A New Enlightenment | Steven Pinker

[Music] good evening I'm Stuart bran from the long now foundation welcome I want to see it work to about our speaker's book something I've come to admire and even require and stuff that I'm gonna spend a whole bunch of time reading or even listening to is density I want a lot of insight a lot of news a lot of meat per paragraph in a book and that's relatively uncommon but this is about a third of the way through enlightenment now you can see I've dog you're just about every page and that's because the density of insight and originality and serious news is that thick in this book and what will here tonight is not the book the book has a whole lot more than what Steve can say in the course of an hour and a half our conversation so let me introduce the speaker to the introduction to enlightenment now Steven Pinker thank you so much what an honor it is to be speaking at the long now and to be introduced by Stuart brand from time to time we all ask some deep and difficult questions why is the world filled with woe how can we make it better how do we give meaning and purpose to our lives well as important as these questions may seem there are some people with confident answers to them for example morality is dictated by God in holy scriptures when everybody obeys his loss the world will be perfect for example problems are the fault of evil people who must be shamed punished and defeated our tribe should claim its rightful greatness under the control of a strong leader who embodies its authentic virtue in the past we lived in a state of order and harmony until alien forces brought on decadence and degeneration we must restore the society to its golden age well what about the rest of us many people know what they don't believe in but what what do we believe in in enlightenment now I suggest that there is an alternative system of beliefs and values the one that we associate with the 18th century enlightenment in a nutshell that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing many people embrace the ideals of the Enlightenment without being able to name or describe them as a result they faded into the background as a bland status quo or the establishment other ideology our ideologies have passionate advocates and I suggest that enlightenment ideals to need a positive defense and an explicit commitment and that's what I've tried to do in enlightenment now enlightenment ideals I suggest revolve around four themes reason science humanism and progress let me say a few words about each it all begins with reason and with the understanding that traditional sources of belief are generators of do faith revelation tradition Authority charisma mysticism intuition the parsing of sacred texts are all ways of being wrong reason in contrast is non-negotiable as soon as you try to provide reasons why we should trust anything other than reason as soon as you insist that you are right that other people should believe you that you're not lying or full of crap you've lost the argument because you have appealed to reason human beings on their own are not particularly reasonable cognitive scientists have shown that we are liable to generalize from anecdotes to reason from stereotypes we seek evidence that confirms our beliefs and we ignore evidence that disconfirms them and we're overconfident about our knowledge our wisdom and our rectitude but people are capable of reason if they adopt certain norms free speech open criticism and debate logical analysis fact-checking and empirical testing which brings me to the second enlightenment ideal science science is based on the conviction that the world is intelligible and that we can understand it by formulating possible explanations and testing them against reality science has shown itself to be our most reliable means of understanding the world including ourselves an important enlightenment theme was that there can be a science of human nature and that beliefs about society are testable just like any other beliefs about the world science moreover provides not just technical know-how but fundamental insights about the human condition naturalism the laws of the universe have no goal or purpose related to human welfare which means that if we want to improve that welfare we have to figure out how to do it ourselves entropy in a closed system without input of energy disorder increases things fall apart stuff happens and that's because there are vastly more ways for things to go wrong than to go right evolution humans are products of a competitor process which selects for reproductive success not for wellbeing as a manual can't put it out of The Crooked Timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be built the third enlightenment value is humanism that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings and other sentient creatures well human flourishing who could be against that well in fact there are alternatives to humanism it is by no means a trite or banal moral commitment for example there among the alternatives are that the ultimate good is to enhance the glory of the tribe the nation the race the class or the faith to obey the dictates of a divinity and pressure others to do the same to achieve feats of our artistic or Marcille or heroic greatness to advance a mystical force a dialectic or struggle or pursuit of a utopian or messianic age humanism is feasible because people are endowed with a sense of sympathy an ability to show concern for the welfare of others another recurring enlightenment theme now by default our circle of sympathy is rather small we tend to feel the pain only of our genetic relatives our friends our allies cute little furry baby animals and that's about it but our our circle of sympathy can be expanded through forces of cosmopolitanism the mixing of ideas and people such as education journalism mobility art and reason as soon as I enter into a conversation with you I can't insist that my interests are special just because I me and and you're not and hope for you to take me seriously finally this leads to the enlightenment ideal of progress that if we apply knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing we can gradually succeed well you may ask if human nature doesn't change how could progress even be possible and an answer from the Enlightenment is through benign institutions that allow us to deploy energy and knowledge to combat entropy that magnify the better angels of our nature like reason and sympathy while marginalizing our inner demons our biases our illusions our tribalism our thirst for dominance and vengeance examples of institutions that were brain children of the Enlightenment that we continued to enjoy our democracy declarations of rights markets organizations for global cooperation and institutions of truth seeking academies scientific societies Free Press lecture series