and the Internet,” June 12, 2010, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/06/steven_pinker_a.php. 58 David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 84. 59 Ibid., p. 76. 60 Ibid., p. 141. 61 Ibid., p. 137. 62 Ibid., p. 162. 63 Ibid., p. 172. 64 Jean-Claude Bradley, “Dangerous Data: Lessons from My Cheminfo Retrieval Class,” January 2, 2010, http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2010/01/dangerous-data-lessons-from-my-cheminfo.html. 65 “Eggs Good for You This Week,” The Onion, April 28, 1999, http://www.theonion.com/articles/eggs-good-for-you-this-week,4144/.

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Hyperlinked science If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing.57 So wrote cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in an op-ed in the New York Times in the summer of 2010. It would be difficult to find scientists who would disagree with this assessment overall, although every scientist would likely point to some pain point: lack of funding, government ineptitude, media sensationalism.... Still and all, this is a great age for science.

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It is the network itself—the seamless connection of scientists, data, methodologies, hypotheses, theories, facts, speculations, instruments, readings, ambitions, controversies, schools of thought, textbooks, faculties, collaborations, and disagreements that used to struggle to print a relative handful of articles in a relative handful of journals. So, Steven Pinker is right: Science is doing better than ever thanks to the Net. There is more information than ever. More of it is available than ever. Computers can discover patterns that humans would never have noticed. Commons are forming from clouds of Linked Data. Collaborative tools allow scientists to work together across all boundaries.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

May 5, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7380400.stm. For a more academic slant on things, see Susan Batchelor, “Girls, Gangs, and Violence: Assessing the Evidence,” Probation Journal 56, no. 4 (2009): 399–414, doi:10.1177/0264550509346501. 2 Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has recently flagged this … See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). 3 Trawling through the court records of a number of European countries.. See Manuel Eisner, “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” Crime and Justice 30 (2003): 83–142. 4 Similar patterns have elsewhere been documented … Michael Shermer, “The Decline of Violence,” Scientific American, October 7, 2011, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?

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In China, following an incident in which a two-year-old baby was left stranded in the middle of a marketplace and run over, not once but twice, as passersby went casually about their business, an appalled electorate has petitioned the government to pass a “Good Samaritan” law to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. On the other hand, however, bad things have always happened in society. And no doubt always will. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has recently flagged this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. In fact, he goes one step further. Far from being on the increase, Pinker argues, violence is actually in decline. The reason that vicious slayings and other horrific crimes make the front pages of our papers isn’t because they’re commonplace.

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The subject of neurolaw came up in the context of a wider discussion about the field of cultural neuroscience: the study of how societal values, practices, and beliefs shape, and are shaped by, genomic, neural, and psychological processes across multiple timescales and cultures. If society was becoming increasingly psychopathic, I wondered, was there a gene already at work out there churning out more psychopaths? Or was it a case, as Steven Pinker had elucidated in his “culture of dignity” argument, of customs and mores becoming ever more socialized until they end up second nature? Hare suggests that it’s probably a little of both: that psychopaths, right now, are on a bit of a roll, and that the more of a roll they get on, the more normative their behavior becomes.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Robert Atkinson, director of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (the very same foundation that gives out the Luddite Award), made a similar argument in a 2015 debate.20 While there are valid questions about precisely how risks should be described when talking to the media, the overall message is clear: “Don’t mention the risks; it would be bad for funding.” Of course, if no one were aware of the risks, there would be no funding for research on risk mitigation and no reason for anyone to work on it. The renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker gives a more optimistic version of Atkinson’s argument. In his view, the “culture of safety in advanced societies” will ensure that all serious risks from AI will be eliminated; therefore, it is inappropriate and counterproductive to call attention to those risks.21 Even if we disregard the fact that our advanced culture of safety has led to Chernobyl, Fukushima, and runaway global warming, Pinker’s argument entirely misses the point.

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Thus, for example, Yann LeCun, a pioneer of deep learning and director of AI research at Facebook, often cites this idea when downplaying the risk from AI:28 There is no reason for AIs to have self-preservation instincts, jealousy, etc. . . . AIs will not have these destructive “emotions” unless we build these emotions into them. I don’t see why we would want to do that. In a similar vein, Steven Pinker provides a gender-based analysis:29 AI dystopias project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. They assume that superhumanly intelligent robots would develop goals like deposing their masters or taking over the world. . . . It’s telling that many of our techno-prophets don’t entertain the possibility that artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines: fully capable of solving problems, but with no desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.

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It follows that those problems reflect things of value to humans that were omitted from the goals set for it by humans. The optimal plan being carried out by the machine may well cause problems for humans, and the machine may well be aware of this. But, by definition, the machine will not recognize those problems as problematic. They are none of its concern. Steven Pinker seems to agree with Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis, writing that “intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal; the goals are extraneous to the intelligence itself.”32 On the other hand, he finds it inconceivable that “the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding.”33 He continues, “The ability to choose an action that best satisfies conflicting goals is not an add-on that engineers might forget to install and test; it is intelligence.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

It’s hard to imagine a realistic scenario in which the world can add around $40 trillion of new economic output in the 2040s alone while decarbonising by using low-EROI energy sources that require greater investment in unproductive intermediate stocks, and deal simultaneously with a raft of other crises related to soil, water and biodiversity loss. But here I’m going to focus on a second form of crisis – the human inequalities within and between countries that seem both an ethical outrage and a political tinderbox. On this point, progress-literature (see ‘Introduction’, page 5) attempts to soothe us with a different view. Steven Pinker, for example, asserts that ‘industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a Great Convergence in the 21st’.127 I’m reluctant to enter the statistical labyrinth through which such claims are defended or refuted because, unlike Pinker, I think summary statistics and grand historical claims make for uncomfortable bedfellows, but I’d like to take a cautious step inside, just to suggest that other views are possible.

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For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly,’ while Anthony Warner makes the bold and conveniently untestable assertion that ‘every society that has ever existed would eagerly swap their lives with someone living in the developed world today’. Other writers I mentioned earlier – Steven Pinker and the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto among them – also weigh in on the theme that when all is said and counted, the evidence proves conclusively that modern lives are just better than premodern ones.143 You’d have thought a confident culture that was truly modern in the sense described by Therborn could let the dead lie, rather than indulging in shrill pronouncements of its superiority over them.

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It’s not that there’s nothing worth celebrating or defending in the traditions of modernity, but doing so requires a nuanced and creative response to changing times that acknowledges modernity’s downsides. The heavy-handed nostalgia for a perfected vision of past modern achievements as the lodestar of human progress offered by figures like Steven Pinker is stuck in the past. It’s time to move forwards to a small farm future. CHAPTER TWO Wicked Problems: Of Progress and Other Utopias As I charted the ten crises in Chapter 1, I intentionally sequenced them from physical and technological issues – our human numbers, the climate, energy availability, soils, water and so on – to deeper cultural, political and economic forces driving them.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

In addition to my dissertation committee at UCLA, several outside scholars and scientists reviewed early drafts of this book. Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, and Steven Pinker read the text, in whole or in part, and offered extremely helpful notes. A few sections contain cannibalized versions of essays that were first read by a larger circle of scientists and writers: including Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Anthony Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven Pinker. I am pleased to notice that with friends like these, it has become increasingly difficult to say something stupid. (Still, one does what one can.)

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—Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and winner of the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam “A lively, provocative, and timely new look at one of the deepest problems in the world of ideas. Harris makes a powerful case for a morality that is based on human flourishing and thoroughly enmeshed with science and rationality. It is a tremendously appealing vision, and one that no thinking person can afford to ignore.” —Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate “Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris’s previous books that couldn’t have been written by any of his fellow ‘horsemen’ of the ‘new atheism.’

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Evolution could never have foreseen the wisdom or necessity of creating stable democracies, mitigating climate change, saving other species from extinction, containing the spread of nuclear weapons, or of doing much else that is now crucial to our happiness in this century. As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed,21 if conforming to the dictates of evolution were the foundation of subjective well-being, most men would discover no higher calling in life than to make daily contributions to their local sperm bank. After all, from the perspective of a man’s genes, there could be nothing more fulfilling than spawning thousands of children without incurring any associated costs or responsibilities.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Let’s look more closely at how this pattern of mistakes and corrections unfolded. People as Property It has been acceptable in many societies throughout history for people to own other people, especially if they come from a different ethnic group, religion, or tribe. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes that sentiment toward slavery began to change in the late 1700s with the rise of humanism, or the belief that “the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish… call[s] on our moral concern.” As Pinker writes in his book Enlightenment Now, “The Enlightenment is sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, because it led to the abolition of barbaric practices [such as slavery] that had been commonplace across civilizations for millennia.”

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The fuel of interest in eliminating costs was added to the fire of the computer revolution, and the world began to dematerialize. The economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that the Industrial Era was made possible by the values of the Enlightenment. This intellectual movement began in the second half of the eighteenth century with many societies in the West embracing what Steven Pinker characterizes as four values: reason, science, humanism, and progress. According to Mokyr, the Enlightenment created a “culture of growth” that let both capitalism and technological progress flourish. I see an interesting inversion taking place now. If the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Era, then the Second Machine Age has led to a Second Enlightenment—a more literal one.

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Governments abuse their own people less and have become more effective at halting abuses. You Have Our Sympathies The last of the four horsemen of the optimist is public awareness: awareness both that we should take better care of each other and of our planet, and of good ways to do so. In Enlightenment Now Steven Pinker uses the image of an expanding “circle of sympathy” to convey that the first kind of public awareness is increasing. He makes an optimistic argument: “Given that we are equipped with the capacity to sympathize with others, nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realizing that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Alternatively, we could consider words, and memes more generally, to be the result of variable, temporally extended processes of reproduction (as if father’s contribution was not made “at conception” but at some later time, after mother had already given birth), an imaginable variation on our normal mode of sexual reproduction. So there are several ways we could consider cultural evolution to be Lamarckian without thereby erecting a barrier against the imperialistic forays of dread Darwinism into the sacred precincts of culture. Steven Pinker—no friend of memes—has candidly acknowledged: “To say that cultural evolution is Lamarckian is to confess that one has no idea how it works.” He goes on, however, to say quite a bit about how he thinks it works: The striking features of cultural products, namely their ingenuity, beauty, and truth (analogous to organisms’ complex adaptive design), come from the mental computations that “direct”—that is, invent—the “mutations,” and that “acquire”—that is, understand—the “characteristics.” (1997, p. 209) This perfectly expresses the traditional view that it is comprehension, by inventors, by intelligent designers, that accounts for the improvements—the “ingenuity, beauty, and truth”—we observe in cultural items.

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Niche construction is not just an effect of the selective pressures of natural selection; it is also an important, even destabilizing, cause of new selective pressures, a crane of considerable lifting power in Design Space. There is no doubt that our species has engaged heavily in niche construction. Steven Pinker (2003, 2010) calls our world the “cognitive niche,” stressing that it is a product of human comprehension. Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich (2011) disagree with Pinker, proposing that it would better be called the “cultural niche,” a platform of competences on which comprehension can grow. As we will see, the R&D that has constructed the niche we inhabit today is a changing blend of both Darwinian, bottom-up processes and top-down intelligent design.

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This fluidity of information transmission in human culture, and its use in combatting, discrediting, discarding, but also revising, improving, adapting and spreading, new memes pushes Darwinian meme evolution into the background. Have I just admitted that memetics cannot be a valuable theoretical tool in modeling today’s (and tomorrow’s) cultural evolution? Consider again the claim by Steven Pinker, quoted in chapter 11: The striking features of cultural products, namely their ingenuity, beauty, and truth (analogous to organisms’ complex adaptive design), come from the mental computations that “direct”—that is, invent—the “mutations,” and that “acquire”—that is, understand—the “characteristics.” (1997, p. 209) This is close to the truth about some cultural products, but, as we have seen, by insisting that invention and understanding are the sole phenomena at work, Pinker restricts our attention to cultural treasures only, and exaggerates the role of intelligent design in creating these.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style Enlightenment Now EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2021 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright.

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ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style Enlightenment Now EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2021 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: Excerpt on this page from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson.

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Copyright © 2018 by Emily Wilson. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Charts rendered by Ilavenil Subbiah library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Pinker, Steven, 1954– author. Title: Rationality : what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters / Steven Pinker. Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Viking, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021003592 (print) | LCCN 2021003593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561996 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525562009 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593489352 (international edition) Subjects: LCSH: Critical thinking. | Practical reason. | Choice (Psychology) Classification: LCC BF441 .P56 2021 (print) | LCC BF441 (ebook) | DDC 153.4/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003592 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003593 Cover design: Pete Garceau Designed by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0 To Roslyn Wiesenfeld Pinker What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed?

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

anti-communist, British Empire, centre right, discovery of DNA, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Parag Khanna, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

But though once upon a time everyone in linguistics seemed to be responding to the dominant “classical” Chomskyan paradigm, today the minimalist program has put the titan himself into a smaller, more controversial camp, against, for example, his fellow “innatist” (a believer that some elements of grammar are wired in the brain), Steven Pinker. All this should dispel the notion that descriptivists don’t believe in rules. But they see their role as discovering, not pronouncing, them. Some (like Pullum) use real-world evidence. Others (like Chomsky) construct artificial examples to illustrate their points. But what neither does is sit in a chair saying “This is how it is, by Jove, and anyone who doesn’t know this rule is a fool.”

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Boroditsky points out that groups living near the Kuuk Thaayorre, in nearly identical conditions but without this feature in their languages, also lack the ability to stay constantly oriented. Boroditsky’s work puts her in a camp of neo-Whorfians. She strongly believes that different languages train the mind in different ways. Boroditsky rejects the notion—prominently expounded by Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, and others—that human language is fundamentally a single phenomenon, with interesting surface variations but much deeper universals. But the neo-Whorfians argue that language steers—it does not govern—what we perceive and think. Some languages, such as Chinese, have no word for “brother,” only “older brother” and “younger brother.”

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Patel in London will think of himself primarily as an Indian, a British citizen, a Hindu, a Gujarati-speaker, an ex-colonist from Kenya, a member of a specific caste or kin-group, or in some other capacity depends on whether he faces an immigration officer, a Pakistani, a Sikh or Moslem, a Bengali-speaker, and so on. There is no single platonic essence of Patel. He is all these and more at the same time. —ERIC HOBSBAWM Steven Pinker, in his book The Stuff of Thought, has a fascinating chapter about metaphors. “The Metaphor Metaphor” is about cognition itself: some people think that to think is to think in metaphors or that metaphorical thinking is a metaphor for thought. It is a powerful idea. He begins with the famous first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and finds it rife with metaphors: to “dissolve … the bands which have connected them with another” is a metaphor: alliances are bonds.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Human behavioral traits, such as IQ, are profoundly shaped by genetic parentage, and this genetic influence plays a larger role in determining human outcomes than the family and home environment. I began reading more deeply in the field and found that the influence of genetics on behavioral traits had been replicated again and again, not just in IQ but in personality traits like persistence, optimism, even political orientation. Books like Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Judith Rich Harris’s brilliant The Nurture Assumption laid out the importance of biological parentage, and in doing so articulated why so many people resist these conclusions. The relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes.

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In keeping with his empiricist assumptions, Locke believed that all moral rules and laws should be reasoned out rather than be accepted as handed down from the ancients. To make this communal reasoning possible, it was necessary to believe that everyone who would be governed according to these rules was equally capable of contributing. As Steven Pinker notes, Locke didn’t use the term “blank slate,” but rather referred to humans with the similar metaphor of “white paper, void of all characters.” And, as Pinker writes, “Locke’s notion of a blank slate also undermined a hereditary royalty and aristocracy”6—an important facet of his philosophy in a world where many societies were still ruled by kings.

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Not If Parenting Matters, But How It Matters While biological parentage plays an outsize role in a child’s outcomes, the portion of influence left for parenting style, family dynamics, and home effects is often quite small. The notion that parents can control very little of the behavioral traits in their children—that parenting doesn’t have much to do with personality—is consistently one of the most controversial elements of modern behavioral genetics. In an interview with The Guardian, Steven Pinker explained the continuing importance of parenting succinctly: The first reaction of everyone to such evidence was, [Pinker] says, remarkable. “So you are saying it doesn’t matter how I treat my children?” “Of course, it matters. Because parents have an enormous influence on the child’s happiness and wellbeing.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Paul Kedrosky Shifting Baseline Syndrome We don’t have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal. Martin Seligman PERMA The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive. Steven Pinker Positive-Sum Games In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself. Roger Highfield The Snuggle for Existence Competition does not tell the whole story of biology. Dylan Evans The Law of Comparative Advantage At a time of growing protectionism, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of free trade.

