Enlightenment Now

Enlightenment Now

Author: Steven Pinker Created time: August 20, 2021 11:29 AM Page No.: 576 Progress: ✔️

Description

What I am going to to do after reading it?

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Points

• Education
  • More than 80 percent of the world was unschooled; by 1900.
  • 83 percent of the world is literate.
  • Middle Eastern and North African countries, more than three-quarters of the people over sixty-five are illiterate, whereas the rate for those in their teens and twenties is in the single digits.
  • According to current projections, by the middle of this century, only five countries will have more than a fifth of their population uneducated, and by the end of the century the worldwide proportion will fall to zero.
  • Less-educated people reported having more leisure.
  • Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can.
• Politics
  • Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.
  • Liberals are more hostile and aggressive.
  • Conservatives are indeed more prejudiced against African Americans, but liberals turn out to be more prejudiced against religious Christians.
  • Conservatives are indeed more biased toward allowing Christian prayers in schools, but liberals are more biased toward allowing Muslim prayers in schools.
  • But just when we need this disinterested forum the most, academia has become more politicized as well—not more polarized, but more left-wing. Colleges have always been more liberal than the American population.
  • Many political commentators can recall a failure of peacekeeping forces (such as in Bosnia in 1995) and conclude that they are a waste of money and manpower. But when a peacekeeping force is successful, nothing photogenic happens, and it fails to make the news.
  • Three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movements succeeded, compared with only a third of the violent ones. Gandhi and King were right, but without data, you would never know it.
• Improvement of world
  • Life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.
  • Rest in 2007 had reached the level of the West in 1950.
  • Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe.
  • People recognize that democracies are relatively nice places to live, the idea of democracy can become contagious and the number can increase over time.
  • Life has been getting safer in every way. Over the course of the 20th century, Americans became 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car accident, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 59 percent less likely to fall to their deaths, 92 percent less likely to die by fire, 90 percent less likely to drown, 92 percent less likely to be asphyxiated, and 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job.
  • “drugs are symptomatic of the rising value affluent societies place on human life. . . . Health research is displacing R&D that could have gone toward more mundane consumer products. Indeed, . . . the rising value of human life virtually dictates slower growth in regular consumer goods and services—and they constitute the bulk of measured GDP.” A natural interpretation is that this tradeoff is evidence for the acceleration of progress, not the stagnation of progress.
  • Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe.
• Improvement in Lifestyle
  • Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.14 For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.
  • Fact, single and working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home married mothers did in 1965.
  • Senior citizens today are richer than people of working age: the poverty rate for people over 65 plunged from 35 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2011, well below the national rate of 15 percent.
  • Millennials seem to be in pretty good shape, happier and mentally healthier than their helicoptering parents.
• Human nature
  • Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors.
  • Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful.
  • People who feel they lead meaningful lives are more susceptible to stress, struggle, and worry.
  • Meaning, in contrast, registers the novel and expansive goals that are opened up for us as social, brainy, and talkative occupants of the uniquely human cognitive niche. We consider goals that are rooted in the distant past and stretch far into the future, that affect people beyond our circle of acquaintance, and that must be ratified by our fellows, based on our ability to persuade them of their worth and on our reputation for benevolence and efficacy.
  • People may be likelier to acknowledge a problem when they have reason to think it is solvable than when they are terrified into numbness and helplessness.
  • Governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.
  • People saw more infractions by the other team.
  • Exchange can make an entire society not just richer but nicer, because in an effective market it is cheaper to buy things than to steal them.
• Biases
  • People understand concepts only when they are forced to think them through, to discuss them with others, and to use them to solve problems.
  • People are less biased when they have skin in the game and have to live with the consequences of their opinions.
  • People are quite capable of reasoning in an unbiased manner, at least when they are evaluating arguments rather than producing them, and when they are after the truth rather than trying to win a debate.
  • To make public discourse more rational, issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible.
  • When people hear about a new policy, such as welfare reform, they will like it if it is proposed by their own party and hate it if it is proposed by the other—all the while convinced that they are reacting to it on its objective merits.
  • People should take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. It is more useful to pay attention to those who disagree with you than to pay attention to those who agree.
• Social Media
  • Users of social media have more close friends, express more trust in people, feel more supported, and are more politically involved.
  • Social media users care too much, not too little, about other people, and they empathize with them over their troubles rather than envying them their successes.
  • They are less likely to have a large number of friends but also less likely to want a large number of friend.
  • Just because social life looks different today from the way it looked in the 1950s, it does not mean that humans, that quintessentially social species, have become any less social.
  • People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings and via digital media.
• Tech
  • The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it.
  • And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening.
  • That’s because hundreds of thousands of man-years of effort have gone into preventing this from happening, in the case of the internet, and millions of years of evolutionary effort to prevent species death, in the case of biology.
• Countries
  • Countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.
  • Developed countries are actually pretty happy, a majority of all countries have gotten happier, and as long as countries get richer they should get happier still.
  • The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation.
  • Whenever ethnic neighbors go for each other’s throats we read about it, but what about the neighborhoods that never make the news because they live in boring peace? What proportion of pairs of ethnic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer is, most of them: 95 percent of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99 percent of those in Africa
• Cyber Attack
  • The strikes have mostly been nuisances such as doxing, namely leaking confidential documents or e-mail (as in the Russian meddling in the 2016 American election), and distributed denial-of-service attacks, where a botnet (an array of hacked computers) floods a site with traffic.
  • Not a single person has ever been injured by a cyberattack.
• Weapon
  • The ban was driven by a widespread revulsion at the very idea, but the world’s militaries needed little convincing, because tiny living things make lousy weapons. They easily blow back and infect the weaponeers, warriors, and citizens of the side that uses them.
  • The biologist Paul Ewald notes that natural selection among pathogens works against the terrorist’s goal of sudden and spectacular devastation.
  • Germs that depend on rapid person-to-person contagion, like the common-cold virus, are selected to keep their hosts alive and ambulatory so they can shake hands with and sneeze on as many people as possible. Germs get greedy and kill their hosts only if they have some other way of getting from body to body, like mosquitoes (for malaria), a contaminable water supply (for cholera), or trenches packed with injured soldiers (for the 1918 Spanish flu).
  • If a nuclear bomb has been detonated on your territory, you know it. States can launch weapons from submarines, which hide in deep water, or from bomber aircraft, which can be sent scrambling, making the weapons invulnerable to a first strike and poised to exact devastating revenge.
• Forecasters
  • The forecasters who do the worst were the ones with Big Ideas—left-wing or right-wing, optimistic or pessimistic—which they held with an inspiring (but misguided) confidence. The more famous they were, and the closer the event was to their area of expertise, the less accurate their predictions turned out to be.
  • These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds.47
  • They have personality traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity), and “integrative complexity” (appreciating uncertainty and seeing multiple sides).
  • They are anti-impulsive, distrusting their first gut feeling. They are neither left-wing nor right-wing. They aren’t necessarily humble about their abilities, but they are humble about particular beliefs, treating them as “hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”
  • They are aware of cognitive blind spots like the Availability and confirmation biases, and they discipline themselves to avoid them.
• Religions
  • Positive contributions of religions at particular times and places are education, charity, medical care, counseling, conflict resolution, and other social services.
  • Developed world these efforts are dwarfed by their secular counterparts; no religion could have decimated hunger, disease, illiteracy, war, homicide, or poverty on the scales.
  • It’s long been known that churchgoers are happier and more charitable than stay-at-homes, but
  • An atheist who has been pulled into a congregation by an observant spouse is as charitable as the faithful among the flock, whereas a fervent believer who prays alone is not particularly charitable.
  • 13 percent of the world’s population identified themselves as a “convinced atheist” in 2012, up from around 10 percent in 2005. 65 It would not be fanciful to say that over the course of the 20th century the global rate of atheism increased by a factor of 500, and that it has doubled again so far in the 21st.
  • An additional 23 percent of the world’s population identify themselves as “not a religious person,” leaving 59 percent of the world as “religious,” down from close to 100 percent a century before.
  • Countries with stronger safety nets are less religious, holding other factors constant.
  • When people become more intellectually curious and scientifically literate, they stop believing in miracles.
  • Better-educated countries have lower rates of belief.
  • The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.
• Who care about you?
  • The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.
  • You care about yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe that keep you alive, so you don’t squander your existence.
  • Your loved ones care about you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow your spouse, and shatter your parents.
  • And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.
• Others
  • The mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness.
  • Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.
  • Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.

