“There’s a difference between progress and perfection,” says Steven Pinker, left. “The fact that things are better now than they were in the past doesn’t mean that they are acceptable now.” Pinker speaks with Chris Anderson, at right, during TED2018, April 12, 2018. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
After his mainstage talk on the opening night of TED, psychologist Steven Pinker sat down with Chris Anderson to dive into his new book, Enlightenment Now. The two examined some criticisms of the book and the thesis behind it, dug into the data, and then threw the floor open for questions, in a session that offered the luxury of time to really dig in. Below, edited highlights.
Chris Anderson: So: Progress. The question about how we think about progress, whether it’s actually happening, whether it’s an illusion — I don’t see a more important conversation or more important thing to figure out. Because what we believe about progress will impact what we pay attention to. And then more than that, what we feel about progress is a kind of soundtrack to our lives that affects how we feel, whether we’re joyful or miserable, for the wrong reasons, or for the right reasons. If I could paraphrase your talk, you basically said that the impression we all have is that the world is getting worse, but actually that’s an illusion when you look at the data. Are you saying that what we read in the media, that those things are basically false?
Steven Pinker: Certainly not false. The wars that take place really do take place and the terrorist attacks and the pollution and the poverty, but there’s a basic fallacy that we’re vulnerable to when we read the news: Because the news tells us about all of the worst things happening in the world at any given time, we’re apt to take that as a snapshot of the world as a whole. It’s a quirk of human memory that we tend to forget how bad things were in the past, but we’re reminded of how bad they are in the present, and so we have an illusion of decline whether or not there is one.
CA: So journalists may be doing their job perfectly, but if the question they’re asking is “What is the most dramatic thing that happened in the last day?” that could lead to a terrible unintended consequence. Because you said yesterday: bad things happen more quickly than good things.
SP: It’s easy to destroy something very quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and so the timescale of news — formerly once a day, now I guess once a minute — matches the timescale of destroying things but not the timescale of improving things, such as the gradual conquest of extreme poverty. Occasionally there will be a dramatic event when it comes to an advance in public health, such as the eradication of smallpox, but more often it’s a few percentage points a year which get compounded, and so there’s never a Thursday in October in which it’s actually news.
And there is a kind of asymmetry in our moral perceptions. As the financial writer Morgan Housel pointed out, pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something. It is a tough sell.
CA: So I ask you this: are you trying to sell us something?
SP: I guess I’m—a lot of people when they hear a talk of the kind that I gave the other day or read the book or read the essays, they say, “Oh it’s so nice to see someone who’s optimistic,” but that isn’t really what I’m trying to do. It’s not seeing the glass half-full or being optimistic to say that global poverty has declined from 90 percent to 10 percent, that’s a fact, and it’s a fact that people aren’t aware of. It’s not that people are ignorant as much as they are irrationally pessimistic. They actually don’t get the facts right. It’s not a question of how you spin the facts, but if you ask people has global poverty gone up or down, they give the wrong answer, they say it’s gone up.
CA: Yesterday you presented compelling stats about lifespan, health, education, safety and several other things, all of which showed shocking, stunning progress over the last few hundred years. You didn’t have time to cover everything. What other aspects of progress are notable to you?
SP: The spread of tolerance, liberal values, respect for marginalized groups. Racism, sexism, homophobia are all in decline, and it’s very hard to get that impression reading the news the last year or two in the United States. Some of the supporters of the campaign of Donald Trump, for example, are quite overtly misogynistic and racist; but the data suggests that those are kind of people formerly in the shadows finding each other, rather than a reversal of a pretty steady trend. If you ask people questions like, Would you be upset if you child married an African American? Would you move out if an African American moved next door? Do you think that blacks and whites should go to separate schools? Likewise, Do you think that gay people should be fired from their positions as teachers? Do you think they should be imprisoned? Do you think women should return to their traditional roles? Just about any question like that that you ask, the percentage of respondents giving the traditional racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes have declined, and that’s true not just in the Western countries, but worldwide, although there are many differences among countries.