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We think of the New York intellectuals who wrote for little magazines like Partisan Review in the 1950s. The most influential thinkers in our own era live at the nexus of the cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology, and information technology. This constellation of thinkers, influenced by people like Daniel Kahneman, Noam Chomsky, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin, do a great deal to set the intellectual temper of the times. They ask the fundamental questions and shape debates outside of their own disciplines and across the public sphere. Many of the leaders of this network are in this book. They are lucky enough to be at the head of fast-advancing fields.

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As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?” I’m looking for questions that inspire answers we can’t possibly predict. My goal is to provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have. This year’s question, suggested by Steven Pinker and seconded by Daniel Kahneman, takes off from a notion of James Flynn, intelligence researcher and emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who defined shorthand abstractions (SHAs) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

“Smoking and Tobacco Use, Fast Facts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, page last reviewed May 21, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/. There are 1,300 deaths a day from smoking-related diseases, about 40,000 a month; almost 3,000 people were killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001. 16. “Steven Pinker on the Case for Optimism,” interview by Chris Anderson, TED2018 conference, https://www.ted.com/talks/the_ted_interview_steven_pinker_on_why_our_pessimism_about_the_world_is_wrong/transcript?language=en. 17. Steven Pinker mentions in the endnotes of Enlightenment Now (New York: Viking, 2018) that this correspondence took place in 1982. 18. Quoted in Denis Campbell, “Stroke Association Warns of Alarming Rise in Number of Victims,” Guardian, May 12, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/12/stroke-association-warns-of-alarming-rise-in-number-of-victims; see also More or Less, May 17, 2015, with the analysis of this claim: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpz78. 19.

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Arguably this temptation lay at the root of the last financial crisis: the sophistication of mathematical risk models obscured the question of how, exactly, risks were being measured, and whether those measurements were something you’d really want to bet your global banking system on. Working on More or Less, I found the problem everywhere. After working with a particular definition for years, the experts we talked to could easily forget that the ordinary listener might have something very different in mind when they heard the term. What the psychologist Steven Pinker calls the “curse of knowledge” is a constant obstacle to clear communication: once you know a subject fairly well, it is enormously difficult to put yourself in the position of someone who doesn’t know it. My colleagues and I weren’t immune. When we started researching some statistical confusion, we’d habitually start by pinning down the definitions—but as we quickly took them for granted, we always had to remind ourselves to explain them to our listeners, too

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Ten times as many US residents died from smoking-related diseases as from terrorism in September 2001, the month that saw the most deadly terrorist attack in the country’s history.15 Even a weekly magazine could honestly have noted at the end of that terrible week that cigarettes had killed more people than al-Qaeda. The newspapers ignored the deaths from cigarettes because they had a bias toward the shocking. It’s possible, of course, for shocking news to be positive. But the psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that good news tends to unfold slowly, while bad news is often more sudden.16 That sounds right—it is, after all, quicker to knock something down than to build it. Following a thought experiment the great psychologist Amos Tversky once shared with a young Pinker,17 imagine the best possible thing that could happen to you today.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

Whether or not you agree with all the points he makes, you must take them very seriously indeed.” —ROGER PENROSE, author of Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe “An engaging analysis of the most important issues facing the world, sprinkled with insight and suffused with wisdom and humanity.” —STEVEN PINKER, author of Enlightenment Now “Are we heading for a utopian or dystopian future? Martin Rees believes it’s down to us. But the one thing we must not do is put the brakes on technology. Science, applied wisely, offers humanity a bright future, but we must act now. In this visionary book, and despite his many fears, Rees adopts a refreshing and cautiously optimistic tone.”

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Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby and competitive game. Back in 2003 I was worried about these hazards and rated the chance of bio error or bio terror leading to a million deaths as 50 percent by 2020. I was surprised at how many of my colleagues thought a catastrophe was even more likely than I did. More recently, however, psychologist/author Steven Pinker took me up on that bet, with a two-hundred-dollar stake. This is a bet that I fervently hope to lose, but I was not surprised that the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature6 should take an optimistic line. Pinker’s fascinating book is infused with optimism. He quotes statistics pointing to a gratifying downward trend in violence and conflict—a decline that has been obscured by the fact that global news networks report disasters that would have been unreported in earlier times.

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Noyce, Seth Lederman, and David H. Evans, ‘Construction of an Infectious Horsepox Virus Vaccine from Chemically Synthesized DNA Fragments’, PLOS One (January 19, 2018): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188453.   5.  Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth (London: Allen Lane, 2017).   6.  Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).   7.  Freeman Dyson, Dreams of Earth and Sky (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015).   8.  An overview of these developments is given in Murray Shanahan, The Technological Singularity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); and Margaret Boden, AI: Its Nature and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Pinker’s “cognitive niche”: The term is not Pinker’s per se, though he’s most closely associated with it. As he points out, the idea and phrase come from the anthropologists John Tooby and Irven DeVore. See: “Listen to Psycholinguist Steven Pinker Speak About ‘Cognitive Niche’ in Early Modern Human Evolution,” transcript, Britannica, May 29, 2015, https://www.britannica.com/video/193409/Psycholinguist-Steven-Pinker-humans-evolution-niche. Metaphorical abstraction: The specific example and quote come from: Steven Pinker, “The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, supplement 2 (May 2010): 8993–99, https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2010/05/04/0914630107.full.pdf.

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But our ability to abstract enabled humans to develop grammatical language, which in turn gave us the ability to coordinate with one another beyond immediate kinship and across space and time. Groundbreaking research in recent years sheds powerful light on the factors behind the success of frames. The work of two professors in particular underscores the role they play. One is Steven Pinker, the Harvard neuroscientist and polymath whose ideas are as distinctive as his flowing silver hair. The other is Michael Tomasello, a Floridian who teaches at Duke University (and whose own gray hair, for the record, is neat and trim). In Pinker’s view, the most important factors include our ability to use cognitive skills for abstract thinking, the development of grammatical language, and humanity’s social tendencies that let us share ideas.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

“suddenly become opaque and bewildering”: Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, 186. 100 billion sentences: Actually, to avoid duplicate sentences, it’s really 10,000 nouns × 1,000 verbs × 9,999 nouns. It would still take more than 30,000 years to go through these sentences. from the linguist Steven Pinker: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994; repr. HarperPerennial, 1995), 205. “This is the cheese”: Quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), 95. Consider Kant Generator: Program via Mark Pilgrim, Dive into Python: Python from Novice to Pro, updated 2004.

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It’s silly to say that language allows for an arbitrarily large number of embedded clauses: that may be technically feasible according to the rules of grammar, but our brains simply can’t parse that much recursion. As much as we would like our languages to be infinite and variegated, we can’t handle sentences with a recursion depth of much more than two or three. Here are some sentences from the linguist Steven Pinker that not only are hard to understand, they don’t even look syntactically correct: The dog the stick the fire burned beat bit the cat. The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable. Each of these has only a small amount of nesting. For example, the first sentence means that the dog—the one that was beaten by a burnt stick—bit the cat.

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

Then again, besieging armies often did not allow surrender on terms, since they “stood to lose all they might gain by loot from a storm attack.” All in all, medieval warfare was not a model of civilized chivalry compared with today’s barbarous warfare—quite the opposite. ANCIENT WARFARE Catch the time machine back to the ancient empires. They lived by war. In fact, for most of human history, writes Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, “unexceptional features of life” included human sacrifice, slavery, conquest, genocide, assassination, rape as a spoil of war, and “homicide as the major form of conflict resolution.” Pinker concludes that “violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.”

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But then in his conclusion Luard declares that wars in these places are more costly now than in the past. He “assumes that the modern events he knows about are larger and more frightening than past events of which he is not aware.” Chapter 2 described these actual trends; the point here is the importance of chronological bias. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker adds that we miss long-term declines in violence because “the decline of violent behavior has been parallelled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence.... From a contemporary vantage point, we see [today’s atrocities, mild by historical standards] as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.”

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And thus “peace organizations obey the same imperative: if they report that the world is getting more peaceful, they make their mission seem less necessary, and donations to them will slack off.” As journalist Gregg Easterbrook puts it, “Most contemporary fund-raising turns on high-decibel assertions that everything’s going to hell. It is not. . . .” Steven Pinker adds, “No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better.” In addition, people have trouble thinking realistically about war trends because war is so traumatic and horrible. Psychological trauma interferes with the ability to measure and compare information accurately.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Governing. 2018. Car Ownership in U.S. Cities Data and Map. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-vehicles-by-city-map.html Grant, R.G. 2017. Flight: The Complete History of Aviation. London: DK. Gray, J. 2015. Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war. The Guardian, March 13, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining GRUMP (The Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project). 2019. The Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project. New York: Columbia University. http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/grump-v1 Guo, J. et al. 2010.

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Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Williams, M. et al. 2009. Environmental impact of the 73ka Toba super eruption in South Asia. Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology 284:295–314. Willick, J. 2018. False dawn. RealClear Books August 3, 2018. https://www.realclearbooks.com/2018/08/03/false_dawn_steven_pinker_against_steven_pinker_16130.html Winegarden, C.R. and J.E. Murray. 2004. Effects of early health-insurance programs on European mortality and fertility trends. Social Science and Medicine 580:1825–1836. Wintle, M. 2000. An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands 1800–1920: Demographic, Economic and Social Transition.

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The first, a relatively restrained version of these views, is one of an ever-better world, of promises that the coming generations will see many repeats of our recent accomplishments, replete with monotonously improving health, rising life expectancies, higher incomes, ever greater surfeits of food and energy, even more affordable mobility, and an even easier access to information—and all of that would be taking place with ever lower impact on the environment. This is the message of the two much acclaimed publications by Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker (Rosling et al. 2018; Pinker 2018). The authors have followed the same basic precept that I did in this book and in other writings since the year 2000 (most notably in Smil 2005, 2006, 2010a, 2013b, 2014, 2017a, and 2020). All of us have assessed many remarkable historic achievements and appraised the current state of modern civilization by focusing on facts and numbers, past and present.

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer

Albert Einstein, clean water, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Flynn Effect, hedonic treadmill, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer: altruism, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, trolley problem, William MacAskill, young professional

Better education may have played some part, but scores have risen most on those questions that test the ability to reason abstractly rather than on the sections that test vocabulary and math. Flynn later proposed that the spread throughout the population of scientific modes of reasoning about problems could contribute to an improvement in reasoning.15 Steven Pinker believes that the improvement in our reasoning abilities may have begun when the development of the printing press spread ideas and information to a much larger proportion of the population. He argues that better reasoning had a positive moral impact too. We became better able to take an impartial stance and detach ourselves from our personal and parochial perspectives.

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Flynn, “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure,” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987): 171–91. 14. U. Neisser, “Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests,” American Scientist 85 (1997): 440–47. 15. James Flynn, What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2011). Chapter 9. Altruism and Happiness 1. http://blog.givewell.org/2013/08/20/excited-altruism/. 2. http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/history/profile-of-founder (2/20/14). 3. Richard Ball and Kateryna Chernova, “Absolute Income, Relative Income, and Happiness,” Social Indicators Research 88 (2008): 497–529.

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I owe this reference and other points in this paragraph to Michael Selgelid, “Governance of Dual-Use Research: An Ethical Dilemma,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87 (2009): 720–23. 15. Luke Muehlhauser, Facing the Intelligence Explosion, chap. 13, available at: intelligenceexplosion.com/2012/intelligence-explosion. 16. Nick Bostrom makes such a proposal at http://www.existential-risk.org/faq.html#10. Afterword 1. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011). 2. For estimates of the death toll in the Syrian civil war, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War. At the time of writing the highest of these estimates is 171,509 for a period of a little over three years, which gives a daily average of 144 deaths.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Because music has such a long history in human society, some scientists believe that an appetite for song is part of the genetic heritage of Homo sapiens, that our brains evolved an interest in musical sounds the way it evolved color perception or the ability to recognize faces. The question of whether music is a cultural invention or an evolutionary adaptation has been a contentious one in the last decade or so, a debate initially triggered by Steven Pinker’s best-selling manifesto of evolutionary psychology, How the Mind Works. Pinker is famous for seeing the mind as a kind of toolbox with a set of specific attributes shaped by the evolutionary pressures of our ancestral environments. But music he considers to be a cultural hack, designed to trigger circuits in the brain that evolved for more pressing tasks.

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And I’m also very grateful to Helen Yentus and Ben Denzer for what may well be my favorite jacket design of all of my books. A number of people were gracious enough to read the book (or sections of it) in draft form. I’m deeply indebted to the comments, corrections, and encouraging words from Alex Ross, Ken Goldberg, Stewart Brand, Steven Pinker, Mike Gazzaniga, Filipe Castro, Jane Root, Fred Hepburn, Chris Anderson, Juliet Blake, Angela Cheng, and Jay Haynes. As always, my wife, Alexa Robinson, read every word—but only improved every other word—with her wisdom and line-editing mojo. Thanks to Franco Moretti for introducing me to the kleptomaniacs of Paris more than two decades ago.

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Fifty Years Ago, the Mall Was Born. America Would Never Be the Same,” The New Yorker 15 (2004). “Southdale was not a suburban alternative”: Ibid. “The service done by the Fort Worth”: Quoted in Hardwick, 181. “giant shopping machine”: Quoted in Hardwick, 211. Chapter 2. Music “We enjoy strawberry cheesecake”: Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1999), 535. “The presence of music”: Nicholas J. Conard, Maria Malina, and Susanne C. Münzel, “New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany,” Nature 460:7256 (2009), 739. Others take the sexual conquests: A fine overview of the arguments for the evolutionary roots of music can be found in Daniel J.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

The Enlightenment was characterized by a burgeoning confidence in the human ability to make sense of the world, to grasp its regularities and fundamental principles, to predict its future, and to manipulate its powers for the benefit of mankind.”27 The most prominent progressive liberals over the past fifty years include Ronald Dworkin, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, and John Rawls. Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article “The End of History?,” which argued that with the fall of communism the question of the ideal form of government had largely been answered in favor of liberal democracy, is an outstanding example of this genre. Rawls, of course, was one of the most influential political philosophers of modern times, while Dworkin was a giant among legal philosophers.

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In that setting, it makes good sense for people to be well armed and to shoot first and ask questions later if someone comes toward them in menacing ways. The growing reach of the various political entities that have populated the planet since the beginning of human history seems to explain in good part why violence around the world has steadily declined over time. As Steven Pinker notes, “The reduction of homicide by government control is so obvious to anthropologists that they seldom document it with numbers.”28 Finally, the story Thomas Hobbes tells in Leviathan is largely consistent with structural realism. Individuals in the state of nature, which is an anarchic system, cannot know each other’s intentions, and they all have the capability to kill each other.

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Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 53. Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936). 54. I discuss the limits of rules under anarchy in John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/95): 5–49. 55. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), chaps. 2–3. 56. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 352. 57. Joseph M. Parent, Uniting States: Voluntary Union in World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sebastian Rosato, Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Ashley J.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

In 1968, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon came along with a study on the Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil that really shook things up. Title? The Fierce People. It described a society ‘in a chronic state of war’. Worse still, it revealed that men who were killers also had more wives and children – makes sense then that violence is in our blood. But the argument wasn’t truly settled until 2011, with the publication of Steven Pinker’s monumental book The Better Angels of Our Nature. It’s the magnum opus of a psychologist who was already ranked among the world’s most influential intellectuals: a massive doorstop of a book with 802 pages in extra-small font and packed with graphs and tables. Perfect for knocking your enemies out cold.

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Fortunately, Pinker reassures his readers, we’ve been ennobled by the ‘artifices of civilization’.11 The invention of farming, writing and the state have served to rein in our aggressive instincts, applying a thick coat of civilisation over our nasty, brutish nature. Under the weight of all the statistics trotted out in this hefty tome, the case seemed closed. For years, I thought Steven Pinker was right, and Rousseau cracked. After all, the results were in and numbers don’t lie. Then I found out about Colonel Marshall. 3 It’s 22 November 1943. Night has fallen on an island in the Pacific, and the Battle of Makin has just begun. The offensive is unfolding as planned when something strange happens.12 Samuel Marshall, colonel and historian, is there to see it.

