Skip to main content

February 28, 2018

From The New York Times:
[Steven] Pinker’s philosophical lens prevents him from seeing where the real problems lie. He calls himself an Enlightenment man, but he’s really a scientific rationalist. He puts tremendous emphasis on the value of individual reason. The key to progress is information — making ourselves better informed. The key sin in the world is a result either of entropy, the randomness that is built into any system, or faith — dogma clouding reason.
The big problem with his rationalistic worldview is that while he charts the way individuals have benefited over the centuries, he spends barely any time on the quality of the relationships between individuals.
That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres.
Conscious reason can get you only so far when tribal emotions have been aroused, when existential fears rain down, when narcissistic impulses have been given free rein, when spiritual longings have nowhere healthy to go, when social trust has been devastated, when all the unconscious networks that make up 99 percent of our thinking are aflame and disordered.
Our problems are relational. I don’t know about yours, but after the CNN Town Hall Wednesday night, my Twitter feed was aflame, with two raging warring camps. If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick.
Pinker’s rationalism is not the total cure. But I have to confess, I really like him. A few years ago the magazine Moment gave genetic tests to a bunch of writers with Jewish heritage. The tests reveal that Pinker and I are third cousins. Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 27, 2018

From The New York Times : [Steven] Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all. Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent. There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent. Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the...
Post a Comment
Read more