Also the World Values Survey, which surveys countries from all over the world and has been doing so since the early eighties, has found that a composite of what we might think of as liberal values—gender equality, acceptance of homosexuality, raising kids to be independent as opposed to obedient, participation in decision making in government, and so on—that composite still shows huge differences among the world’s regions—like Western Europe is certainly more liberal than the Middle East—but all of them have increased over the last fifty years. A young person in the Middle East today has values that are more liberal than his or her counterpart in say Sweden or the Netherlands in the early nineteen sixties, and I thought this was—
CA: That is astonishing.
SP: —astonishing until I read, again to go back to Hans Rosling, in his posthumous book Factfulness, he reminisces about what it was like when he was a young man in Sweden in the fifties, and he confirmed from his own experience, the idea of gay rights, of women’s equality, was quite exotic back then and now it’s become completely commonplace, so even in the most progressive government that we’ve had in years, there isn’t discussion of return to segregation, which there was in 1968 when George Wallace won five states and 13 percent of the vote in the United States.
CA: But one problem of saying this is: This may be true, but there is still deeply offensive sexism, racism, etcetera, and you can sound complacent in saying it. You’re saying we don’t have to worry about this anymore?
SP: No. What I always have to remind people is that there’s a difference between progress and perfection, that the fact that things are better now than they were in the past doesn’t mean that they are acceptable now. In fact, quite the contrary to complacency, if it were true that 55 years after the civil rights movement there had been no progress in racial equality, the natural conclusion would be, well why bother with activism? It hasn’t accomplished anything. And similarly for women’s rights. The fact that the activism of the past and other changes have made progress if anything emboldens us to seek more.
CA: There was one critique of your book from Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times, which is relevant to this. “He,” meaning you, “he has little patience for individual tragedy, it’s the aggregate that excites him. Even if manufacturing jobs have gone to China and the world’s poor have gotten richer, in part at the expense of the American lower class, he still sees this as cause for celebration, but life isn’t lived in the aggregate, and it’s crude sentiment, utilitarian sentiments like this, a jarring blend of chipper triumphalism and unfeeling sangfroid, that makes Enlightenment Now such a profoundly maddening book.”
SP: That’s just terrible reasoning and terrible moral reasoning, that kind of critique, because the aggregate consists of flesh and blood human beings, lots of them. So imagine a person who rises out of poverty, whose child makes it to the age of five without dying of diarrhea or malaria, who goes to school, who has a comfortable existence; now imagine another person like that, and another person, and do it a billion times. Now that is, that is a triumph, and the fact that it, to some extent comes at the expense of a displaced American steelworker, it’s not that you celebrate the fact that things have gotten worse for the American steelworker, but life is a set of trade-offs and the fact that you have an enormous increase in well-being for an enormous number of people, and not every last person on Earth experiences that, that’s just the way complex life works, means that it is something to to favor, if the choice was, well let’s keep China and Bangladesh and India and Africa in poverty but the steelworker keeps the same job that he had in 1965, no, I think that’s not a defensible trade-off.
CA: A related critique to this is this idea that, fundamentally, the progress story of the enlightenment is a story about elitist Western ideas: the march of progress in Europe and America, ignoring the pain of what happened in much of the rest of the world, ignoring that it was often used to drive colonialism, say. I mean, how do you respond to that?
SP: I distinguish enlightenment values from Western values. Even though many enlightenment ideas originated from the West, it doesn’t mean that they’re parochial to the West, just as discoveries of science and mathematics that may have originated in a particular country aren’t specific to that country; they’re universal truths, someone had to discover them and they had to be somewhere. The enlightenment values, you could see versions of them that were voiced in classical Islamic civilization, in Mughal India, there is even a recent report of a Ethiopian kind of seer living in a cave who came up with many of the enlightenment ideas just on his own, talking to his own disciples back in the 17th century.
CA: That would be a great story or piece of history to uncover. Because your passionate plea that this is not for one tribe, it’s for everyone, is so powerful, and seeing it clearly that some of it originated in may other parts of the world would really help with that narrative.