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True, it might not rate as high as sex, but it certainly wouldn’t inspire a deep aversion. If, on the other hand, Rousseau was right, then nomadic foragers should have been largely peaceable. In that case, we must have evolved our intrinsic antipathy towards bloodshed over the tens of thousands of years that Homo puppy went about populating the earth. Could Steven Pinker, the psychologist of the weighty tome, be mistaken? Could his seductive statistics about the high human toll of prehistoric wars – that I eagerly cited in earlier books and articles – be wrong? I decided to go back to square one. This time, I steered clear of publications intended for a popular readership and delved deeper into the academic literature.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

There is nothing else like it, and it is going to have an impact that extends well beyond the scientific academy.” —Paul Bloom, Trends in Cognitive Sciences “Steven Pinker has written an extremely good book—clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating. I only hope that people study it carefully before rising up ideologically against him. If they do, they will see that the idea of an innately flawed but wonderfully rich human nature is a force for good, not evil.” —Colin McGinn, The Washington Post “Steven Pinker is a man of encyclopedic knowledge and an incisive style of argument. His argument in The Blank Slate is that intellectual life in the West, and much of our social and political policy, was increasingly dominated through the twentieth century by a view of human nature that is fundamentally flawed; that this domination has been backed by something that amounts to academic terrorism (he does not put it quite so strongly): and that we would benefit substantially from a more realistic view.

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PENGUIN BOOKS THE BLANK SLATE Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has earned prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association. Pinker has also received many awards for his teaching at MIT and for his books How the Mind Works (which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and The Language Instinct. He is an elected fellow of several scientific societies, associate editor of Cognition, and a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

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Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him.” —Richard Dawkins, The Times Literary Supplement “The Blank Slate is not dismal at all, but unexpectedly bracing. It feels a bit like being burgled. You’re shocked, your things are gone, but you can’t help thinking about how you’re going to replace them. What Steven Pinker has done is break into our common human home and steal our illusions.” —John Morrish, The Independent “As a brightly lighted path between what we would like to believe and what we need to know, [The Blank Slate] is required reading. Pinker presents an unanswerable case for accepting that man can be, as he is, both wired and free.”

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anton Chekhov, Bob Geldof, Celtic Tiger, clean water, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Steven Pinker, urban planning

When church influence weakened, the products of the body—which Puritan influence has successfully turned into a foul, shameful thing—stepped in instead to give us our worst words. There must be something wrong with it, after all, when all we do is get rid of it as fast as possible. Meanwhile, a plentiful supply of euphemisms can serve as linguistic stand-ins. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker lists a dozen categories of euphemism, including taboo (shit), medical (stool, bowel movement) and formal (feces, excrement, excreta, defecation, ordure). The category that’s missing is “conversational.” There is no neutral word for what humans produce at least once a day, usually unfailingly.

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A place where all sorts of human needs and habits intersect: fear, disgust, conversation, grooming, sex. It’s an ambiguous space that is not quite in the public eye, though the public uses it. A place of refuge and sociability, of necessity and criminality. How we are allowed to behave in a public necessity even influences everyday speech. Steven Pinker, in his explanation of taboo words, quotes a spectrum of excreta-related swearing. Shit is less acceptable than piss, which is less acceptable than fart. And so on through to snot and spit, “which is not taboo at all. That’s the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public.”

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Borody, “Flora Power: Fecal Bacteria Cure Chronic C. difficile Diarrhea,” American Journal of Gastroenterology 11 (August 1995): 3028–29. You don’t ever see or smell a thing Megan Levy, “Grandma Saved by Daughter’s Poo,” Daily Telegraph, November 29, 2007. Once people got talking about bathrooms “Examining the Unmentionables,” Time, May 20, 1966. A dozen categories of euphemism Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 351. Without talking frankly about shit WSSCC, Listening (Geneva: WSSCC, 2004), p. 44. [Humanity’s] wiser course Freud quotes from the last scene of Faust, where the “more perfected angels” lament “Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest/zu tragen peinlich/und wär’ er von Asbest/er ist nicht reinlich” (We still have a trace of the Earth, which is distressing to bear; and though it were of asbestos, it is not cleanly).

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

NOTES INTRODUCTION: FROM ATOMS TO PEOPLE TO ECONOMIES 1. In this context, the word atom is used to refer mainly to discrete particles, which could be either atoms or molecules. 2. Two great books describing the interaction between evolution and behavior are Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003). 3. Information theory also has a quantum version, known as quantum information theory. The existence of quantum information theory, however, does not invalidate the claim that classical information is a concept that works at a range of scales that is unusual for other theories. 4.

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The point here is that the need for social learning slows down knowledge accumulation because it is hard for individuals to find the social learning opportunities they require to acquire each specific chunk of knowledge. 10. A great book eloquently describing the role of genes on human behavior is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003). 11. During the last couple of decades the political scientists and biologists working in the field of genopolitics have amassed an impressive amount of evidence connecting political preferences and genetics. These studies have hinged largely on exploiting data on identical and nonidentical twins, which they have matched with voter records and political party affiliations.

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Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 19. M. Pagel, “Human Language as a Culturally Transmitted Replicator,” Nature Reviews Genetics 10, no. 6 (2009): 405–415. 20. Ronen Shahar, Bruno Goncalves, Kevin Hu, Alessandro Vespignani, Steven Pinker, and César A. Hidalgo, “Links That Speak: The Global Language Network and Its Association to Global Fame,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (10.1073/pnas.1410931111(2014)). 21. G. F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-shaped America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 22.

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

Economic pressures are clearly part of the story, but they do not explain the whole. 5. According to the US Justice Department’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, the nationwide violent-crime rate in 2017 was the lowest since 1970. 6. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018); Steven Pinker, “The Enlightenment Is Working,” Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2018. 7. This view has long been identified with the communitarian Left (the work of Harvard’s Michael Sandel offers some examples), but it has also expressed itself in recent years on the Right in a series of sharp critiques of the liberal tradition as a foundation for American life.

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But even those declines don’t come close to explaining the source of people’s anxiety (and as noted above, they actually seem to be symptoms as much as causes of a crisis of isolation and despair).5 In fact, some observers have argued that the frustration and anxiety that seem to overwhelm us are rooted in imaginary grievances and are themselves the problem. Harvard’s Steven Pinker takes the complaints that roil our social life to be just irritable gestures of self-indulgent ingratitude. In a recent book, he reviews mountains of data on wealth, health, safety, and choice and concludes that populist outrage on all sides of our politics is detached from reality. And it is dangerous too, he says.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

If we were indeed prepared to lash out to spite logic, the laws of nature, and inevitability itself, this would make us tragic beasts. Yet, as we will see, such apparently nonsensical behavior can also have benefits. We are at least gloriously tragic. The solutions to the formidable global problems we face, argues another Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, lie in reason.2 This is consistent with the Enlightenment principle that we must use reason to understand our world and overcome our follies. After dismissing faith, authority, and gut feelings as “generators of delusions,” Pinker argues that the use of reason when making decisions is “non-negotiable.”

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Existential spite would lead humans to be defined not only by their rationality but also by their willingness to oppose it.33 Existential spite, paying a cost to retain a feeling of freedom in the face of the dictates of reason, would appear to have only downsides. When it comes to the laws of nature, the house always wins. Existential spite could only end in calamity. Or would it? There are two objections to this assertion. First, it can be rational to refuse reason. Steven Pinker’s masterful ode to reason, Enlightenment Now, claims reason as the only solution to humanity’s problems. I don’t doubt that he is right, in the long run. But reason has a dark side. It is the only acceptable form of domination left in our society. The better-reasoned argument wins through what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls “unforced force” (zwanglose Zwang).34 Yet unforced force is still force.

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Mance, “Britain Has Had Enough of Experts, Says Gove,” Financial Times, June 3, 2016, www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c. 36. J. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 26, 102. 37. See, for example, Steven Pinker’s lecture on Bayesian reasoning, Spring 2019–2020: https://harvard.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=921ab5c6-3f83-450d-b23f-ab3b0140eeae. 38. Berlin, “Four Concepts of Liberty.” 39. B. Wootton, In a World I Never Made: Autobiographical Reflections (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), 279. 40.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

Newton's law that objects stay in motion unless positively stopped is counter-intuitive. So is Galileo's discovery that, when there is no air resistance, light objects fall at the same rate as heavy objects. So is the fact that solid matter, even a hard diamond, consists almost entirely of empty space. Steven Pinker gives an illuminating discussion of the evolutionary origins of our physical intuitions in How the Mind Works (1998). More profoundly difficult Eire the conclusions of quantum theory, overwhelmingly supported by experimental evidence to a stupefyingly convincing number of decimal places, yet so alien to the evolved human mind that even professional physicists don't understand them in their intuitive thoughts.

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Well, I'd be surprised if it quite came to that, and not only because the double helix model is now very unlikely to be disproved. But in science, as in any other field, there really are dangers of becoming intoxicated by symbolism, by meaningless resemblances, and led farther and farther from the truth, rather than towards it. Steven Pinker reports that he is troubled by correspondents who have discovered that everything in the universe comes in threes: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; protons, neutrons and electrons; masculine, feminine and neuter; Huey, Dewey, and Louie; and so on, for page after page. How the Mind Works (1998) Slightly more seriously, Sir Peter Medawar, the distinguished British zoologist and polymath whom I quoted before, invents a great new universal principle of complementarity (not Bohr's) according to which there is an essential inner similarity in the relationships that hold between antigen and antibody, male and female, electropositive and electronegative, thesis and antithesis, and so on.

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But 'typically' is not the same thing as 'universally', and the scientific truths that men and women eventually discover (albeit there may be statistical differences in the kinds of research that they are drawn to) will be accepted equally by reasonable people of both sexes, once they have been clearly established by members of either sex. And no, reason and logic are not masculine instruments of oppression. To suggest that they are is an insult to women, as Steven Pinker has said: Among the claims of 'difference feminists' are that women do not engage in abstract linear reasoning, that they do not treat ideas with skepticism or evaluate them through rigorous debate, that they do not argue from general moral principles, and other insults. How the Mind Works (1998) The most ridiculous example of feminist bad science may be Sandra Harding's description of Newton's Principia as a 'rape manual'.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

Sure Deep Blue can occasionally beat grandmasters (and no doubt elephants) at chess, but it’ll never be able to find shade or express its political views on Vladimir Putin. So, does Deep Blue think? Well, sort of. A bit. But we still haven’t got anything like Star Wars’ C-3PO, the multipurpose smart machine that we consider a real personality. Or as Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, wrote: The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognising a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.

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But the figures speak for themselves and they speak volumes. It’s an astonishing and underreported fact that violence is declining and has been for centuries. This goes against popular sentiment that the past was somehow safer and simpler – a time without nuclear weapons or helicopter gunships, with no violent movies or 18-rated computer games. Steven Pinker sums up this misconception when he describes it as ‘the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions.’ In the last thirty-five years, anthropologists like Carol Ember and Lawrence Keeley have been scouring the archaeological record and studying tribal cultures with results that seriously question the idea that the trappings of civilisation corrupt us toward violence.

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Recent research by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington and Harvard Medical School suggests that in some cases war deaths may be three times more than WHO estimates. All that said, the long view is that the underlying trend in violent deaths is steeply downward. Even if we double, triple or quadruple the recorded rates of slaughter for the last century we’re still killing far fewer people per capita than our ancestors. As Steven Pinker says, ‘We must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.’ My hunch is that one of the things we’re getting right is becoming increasingly connected, and being so we find it harder to kill each other. It’s a popular view and one that seems to make instinctive sense.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

While some on the far right might want to halt progress or even consider it to have gone too far already, and some on the far left consider progress a myth and insist that life in liberal democracies is still as oppressive as it ever has been (thanks, Foucault), liberalism both appreciates progress and is optimistic that it will continue. Within the liberal spectrum, which encompasses people on both the political right and left, everyone agrees that liberalism implies progress, though the speed and means of that progress are up for debate. For cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, it is vital that we appreciate how much progress we have made in liberal democracies—and that we owe that progress to Enlightenment humanism—if we wish it to continue: A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones.

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“Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women…. [G]eneralizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And notions like ‘proper role’ and ‘natural place’ are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.” Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2002), 340. 12.E. O. Wilson, “From Sociobiology to Sociology,” in Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 98. 13.Some trans scholars and activists have recently begun to call upon science, as neuroscience has increasingly provided evidence that trans people’s experience of their gender as different from their sex is biologically based.

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Harding was perhaps most influential for developing the idea of “strong objectivity” in standpoint theory and is perhaps most famous for referring to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual” in her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism, which she later claimed to have regretted writing. Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 53.Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Penguin Books, 2019). 54.Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle, “Relationship of Gender Differences in Preferences to Economic Development and Gender Equality,” Science 362, no. 6412 (2018): eaas9899. 7 Disability and Fat Studies 1.This strange notation is relatively common in disciplines that use postmodern methods and means.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The insular community served as an incubator of extreme, irrational views.”50 As with online outrage, so also with canceling: the ostensible target, whether a person like Rushdie or Tuvel or a piece of work like The Satanic Verses or Tuvel’s article, is not the campaign’s real subject at all, but rather a convenient object for a show of group solidarity. If Rushdie had not come along, some other target might have served just as well. In the summer of 2020, almost 600 “members of the linguistic community,” as they called themselves, sent a letter to the Linguistic Society of America demanding that Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard linguist, be removed from “both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts.” They could not cite any examples of professional misconduct or assert plausibly that Pinker was not distinguished or expert. Instead, they had combed through Pinker’s writings and Twitter feed and come up with a handful of complaints which were trivial if not absurd (Pinker had used the phrase “urban crime,” had cited a Black scholar on the decline of overt racism, had described a public shooter as “mild-mannered,” and so on).

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The indictment’s arbitrariness—one might comfortably say silliness—was part of its point: “No one engaged in public life could be confident of avoiding speech that might be deemed problematic by the standards used in the Pinker letter,” wrote Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.51 Pinker was a tenured professor with a national following, too big to take down—but that, too, was part of the point. In an important respect, the ostensible target—Steven Pinker—was not the campaign’s real target, or at least not its main target. The real target was the onlooking audience of much less powerful people who understood that they might be next, and that if Pinker could be targeted, certainly they could be. “This letter wasn’t really about Pinker at all,” wrote a graduate student named Shaun Cammack.

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Quoted in Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 110. Hat tip to Jacob Mchangama, whose podcast history of free speech (“Clear and Present Danger”) is invaluable. 2. I exaggerate, but not all that much. See, for example, Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking, 2018). 3. See Samuel Fleischacker, Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Fleischacker argues that Smith’s notion of empathy is distinctive in having a cognitive as well as emotional component: we can “enter in imagination into the circumstances of others … thereby gain[ing] insight into what it is like to occupy their perspective.” 4.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, autism spectrum disorder, Drosophila, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, framing effect, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, nocebo, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Shai Danziger, Skype, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

It helps define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast. This view of emotions has been around for millennia in various forms. Plato believed a version of it. So did Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Buddha, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Today, prominent thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama also offer up descriptions of emotions rooted in the classical view. The classical view is found in virtually every introductory college textbook on psychology, and in most magazine and newspaper articles that discuss emotion. Preschools throughout America hang posters displaying the smiles, frowns, and pouts that are supposed to be the universal language of the face for recognizing emotions.

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A dog is never a cat. Likewise, all varieties of the classical view consider emotions like sadness and fear to have distinct essences. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, for example, writes that an emotion’s essence is a circuit in the subcortical regions of your brain. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes that emotions are like mental organs, analogous to body organs for specialized functions, and that an emotion’s essence is a set of genes. The evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides and the psychologist Paul Ekman assume that each emotion has an innate, unobservable essence, which they refer to as a metaphorical “program.”

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Others have made this point before me, but it’s time to take it seriously. We don’t know every detail about how the mind and brain work, but we know enough to say definitively that neither biological determinism nor cultural determinism is correct. The boundary of the skin is artificial and porous. As Steven Pinker so nicely writes, “It is now simply misguided to ask whether humans are flexible or programmed, whether behavior is universal or varies across cultures, whether acts are learned or innate.” The devil is in the details, and the details give us the theory of constructed emotion.34 … Now that the final nails are being driven into the classical view’s coffin in this era of neuroscience, I would like to believe that this time, we’ll actually push aside essentialism and begin to understand the mind and brain without ideology.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

When referring to individual bits or varieties of data and contrasting them among one another, it may be sensible to favor the plural as in “these data are not all equally reliable”; whereas, when referring to data as one mass, it may be better to use the singular as in “this data is reliable.” According to Steven Pinker, in English today, the latter usage has become usual.9 The fact that a standard English dictionary defines a “datum” as a “piece of information,” a fragment of another linguistically complex mass noun, further strengthens this intuition.10 As Pinker argues, however much priggish pleasure professors may take in pointing out that the term data in Latin is plural, foreign plurals may be deployed in English as singulars.

