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

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

Pinker stresses the importance of 3 concepts which were conceived in the enlightenment: The second law of thermodynamics (that entropy always Increases in a closed system), the concept of evolution (that the things we see are only here because they replicate them self. Thirdly information. One implication of Newton II is that it is much easier to destroy something as to build something, as it increases entropy and there are much more possibilities for a thing to not work than to work. Furthermore, the enlightenment gave us the knowledge that not everything happens for a reason.

He makes the point that a shorter news cycle lets us perceive the world as worse, while news over a decade might include a drop in unemployment, the avoidance of war and other deeds, daily news includes accidents, shootings and other small-scale tragedy. Furthermore, we are made to overvalue negative news (negativity bias). This then influences demand on news.

In the last ten years the life expectancy of Kenyans flatlined, despite everyone getting 10 years older in that time, that’s amazing. For the west we only approach death 7 months for every year we live.

When we measure the GINI index of consumption, it’s rather flat.

Pinker describes the resilience of the the human population and lays out why it’s improbable that we are close to self-destruction. He goes into detail about nuclear war and the singularity and gives his reason why he is not concerned. Then he rants a little bit about Trump.

He goes on to point out things that need improvement and says that populism in both extremes is working actively against the enlightenment ideas. He makes short process with post-modernism, by pointing out it’s central flaw of self-contradiction.

He misunderstands Nietzsche which is a shame, he believes that Nietzsche wants to be an Übermensch, which I just don’t see. He says that he would threaten Nietzsche with the life of his sister unless he would know an argument why not to do that. That’s stupid. He’d kill you.