SP: Not only are ideas like knowledge and life and health and safety and peace universal, but they haven’t been univocally embraced in the West. No sooner did the enlightenment unfold than there was a counter-enlightenment, there was a rise of nationalism and racialism and the valorization of blood-and-soil as opposed to universal human values that appeared with the romantic movement in Europe in the 19th century, a romantic militarism that then turned into fascism. We’re seeing something of a recrudescence of it right now in the United States and in Eastern Europe. Indeed, many enlightened values were accepted globally despite pushback from the United States and Britain. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example, where it was signed by, without opposition, seven Muslim countries in the late 1940s, by Ethiopia, by Thailand, by Burma — and the United States had to have its arm twisted by Eleanor Roosevelt and others to sign it because they had this problem of racial segregation still going on. Britain dragged its feet because of colonialism, whereas Turkey and Egypt and Lebanon and Ethiopia and Burma were gung-ho for it. Likewise, the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, which are humanistic value statements, and every last country signed onto them, it wasn’t particularly Western.
CA: Let’s dig a bit deeper into some of the specific areas of progress. First of all, all these graphs that go up and away, isn’t that exactly this progress that is destroying the planet, causing irreversible climate change?
SP: Well, if it was truly irreversible, that is if we should all give up on trying to mitigate climate change. We may as well just turn up our air conditioners and get in our Hummers and enjoy life while it lasts. But I think it is reversible if we take seriously the magnitudes involved and look at scenarios for deep decarbonization of economies, how we can achieve the lifestyle that people are not going to give up, and allow it to spread to Asia and Africa, the developing world, and make the sums come out right, that is, low carbon, zero carbon, and eventually negative carbon energy sources.
CA: So are you saying that climate change, you believe that climate change is absolutely something we should, must, deeply worry about?
SP: Yes.
CA: And work on. Get to work.
SP: Absolutely. And it’s precisely because we have solved the problems in the past that we should not resign ourselves to catastrophic climate change.
CA: What about inequality? You know, you’ve presented really strong graphs showing how the world’s getting more prosperous, but it is not fairly distributed, it’s getting very, you know, all the rewards going to the one percent of the one percent, and doesn’t that, isn’t that deadly dangerous as well as being deeply unfair?
SP: A couple of things. Internationally, inequality is actually decreasing now, because poor countries are getting richer faster than rich countries are getting richer. So if you compare inequality with the unit being either a country or country weighed by its population, then inequality has actually turned a corner. And as, again, going back to Angus Deaton in his book The Great Escape, it was inevitable that internationally inequality would increase if there was any escape from universal poverty and squalor and wretchedness a couple of hundred years ago, because it would have been a miracle if every country, every part of the world got rich at exactly the same rate all at the same time. That didn’t happen. It was the countries of Western Europe and the Americas that, thanks to the industrial revolution, were the first to see the GDP go up, but now other regions of the world are catching up and closing the gap, which is why international inequality is starting to decrease.
Now that’s separate from inequality within wealthy countries, which has increased in the last thirty years or so. I take a somewhat unorthodox position there, I’m not the only one, but I tend to think that the focus on inequality per se is misplaced, that what we should focus on is certainly unfairness and the ability of the wealthy to game the system, the danger of plutocracy, that is a real problem. Certainly the well-being of poor people is absolutely a problem, globally and in, within wealthy countries, but focusing on the gap between the rich and the poor is just not the morally relevant criterion. Here I’m echoing an argument made by philosophers made by Derek Parfit and Harry Frankfurt, that what we should care about is how well people live their lives, not how evenly distributed things are.
CA: But I mean a sense of fairness does seem to be pretty core to humans, and, so there was this idea that you actually take on in your book, that inequality triggers all manor of other evils in society, from you know, stress and health, yeah stress and health and many other things. You think that book The Spirit Level, which was a very influential argument, has it been discredited to some extent?