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On the usage of “data” in contemporary English, see American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed. 37 38 Daniel Rosenberg Technical literature on the subject includes the following: Chaim Zins, “Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 4 (2007): 479–493; Carter A. Daniel and Charles C. Smith, “An Argument for Data as a Collective Singular,” Business Communication Quarterly 45, no. 3 (September 1982): 31–33;Walter E. Meyers, College Composition and Communication 23, no. 2 (May 1972): 155–169. 9. Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 178. 10. Oxford Dictionaries Online, “Datum,” http://oxforddictionaries.com (accessed February 10, 2012). See also Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 103–138. 11.

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In this vast literature, see, for example, Nicholson Baker, The Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Vintage, 2002); Robert Darnton, The Case for Books (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009). 16. Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331 (2011), published online ahead of print: December 16, 2010; Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Joe Jackson, Tina Tang, and Martin Nowak, “Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Language,” Nature 449 (2007).

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Autistic people, even if not formally diagnosed, often hide in the shadows, avoiding the limelight, and systemize to such an extreme that they are more likely to invent something, though they may not even put their name to their invention. They just systemize for the pure pleasure of systemizing. Systemizing is wired into our brains by evolution, and it is wired into the brains of autistic people to such a high degree that they can’t help but do it all day long. Psychologist Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct about how language is an instinct for humans just as much as web-spinning is an instinct for spiders: “Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades.

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Eldrid-Cohen (2016), “Historical figures who may have been on the autism spectrum,” The Art of Autism, October 20, the-art-of-autism.com/historical-figures-who-may-have-been-on-the-autism-spectrum/; and “Was Nikola Tesla autistic?,” AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEdu.org, www.applied behavioranalysisedu.org/was-nikola-tesla-autistic/. Note that although the latter website is related to applied behavioral analysis, this is not relevant to Tesla’s biography. 20. See P. Galanes (2018), “The mind meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker,” New York Times, January 27; and S. Levy (2019), “Inside Bill’s Brain calls BS on Malcolm Gladwell’s outliers theory,” Wired, September 20. 21. The sigma character is taken from Wikipedia, “The common Six Sigma symbol,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma#/media/File:Six_sigma-2.svg; see also D.

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Peretz et al. (2002), “Congenital amusia: A disorder of fine grained pitch perception,” Neuron 33, 185–191; J. Ayotte et al. (2002), “Congenital amusia,” Brain 125, 238–251; and M. Thaut et al. (2014), “Human brain basis of musical rhythm perception: Common and distinct neural substrates for meter, tempo, and pattern,” Brain Sciences 4, 428–452. 10. I have to briefly deal with the claim by linguist Steven Pinker that music is “auditory cheesecake.” See S. Pinker (1994), The language instinct: How the mind creates language (New York: William Morrow). What he means is that our love of music is simply a by-product of something more basic, such as hearing or spoken language, both of which were adaptive. When something is a by-product of evolution, it is called an “exaptation” rather than an adaptation.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The first piece of evidence to support the notion that language begot our highly evolved consciousness is genetic. In the late 1990s, a team of British scientists17 isolated a gene that is crucially involved in the development of speech and language. Dubbed ‘FOXP2’, it also became known as the ‘language gene’. Steven Pinker, the renowned MIT psychologist, has called the finding the smoking gun for the relationship between genes and language.18 The gene exists in other mammals too, including chimpanzees, but seems to have undergone a significant mutation in humans around 200,000 years ago, a period that roughly coincides with the advent of H. sapiens sapiens.

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The discovery of FOXP2 provides some validation of the language theory proposed by Noam Chomsky, about the connection between genes and language. Chomsky observed that children are born with an innate knowledge about language and grammatical structure, which had to be biologically determined. According to his language theory, we are hardwired for language, a notion shared and supported by Steven Pinker and other neurolinguists. We saw how human brains became increasingly larger as our biological lineage made its epic journey though time; from 750 to 1250 cc for earliest H. erectus to 1200 to1750 cc for Neanderthals. Brain size reached a plateau between 1.8 million and 500,000 years ago, and rapidly increased as archaic H. sapiens appeared.

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He writes: ‘… it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence test or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility’.30 Although computational methods can reproduce high-level reasoning – as demonstrated in the case of expert systems – research in robotics has shown that sensorimotor skills remain a huge challenge. Coding cognition has proved to be an easy problem. The really hard problem in AI is coding sensing and action. According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, this is the most significant discovery about AI.31 It suggests that in the second machine age, while lawyers and doctors may struggle on social benefits, gardeners and janitors will remain in business and thrive. But why is this so? Many AI researchers, including former MIT professor and current robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks, point out that human sensorimotor skills are not related to cognition but are the product of millions of years of evolution.32 Despite the success achieved in AI by approaching the problem of intelligence from a different angle (the ‘aeroplane’ way), one would really need to reverse-engineer evolution in order to reproduce the full capabilities of a human brain including self-awareness and high-levels of consciousness.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

See also Richard G. Klein, “Archeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2000): 17–36, which argues that this sudden change must have been caused by a genetic mutation that permitted symbolic thought. 16. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 4–5. 17. Ibid., 44–73. 18. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, no. 4 (1990): 707–84. 19. Daniel Margoliash and Howard C. Nusbaum, “Language: The Perspective from Organismal Biology,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 12 (2009): 505–10; Morten H.

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After all, if there is a language instinct, it must be embedded so deeply in the human psyche that we would have been talking to each other at least a few hundred thousand years ago. So let's see what light this other debate sheds on the problem. A Language Instinct? The Language Instinct is a popular book written by renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Pinker's title says it all, and he makes no bones about his position in the language debate. “Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works,” he writes. “Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.”

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In time, attacking Sapir-Whorf became a favorite path to academic tenure, until the entire theory became completely discredited.9 In place of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis arose what is known as the nativist view, which argues that the grammar of language is innate to humankind. As discussed earlier, the theory of universal grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and popularized more recently by Steven Pinker, posits that humans have a “language instinct” with grammatical rules coded into our DNA. This theory has dominated the field of linguistics for decades. “There is no scientific evidence,” writes Pinker, “that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking.” Pinker and other adherents to this theory, however, are increasingly having to turn a blind eye—not just to the Guugu Yimithirr but to the accumulating evidence of a number of studies showing the actual effects of language on people's patterns of thought.10 Frustration…or Stenahoria?

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

DEDICATION To Mom and Dad CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication Foreword by Steven Pinker Introduction: The Outlines of a Revolution PART I: DATA, BIG AND SMALL 1. Your Faulty Gut PART II: THE POWERS OF BIG DATA 2. Was Freud Right? 3. Data Reimagined Bodies as Data Words as Data Pictures as Data 4. Digital Truth Serum The Truth About Sex The Truth About Hate and Prejudice The Truth About the Internet The Truth About Child Abuse and Abortion The Truth About Your Facebook Friends The Truth About Your Customers Can We Handle the Truth? 5. Zooming In What’s Really Going On in Our Counties, Cities, and Towns?

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No experiment using reaction time or pupil dilation or functional neuroimaging could ever have turned up that fact. Everybody will enjoy Everybody Lies. With unflagging curiosity and an endearing wit, Stephens-Davidowitz points to a new path for social science in the twenty-first century. With this endlessly fascinating window into human obsessions, who needs a cerebroscope? —Steven Pinker, 2017 INTRODUCTION THE OUTLINES OF A REVOLUTION Surely he would lose, they said. In the 2016 Republican primaries, polling experts concluded that Donald Trump didn’t stand a chance. After all, Trump had insulted a variety of minority groups. The polls and their interpreters told us few Americans approved of such outrages.

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He is responsible for a huge amount of what is good about the Times columns that have my name on them. Other players on the team for these columns include Bill Marsh, whose graphics continue to blow me away, Kevin McCarthy, and Gita Daneshjoo. This book includes passages from these columns, reprinted with permission. Steven Pinker, who kindly agreed to write the foreword, has long been a hero of mine. He has set the bar for a modern book on social science—an engaging exploration of the fundamentals of human nature, making sense of the best research from a range of disciplines. That bar is one I will be struggling to reach my entire life.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

., “Potential Indirect Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Use of Emergency Departments for Acute Life-Threatening Conditions—United States, January–May 2020,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR Morb Mortal Weekly Report 69 (2020):795–800; and Will Feuer, “Doctors Worry the Coronavirus Is Keeping Patients Away from US Hospitals as ER Visits Drop: ‘Heart Attacks Don’t Stop,’ ” CNBC, April 14, 2020. 80 swine flu could kill 65,000 in Britain . . . some 450 Britons died: Jonathan Ford, “The Battle at the Heart of British Science over Coronavirus,” Financial Times, April 15, 2020; David D. Kirkpatrick, Matt Apuzzo, and Selam Gebrekidan, “Europe Said It Was Pandemic-Ready. Pride Was Its Downfall,’ New York Times, July 20, 2020. 81 overblown panic may have contributed: Ibid. 81 an April 2020 interview: Steven Pinker, “Alan Alda & Steven Pinker: Secrets of Great Communication,” 92nd Street Y, April 23, 2020. 81 a science lesson: Jhag Balla, “This Viral Angela Merkel Clip Explains the Risks of Loosening Social Distancing Too Fast,” Vox, April 17, 2020; and Katrin Bennhold, “Relying on Science and Politics, Merkel Offers a Cautious Virus Re-entry Plan,” New York Times, April 15, 2020. 82 “universal masking”: Lili Pike, “Why 15 US States Suddenly Made Masks Mandatory,” Vox, May 29, 2020. 82 fundamentally disingenuous: For one account of how these missteps could have been avoided, see: Zeynep Tufekci, “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired,” New York Times, March 15, 2020. 82 US surgeon general admitted: On CBS Face the Nation.

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Most Americans think of science by its endpoints—a discovery or breakthrough or invention. They look at dazzling pictures of galaxies and read of miracle drugs. But science is really all about the process of learning and discovering, with many failures and disappointments. The Harvard scholar Steven Pinker warned in an April 2020 interview that scientists’ “earned authority” may be breaking down, so that much of the public may “think that those people in the white coats are just another priesthood.” Pinker called on advocates of science to start “lifting the hood and showing how it works,” through a process of “open debate and attempts at falsification.”

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

There is strong desire for a clear explanation of why nearly all forms of crime have moderated: especially, for a narrative tied to single causes. But it may be that no one can fully explain the remarkable decline of crime—a frustrating conclusion unless the theories of the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, to be addressed at the close of this chapter, ultimately will provide the explanation. Why war is in decline seems, by contrast, straightforward. JOSHUA GOLDSTEIN, A RESEARCHER AT the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has spent years swimming upstream against conventional wisdom by documenting the decline of combat: there has been no direct great-power combat since the Korean War armistice of 1953, and no proxy great-power combat since the Soviet Union folded in 1991.

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Some awful reversal of fortune may be in our future; worse, one of the nuclear powers may make The Big Mistake. For now, we live in a world where all forms of violence are in at least mild decline—some in sharp decline—compared to population rise. And that leads to the theories of Michael Tomasello and Steven Pinker. * * * TOMASELLO STUDIES SOCIAL COGNITION AT Duke University and at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. His research finds that although human beings are perceived as insensible to the needs of their fellows, men and women have incentives to behave altruistically: this not only makes for an improved society; it also increases the individual’s chance of getting ahead.

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The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks this issue: See the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Military Expenditure Database maintained at www.sipri.org/databases/milex. Not long before her 1989 death, the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman wrote: Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, said that year: Steven Pinker, “Colombia’s Milestone in World Peace,” New York Times, August 26, 2016. The Yale University historian Timothy Snyder has noted: Timothy Snyder, Black Earth (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015). The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem introduced the concept: Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco (New York: Harcourt, 1987).

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

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2018 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright.

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ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles The Sense of Style EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2018 by Steven Pinker Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Charts rendered by Ilavenil Subbiah ISBN 9780525427575 (hardcover) ISBN 9780698177888 (ebook) ISBN 9780525559023 (international edition) Version_1 TO Harry Pinker (1928–2015) optimist Solomon Lopez (2017– ) and the 22nd century Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.

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Charts rendered by Ilavenil Subbiah ISBN 9780525427575 (hardcover) ISBN 9780698177888 (ebook) ISBN 9780525559023 (international edition) Version_1 TO Harry Pinker (1928–2015) optimist Solomon Lopez (2017– ) and the 22nd century Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind. —Baruch Spinoza Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. —David Deutsch CONTENTS ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION EPIGRAPH LIST OF FIGURES PREFACE PART I: ENLIGHTENMENT CHAPTER 1. DARE TO UNDERSTAND! CHAPTER 2. ENTRO, EVO, INFO CHAPTER 3. COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENTS PART II: PROGRESS CHAPTER 4. PROGRESSOPHOBIA CHAPTER 5. LIFE CHAPTER 6.

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

Germany’s biggest and most influential magazine, Der Spiegel, said the Pirahã, a “small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers. Even Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, two of the most influential theorists on the subject, are still arguing over what it means for the study of human language that the Pirahã don’t use subordinate clauses.”134 The British newspaper the Independent zeroed in on recursion. “The Pirahã language has none of [recursion’s] features; every sentence stands alone and refers to a single event.

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But in 2009, after Everett’s book was published, he went all out in a paper entitled “Universal Grammar Is Dead” for the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and confronted Chomsky head-on: “The idea of a biologically evolved, universal grammar with linguistic content is a myth.”152 “Myth” became the new word. Vyvyan Evans of Wales’s Bangor University expanded it into a book, The Language Myth, in 2014. He came right out and rejected Chomsky’s and Steven Pinker’s idea of an innate, natural-born “language instinct.” In a blurb, Michael Fortescue of the University of Copenhagen added, “Evans’ rebuttal of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics provides an excellent antidote to popular textbooks where it is assumed that the Chomskyan approach to linguistic theory…has somehow been vindicated once and for all.”153 Thanks to Everett, linguists were beginning to breathe life into the words of the anti-Chomskyans of the twentieth century who had been written off as cranks or contrarians, such as Larry Trask, a linguist at England’s University of Sussex.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

If evolution gave men and women different sets of desires and skills, for example, that would be an obstacle to achieving gender equality in many professions. If nativism could be used to justify existing power structures, then nativism must be wrong. (Again, this is a logical error, but this is the way righteous minds work.) The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s. In his 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker describes the ways scientists betrayed the values of science to maintain loyalty to the progressive movement. Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14 Nowhere was the betrayal of science more evident than in the attacks on Edward O.

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I date the rebirth to 1992 because that is when an influential volume appeared with the provocative title The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. The book was edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. Other leading figures in the field included David Buss, Doug Kenrick, and Steven Pinker. Morality (particularly cooperation and cheating) has been an important area of research in evolutionary psychology since the beginning. 25. I call this model “Jeffersonian” because it allows the “head” and the “heart” to reach independent and conflicting moral judgments, as happened in his letter to Cosway.

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I’m oversimplifying here; species of bees, ants, wasps, and termites vary in the degree to which they have achieved the status of superorganisms. Self-interest is rarely reduced to absolute zero, particularly in bees and wasps, which retain the ability to breed under some circumstances. See Hölldobler and Wilson 2009. 15. I thank Steven Pinker for pointing this out to me, in a critique of an early version of this chapter. Pinker noted that war in pre-state societies is nothing like our modern image of men marching off to die for a cause. There’s a lot of posturing, a lot of Glauconian behavior going on as warriors strive to burnish their reputations.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

It appears we'll have some time to wait before we start seeing popular books with titles like He Really Is Driving You Crazy: Understanding Theta Wave Activity, or Bitch: The Science behind the Savagery. But genetics is as important as neuroscience in understanding the successfully sinister. Groundbreaking books such as Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate have served as fulcrums to help swing researchers off their centuries-long love affair with the idea that people are naturally good.12 Under this well-intentioned ideology, “evil” people were believed to be created and shaped solely by their environment. The advantage of this belief is that it gives researchers the comfort of thinking that humans have direct control over evil—that by somehow reengineering the social environment, human evil can be eliminated.

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Chomsky gave credence to the idea that the brain was composed of a modular set of units, with specialized, innately unique areas that were responsible for learning different things, such as language, mathematics, or the various motor skills. Another revolutionary investigator, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, cut his professional teeth on research related to language before moving on to write The Blank Slate. Pinker's brilliant book, along with the Judith Rich Harris's seminal The Nurture Assumption, was to help redefine psychology so that nature—genetics—was firmly shown to play an equal or even more crucial role than nurture—that is, the environment.

