Taleb doesn't take himself seriously, Pinker takes himself far too seriously. Taleb is entertaining, Pinker draws out his ideas to the point of tedium. Taleb is a skeptical empiricist, Pinker likes to get lost in theory.

Pinker certainly has Taleb lapped in terms of old guard intellectual credentials. Whether that is a good thing is debatable.

Pinker isn't taken very seriously by historians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tuivk/steve...

I don't think Trump would pack those venues so full of people if he wasn't somehow in tune with what a whole lot of people are thinking. He is easy to dismiss. He is not a politician. He is not pre-packaged or polished. He is not particularly well educated. But he's right--the US is not living up to its ideals. We can even run a clean election.

America ended in 2008. We've been living off of a corpse ever since. At some point everyone is going to know it.

To reiterate: just because he recognizes the malaise, doesn't mean he has a cure. I had a political scientist who described Communism as having diagnosed the disease (class struggle), but having been unable to come up with a reasonable cure.

"America ended in 2008" Sorry your racist ass is too upset by a black president to notice how much better things have gotten over the past 8 years