SP: The newest and most comprehensive study with the largest sample does seem to discredit that hypothesis. The hypothesis that what, that inequality causes a number of social ills such as crime and obesity and that absolute level of wealth doesn’t matter as much. It turns out to be the other way around, that, and they’re often confounded, because countries like Sweden and Denmark are both wealthy and equal, countries like South Africa are poorer and unequal, and so depending on which countries you throw into the pot, you can get different answers as to which of these is more important. But this most recent analysis suggests that it’s wealth that’s more important in societal well-being, that you can have countries, and a dramatic example is Venezuela, which has become much more equal in the last ten years, but much more miserable in every dimension. And whereas countries like Hong Kong, which is highly unequal, but the people are doing pretty well by measures of human well-being.
CA: So it makes a big difference what the very wealthy do with their wealth …
SP: And how people experience the rules of the game, whether they think they’re stacked against them or not. This is a result of the literature review by Christine Stallman and Paul Bloom, that looked back a number of studies from psychology that seemed to suggest that people are averse to inequity, that they want equal distribution, and they looked back and they said, that’s actually not what the literature shows, it’s that people, as long as the inequality is either distributed as a relatively fair and random lottery or as a reward for risk or effort, people are okay with it. When they think that there’s unfairness, that’s when they get angry.
CA: What about the decline in violence? The stats are really impressive on every measure that you showed, but technologies are getting more powerful, it’s becoming more and more possible for a single bad actor to wreak enormous havoc; a single nuke in New York would blow up the whole hypothesis of the decline of violence.
SP: It is certainly worth giving far more attention to making the nuclear regime more stable and eventually eliminating it altogether. We do have to remember that contrary to all predictions that we grew up with that nuclear war was inevitable, no nuclear war weapon has been used in war since Nagasaki, and that’s going on seventy-three years. So it’s not that unstable, but it’s still more unstable than we should accept. Reducing the risk by specific measures such as putting nuclear weapons on a long fuse; getting rid of the so-called hair trigger;, policies such as no first use, no use against a country, against a non-nuclear country; and aiming at global zero, the aspiration of Ronald Reagan, originally and then of Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and Barack Obama, which is sidelined after the election of Donald Trump. We should get back on track to bringing that risk as low as possible and then eventually to as close to zero as possible.
CA: One last one for you before we open up to audience questions: Are we special? In How the Mind Works, you said at one point in there, that you should think of the mind as in parallel with say the elephant’s trunk, these are both remarkable things. The human mind can you know, reason and think and do it, have all these abilities, vision and so forth; but the elephant’s trunk has ten thousand muscles in it and can operate as you know, a shower and a feeder and smell and communication and so forth. Just as remarkable an endpoint of billions of years of evolution as the human mind. We should not expect our minds to do everything. We, there is no reason why we should expect that we should have a, one day for example, understand the hot problem of consciousness, it’s an evolutionary organ. But then I’ve noticed in Enlightenment Now, you’re quoting David Deutsch in a couple of places, and in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, he makes a different argument, that actually knowledge and the ability to understand, the ability to reason, these are special in the sense that they can initiate a process, a force, that iterates on itself and can in principle expand to the scale of a solar system, a galaxy, you know, his example is, there are two kinds of planets in the universe: those than can shoot down incoming asteroids and those that can’t. One has knowledge, one doesn’t. But that we are special. Are we special?
SP: Yeah. That is interesting tension, and I think the answer is we’re special in some ways and not others, I mean, not others just in the sense that we can’t achieve miracles, we’re made out of matter, we need energy to not fall apart and defy entropy and so on, but I do think that human intelligence is a unique adaptation, it’s not a miracle, but it does, it makes us a deeply strange primate, very different than any other species in that particular regard. Now a biologist could say, well, you know, every species is special, and in some ways there are some other species, blue-green algae which gave us, you know oxygen, and reshaped the planet, but I am sympathetic to Deutsch’s point that there is something qualitatively different about the ability to acquire knowledge, to have recursive symbolic representations of the world, of thoughts about our thoughts, to have an open-ended infinite combinatorial system that allows us to entertain an unlimited number of thoughts and to express them in an unlimited number of sentences, and that is why humans genuinely are a very strange species among the millions on Earth.
CA: Is the ability to intentionally shape the future a uniquely human trait?