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Tony Becher and Paul Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2001); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 12. Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption (New York: Free Press, 1998); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). CHAPTER 1: IN SEARCH OF MACHIAVELLI 1. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, in L. J. Peter, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p. 123. 2. Richard Christie, “Why Machiavelli?” in Studies in Machiavellianism, ed.

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, dark triade / dark tetrad, Defenestration of Prague, domesticated silver fox, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, impulse control, income inequality, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, twin studies, ultimatum game

My experience in the Congo seems to be the norm for our species. * * * — From a comparative perspective, the rate of physical aggression among humans “at home” may be low, although from a moral perspective, it is still higher than most of us would wish. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, among others, has documented a decline in the probability of dying from violence within many countries over the past millennium, a trend for which we should all be grateful. Undoubtedly, life for millions of people would be more pleasant if the rate continued to decline.14 Nevertheless, from an evolutionary perspective, the human rate of physical aggression within social communities is already strikingly low.

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Proactive aggression is not produced by individuals in a fit of rage, or in an alcoholic haze, or out of a testosterone-induced failure of cortical control. It is a considered act by an individual or coalition that takes into account the likely costs. It has a strong tendency to disappear when it does not pay. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker testified to that effect. In his Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker documented in detail the multiple ways in which violence has declined in the most recent decades, centuries, and millennia. Almost all of the iniquities that Pinker wrote about stemmed from coalitionary proactive violence. If we continue to improve the protections in our societies, the level of damage will continue to recede.

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For reviewing individual chapters or sections, I similarly thank Ofer Bar-Yosef, Christopher Boehm, Fiery Cushman, Madeleine Geiger, Marc Hauser, Karl Heider, Rose McDermott, Dale Peterson, Matt Ridley, Kate Ross, John Shea, Barbara Smuts, Ian Wrangham, and Christoph Zollikofer. For advice on specific points, I am grateful to Johan van der Dennen, Paul Crook, Sylvia Kaiser, Steven Pinker, and Adrian Raine. For sharing unpublished data, I thank Cat Hobaiter, Nicole Simmons, Martin Surbeck, and Michael Wilson. In addition to those mentioned above, conversations and correspondence with numerous other friends, family, and colleagues over the years have been critically helpful.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

King, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan (1911; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004). 14. Bill Gates, “My New Favorite Book of All Time,” Gates Notes Blog, 26 January 2018, https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now. 15. Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s Ideas about Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why,” Patterns of Meaning, 17 May 2018, https://patternsofmeaning.com/2018/05/17/steven-pinkers-ideas-about-progress-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why/. 16. “Meaning of feitorias (Portuguese),” Wiktionary, accessed 3 July 2019, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/feitoria#Portuguese. 17. Danny Dorling, Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists, rev. ed.

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12 In the northern plains of China, over one hundred generations are thought to have lived much the same life, stable and sustainable, at a high population density, and that kind of society is only possible when the elites are controlled. Out-of-control elites lead to war.13 There are always a few people who seemingly can’t help sucking up to elites and who suggest that all will be well if we just allow a few people “who know what is best for us” to be in control. In 2018 Steven Pinker wrote a book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, in which he suggested that the human race has never had it so good as it does today. Bill Gates promptly declared it his “new favorite book of all time.”14 It is not hard to see how Pinker’s story is wrong.

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Department of Health Education and Welfare, 1968) table 19 (p. 138), table 80 (p. 876), http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsrates1940_60.pdf. 16. Max Roser and Mohamed Nagdy, “Nuclear Weapons,” Our World in Data, accessed 4 September 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons/#note-3. Figure 5-22 is based on Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London: Penguin, 2011). 17. Statistics New Zealand, “Sure to Rise: Tracking Bread Prices in the CPI,” Stats NZ On-line, 2011, http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/economic_indicators/prices_indexes/tracking-bread-prices-in-the-cpi.aspx. 18.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Urbanization, industrialization, and energy consumption have been overwhelmingly positive for human beings as a whole. From preindustrial times to today, life expectancy extended from thirty to seventy-three years.34 Infant mortality declined from 43 to 4 percent.35 Before 1800, notes Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, most people were desperately poor. “The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today (about $500 a year in international dollars),” he writes, “and almost 95 percent of the world lived in what counts today as ‘extreme poverty’ (less than $1.90 a day).” The Industrial Revolution constituted what Pinker calls the “Great Escape” from poverty.36 The Great Escape continues today.

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It was little more than two rollers and a hand crank, but it spared my grandmother’s hands the hard labor of pulling, squeezing, and twisting clothes. Later came the electric-powered washing machines and dryers that fully liberated women from having to wash, wring, and hang out to dry the family’s clothes.41 Scholars including Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman and Steven Pinker find that rising prosperity is strongly correlated with rising freedom among, reduced violence against, and greater tolerance for, women, racial and religious minorities, and gays and lesbians. Such was the case in Indonesia.42 “My favorite singer is Morrissey,” Ipeh told me. “I went to his show last year and was nervous that [Islamic] extremists would threaten to bomb it, and the show would be canceled.

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The world series for 1800 to 1960 was calculated by the authors on the basis of the Gapminder estimates of child mortality and the Gapminder series on population by country. For each estimate in that period a population-weighted global average was calculated. The 2017 child mortality rate was taken from the 2019 update of World Bank data. 36. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019), 86–87. 37. “PovcalNet: An Online Analysis Tool for Global Poverty Monitoring,” World Bank Group, accessed October 29, 2019, http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/home.aspx. 38.

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

And I mean that in a literal sense. Humans shaped trade but trade also shaped the humans we became. This is the key to understanding how humans managed to take over the world and to inhabit all sorts of climates even though we have few environment-specific genetic adaptations. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker thinks that Homo sapiens’ peculiarities can be explained by the knowledge-using and socially interdependent ‘cognitive niche’ we inhabit. A couple of hundred thousand years ago, we simultaneously developed three unique traits: intelligence, language and cooperation. These are mutually reinforcing: incremental improvements in one of them make the other two more valuable, and thus change the social and physical environment – and with it evolutionary pressures for additional adaptations.8 Intelligence makes it possible to learn and store information and skills.

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If we did not regularly meet and communicate and exchange with individuals from other groups, they would forever remain the mysterious, dangerous outgroup, the barbarians at the gates. The ones whom we raid whenever we think we have an advantage, and who raid us when they think they do. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker has documented how much more frequent war was in our past before we opened economies, doors and minds to outsiders. Tribes raided and killed neighbouring tribes every time they thought they had a major advantage because of numbers or surprise, because why not? One less rival. Kings and princes genuinely believed war was the natural order of things, and peace was just a brief interlude during which one rearmed for the next battle.48 In a closed world we look at others through binoculars.

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‘Modern competition is described as the fight of all against all, but at the same time it is the fight of all for all,’ as the sociologist Georg Simmel put it in 1908.16 But this complexity also means it is impossible for anyone to fully comprehend all the links in even a very simple form of exchange. Steven Pinker believes many clashes over economics stem from this conflict between traditional, personal exchange and modern market exchange, ‘one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned’.17 Suddenly, we can see the wealth of others but we don’t understand what they have contributed to get it.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

—Erik Davis, The Village Voice “Thoughtful and lucid and charming and staggeringly smart, all of which I’ve come to expect from Steven Johnson. But it’s also important, I think—a rare, bona fide glimpse of the future.” —Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century “A lucid discussion of a fascinating and timely set of ideas.” —Steven Pinker, professor of psychology, MIT, and author of How the Mind Works and Words and Rules “Emergence will make understanding ‘emerge’ in your own head, as Steven Johnson explains a lot of phenomena you may not even have noticed.” —Esther Dyson, author of Release 2.0 “Johnson’s clarity is a boon. . . .

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The Web’s city would simply be an undifferentiated mass of data growing more confusing with each new “building” that’s erected—so confusing, in fact, that the mapmakers (the Yahoos and Googles of the world) would generate almost as much interest as the city itself. And if the Web would make a miserable city, it would do even worse as a brain. Here’s Steven Pinker, the author of How the Mind Works, in a Slate dialogue with Wright: The Internet is in some ways like a brain, but in important ways not. The brain doesn’t just let information ricochet around the skull. It is organized to do something: to move the muscles in ways that allow the whole body to attain the goals set by the emotions.

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They deserve extra credit for suffering through all my overcaffeinated riffs on clusters and pointer nodes. This book was greatly enhanced by interviews I conducted with Manuel De Landa, Richard Rogers, Deborah Gordon, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Oliver Selfridge, Will Wright, David Jefferson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Rik Heywood, Mitch Resnick, Steven Pinker, Eric Zimmerman, Nate Oostendorp, Brewster Kahle, Andrew Shapiro, and Douglas Rushkoff. I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Modern-day followers of Rousseau have a tendency to look back on this time through the rose-colored glasses of romanticism, harkening back to a simpler time, when humans lived in harmony with nature, uncorrupted by the trappings of the modern world. Most of us, if dropped back into that time to live out our days, would likely not conclude these were the good old days. To begin with, times were violent. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker estimates that, based on studies of ancient human remains, nearly one in six ancient hunter-gatherers met with a violent end at the hands of another human. Compare this with just the one in thirty who died such a death in the “bloody” twentieth century, with its two world wars. Thus we can confidently say that life as an ancient hunter-gatherer was short, painful, and harsh.

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“After all,” they reason, “science doesn’t even have a way to describe how something like consciousness can exist, so how can it be a physical phenomenon?” Others interpret our lack of understanding as proving, or at least suggesting, that consciousness is just a mental process, and that absolutely nothing even hints otherwise. Harvard’s Steven Pinker writes that scientists “have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain.” He elaborates by pointing out, “Cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people’s thoughts from the blood flow in their brains.” For Pinker, it’s obvious that this is all just normal brain function.

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In addition, the historian Yuval Noah Harari speculates on what else to expect: When brains and computers can interact directly, that’s it, that’s the end of history, that’s the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. . . . We have no way of even starting to imagine what’s happening beyond that. There are many who say this can’t be done. Steven Pinker sums up some of the difficulties: Brains are oatmeal-soft, float around in skulls, react poorly to being invaded, and suffer from inflammation around foreign objects. Neurobiologists haven’t the slightest idea how to decode the billions of synapses that underlie a coherent thought, to say nothing of manipulating them.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

Today rapid digital sequencing technology can count individual RNA fragments that can subsequently be mapped back to the genome once it is known for an organism. In 2001, Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, assembled a group of scientists, including James Watson of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Steven Pinker, then at MIT, to discuss the future of neuroscience and what could be done to accelerate neuroscience research. During these meetings the idea emerged that a complete 3D atlas of gene expression in the mouse brain would be of great use to the neuroscience community. The mouse was chosen due to the wealth of existing genetic studies and for practical reasons.

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Take away a neuron’s connections and it becomes deaf and mute, cut it off from inputs and it becomes unable to exert any influence whatsoever. The power of neurons derives from their collective action as part of brain networks, bound together by connections that allow them to interact, compete, and cooperate. “Brain cells fire in patterns,” as Steven Pinker once put it when challenged on the Colbert Report to explain brain function in five words. And these patterns are orchestrated by connections. Although we have known for a long time that neurons are connected into circuits, and that it is this circuit activity that drives all perception, thought, and action, I would argue that modern concepts of networks add an important new dimension.

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Then, like so many fads in psychology (Freud’s psychodynamic theory and Skinner’s behaviorism), neural networks begin to fade away, never quite making the transition from proofs of concept on toy problems (which were abundant) to realistic models of mind or brain. In the 1990s, journals and conferences were filled with demonstrations that showed how it was supposedly possible to capture simple cognitive and linguistic phenomena in any number of fields (such as models of how children acquired English past-tense verbs). But as Steven Pinker and I showed, the details were rarely correct empirically; more than that, nobody was ever able to turn a neural network into a functioning system for understanding language. Today neural networks have finally found a valuable home—in machine learning, especially in speech recognition and image classification, due in part to innovative work by researchers such as Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

When the researchers asked the patient why he picked what he did, the interpreter in the left brain kicked into gear: “Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Rather than saying, “I don't know,” the left hemisphere made up a response based on what it knew.6 Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, calls this part of the left hemisphere the baloney-generator. He wrote, “The spooky part is that we have no reason to believe that the baloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any different from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains.

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Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 294; see also Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain Revisited,” Scientific American, July 1998, 50–55. For another outstanding source for this discussion, see Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980). 7. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 43. 8. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5–7. 9. Arthur Danto, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University who has carefully analyzed what historians do, suggests that narrative sentences are fundamental to the craft.

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Mauboussin, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), 107–108. 3. Matthew Rabin and Dimitri Vayanos, “The Gambler's Fallacy and Hot-Hand Fallacies: Theory and Application,” Review of Economic Studies 77, no. 2 (April 2010): 730–778. For a discussion of why the gambler's fallacy is not a fallacy in other areas of life, see Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 346–347. The classic paper on this topic is Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” Psychological Bulletin 76, no. 2 (1971): 105–110. 4. The structure of the game is also very important. Phil Birnbaum illustrates this point by comparing professional basketball to baseball.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

airport security, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Broken windows theory, crack epidemic, desegregation, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, mental accounting, moral hazard, More Guns, Less Crime, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pets.com, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, school choice, sensible shoes, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, War on Poverty

See Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 1998); for a Harris profile that also provides an excellent review of the nature-nurture debate, see Malcolm Gladwell, “Do Parents Matter?” The New Yorker, August 17, 1998; and Carol Tavris, “Peer Pressure,” New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1998. / 141 “‘Here we go again’”: See Tavris, “Peer Pressure.” / 141 Pinker called Harris’s views “mind-boggling”: Steven Pinker, “Sibling Rivalry: Why the Nature/Nurture Debate Won’t Go Away,” Boston Globe, October 13, 2002, adapted from Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). SCHOOL CHOICE IN CHICAGO: This material is drawn from Julie Berry Cullen, Brian Jacob, and Steven D. Levitt, “The Impact of School Choice on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Chicago Public Schools,” Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming; and Julie Berry Cullen, Brian Jacob, and Steven D.

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“One year we’re told bonding is the key, the next that it’s birth order. Wait, what really matters is stimulation. The first five years of life are the most important; no, the first three years; no, it’s all over by the first year. Forget that: It’s all genetics!” But Harris’s theory was duly endorsed by a slate of heavyweights. Among them was Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author, who in his own book Blank Slate called Harris’s views “mind-boggling” (in a good way). “Patients in traditional forms of psychotherapy while away their fifty minutes reliving childhood conflicts and learning to blame their unhappiness on how their parents treated them,” Pinker wrote.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

If instead there was simply one list, called “Books I’ve, at the Very Least, Begun,” my life might be easier. 7. Barging In Listeners keep up with talkers; they do not wait for the end of a batch of speech and interpret it after a proportional delay, like a critic reviewing a book. And the lag between speaker’s mouth and listener’s mind is remarkably short. –STEVEN PINKER Spontaneity; Flow “Well, I mean, you know, there are different levels of difficulty, right? I mean, one obvious level of difficulty is that, you know, ‘be yourself’ would be an injunction in the first place, right, which suggests, of course, if you have to be told to be yourself, that you could in some way fail to be yourself.”

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Whereas Plato argues in The Republic that “the fairest class [of things is] that which a man who is to be happy [can] love both for its own sake and for the results,” Aristotle insists in The Nicomachean Ethics that any element of instrumentality in a relationship weakens the quality or nature of that relationship. 29 Philip Jackson, personal interview. 30 Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie (Warner Bros., 2009). 7. Barging In 1 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994). For more on how listener feedback affects storytelling, see, e.g., Janet B. Bavelas, Linda Coates, and Trudy Johnson, “Listeners as Co-narrators,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (2000), 941–52. 2 Bernard Reginster, personal interview.

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(New York: Springer, 2008). 19 Hava Siegelmann, personal interview. 20 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946), pp. 252–65. 21 Roger Levy, personal interview. 22 Dave Ackley, personal interview. 23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, see below) notes that “the Greater Dallas Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse has compiled an extraordinarily entertaining index of cocaine street names.” 24 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 25 Ezra Pound’s famous battle cry of modernism, “Make it new,” comes from his translation of the Confucian text The Great Digest, a.k.a. The Great Learning. 26 Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007). 27 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by John Minford (New York: Penguin, 2003). 28 The phrase “euphemism treadmill” comes from Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002). See also W. V. Quine, “Euphemism,” in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987). 29 The controversy over Rahm Emanuel’s remark appears to have originated with Peter Wallsten, “Chief of Staff Draws Fire from Left as Obama Falters,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2010. 30 Rosa’s Law, S.2781, 2010. 31 “Mr.

