Re:Steven Pinker thinks your sense of imminent doom is wrong
by burntoutsophos on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:32PM
(#28528004)
I echo your sentiments - That's precisely what I thought after reading those same books.
I've speculated that his excessively positive stance might be - in order to cater to an uber-optimistic crowd of humans (high percentage of entrepreneurs in that cohort) similar to but exactly antithetical to any doomsday-prophet - a bloomsday-prophet, if you will.
Nothing wrong with that, though I tend to prefer more balanced and thoughtful opinions that would think of multiple sides (even speculate on some partially-unknown stances)
On the one hand, his books are definitely worth reading, well researched, very informative. On the other hand, he does seem to look at everything through pink glasses. I don't subscribe to the ideas that we will all literally perish within the next X decades, but it's not really idiotic to think that there are many things which can destroy our rare calmness bubble in history, either slowly, like climate change, or rather quickly, like a world war.
I guess what puts me off, especially in "Enlightenment Now" is that he seems to treat these things like they are provably impossible to happen by just looking at the past and all the near misses we've had and how it was all okay in the end. Am I missing something?