SP: It’s, whenever you say that something is uniquely human, then every animal researcher immediately sees red and they have that in their sights and well, you know, but crows, you know, they cache, or Clark’s nutcrackers cache seeds for the future, so in limited and highly circumscribed respects there are other animals that do plan for the future, but as kind of an open-ended planning whatever we want to plan for the future, and setting that as a goal, that I think is uniquely human. I say that despite the fact that I’m courting refutation from all of the biologists, the zoologists, but…
CA: [to audience] Some of you guys here I know have questions. Let’s go ahead.
Audience Q: Steven, thanks for the book. I thought it was going to make me feel good. I read the book, heard your talk, and I keep waiting for it to make me feel better, and there’s two things that kind of hold me back and one of them is the word ‘now,’ right? And you take a look at now and you look at all the data you present today and yesterday, and most of the data’s a century or centuries, it’s not really now, it’s just a long duration. And then the other thing is that when we aggregate emerging-market countries with developed countries, then it keeps the old trend going, but if you just take a look at let’s say now, if it’s twenty or thirty years, and if you take a look at us, in America now, let’s say use thirty years as yesterday, let’s say twenty or thirty years, what are the trends now?
SP: Oh. Crime. The fact that the crime rate, violent crime rate in the United States has plunged since 1992, so that’s in the last twenty-six years or so. The pollution, now that might be, that’s in danger of being reversed given the policies of the current administration, but particulate matter and sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen have been going down in recent decades. War, much of it depends on the timescale. Since 2012, the overall rate of death in war has risen because of the Syrian civil war, although it has not risen to the levels of the eighties, seventies, sixties or fifties, but certainly over a span of decades, then the rate of death in wars continue to go down. Attitudes towards gay people, racial minorities, women, have gone down over a span of decades. These aren’t centuries-long trends. These are trends in decades and years.
Audience Q: So, Steve, I appreciate the long view and as an American I’m worried about the short view too, and wondered what specific practical things we can do to encourage or maybe demand the renewed use of reason and science in our public discourse and policy setting?
SP: Certainly identifying reason and evidence as ideals, as values would be a start, but a less obvious one is to decouple our policy preferences from our politics. The main enemy of reason, and I discovered this in writing the chapter on reason, is not so much scientific illiteracy as it is political tribalism; if you look at for example climate literacy among people who accept anthropogenic climate change and those who deny it, there’s no difference in how scientifically sophisticated they are; the only thing that matters is politics. The farther you are to the right, the more you deny climate change, and a lot of people who accept climate change have no idea how it works. They identify, you know, ozone as the reason the temperatures are rising, and they say the way to deal with it is to clean up toxic waste dumps. They have just this vague concept of pollution versus green-ness, and that’s the depth of their climate understanding. Yet they are on what most of us would consider to be the correct side of that opinion spectrum. And that is true of evolution, it’s true of other hot-button issues, that as soon as they become identity badges for a political coalition, that’s when most of our critical faculties get shut down, and that’s a problem on the left as well as on the right. We ought to realize how ignorant we are of what works in a complex society, how open we should be to evidence-based recommendations, whether they feel comfortable from a left-wing perspective or a right-wing perspective.
Audience Q: So I come from a relatively happy region, Latin America, and if you look at the indicators, not everything but many things are getting better — and yet for the first time when you poll Latin Americans, they are very negative about democracy, and no matter how much we show them data, they feel that the lives of their children will be worse off than their own lives. And one of the explanations for that is corruption. They are very angry. I am angry too. What’s your take on the future of corruption? I do believe that if we don’t do something about that, no matter how much we show them progress in other areas, there is this raw anger that makes them vote for fanatical leaders or populists.
SP: Yeah corruption is an endemic problem to all institutions and always has been and always will be, simply because what we call corruption in a modern, formal, institutional context is just human nature in any other context, namely you are nice to your friends and you’re nice to your family, and you tend to reward yourself. So we have in modernity, we have this very artificial idea that you should only dole out perks according to a set of fixed rules that optimize the system as a whole, and that goes against our nature. And it’s worth going against our nature, it’s a case where human nature leads to bad outcomes, but it’s always going to be a problem. I don’t know if corruption has gotten worse or if it’s just increasingly exposed, but it clearly is a battle we’re going to have to continue to fight.