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher

Alfred Russel Wallace, correlation does not imply causation, Kickstarter, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

For example, does the need to pay constant attention to certain aspects of experience train speakers to be especially sensitive to certain details or induce particular types of memory patterns and associations? These are exactly the questions we shall explore in the next chapters. For some critics, such as Steven Pinker, the fact that our mother tongue constrains neither our capacity to reason logically nor our ability to understand complex ideas is an irredeemable anticlimax. In his recent book, The Stuff of Thought, Pinker argues that since no one has ever managed to show that speakers of one language find it impossible, or even extremely difficult, to reason in a particular way that comes naturally to the speakers of another language, then any remaining effects of language on thought are mundane, unsexy, boring, even trivial.

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And as this habit of mind will be inculcated almost from infancy, it will soon become second nature, effortless and unconscious. The causal link between language and spatial thinking thus seems far more plausible than the case of language and hair color. Still, plausibility by no means constitutes proof. And as it happens, some psychologists and linguists, such as Peggy Li, Lila Gleitman, and Steven Pinker, have challenged the claim that it is primarily language that influences spatial memory and orientation. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker argues that people develop their spatial thinking for reasons unrelated to language, and that languages merely reflect the fact that their speakers think in a certain coordinate system anyway.

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the acquired aptitudes of one generation: Gladstone 1858, 3:426. “progressive education”: Gladstone 1858, 3:495. Naturalness in concept learning: See Waxman and Senghas 1992. Yanomamö kinship terms: Lizot 1971. The innateness controversy: The most eloquent exposition of the nativist view is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994). Geoffrey Sampson’s The “Language Instinct” Debate (2005) offers a methodical refutation of the arguments in favor of innate grammar, as well as references to the voluminous academic literature on the subject. 5: PLATO AND THE MACEDONIAN SWINEHERD The flaws of the equal-complexity dogma: For a fuller argument, see Deutscher 2009.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Even more vengeful, in best Old Testament style, He ‘scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.’ This ancient tale is a timely reminder that the world remains a patchwork of some 5,000 separate and competing languages. As Steven Pinker reminds us in The Language Instinct, we are wise to concede Noam Chomsky’s perception that, aside from mutually unintelligible vocabularies, ‘Earthlings speak a single language’. Nonetheless, the conspicuous differences between English and some of its obvious rivals, like Russian or Japanese, only serve to emphasise the differences, not the similarities.

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Epilogue: ‘A Thoroughfare for All Thoughts’ 275 Consider the powers of the earth: see Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (London, 2004). 275 ‘the whole earth was of one language’: Genesis 11: 1-9. 276 According to the British Council: reported in The Economist, 16 December 2006. 276 ‘As Steven Pinker reminds us’: Pinker, ibid., pp. 231-61. 277 ‘a thoroughfare for all thoughts’: in The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), vol. 1, p. 193. 279 ‘There are more people’: Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (London, 2008), p. 427. 283 ‘to be born an English-speaker’: Sunday Times, 5 October 2008. 284 ‘when you are leading the world’: Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa (New York, 2009), p. 11. 286 A new belief system is emerging: see James Boyle, The Public Domain (Yale, 2009). 287 Taha Mahmoud, a twenty-five-year-old computer programmer: reported in the Guardian, 30 July 2007.

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Peter Davidson (London, 1998). —, Nineteen Eighty–Four (London, 1949). George D. Painter, William Caxton (London, 1976). Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford, 2006). Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty–First Century (London, 2008). Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (London, 2004). David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London, 2004). Mordechai Richler, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! (London, 1992). Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown (London, 2005). Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present (London, 2006).

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, company town, index card, microaggression, natural language processing, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, why are manhole covers round?

“I wish you would”: Quoted in transcripts from Charles Gibson, “Kennedy Letters: Insight into History,” ABC World News transcripts, Sept. 28, 2006. “I once asked a weapons specialist”: Geoffrey Nunberg, “Going Nucular,” Fresh Air, NPR, Oct. 2, 2002. Metcalf notes: Metcalf, Presidential Voices, 108. Steven Pinker, another linguist: Steven Pinker, “Pinker Contra Nunberg re Nuclear/Nucular,” Language Log, Oct. 17, 2008. But then we’d have to account: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “thermonukes” and “nuclear.” “But which of these stories explains”: Nunberg, “Going Nucular.” NUDE: On Correspondence In 2015, BuzzFeed: “Black Women Try ‘Nude’ Fashion,” BuzzFeed, May 20, 2015.

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Nunberg has talked to some of these people, who all manage to say “\ˈnu-klē-ǝr\ family” and “\ˈnu-klē-ǝr\ medicine,” but anything having to do with weaponry is \ˈnü-kyə-lər\. “I once asked a weapons specialist at a federal agency about this, and he told me, ‘Oh, I only say “nucular” when I’m talking about nukes.’ ” Metcalf notes the same general pattern, though he gives no anecdata*12 to support his contention. Steven Pinker, another linguist who got in something of a mild slap fight with Nunberg over \ˈnü-kyə-lər\, drops that in 2008 he spoke to the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and heard \ˈnü-kyə-lər\ from two senior analysts there. Interestingly, the earliest print instances we have of “nucular,” the spelled-out variation of the pronunciation that everyone hates, are in stories about and bulletins from people in the military, government, or nuclear sciences.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Fifty million years ago, in this post-dinosaur, post-PETM world of chilly and erratic climate changes, our primate ancestors evolved. Part III * * * US Chapter 7 Humans: Threshold 6 A common language connects the members of a community into an information-sharing network with formidable collective powers. —STEVEN PINKER, THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT Humanity entire possesses a commonality which historians may hope to understand just as firmly as they can comprehend what unites any lesser group. —WILLIAM H. MCNEILL, “MYTHISTORY” The appearance of humans in our origin story is a big deal. We arrived just a few hundred thousand years ago, but today we are beginning to transform the biosphere.

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Was it, as American neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon has argued, a new ability to compress large amounts of information into symbols (deceptively simple words like symbol that carry a huge informational cargo)? Or was it the evolution of new grammar circuits in the human brain that helped us combine words according to precise rules so as to convey a great variety of different meanings, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has suggested? This is a tempting idea because, as another linguist, Steven Pinker, puts it, the really difficult trick was “to design a code that can extrude a tangled spaghetti of concepts into a linear string of words” and to do this so efficiently that the hearer could quickly re-create the spaghetti of concepts from the linear string.17 Was human language enabled by the increased space for thinking available in an enlarged cortex, which could hold enough complex thoughts in place to form syntactically complex sentences or let an individual memorize the meanings of thousands of words?

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Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, loc. 5, Kindle: “Faithful social transmission … can work as a ratchet to prevent slippage backward—so that the newly invented artifact or practice preserves its new and improved form at least somewhat faithfully until a further modification or improvement comes along.” Tomasello calls this collaborative learning. 17. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Penguin, 2015), 110. 18. This idea is suggested by Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 264; on the unique human capacity to remember many words, see Hurford, The Origins of Language, 119. 19.

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen

correlation does not imply causation, information retrieval, intentional community, machine readable, Parler "social media", pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, statistical model, Steven Pinker, traumatic brain injury

For the most part, though, language researchers steer clear of studying profanity, even if it’s potentially fascinating, for fear of what will happen when their institutional review board evaluates their experimental materials or when a committee of their peers reads their publications during tenure deliberations. Nevertheless, a small cabal of researchers has been toiling away on profanity. With several exceptions, most notably psychologists Timothy Jay2 and Steven Pinker,3 they’ve largely done their work without much public attention. At least until recently, they’ve been practitioners of a secret science of swearing. But things have started to change, in large part because of changes in public language norms. The highly regulated public airwaves don’t carry the bulk of public communication as they once did.

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If analogous circuitry is indeed responsible for reflexive human swearing, then it provides privileged access to emotion in the brain, laying bare a speaker’s covert internal experiences unmediated by rational and deliberate planning. But there’s a caveat. This older, emotion-driven circuit doesn’t behave the same way in humans as it does in other animals. As both Timothy Jay and Steven Pinker have pointed out, the vocalizations we produce when spontaneously swearing are conventionalized—they’re the product of socially driven learning.27 Swearwords are a different beast from shrieks or growls in that they have a specific learned form—you swear specifically in English or Chinese or ASL, whereas a monkey just shrieks in Monkey

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Whenever the Blooms cried out flep! their kids looked at them like they were out of their flepping minds.3 Once they reach a certain age, kids actually learn most of their language from peers and older children, and they do a very good job of ignoring what they hear from their parents, as psychologist Steven Pinker points out.4 As a consequence, kids often come home with words that their parents don’t use and often don’t even know. They also come home using words the parents do know in ways that the parents would never imagine. Profanity is especially likely to be learned from peers, not only because it’s more likely to be said on the playground than at the dinner table but also because of what kids use it for.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab! —William James Is intelligence the goal, or even a goal, of biological evolution? Steven Pinker writes, “We are chauvinistic about our brains, thinking them to be the goal of evolution,”1 and goes on to argue that “that makes no sense…. Natural selection does nothing even close to striving for intelligence. The process is driven by differences in the survival and reproduction rates of replicating organisms in a particular environment.

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For a historical perspective on how far we have advanced, I suggest people read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in which he describes the “life of man” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For a modern perspective, the recent book Abundance (2012), by X-Prize Foundation founder (and cofounder with me of Singularity University) Peter Diamandis and science writer Steven Kotler, documents the extraordinary ways in which life today has steadily improved in every dimension. Steven Pinker’s recent The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) painstakingly documents the steady rise of peaceful relations between people and peoples. American lawyer, entrepreneur, and author Martine Rothblatt (born in 1954) documents the steady improvement in civil rights, noting, for example, how in a couple of decades same-sex marriage went from being legally recognized nowhere in the world to being legally accepted in a rapidly growing number of jurisdictions.4 A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved.

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I have found this to be an invaluable method for harnessing the natural creativity of my dreams. Reader: Well, for the workaholics among us, we can now work in our dreams. Not sure my spouse is going to appreciate this. Ray: Actually, you can think of it as getting your dreams to do your work for you. Chapter 4: The Biological Neocortex 1. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 152–53. 2. D. O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949). 3. Henry Markram and Rodrigo Perrin, “Innate Neural Assemblies for Lego Memory,” Frontiers in Neural Circuits 5, no. 6 (2011). 4. E-mail communication from Henry Markram, February 19, 2012. 5.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

Almost the entirety of Plato’s Theaetetus is dedicated to dismantling Protagoras’s theory of knowledge, but for the issues I’m addressing here, see especially pp. 12–50. Keeler also provides considerable background on what the Sophists, Plato, and other early philosophers thought about the problem of errors of perception. (See especially pp. 1–21.) Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 8. David Brewster. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883), 91. I tracked down this text after reading about it in Sully’s Illusions. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. The story of Robert-Houdin in Algeria can be found in Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant (De Capo Press, 2004), pp. 145–146.

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Actually, it’s not your eyes that are telling you this; it’s a handful of interpretative processes of the kind I just described. These processes are in play because, when it comes to determining the color of objects around us, our visual system can’t afford to be too literal. If it were, it would do nothing but measure the wavelength of light reflecting off a given object. In that case, as the psychologist Steven Pinker has pointed out, we would think that a lump of coal sitting in bright sunlight was white, and that a lump of snow inside a dark house was black. Instead, we’re able to correct for the presence of light and shadow so that the coal still appears fundamentally black and the snow still appears fundamentally white.

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In everyday life, we use phrases like “I know” to indicate that we don’t feel any uncertainty and phrases like “I believe” to indicate that we do—distinctions that are extremely helpful, and that we cannot jettison without resorting to the notoriously impractical and unpalatable option of complete capital-S Skepticism. My point here is only that knowledge, as a category, has limitations and assumptions we should come to understand—and that error is predicated on belief, which is, accordingly, a more useful conceptual tool for a book about wrongness. Justice William Douglas. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2003) 265. the brain mistakes an idea in the mind…for a feature of the real world. Specifically, scientists think that denial of disease arises when a part of the brain called the supplementary motor area remains unaffected by a brain injury.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

More children survive to adulthood and they grow up to be taller, better educated, and have many more choices over how to live their lives than they did in medieval times. They have a far greater chance of dying peacefully in their beds of old age (see chart). These advances would not have been made without economic growth. As Steven Pinker recounts,9 back in 1800 no country in the world had a life expectancy higher than 40. Now the world average is around 70; an African born today can expect to live as long as a European born in the 1930s. In 2016, 4.2m babies died in the first year of life.10 That is a terrible number, but it has been steadily falling in recent years.

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The idea of the “noble savage”, of peace-loving tribes at home with nature, is quite persistent. But observations of modern hunter-gatherer tribes find that violent raids on their neighbours are quite common. Excavations in modern-day India uncovered the skeletons of one group of Stone Age hunter-gatherers; most were around 20 years old and none were over 40.19 Steven Pinker tells the tale of Őtzi, a human found frozen in the Alps, who lived 5,000 years ago. He had an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder, unhealed cuts on his hands, wounds on his head and chest, traces of blood from two other people on one of his arrowheads, and blood from a third on his dagger and from a fourth on his cape.

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“Worst tech predictions of all time”, The Daily Telegraph, June 29th 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/worst-tech-predictions-of-all-time/thomas-watson-ibm-president-in-1943/ 7. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History 8. https://www.tudorsociety.com/childbirth-in-medieval-and-tudor-times-by-sarah-bryson 9. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress 10. Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think 11. Ibid.; the figures comes from a World Bank study by Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen 12.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); W. Yang, “Nasty, Brutish, and Long,” New York, October 16, 2011. 4. S. Herman and D. Peterson, “Steven Pinker on the Alleged Decline of Violence,” Int Socialist Rev, November/December, 2012. 5. R. Douthat, “Steven Pinker’s History of Violence,” New York Times, October 17, 2011; J. Gray, “Delusions of Peace,” Prospect, October 2011; E. Kolbert, “Peace in Our Time: Steven Pinker’s History of Violence,” New Yorker, October 3, 2011; T. Cowen, “Steven Pinker on Violence,” Marginal Revolution, October 7, 2011. 6. C. Apicella et al., “Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers,” Nat 481 (2012): 497. 7.

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In 1996 the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois synthesized the existing literature in his highly influential War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, ostensibly showing that the archaeological evidence for war is broad and ancient.55 A similar conclusion comes in the 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Harvard’s Steven Pinker.56 Cliché police be damned, you can’t mention this book without calling it “monumental.” In this monumental work Pinker argued that (a) violence and the worst horrors of inhumanity have been declining for the last half millennium, thanks to the constraining forces of civilization; and (b) the warfare and barbarity preceding that transition are as old as the human species.

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., “Life Histories, Blood Revenge and Reproductive Success Among the Waorani of Ecuador,” PNAS 106 (2009): 8134. 66. The original research cited by Pinker and Fry: K. Hill and A. Hurtado, Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996). 67. S. Corry, “The Case of the ‘Brutal Savage’: Poirot or Clouseau? Why Steven Pinker, Like Jared Diamond, Is Wrong,” London: Survival International website, 2013. 68. K. Lorenz, On Aggression (MFJ Books, 1997); R. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (Delta Books, 1966); R. Wrangham and D. Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). 69.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter 1 - A FOREIGN COUNTRY Chapter 2 - THE PACIFICATION PROCESS Chapter 3 - THE CIVILIZING PROCESS Chapter 4 - THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION Chapter 5 - THE LONG PEACE Chapter 6 - THE NEW PEACE Chapter 7 - THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS Chapter 8 - INNER DEMONS Chapter 9 - BETTER ANGELS Chapter 10 - ON ANGELS’ WINGS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2RoRL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St.

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Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Steven Pinker, 2011 All rights reserved Excerpts from “MLF Lullaby,” “Who’s Next?,” and “In Old Mexico” by Tom Lehrer. Excerpt from “It Depends on What You Pay” by Tom Jones. Excerpt from “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” words and music by Joe McDonald. © 1965, renewed 1933 by Alkatraz Corner Music Co. LIBRARY OF CONGRES CATALOGING -IN-PUBLICATION DATA Pinker, Steven, 1954– The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined / Steven Pinker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN : 978-1-101-54464-8 1.

