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Comment by happyscrappy | Hacker News Reader

>His words bear extraordinary prescience today, as we face a swelling tide of political unrest, ethnic violence, and global conflict.

Doom sells but that doesn't make it true. Someone should send him a copy of Pinker's book.

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I haven't read Pinker's book, but I've read Tolstoy recently.

Tolstoy doesn't present any data or historical evidence, just shares his deep intuitive wisdom.

He predicted the rise of communism and the world wars, but also inspired Ghandi and Martin Luther King and many others... .

And at times it's really scary how much similarity there exists between the popular ideas back then (which he discusses) and the ideas of today. The almost fanatic belief in human superiority over nature, the power of Reason, the scientific method, the powerful religious groups, the armies, the police, the banks..

One would think that after 2 world wars and countless experimentation with social order and extreme technological advancement, we would have evolved to a higher level of thinking.

But no, there are some principles which stay the same. We still eat, we still drink, we still hate, we still love.

>deep intuitive wisdom.

aka he pulled it out of thin air. The sooner we base long term plans on verified data instead of intuition the sooner we'll reduce needless suffering.

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." The Little Prince.

All woo-woo aside, ooshy gooshy feelings won't get us to the moon, cure cancer, decrease childhood diseases, or feed a billion people with the land usually used to only feed 10,000.

Sure I pretty much entirely agree with you but the caution I stated earlier is the notable one for that mindset. There's always a step where you have to decide what the data means.

Long term plans need (a) vision.

A great thinker like this can't be replaced by something quantifiable.

I disagree. A long term plan can be extracted from data, the physical constraints of the world, and knowledge of the human condition. The hype of a great leader, messiah, or single white man at a podium, is totally overrated. If it weren't we would have already run into one that cured all our ills.

I assume you're referring to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, which has faced a number of criticisms, including his analysis of the data and what - in his mind - constitutes "violence".

If we avoided reading books simply because they have criticisms, we'd never read anything.

If you could summarize or link to those critiques, I would be interested.

That wikipedia page is good.

I also think expanded notions of violence are appropriate, though excluded from Pinker's analysis. For example, if a rich country COULD provide equal, high-quality health care to all its citizens, but doesn't because the health care industry (hospitals, insurers, physician groups, pharma) lobbies against such outcomes, and excess morbidity and mortality result, that is a kind of violence, though one that Pinker is not interested in.

Or North Korea (or to a lesser extent China), which maintains relatively low levels of violence, but is simultaneously committing abuses against its population.

The idea that fewer people (or a smaller proportion of people) are smashing their neighbor's head in with a rock doesn't necessarily constitute absolute "progress" to me (though it would be a nice development... provided it was true... which it might not be).

I don't disagree with those very insightful criticisms. I also recognize that Pinker is making a very sweeping argument in his book, one that he likely can't fully back up.

But it feels like we're expecting a lot from Pinker. Basically a full analysis of all types of coercion that can possibly occur. That seems a basically impossible task to undertake. Drawing the line somewhere does not seem unfair.

Pinker takes a strong normative position on what constitutes violence and what does not. I think if he had said, 'this is how I'm defining violence, and here's why, but if you were to define it another way, you might reach different conclusions', I'd feel less critical of his claims. To me, his argument is too unambiguous and he ultimately overreaches. (And - further - what does and does not constitute coercion or violence in the 21st century is the truly interesting question.)

If his conclusion had been, maybe we're seeing a drop in a particular form of violence and we're not entirely sure why but here are my thoughts (ahem, development of the atom bomb perhaps?), I would have agreed with him, but he wouldn't have sold all those books...

Wikipedia has some here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

Not the OP, but I enjoyed it, and think people should read or listen to it even though it contains some inaccuracies.

Read it, not very convincing.

Pinker overestimates hunter-gatherer violence and underestimates non-direct violence in present times (such as US covert violence).

A lot of these criticisms are available online.

There is def. some truth to this. The idea of, "End of Days" is one that continues to be recycled. There's always some sort of catastrophe around every corner. And this is true. But, I also need to wake up, and water the plants. (If you wanna be all Zen about it!)

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