Reading thoughts on Steven Pinker’s book ‘Enlightenment Now’. Rating: 10 out of 10

Summary

The gist of the book is that the word is a better place though the application of reason to address problems. That is progress, and in particular since the Enlightenment the word has made tremendous, measurable progress on a large number of issues like poverty, health, human rights etc. This provides the optimism that the word can continue to improve if we continue to apply reason to problems.

It’s a great book. I’m going to list a few of the aspects/ideas of the book I particularly enjoyed.

Style

The style is sharp and clear and he uses repeatedly a ‘thorough informed argumentation’ approach: he makes a claim and then presents structured, detailed arguments for the claim.

Data is one way of providing arguments in the book. He references the original source of the data, it’s meaning (are we talking about absolute or relative poverty?), the scales (e.g. is it linear or logarithmic?). He is upfront about the limitations and weaknesses of the data and is upfront with regards to what can be inferred (e.g. points that two curves on the graph cannot be compared for scale to each other, but they do show the same trend).

To support the claim he also deals with the main counter-arguments for the claim and why they are not valid or do not apply.

The other approach for arguments is using ‘pure reason’.

Pure reason

‘I think, therefore I am’ said Descartes. Something must exist in order to think. This is a self evident truth obtained through pure reason.

Pinker uses similar approaches to support claims. For example we should use reason in human affairs. Good luck with convincing anyone with the opposite claim.

Entropy

One one side there is the second law of thermodynamics that states that the entropy of a system does not decrease. Basically that means that systems don’t tend to become more organized. And yet living beings require quite a lot of structure and order.

This is reconciled by the observation that living beings, humans included lead a continuous fight against entropy and they use energy, increase disorder elsewhere so that they maintain their own order.

In particular an individual’s life is very fragile. An arrow, a virus, an accident can end it quickly. This asymmetry between the effort to maintain it, and the ease with which it can end provides an incentive for people to cooperate with each other.

Progress

News are short-termist, but over long periods of time we can see progress.

300 years ago people struggled to get enough calories. That’s largely solved now. In addition to plain hunger due to lack of food, this addresses things like stunted growth in children.

Solving some problems introduces other problems. Obesity for example. But it’s better to have to address obesity rather than hunger.

Fridge

You can buy a fridge for anything between £100 and £1000. But the benefit to you is larger than this amount of money. Imagine what it would mean to not have a fridge. Going more often to the shops to buy milk and veg? What if they don’t have fridges?

One point is that a lot of goods deliver value above the cost.

The other is that a few hundreds of years ago the richest could not buy a fridge (or a computer, or a mobile phone etc.)

Optimism

Pinker claims he’s an optimist that progress will continue. Not the sort of optimism of a child hoping that Santa will give him presents, but the sort of optimism of a child with some wood, a hammer, nails and some friends hoping they can build a tree house.

Religion

Religion comes intertwined with art, architecture, charitable, social even educational and science. There is value in these non-religious aspects.

But the idea of faith versus reason is failed. In particular one cannot win a argument by starting from a position opposing reason by introducing faith.

Religion institutions influencing backward. That is the case with regards to climate change for example. Also Vatican is the only state in the world where women can’t vote.

3 days later

Genesis (as in the beginning of the Bible):

• day one: God creates day, night, evening and morning
• three days later God creates the sun

Rule of thumb

If something has ‘science’ in the name it’s probably not (e.g. scientific socialism, Christian Science, Scientology).

Same about democracy: countries that have ‘Democratic’ in their name, probably aren’t.

Morality

Reason can and provides morality, there is no need to use religion. States have laws, penal codes.

In particular the Bible reflects iron age standards where denying your god or talking back to your parents is punishable by death, but rape and slavery are OK.

Irrational behaviour

There are well known cases where humans exhibit irrational behaviour. That does not mean that humans are condemned to irrationality, but instead that we need to be aware and learn to address and work around our limitations (e.g. use peer review, double blind tests etc.).

I’ve also learned another fallacy (that I’m vulnerable to as well): the failure to apply knowledge to unfamiliar situations (e.g. one can be familiar with the evolution theory but not understand it or fail to apply it outside the animal kingdom)

2019-03-19 Update: The following points are additional ideas that I got from attending a Steven Pinker public talk in Oxford yesterday on the topic of this book.

Convincing others

Data and arguments alone are not always going to convince others. Often people make claims, or have systems of belief that are based on belonging to a group of people that make similar noises.

There are dark arts of persuasion, but that’s not the line taken by Pinker in the book. Self-confessedly those dark arts are outside his core skill set, instead he sets the arguments and data.

Why Enlightenment

It’s just a catchy title. The subtitle is more important: “the case for reason, science, humanism and progress”.

Current political issues

With regards to the rejection of expert advice from the Brexit leave campaign: It is true that one should not blindly trust experts, it is important that experts have their facts and arguments right, it is important that they are experts on the field that they provide advice (not on another field). But it is easy to see the source of the fallacy. All plane crashes have a trained pilot, all surgery deaths have a surgeon performing the operation. Correlation is not necessarily cause.

With regards to the support base for the recent populist surge being old people in rural areas. The demographics work against it for the long term. It looks like a Cohort Effect (people born at certain times having similar behaviour) rather than Lifecycle Effect (people’s behaviour changing predictably as they become older). Also rural population tends to decrease over the long term.

References

Stephen Pinker: On “Enlightenment Now” one year later
https://quillette.com/2019/01/14/enlightenment-wars-some-reflections-on-enlightenment-now-one-year-later/