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Wilson, Margo Wilson, Woodrow Wimer, Christopher Winfrey, Oprah Wirth, Christian witchcraft Witness (film) Wollstonecraft, Mary Wolpert, Daniel women: and abortion Amazons in American West antiwar views of attitudes toward competition for and domestic violence feminism feminization genital mutilation of in harems and Islam as leaders male control of as pacifying force peace activists postpartum depression as property rape of, see rape rights of self-defense for “Take Back the Night,” torture of violence against violence by violence over; see also sexual jealousy World Bank world government World Health Organization (WHO) World War I and antiwar views and influenza pandemic as literary war and nationalism onset of poison gas in and World War II World War II causes of destructiveness of and ethnic cleansing London Blitz in and Pearl Harbor and poison gas Wotman, Sara Wouters, Cas Wrangham, Richard Wright, Quincy Wright, Robert Xhosa people Yamaguchi, Tsutomu Yanomamö people Yates, Andrea Yemen Young, Liane Young, Maxwell Younger, Stephen young men: African American aggression of in American West in bachelor cults and code of honor and crime in criminal gangs and dominance and drug culture homicides by in prison socialization of terrorists tribal elders defied by Yugoslavia Zacher, Mark Zambia Zebrowitz, Leslie Zelizer, Viviana zero-sum games Zimbardo, Philip Zimring, Franklin Zipf, G. K. Źiźek, Slavoj Zola, Émile ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler) Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter 1 - A FOREIGN COUNTRY Chapter 2 - THE PACIFICATION PROCESS Chapter 3 - THE CIVILIZING PROCESS Chapter 4 - THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION Chapter 5 - THE LONG PEACE Chapter 6 - THE NEW PEACE Chapter 7 - THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS Chapter 8 - INNER DEMONS Chapter 9 - BETTER ANGELS Chapter 10 - ON ANGELS’ WINGS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter 1 - A FOREIGN COUNTRY Chapter 2 - THE PACIFICATION PROCESS Chapter 3 - THE CIVILIZING PROCESS Chapter 4 - THE HUMANITARIAN REVOLUTION Chapter 5 - THE LONG PEACE Chapter 6 - THE NEW PEACE Chapter 7 - THE RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS Chapter 8 - INNER DEMONS Chapter 9 - BETTER ANGELS Chapter 10 - ON ANGELS’ WINGS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

And, as in the military, there is great scope for the type of job available to humans within any given sector to change radically. It is widely believed that the challenge from robots and AI will be felt most acutely in manual occupations. Actually, it is not true that all manual jobs are acutely under threat. As noted above, robots continue to be poor at manual dexterity. According to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker: “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.”20 Accordingly, many skilled, manual jobs look safe for the foreseeable future. These include plumbers, electricians, gardeners, builders, and decorators. That said, research from Mace suggests that by 2040, out of the 2.2 million jobs in the construction industry, 600,000 could be automated.

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But there is now in the developed world hardly any absolute poverty, at least poverty as we used to know it. Increased inequality is not going to mean people starving or living without shelter and warmth. (Matters are quite different in much of the rest of the world, but there AI-induced inequality is not likely to be a problem.) Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says that some of the outrage of the anti-inequality movement is based on a misunderstanding. He points out that in Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which I discussed in Chapter 6), there appears to be a confusion between relative and absolute. Piketty says: “The poor of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, as in 1910.”24 But Pinker points out that, since wealth was vastly larger in 2010 than a hundred years earlier, if the poorer half of the population owns the same proportion of the wealth, they are in fact vastly richer.25 Pinker also lays into the argument that societies that are more unequal are thereby less successful and less happy.

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But the Singularity is not inevitable. Indeed, far from it. With more than 60 years of studying cognitive science at MIT behind him, Noam Chomsky says that we are “eons away” from building human-level machine intelligence. He dismisses the Singularity as “science fiction.” The distinguished Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker broadly agrees. He has said: “There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity.” Admittedly, these are still early days and it is quite possible that either a breakthrough in what AI researchers are already doing, or a complete change of course, will deliver dramatic results.12 But it has to be said that the progress of AI toward anything like human general intelligence has been painfully slow.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But how do we explain helping individuals to whom we are not genetically related? How can this possibly improve our genetic fitness? Here reciprocity (the notion that cooperative acts will ultimately be reciprocated) provides an explanation. The simplest version is direct reciprocity, an idea introduced by Robert Trivers, whose work inspired Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and many others. Basically this says that when we are in a situation in which another individual can directly reciprocate our help by helping us back, we both recognize that we will be better off by cooperating than not. This basic dynamic is not confined to humans; it has been demonstrated through numerous animal studies.

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I will use a bit of all of these approaches in understanding what makes human cooperation work. Each reveals certain parts of the picture. And each imposes some constraints on our desire to confirm existing beliefs and ratify existing practices. None do so perfectly, but we have no better. We might as well get on with it. * Such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Steven Pinker. * Along with extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness. • CHAPTER 3 • STUBBORN CHILDREN, NEW YORK CITY DOORMEN, AND WHY OBESITY IS CONTAGIOUS: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON COOPERATION Washington Square Park. I was sitting with my kids in the playground. A group of children were digging and playing with trucks in the sandbox.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

A check of primary sources suggests Ayres made two errors in his equation (the constant should be a negative value and a decimal place is off). I believe this equation is correct. 7. Orley Ashenfelter, “Predicting the Quality and Prices of Bordeaux Wines,” Working paper no. 4, American Association of Wine Economists, April 2007. 8. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1997), 305–306. 9. J. Scott Armstrong, Monica Adya, and Fred Collopy, “Rule-Based Forecasting: Using Judgment in Time-Series Extrapolation” in Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners, ed. J. Scott Armstrong (New York: Springer, 2001), 259–282; and John D.

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Rex Dalton, “Quarrel Over Book Leads to Call For Misconduct Inquiry,” Nature 431 (October 21, 2004): 889; Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 1998), 365–378; Frederic Townsend, “Birth Order and Rebelliousness: Reconstructing the Research in Born to Rebel,” Politics and the Life Sciences 19, no. 2 (2000): 135–156; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 389–390; and Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 83–114. 3. John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1999), 192. 4.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

“There is a psychologist, quite famous, who has written a book about how everything has been getting better for humanity over time, and that this is the best moment in history to be alive.” “Are you talking about Steven Pinker?” “Maybe,” she said. “I am terrible with names.” “Voluminous mane of silver ringlets? Looks like Brian May out of Queen? Goes on about the Enlightenment all the time?” “Yes,” she said, “I think that’s him.” “I don’t find him particularly convincing,” I said, more dismissively than I intended to. She shrugged in a particularly French-seeming way, raising her eyebrows, dipping her head to one side. She was clearly not willing to sacrifice the last fifteen minutes of our session to a defense of Steven Pinker. There was a silence then, during which I gazed out the window and listened to the bell of an approaching tram, and fell to thinking about Pinker’s hair.

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Friendliness drove this technological revolution by linking groups of innovators together in a way other hominin species never could. Self-domestication gave us a superpower, and in the blink of an evolutionary eye, we took over the world. And one by one, every other human species went extinct. * * * — Our capacity for friendliness toward strangers has continued to increase. The psychologist Steven Pinker argues that human violence has steadily declined over time.62 Yuval Harari writes that the “Law of the Jungle has finally been broken, if not rescinded…a growing segment of humankind has come to see war as simply inconceivable.”63 We have human self-domestication to thank for this. The concept of the intragroup stranger has allowed us to extend our love toward those we have never met.

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Hurtado, R. T. Boyd, “Hunter-gatherer Inter-band Interaction Rates: Implications for Cumulative Culture,” PLoS One 9, e102806 (2014). 61. K. Hill, “Altruistic Cooperation During Foraging by the Ache, and the Evolved Human Predisposition to Cooperate,” Human Nature 13, 105–28 (2002). 62. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Penguin Books, 2012). 63. Y. N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Random House, 2016). 64. R. C. Oka, M. Kissel, M. Golitko, S. G. Sheridan, N. C. Kim, A. Fuentes, “Population Is the Main Driver of War Group Size and Conflict Casualties,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, E11101–E11110 (2017). 6 Not Quite Human 1. “ ‘Burundi: The Gatumba Massacre: War Crimes and Political Agendas,’ ” (Human Rights Watch, 2004). 2.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

They do not run a simple loop, but an intricate system which factors innumerable inputs and calculations into its behaviors. The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. - Steven Pinker, “The Mystery of Consciousness” The fact that our minds are machines does not preclude the vast richness of experience of which they are capable. It simply means that at its core, the ineffable complexity of human existence boils down to an operating system we can study and increasingly understand.

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That is why we not only can learn to control our emotions, if we want to live a great life, we must. The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. - Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works Critics would also be correct in stating that suppression, the brute force “willing away” of emotion, is ineffective and often backfires.6 I also would not recommend denying your bad feelings or attempting to hide them from others at all times. But these are far from the only methods to this expansive art.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

Raimo Vayrynen (London: Routledge, 2006); Nils Petter Gelditsch, “The Decline of War—The Main Issues,” International Studies Review 15, no. 3 (2013): 397–99; Lawrence Freedman, “Steven Pinker and the Long Peace: Alliance, Deterrence, and Decline,” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 657–72; John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 32. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, 3. 33. Freedman, “Steven Pinker and the Long Peace,” 658. 34. Ibid. 35. One of the frequently used datasets, Peter Brecke’s “Conflict Catalog,” http://www.cgeh.nl/data, includes 3,708 conflicts, with data on parties, fatalities, date, and duration.

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Scholars who observe these changes are sometimes called “declinists.”31 Declinists note, for example, that the major powers of the world have not fought a war against each other directly since the Second World War.32 Over the last several decades, the total number of conflicts has dropped by 40 percent.33 The deadliest, those that kill at least 1,000 people, have declined even further—by half.34 Several declinists argue that the decline in war has led to a decline in war deaths. Proving this claim, however, is difficult. Unfortunately, the available historical data on war deaths are much less complete and reliable than the data on territorial change.35 Combining data and narrative history, Steven Pinker concludes that though wars have become more deadly, they are less frequent, yielding fewer war-related deaths overall.36 The decline in interstate war is so widely accepted and well documented as to have almost become conventional wisdom.37 There is far less agreement, however, on its cause. Pinker points to a gradual evolution in human empathy, self-control, morality, and reason—the “better angels of our nature.”

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., 3.8.141. 75. Eric Robson, “The Armed Forces and the Art of War,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, eds. G. R. Potter and G. R. Elton, Vol. 7: The Old Regime, 1713–63, ed. J. O. Lindsay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165. On the humanitarian revolution and Enlightenment humanism, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), 129–92. 76. Bell, The First Total War; Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulem (New York: Telos Press, 2007), 36. 77. James Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Randall Lesaffer, “Siege Warfare in Early Modern Europe,” in E.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

On the contrary, {355} instead of just dutifully passing on their messages, correcting most of the typos as they go, brains seem to be designed to do just the opposite: to transform, invent, interpolate, censor, and generally mix up the "input" before yielding any "output." Isn't one of the hallmarks of cultural evolution and transmission the extraordinarily high rate of mutation and recombination? We seldom pass on a meme unaltered, it seems, unless we are particularly literal-minded rote learners. (Are walking encyclopedias hidebound?) Moreover, as Steven Pinker has stressed (personal communication), much of the mutation that happens to memes — how much is not clear — is manifestly directed mutation: "Memes such as the theory of relativity are not the cumulative product of millions of random (undirected) mutations of some original idea, but each brain in the chain of production added huge dollops of value to the product in a nonrandom way."

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CHOMSKY CONTRA DARWIN: FOUR EPISODES Chomsky, one might think, would have everything to gain by grounding his controversial theory about a language organ in the firm foundation of evolutionary theory, and in some of his writings he has hinted at a connection. But more often he is skeptical. — STEVEN PINKER 1994, p. 355 In the case of such systems as language or wings it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them. — NOAM CHOMSKY 1988, p. 167 A sizeable gulf in communication still exists between cognitive scientists who entered the field from Al or from the study of problem solving and concept-forming behavior, on the one side, and those who entered from a concern with language, on the other....

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In short, although Gould has heralded Chomsky's theory of universal grammar as a bulwark against an adaptationist explanation of language, and Chomsky has in return endorsed Gould's antiadaptationism as an authoritative excuse for rejecting the obvious obligation to pursue an evolutionary explanation of the innate establishment of universal grammar, these two authorities are supporting each other over an abyss. In December 1989, the MIT psycholinguist Steven Pinker and his graduate student Paul Bloom presented a paper, "Natural Language and Natural Selection," to the Cognitive Science Colloquium at MIT. Their paper, which has itself subsequently appeared as a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, laid down the gauntlet: Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

We discussed some alarming trends in this book, particularly in the chapters on America’s rising political polarization and rising rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide. These problems are serious, and we see no sign that either trend will be reversing in the next decade. And yet we are heartened and persuaded by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s argument, in Enlightenment Now, that in the long run most things are getting better, quickly and globally. Pinker notes that there are many psychological reasons why people are—and have always been—prone to catastrophizing about the future. For example, some of the problems we discuss in this book are examples of the “problems of progress” that we described in the Introduction.

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We are grateful to the many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who gave us valuable comments on one or more chapters, helped us analyze data, or provided their professional expertise: Jason Baehr, Andrew Becker, Caleb Bernard, Paul Bloom, Samantha Boardman, Bradley Campbell, Dennis Dalton, Clark Freshman, Brian Gallagher, Andrew Gates, Christopher Gates, Benjamin Ginsberg, Jesse Graham, Dan Griswold, Benjamin Haidt, Rebecca Haidt, Terry Hartle, Ravi Iyer, Robb Jones, Christina King, Susan Kresnicka, Calvin Lai, Marcella Larsen, Harry Lewis, Vanessa Lobue, Brian Lowe, Jason Manning, Ian McCready-Flora, John McWhorter, John Palfrey, Mike Paros, Nando Pelusi, Steven Pinker, Anne Rasmussen, Bradly Reed, Fabio Rojas, Kathleen Santora, Sally Satel, Steve Schultz, Mark Shulman, Nadine Strossen, Joshua Sullivan, Marianne Toldalagi, John Tomasi, Tracy Tomasso, Rebecca Tuvel, Lee Tyner, Steve Vaisey, Robert Von Hallberg, Zach Wood, and Jared Zuker. We thank Omar Mahmood for volunteering to create our website, TheCoddling.com.

…

For a review of this literature, including the debate over whether “group selection” played a role in the human story, over and above individual selection, see Haidt (2012), chapter 9. For a contrary view, see: Pinker, S. (2012, June 18). The false allure of group selection. Edge. Retrieved from https://www.edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-of-group-selection 30. Chapter 10 of The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012) describes the “hive switch,” a psychological reflex in which self-interest is turned off and group interest becomes paramount; people lose themselves in the group. People can become tribal without the hive switch getting activated.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

If anything, we’re more peaceful than we’ve ever been, with the amount of violence in human societies declining precipitously in the past several centuries due to developments like strong states (which monopolize violence and institute the rule of law), commerce (other people become more valuable alive than dead) and expanded international networks (which demystify and humanize the Other). As the psychologist Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of Our Nature, his excellent and comprehensive survey of this trend, historical exogenous forces like these “favor our peaceable motives” like empathy, moral sense, reason and self-control, which “orient [us] away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

…

Our gratitude to all our friends and colleagues whose ideas and thoughts we’ve benefited from: Elliott Abrams, Ruzwana Bashir, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Chris Brose, Jordan Brown, James Bryer, Mike Cline, Steve Coll, Peter Diamandis, Larry Diamond, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, James Fallows, Summer Felix, Richard Fontaine, Dov Fox, Tom Freston, Malcolm Gladwell, James Glassman, Jack Goldsmith, David Gordon, Sheena Greitens, Craig Hatkoff, Michael Hayden, Chris Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Dean Kamen, David Kennedy, Erik Kerr, Parag Khanna, Joseph Konzelmann, Stephen Krasner, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Lander, Jason Liebman, Claudia Mendoza, Evgeny Morozov, Dambisa Moyo, Elon Musk, Meghan O’Sullivan, Farah Pandith, Barry Pavel, Steven Pinker, Joe Polish, Alex Pollen, Jason Rakowski, Lisa Randall, Condoleezza Rice, Jane Rosenthal, Nouriel Roubini, Kori Schake, Vance Serchuk, Michael Spence, Stephen Stedman, Dan Twining, Decker Walker, Matthew Waxman, Tim Wu, Jillian York, Juan Zarate, Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman. We also want to thank the guys from Peak Performance, particularly Joe Dowdell and Jose and Emilio Gomez, for keeping us healthy during the final stages of writing.

