I think that line ruined the review for me, that whole paragraph just chastises the notion of evidence
Keep in mind faith has a specific meaning as a belief in something you yourself can't prove. IE, you aren't repeating these experiments, thus you take it on faith they are correct - a critique of science originally put forth by Richard Feynman the Nobel Prize winning physicist.
That's a semantic quibble which isn't really relevant to the point that Harrison is making in the rest of the quoted paragraph.
But yes, you can have misplaced faith in e.g. null hypothesis significance testing and other methods of data collection and analysis common in some of the social sciences.
What you describe is more like fideism.
Using faith and belief interchangeably seems disingenuous and ignores the religious context that is part of faith. Faith implies a lack of compromise, a concreteness, and unwillingness to change. Using that term to describe evidence based science, and the belief that evidence ought to be presented before a belief is held is an attempt to reduce science to dogma.
edit: the word "Scientism" is probably closer to the meaning here; science and rationality as a belief system in itself, as opposed to tools that help us understand physical processes. Faith in these tools to supply meaning and create a better society, often to absurd levels.
An example:
The ultimate import of his graphs is to demonstrate some kind of inexorable and progressive historical law (although he doesn't admit as much).
Where to begin with something as inane as this? The reviewer makes up a silly interpretation of what Pinker has provided, claims without any evidence that this is what Pinker really means, because he obviously knows better, and then faults Pinker for this silly interpretation. Hmm..
He goes on:
In Pinker's history, it seems as though there are no real contingencies - no prospect that the battle of Britain might had been lost, no prospect that the cold war might have turned into nuclear catastrophe, and for the future, no real sense of a potential calamity produced by climate change or a trigger-happy Kim Jong-Un (or his U.S. counterpart, for that matter). This is an almost providential view of history.
Again, the reviewer completely misses the point: we have always had potential calamities. But the real calamities have decreased dramatically, and life has improved so incredibly that it is not even funny. This really hit me when I was on a tour at the Neue Palais in Potsdam, a palace/guest house built by Frederick the Great to impress his neighbors. This palace has a bunch of apartments for royal guests. Even the poorest households in Western countries today live better. Much better.
We. Are. Living. Like. Kings.
No: better than kings of even a few centuries ago.
So yeah, Pinker is right.
How is that not an almost providential view of history? I don't see how the charge is misplaced.
In about every conceivable way?
"Providential" means that there is some divine guidance or care, so it is (a) about the cause of what happened and (b) that this cause is somehow divine in nature.
Saying that "real calamities have decreased dramatically" is not saying anything about causes, it is simply making an empirical observation about the world. Which could certainly be wrong, but even then it is not saying anything about divine causes.
Of course, Pinker does say something about causes, but these are about as far away from "divine intervention or guidance" as possible. In fact, it is about as secular as you can get.
Of course, you may be of an opinion that such a "lucky streak" so to say is so highly improbable that it must be divine intervention, but that is purely you, because it isn't luck and it isn't divine intervention. The entire argument is that we have found something that works really well, empirically.
Unless of course you change the definition of "almost" to be "the exact opposite of".
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
And of course politicians have also been at it for some time. See Adam Curtis's excellent The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
If either of the criticism articles that I saw links to here were actually posted as comments on HN, dang would be asking them to reword their criticisms to be less hostile and aggressive.
Anyways, that cuts both ways. If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
>If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
I guess you're not as big a fan of reason as Pinker is, then. It's the content of the review you need to look at if you want to figure out whether the book's any good or not.
In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia. You can easily find similarly snarky articles by Pinker himself.
A bit off topic, but that's terribly damning of academia! It's not often you get a concrete example of the "educated elite talking down to the proles" stereotype, but that review is it, in the flesh.
It's off-putting. Viscerally so. I've read bad restaurant reviews by professional critics that are less venomous.
True. Doesn't mean it's worth his time to read if the style is distracting. He's just hoping to find a better-written review.