CA: And you would argue part of the anger against corruption is actually a key to progress against it?
SP: Yes that is exactly, identifying it as an injustice that ought to be rectified.
Audience Q (from speaker Kate Raworth): Steven, thank you. I really enjoyed reading your book and I really enjoyed your presentation and discussion today, and I want to respectfully disagree with the way you depict the state of the living world. As you’ve said here and in the book, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, it’s getting better, but as we know, these are the local air pollutants which are well-known to be almost among the only pollutants that do improve as countries get richer, and I would challenge you with the science and rationality to look at the whole story, including global carbon emissions, global material footprints, global impacts of deforestation, biodiversity loss, because these get worse as countries get richer. Now of course when we look at some countries, they’re beginning to, some people say, there’s a peak, right? Some countries have reached the peak in their emissions, but the peaks are far too high. We’re creating a climate mountain that we can’t afford to climb, we cannot survive the peak and then decline if all countries follow this process, because today’s global carbon emissions may be reversible in terms of their concentration, but if we rise to that peak, we may push ourselves over irreversible tipping points such as the melting of glaciers, the loss of the Amazon and we can’t recover those. I really would love to hear you address that as well, because for scientific and rational view on the situation, we have to take both into account.
SP: Yes, I do exactly that in the chapter on the environment in which I — after a more global picture of environmental quality — I separate out greenhouse gas emissions for the entire second half of that chapter, and there I completely agree that we’re not on course to solve that problem with business as usual and that we do need to tighten up both the policy and the technology. The policy being putting a price on carbon, the technology being a combination of zero-carbon energy sources and then eventually removing the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere, whether by technological means or by planting more forests. I actually do single out CO2 and other greenhouse gases as a separate problem from what’s traditionally been called air pollution.
CA: Some of the harshest pushback on the book has come from environmentalists, who feel like on species extinction for example, you didn’t fully cover the extent to which we should be worried about that.
SP: I absolutely agree we should be worried, but I disagree with the strategy of painting everything in the most catastrophic possible terms, out of a fear of complacency. A large number of people are convinced that the planet is ruined, there’s nothing that we can do about it, which tends to make them numb and helpless — as opposed to being proactive and believing that it is within our power to slow down or stop species extinction, short of undoing the industrial revolution and going back to the Middle Ages. It’s dangerous to think that it’s either business as usual or sacrificing all of the gains we’ve made since the industrial revolution.
CA: But you’re a psychologist and a lot of activists certainly seem to believe that unless you really show people what’s at stake, make them fearful, we have no chance of getting people to act. You know, people should be out in the streets on some of these issues to make change, but people are complacent and they worry that you’re making them more complacent.
SP: That’s a psychological question to which we don’t know the answer. I’m actually doing research on it now in collaboration with a student, Jason Nemrow, on the tradeoff between complacency and fatalism. That is, if you convince people the planet is ruined, it’s cooked, and there’s just nothing that that we can do about it, could that have a regressive effect? Another danger of the traditional environmental narrative is that if you convince people that there’s a choice — you can either continue to enjoy economic growth, greater comfort and richness of experience and moreover allow the developing world to enjoy the same benefits that we’ve enjoyed, or you can improve the environment — people are naturally going to drift to the comfort, the efficiency, the richness of experience. I suspect that if you say that is not an either/or, it’s not an ineluctable tradeoff, that through policy and technology, we can give people the comfort, the travel, the escape from extreme poverty, but at the same time prioritizing environmental quality, reducing pollution, saving species, saving land, it would be much more attractive.
Audience Q: What kind of changes you advocate in education to make the world better?