…

With more than four billion videos viewed daily: Alexei Oreskovic, “Exclusive: YouTube Hits 4 Billion Daily Video Views,” Reuters, January 23, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/23/us-google-youtube-idUSTRE80M0TS20120123. CHAPTER 6 THE FUTURE OF CONFLICT, COMBAT AND INTERVENTION “orient [us] away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism”: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), xxv. “The world begins to look different”: Ibid., xxvi. deliberately excludes some 2.2 million ethnic Roma: Amnesty International (AI), “Romania Must End Forced Evictions of Roma Families,” press release, January 26, 2010, http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/romania-must-end-forced-evictions-roma-families-20100126.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

As such, the “New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War may have reduced homicide rates,” Roth writes, but “the crisis of legitimacy in the 1960s and 1970s (especially in the eyes of African-Americans) may have contributed to soaring homicide rates.”11 Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States follow closely the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late sixties and early seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the fifties and mid-nineties, homicides decreased.12 Roth’s research is supported by Steven Pinker 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In it Pinker describes how violence has declined broadly since the dawn of civilization and specifically in recent American history. Pinker finds downward trends in wars, sectarian violence, anti-woman violence, and child abuse, which he suggests flow from historical trends like industrialization and urbanization.

…

Facing widespread criticism and a recall campaign, the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Directors paused its school renaming initiative, ostensibly so it could focus on reopening the schools. Several well-known and respected scholars, journalists, and activists, including Columbia University’s John McWhorter, former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Coleman Hughes, and Chris Rufo, announced the creation of a new organization called Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, to push back against racial essentialism and intolerance.23 And in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, Asian parents filed lawsuits to fight racial discrimination in high school admissions and defend meritocracy.24 No serious historian today would rank Harvey Milk’s advocacy of requiring people to pick up after their dogs as a particularly important aspect of his legacy.

…

Ibid., xi–xii. 10. Ibid., 17. 11. Randolph Roth, “Yes We Can: Working Together Toward a History of Homicide That Is Empirically, Mathematically, and Theoretically Sound,” Crime, History and Societies 15, no. 2 (2011): 131–45, doi:10.4000/chs.1296. 12. Roth, American Homicide, 17. 13. Steven Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2011). 14. Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 8–9. 15. Ibid., photo insert. 16. Ibid., 26, 28. 17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.

Free Will by Sam Harris

Steven Pinker

Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, & C. N. DeWall, 2009. Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35: 260–268. 21. J. Diamond, 2008. Vengeance is ours. The New Yorker, April 21, 2001, pp. 74–87. 22. Steven Pinker, personal communication. INDEX actions: brain and, 69n freedom to reinterpret meaning of, 40 modification of, through punishment or incentives, 59–60 past, free will and, 6, 39–40, 77n as products of impersonal events, 27 seen as “self-generated,” 27–29 voluntary vs. involuntary, 12–13, 31–32, 41–42 see also intentions agency, sense of: experimental manipulation of, 24–25 free will and, 23–26 attention, directing of, as conscious act, 31–32 backward masking, 70n bacteria, in human bodies, 23–24 behavior, see actions brain: causal states of, 34 disorders and tumors of, 50, 51, 53–54, 55–56 dual systems in, 9, 32, 69n–70n medial prefrontal cortex of, 50, 58 as subject to laws of nature, 11–12 subliminal presentation of stimuli to, 70n–71n see also neurophysiology brain activity, as preceding consciousness of intent, 8–11 brain scans, 8–11, 24, 69n–72n chance, 27–28 see also luck change, possibility of, 62–63 child abuse, 3–4, 50, 51 choice: as causal brain state, 24 importance of, 34–35 as product of prior events, 34, 43–44 seeming spontaneity of, 6, 37 stories as explanations of, 35, 37, 43–44 see also intentions Clark, Tom, 20–23 cognition, 69n Cohen, Jonathan, 73n–74n compassion, 45 compatibilism, 15–26 free will as defined by, 16–17, 39–40, 74n moral responsibility and, 18 consciousness: delayed sensory feedback and, 73n as dependent on working memory, 72n free will and, 6, 26 intentions as appearing but not originating in, 8 unconscious origins of, 5, 7–14 Consciousness Explained (Dennett), 74n conservatives, free will and, 61–62 Coyne, Jerry, 76n criminals, criminal behavior: causes of, 3–5 as dangers to society, 52–53, 56 deterrence of, 56, 58–59 empathy for, 45–46 free will and, 17–18, 53 incarceration of, 53, 54, 58 moral responsibility and, 3, 17–18, 49–52 punishment of, see retribution rehabilitation of, 56, 58 Daniel (New Guinea highlander), 57 deliberative thinking, role of, 32–33 Dennett, Daniel, 20–23, 25, 33, 71n desires: mutually incompatible, 18–19 pathological, 18 determinism, 15, 74n fatalism vs., 33–34 moral responsibility and, 48–49 scientific validity of, 16, 29–30 DNA, mutations of, 29 Edelman, Gerald, 72n EEG (electroencephalogram), 8 Einstein, Albert, 75n–76n emotion, brain and, 69n emotional words, subliminal presentation of, 70n–71n empathy, 45–46 entitlement, sense of, 45 evolution, 29 existentialism, 40 experimental psychology, 69n–72n, 74n–75n fatalism, 46 determinism vs., 33–34 Ferriss, Tim, 36, 37 forgiveness, 45 fMRI, see functional magnetic resonance imaging freedom: as ability to act on beliefs, 38–39 sense of, as enhanced by loss of belief in free will, 46–47 social and political, 13 free will, as concept: as basis of justice system, 1, 23, 48, 54 compatibilist view of, see compatibilism consciousness and, 6, 26 conservatives and, 61–62 criminal behavior and, 17–18 determinist view of, see determinism hating and, 53–54 hypothetical requirements for, 13–14 as illusion, 5–6, 11, 22, 53 liberals and, 61 libertarianism and, 15–16, 74n luck vs., 4, 38, 53, 54, 61–62 past actions and, 6, 39–40, 77n rethinking justice system reliance on, 54, 56 retribution as dependent on sense of, 1 scientific validity lacking for, 6, 64–65 sense of agency and, 23–26 subjective validity lacking for, 6, 65 success and, 1 free will, sense of: chance and, 27–28 conceptual understanding of self vs., 22–23 as felt experience, 15, 22–23, 26 moral responsibility as dependent on, 16–17, 23, 27 as mystery, 64–65 as resulting from ignorance of unconscious origins of intentions, 13, 32, 60 seen as necessary illusion, 45–47 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 8 Greene, Joshua, 73n–74n hating, free will and, 53–54 Hayes, Steven, 1–4 Heisenberg, Martin, 27 Holocaust, 57 illusion: free will as, 5–6, 11, 22 necessary, sense of free will seen as, 45–47 incarceration, of criminals, 53, 54, 58 intentions: as appearing but not originating in consciousness, 8 brain activity as preceding consciousness of, 8–11 as causal brain state, 34 to do harm, 52–53 external and internal restraints on, 41–42 as product of prior events, 5–6, 19–20, 34, 60 soul and, 12 subjective mystery of, 13, 37–38, 39–40 unconscious origins of, 7–14 see also actions; choice ion channels, 27 justice system: and distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, 31, 56 free will as basis of, 1, 23, 48 rethinking of reliance on free will, 54, 56 retribution and, 1, 48, 56 Komisarjevsky, Joshua, 1–4 laws of nature, 40 brain as subject to, 11–12 laziness, 62 liberals, free will and, 61 libertarianism, 15–16, 74n Libet, Benjamin, 8, 73n luck: free will vs., 4, 38, 53, 54, 61–62 moral responsibility and, 54 see also chance materialism, 11, 74n meaning, of actions, freedom to reinterpret, 40 medial prefrontal cortex, 50, 58 Meditations on Violence (Miller), 43–44 Miller, Rory, 43–44 moral responsibility, 48–60 and brain disorders, 50, 51, 53–54, 55–56 compatibilism and, 18 of criminals, 3 degrees of, 49–52 as dependent on sense of free will, 16–17, 23, 27 determination of, as dependent on overall complexion of mind, 49 determinism and, 48–49 and distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, 31, 41–42 and fear of retribution, 58–59 luck and, 54 murder, 3–4, 12–13, 17, 18, 55, 57 mystery: origins of intentions as, 13, 37–38, 39–40 sense of free will as, 64–65 Nahmias, Eddy, 41–42 neuroimaging, 8–11, 24, 69n–72n neurophysiology, seen as part of the self, 20–22, 75n New Guinea, 57 New Yorker, 57 New York Times, 41–42 past actions, free will and, 6, 39–40, 77n Petit, Hayley, 2–3 Petit, Jennifer, 2–3 Petit, Michaela, 2–3 Petit, William, 2–3 philosophical materialism, 11, 74n philosophy, free will and, see compatibilism; determinism; libertarianism politics, 61–63 priming, 69n psychopaths, 51 punishment, see retribution quantum indeterminacy, 27, 29–30 rape, 3, 17, 46 rehabilitation, of criminals, 56, 58 religion, 18, 56 retribution: as dependent on sense of free will, 1 as deterrent, 58–59 human need for, 57–58 justice system and, 1, 48 religion and, 56 as resulting from ignorance of underlying causes of behavior, 55 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 75n–76n self, seen as comprising both conscious and unconscious processes, 20–22, 75n sensory feedback, consciousness and, 73n sin, 48, 56 soul, 56 intentions and, 12 libertarianism and, 16 stimuli, subliminal presentation of, 70n–71n stories, as explanation of choices, 35, 37, 43–44 Strawson, Galen, 74n, 75n success, free will and, 1 Supreme Court, U.S., 48 synaptic vesicles, 27 theology, 18, 56 unconscious, seen as part of the self, 20–22, 75n United States v.

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Nussbaum describes BDS as a “symbolic” boycott that is intended to make a “public statement” about opposition to Israel’s policies.4 It’s another example of the attempt to toxify Israel. In response to an attempt in 2016 by the American Anthropological Association to sign on to the BDS initiative, the Harvard professor Steven Pinker issued a public statement that eloquently sums up the situation: [Are Israel’s] policies really so atrocious, so beyond the pale of acceptable behavior of nation-states, that they call for a unique symbolic statement that abrogates personal fairness and academic freedom? It helps to put the Israel-Palestine conflict in global and historical perspective—something that anthropologists, of all people, might be expected to do….Why no boycotts against academics from China, India, Russia, or Pakistan, to take a few examples, which have also been embroiled in occupations and violent conflicts, and which, unlike Israel, face no existential threat or enemies with genocidal statements in their charters?

…

Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist,” in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israel-Palestine Conflict, ed. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (New York: Grove Press, 2003), pp. 226–32, reprinted in Tablet, August 13, 2014. 3. Drew Himmelstein, “Stanford Professors Take Stand Against Divestment,” Jweekly.com, March 12, 2015. 4. Nussbaum, “Against Academic Boycotts,” p. 47. 5. Steven Pinker, “Against Selective Demonization,” Against Anthro Boycott, https://www.facebook.com/​againstanthroboycott/​posts/​448002548722546. 6. Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 168–69, as quoted in Nelson and Brahm, The Case Against the Academic Boycott of Israel, p. 192. 7.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener, 2020 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy, 1984 Psychology of Crowds, Gustave Le Bon, 1896 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, 2013 Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen Lewis, 2020 A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929 Your Computer Is on Fire, various editors, 2021 (haven’t read this at time of going to press but looks great) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker, 2002 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich, 1976 The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, Sharon Moalem, 2020 Jurassic Car Park Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949 The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells, 1898 People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, Joseph Stiglitz, 2019 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014 Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek, 2014, and Humankind: A Hopeful History, 2019, Rutger Bregman Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, Mark O’Connell, 2020 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, 2011 Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, Xiaowei Wang, 2020 Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark, 2017 The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values?

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Wells, 1898 People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, Joseph Stiglitz, 2019 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014 Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek, 2014, and Humankind: A Hopeful History, 2019, Rutger Bregman Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, Mark O’Connell, 2020 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, 2011 Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, Xiaowei Wang, 2020 Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark, 2017 The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values?, Brian Christian, 2021 I Love, Therefore I Am There is no reading list.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

Even seemingly subjective human attributes—our emotions, perceptions, morals—could be objectively explained as behavioral dispositions, selected for their survival value. And different conscious states were increasingly shown to correlate with physical states and mechanisms in the brain. Our awareness “can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen,” pointed out Steven Pinker in his 1997 book How the Mind Works. So much, he said, for the supposedly immaterial soul. Science, it seemed, proved that consciousness is not a fundamental or necessary ingredient in the cosmos. Instead it’s a side effect or by-product of evolution, entirely caused by and dependent on the physical activity of our neurons.

…

Respected figures are increasingly arguing that even without God, science is missing something big. In 2012, the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel complained in his book Mind and Cosmos that the conventional mix of materialism and Darwinism “is incapable of providing an adequate account . . . of our universe.” He was widely criticized for it—Steven Pinker tweeted that the book exposed “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker,” while Dennett said it was “not worth a damn”—but Nagel’s not alone. High-profile scientists, too, such as physicist Paul Davies and biologist Stuart Kauffman, reject the idea of a supernatural God but have questioned whether cosmic puzzles such as fine-tuning and consciousness can really be dismissed as random accidents.

…

With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 130; quoted in Marin, “ ‘Mysticism’ in Quantum Mechanics.” The 1953 discovery: James Watson and Francis Crick, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–38. “bisected with a knife”: Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 64. grumbling questions: For example: Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (London: Allen Lane, 2006); Ryan Gillespie, “Cosmic Meaning, Awe and Absurdity in the Secular Age: A Critique of Religious Non-theism,” Harvard Theological Review 111 (2018): 461–87.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

Table of Contents ABOUT THE AUTHOR Title Page Dedication Copyright Page PREFACE Chapter 1 - WORDS AND WORLDS Chapter 2 - DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE Chapter 3 - FIFTY THOUSAND INNATE CONCEPTS (AND OTHER RADICAL THEORIES OF ... Chapter 4 - CLEAVING THE AIR Chapter 5 - THE METAPHOR METAPHOR Chapter 6 - WHAT’S IN A NAME? Chapter 7 - THE SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN’T SAY ON TELEVISION Chapter 8 - GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Chapter 9 - ESCAPING THE CAVE NOTES REFERENCES INDEX Praise for The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker “Pinker brings an engaging and witty style to the study of subject matter that—were it not as important to us as it is complex—might otherwise be off-putting. . . . An inviting and important book. Everyone with an interest in language and how it gets to be how it is—that is, everyone interested in how we get to be human and do our human business—should read The Stuff of Thought.”

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[He] has changed the way we understand where we have come from and where we are going.” —Seth Lerer, The New York Sun “A fascinating look at how language provides a window into the deepest functioning of the human brain.” —Josie Glausiusz, Wired “A perceptive, amusing and intelligent book.” —Douglas Johnstone, The Times (London) “This is Steven Pinker at his best—theoretical insight combined with clear illustration and elegant research summary, presented throughout with an endearing wit and linguistic creativity which has become his hallmark. Metaphor, he says, with typical Pinkerian panache, ‘provides us with a way to eff the ineffable.’ The book requires steady concentration, but despite the abstract character of its subject matter it is not difficult to read.

…

From politics to poetry, children’s wonderful malapropisms to slang, Pinker’s fluency in the nuances of words and syntax serves as proof of his faith in language as ‘a window into human nature.’ ” —Donna Seamon, Booklist “A book on semantics may not sound especially enticing, but with Pinker as your guide, pondering what the meaning of ‘is’ is can be mesmerizing.” —Details ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and The Blank Slate. He lives in Boston and Truro, Massachusetts. For Rebecca PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

After World War II, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the closest we have come to a desirable but so far unwritten international law, conferring the same rights to all humans; violations of those rights, in some parts of the world, can be brought before international tribunals as crimes against humanity. Humans are obligated to other humans and maybe one day they will also be obligated to other living species and to the planet they were born into. This is real progress. The circle of human concerns has definitely enlarged, as Amartya Sen, Onora O’Neill, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, and Steven Pinker, among others, have noted.6 But why are we witnessing the weakening or collapse of the very establishments that have made these advances possible? Why have things gone wrong, once again, in humanity’s progress in ways that disturbingly resemble the past? Can biology help explain why? Is There a Biology Behind the Cultural Crisis?

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Amartya Sen, “The Economics of Happiness and Capability”; Onora O’Neill, Justice Across Boundaries: Whose Obligations? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Nussbaum, Political Emotions; Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 7. See Haidt, Righteous Mind. 8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents: The Standard Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 9. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Why War? The Correspondence Between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, trans.