Meaning

Wordsmithing - The making of changes to a text to improve clarity and style.

Catastrophize - Worse then it truly is

Modicum - Small quantity of valuable thing

Emphatic - Forcefully and Clearly

Millennials - Those born after 1980

Stories

When the data suggested that the gun-control measure lowered crime, all the liberal numerates spotted it, and most of the conservative numerates missed it—they did a bit better than the conservative innumerates, but were still wrong more often than they were right. When the data showed that gun control increased crime, this time most of the conservative numerates spotted it, but the liberal numerates missed it; in fact, they did no better than the liberal innumerates.

Cultural pessimists saw the Y2K bug as comeuppance for enthralling our civilization to technology. Among religious thinkers, the numerological link to Christian millennialism was irresistible. The Reverend Jerry Falwell declared, “I believe that Y2K may be God’s instrument to shake this nation, humble this nation, awaken this nation and from this nation start revival that spreads the face of the earth before the Rapture of the Church.” A hundred billion dollars was spent worldwide on reprogramming software for Y2K Readiness, a challenge that was likened to replacing every bolt in every bridge in the world.

In one cartoon of the new millennium, a father says to his young boy, “Son, your mother and I have bought software to control what you see on the Internet. Um . . . Could you install it for us?”

Spain was an economic laggard among Western countries, even though Spaniards were highly schooled, because Spanish education was controlled by the Catholic Church, and “the children of the masses received only oral instruction in the Creed, the catechism, and a few simple manual skills. . . . Science, mathematics, political economy, and secular history were considered too controversial for anyone but trained theologians.”

Resources

• The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker

Quote

Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past.

— Steven Pinker

Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the testing of its own beliefs is not a scientific movement.

— Steven Pinker

You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

— Richard Feynman

Most readers have no idea whether their favorite columnists, gurus, or talking heads are more accurate than a chimpanzee picking bananas.

— Steven Pinker

If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles.

— Pat Paulsen

We don’t believe in reason; we use reason

— Steven Pinker

I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.

— Hans Rosling

Your money or your life

— Jack Benny

Larger the team, the more societal influences.

— Kevin Kelly

Technology is our best hope for cheating death, at least for a while.

— Steven Pinker

Other people are more valuable to you alive than dead.

— Steven Pinker