SP: Aside from advocating more of it, as much as possible, because education is just a fantastic investment, I’d like to see more attention given to the kind of cognitive fallacies and biases that we’re all subject to, and how more statistical literacy and numeracy can overcome them, simply because, as with reading and writing and math, that is a foundation to so much else. It’s a core foundational skill from which many other benefits cascade. I’d also like to see more credit given to some of the institutions that have gotten short shrift, like democracy and rule of law, kind of civics education that has been declining at least in American schools. There’s been so much of an emphasis, much of it justified, on social justice, on overcoming legacy of discrimination and slavery and so on, which of course are valuable, but that what’s lost is how much better rule of law, democracy, regulated markets are to many of the alternatives, like fascism, like communism, like anarchy. We’ve lost the ability to single out what actually is worth preserving about our current institutions.
Audience Q: How would you say rational evidence-based argumentation, especially in a political context, how does that not just lose out to the outrageous, the incendiary, the clickbait-y, in the context of the kind of current major town square forms we have? How does rationality and the ideals of enlightenment win out in that context?
SP: What we have to do is figure out how to align the values of rationality and reason and evidence with the contagion of virality, clickbait-y dynamics, by capitalizing on the fact that people don’t like being fooled, they don’t like being hoodwinked, they don’t like being lied to. They may not realize when they’re being lied to, but just as with in the campaign to reduce teen smoking, the gory pictures of what lung cancer will do to you were ineffective, but telling kids tobacco companies are trying to manipulate you, they’re hiding the truth from you, that actually worked. To the extent that we can capitalize on people’s desire not to be hoodwinked, that would be a way of aligning truth and reason with the darker parts of our psychology.
Audience Q: I’ve been trying to get on the positive Pinker train, and having heard your talk yesterday and now this discussion today, I’m actually lost and confused, and the reason why is because of the timescales in the data sets seem to be completely arbitrary. So you can look at the long-term, you can look at the short-term, you can look at all across the board, and I could show you teenage suicide rates over the past forty years and they look horrible, right? Or I could show you a ratio of defense spending versus education, and it would be horrible, forget about the fact there’s less death in war. So what, how are you selecting data sets, how are you selecting timescales, how should we consider that? Because right now it just seems like a bunch of data sets and we can choose them if we want to feel good, or choose them if we want to feel bad.
SP: Well, with all of them we have the anchor of now. If you pick any time segment, beginning and ending, then you could get any trend you want. But a lot of them ending now, the major ones, show positive movement, of course not everywhere all the time. As I mentioned in the talk, progress can’t be thought of as a miracle, as something that lifts everything always everywhere; it has to be relativized to the particular problems that we face and the particular solutions that we have introduced. The case of teen suicide, there you really do, it’s true that there has been an increase since the 1990s, but on the other hand the 1990s were kind of a low point, a minimum, and if you choose to start there, then there will be a rise. If you look at the entirety of the data set from as long as we know how to answer the question at all, you see that overall there has been a decline. So there it’s not kind of cherry-picking a beginning, it’s “let’s go back to where the data starts,” which is the best we can do. Now that won’t be true all of the time, just again because progress is not magic, but it is true over and over again, that if we look at the entirety of the data set, ending with the present, then we see that kind of progress.
CA: So thank you everyone for spectacularly good questions. Steven, I have one last one for you. It’s about narrative. How much does the narrative that we tell ourselves about progress matter? Does it change how we feel? Does it change what we do? What is at stake?
SP: I think an enormous amount is at stake. As we discussed earlier in regards to inequality, it’s often people’s perception of the rules of the game, the overall process, that matter more than their actual situation at the present. So narratives matter a lot, especially since the narrative has been increasing that everything is getting worse; certainly our current president was elected on a platform of deterioration and decadence and decline, that we have to make America great again, look back to a golden age, which can be highly destructive. We have to be able, while acknowledging the real problems facing us, also acknowledge the progress that we’ve made and even to the extent that we can to try to valorize the fact that human efforts in service of increasing human well-being can succeed, have succeeded, and therefore have the potential of succeeding even more in the future.
from TED Blog https://blog.ted.com/are-we-irrationally-pessimistic-a-deep-dive-qa-with-steven-pinker/
via Sol Danmeri
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