Steven Pinker: Be Positive, The World Is Not Falling Apart.
After all the “decisions” twittering forth from the White House this past week, I decided I needed to suss-out some optimistic words. I found them presented by Dr. Stephen Pinker, cognitive scientist and Harvard Professor, in his presentation on “human progress and how “news tend make us more pessimistic than we should be.”
Dr. Stephen Pinker delivered his talk at the World Economic Forum, Davos. January 2018. He began by quoting David Deutsch, “Problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable.”
A few Highlights
“Solutions bring new problems which must be solved in their turn. Human progress is just not possible but has happened. It happens not by magic. It’s not a law of the universe. It’s the result of commitment to what I call the ideals of the Enlightenment, namely reason, science and humanism. To the extent that we commit ourselves to those ideals progress could continue. If we don’t, it won’t.”
Q. “If the media is part of the problem, driving our pessimistic view of the world, then what should we do differently as consumers of the news?”
A. “I don’t want to make the media the villain. Lord knows they have been the subject of enough intemperate attacks. It is thanks to the media that we know about what is going wrong. And, it is indeed futile to expect of the media that they just balance bad news with good news…. Have more heartwarming stories of tiger cubs at the zoo. That’s not what I would be advocating.”
“Rather, that the point of media coverage is to give us a picture of the world so that we know what’s going wrong. It must also show when things go right in order that we have a signal as to what actually helps, what the solutions are to the problems. If the picture of the world is that there are no solutions, things are bad and they are just getting worse and worse, then the rational response would be to just throw up your hands, be fatalistic, and just enjoy life while you can.”
“I would encourage as part of the ethics and professional standards of the media:
- That news be placed in historical and statistical context.
- That an op-ed columnist should not use, ‘something that blew up yesterday’, as an indication that the world is getting worse.
- All claims about trends have to be backed-up by statistical data and by comparisons of past periods: ‘things suck now but in many cases they were worse in the past’; ‘the Iraq and Syrian civil wars are awful, but the Vietnam war was worse’. People have to remember that.”
Q. “Are you surprised by the change in the mood of our society during the past ten years and how do you expect it to evolve in the next five years? What can change the trend?
A. “I am surprised. There are in a lot of the countries that are actually pretty rich, pretty healthy, there has been an increase in pessimism. This is not true of countries in the developing world that have had the most rapid rate of growth. In China, the polls show that people are pretty optimistic about the future. The United States is maybe the most gloomy country in terms about expectations about tomorrow. And, there is an extremely high correlation between votes for Donald Trump and a belief that the country is heading in the wrong direction.”
“What can we do to change it? Well, I think we do need a more numerate and statistically savvy press and political class and intellectual class. I think there should be far more statistical thinking that is considered to be part of everyone’s basic education so that we aren’t mislead by incidents, such as, terrorism or shootings, into thinking that that is the direction of society as a whole. That is, that we have to push back against cognitive biases like the availability heuristic*.”
“Also, I think that education and public discourse should remind itself of how bad things were in the past, why we need institutions like free speech and liberal democracy, for all its problems. We need to be reminded of what happened in the cultural revolution in China, and Nazi Germany, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and other cases in which we have learned from mistakes in history.”
“Part of our education should be about how bad things used to be so that we can properly evaluate these institutions that were solutions to those problems. If we forget the problems that they were originally designed to solve, we can take them for granted and then become cynical about them and indeed look at every gap between utopia and the state-of-the-world (there always will be such a gap, the world will never be perfect) as a sign of the corruption and evil of our leaders and institutions.”
Q. “It’s a beautiful talk. I really like how you give us perspective about how we should feel more upbeat than other people would have us believe. But, I want to ask you a question: Because the Enlightenment in some sense succeeded so well, isn’t there a problem that the world of knowledge has become some complex that most people can’t understand it. As a practicing scientist, I’m very well trained in all the things you talked about but if I go to some other field, it’s very hard for me to judge anything that is right or wrong. And, so, in a circumstance like that, I think in the end, discourse comes down to authority as opposed to reason. Maybe the Enlightenment has succeeded so much that the whole idea of rational discourse is no longer effective in today’s society. Look at autism and vaccines. Look at fake news, and so on. So, what mechanisms do we have to go beyond that beside using the traditional idea of, just talk it out and we will all come to the right answer.”
A. “We should not be misled by the outburst of irrationality at present into thinking the world has gotten less rational. In my college days, there was a huge growth in astrology, tarot cards, mysticism, crystal healing, and all kinds of nonsense that came up in the 1960s. Humans are always vulnerable to superstition, misinformation, lies, fake news, and conspiracy theories. These are really not new problems.”
“But, the point that you made, that, ‘do we have to fall back on authority because (of complexity) none us can be an expert on anything but our own field, if that’: The long term, global answer is, since we do have to trust others, we need ways of knowing which authorities to trust, namely, the authorities that deserve their epistemic authority by basing their opinions on evidence, open debate, a history of their beliefs being challenged, so we know that they deserve our credulity more than alternative authorities.”
“So, I think that institutions like science and journalism have to open up their workings, reinforce their methods at arriving at their claims, such as peer review in science, emphatical testability, fact checking in journalism, there has to be greater awareness that without those mechanisms, we humans are naturally going to gravitate toward fallacy, rumor, superstition, and ignorance.”
“That has to be part of the conventional wisdom. Knowledge is hard. You shouldn’t trust anyone. But the people who you should take most seriously are those that have a track record of doubting their own beliefs and constantly fact checking and verifying them.”
* The “availability heuristic” is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.
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