and others so 250 years later how did that Lightman thing work out well if you ask most intellectuals the answer is not very well because I have found that intellectuals hate progress and intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress it's it's not that they hate the fruits of progress mind you most members of the Clara Sea would still rather have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it it's the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class if you think we can solve problems I have been told that means you have a blind faith and a quasi religious belief in the outmoded superstition of the false promise of the myth of the onward march of inevitable progress you are a cheerleader for vulgar American can-do ISM with the rah-rah spirit of boardroom ideology Silicon Valley and the Chamber of Commerce you are a practitioner of Whig history a naive optimist a Pollyanna and of course a Pangloss alluding to the Voltaire character who declared all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds well Pangloss as it turns out was a pessimist true optimist believes there can be much better worlds than the ones we have today but this is all irrelevant because the question of whether there has been progress is not a matter of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses or having sunny disposition or seeing the glass as half-full it's an empirical hypothesis human well-being can be measured life health sustenance prosperity peace freedom safety knowledge leisure if they have increased over time I submit that is progress so let's look at the data beginning with life the most precious resource of all for most of human history life expectancy at birth hovered around 30 years of age but then with the discovery of vaccination sanitation antibiotics and other advances in public health and medicine life expectancy across the world has increased so that today it is 71 years and virtually no one guesses that it's that high as with many examples of human progress the development has been highly uneven across the regions of the world Europe was the first region to escape early death followed by the Americas in the 20th century Asia has shown spectacular increases and most recently Africa has began begun to close the gap the life expectancy in Europe is greater than 80 years but in all regions of the world life expectancy at birth is increasing indeed in Kenya life expectancy and has increased by 10 years in the last 10 years which means that a for a Kenyan citizen every year he would get a year older but not approach death at all ah child mortality in for most of human history the greatest reducer of life expectancy was death in fragile children even in Sweden which we today we think of as the the world's most one of the world's most advanced countries in 1750 one-third of Swedish children did not make it to their fifth birthday that was reduced to a third of a percentage point that is a hundredfold decrease again other regions of the world got a later start but followed the same trajectory here we have Canada in North America South Korea in Asia Chile hit Latin America and Ethiopia in sub-saharan Africa which has reduced its rate of child mortality from 25 percent to 6 percent still too high but the progress is continuing in the 18th century 1% of Swedish women Dyle died in childbirth that has been brought down by a factor of two hundred and fifty two point double O four percent and a similar progress was then experienced in the United States in Malaysia and here we have Ethiopia health for the greatest proximate cause of death for most of human history was infectious disease that is largely eliminated as a cause of death in the developed world in the developing world it is still a major killer but tremendous progress has been made there just in the last twenty years the rate of childhood deaths from the five most deadly infectious diseases has all been in decline pneumonia diarrhea malaria measles and hiv/aids sustenance it takes about 2,500 calories to sustain a an active adult meal on an average and it was only with the British agricultural revolution in the second half of the 18th century that the first country was able to exceed that measure thanks to advances in agronomy like crop rotation later to the invention of synthetic fertilizers the mechanization of Agriculture the selective breeding of vigorous hybrids and networks of transportation every region of the world has developed the ability to feed itself here you have the graph for the world as a whole now this would be a dubious form of progress if all those extra calories were just making fat people fatter but in fact they have greatly reduced the rate of undernourishment in 1970 about 35% of the developing world was undernourished that has been cut down to less than 15% again the spread of that progress has been uneven Latin America was the first region in the developing world to decimate undernourishment here you have three regions in Asia and here is progress in sub-saharan Africa also thanks to the availability of calories famine which was one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse could strike any continent and cause sudden devastation has been reduced and famines today are found mainly in war-torn and remote regions prosperity for most of human history there was little to no economic growth this graph shows the gross world product from the year 1 to the Year 2015 and as you can see not much happened until the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century and there's been a 200 fold increase in gross world product since the early 18th century again there the progress has been highly uneven the UK was the first country to make the what Angus Deaton calls the great escape from universal wretchedness and poverty the United States quickly exceeded it here we have South Korea and Asia Chile and China and India are now showing exponential growth the gross the GDP per capita in India today is about what Sweden had in 1920 once again this would be a dubious example of progress if all of the gains went to the one-percent richest but in fact they have drastically brought down the rate of extreme poverty a dollar 90 per person per day in 2015 dollars the bare minimum necessary to feed one's family by that definition about 90% of the world's population was extreme extremely poor 200 years ago that has been brought down to less than 10 percent and there's been a 75 percent reduction in the rate of extreme poverty just since 1999 because poor countries are getting richer faster than rich countries are getting richer the the index of international inequality there's inequality between countries has started to decrease it necessarily increased during the industrial revolution when some countries broke away from the pack of a universal poverty but now more recently the tide has begun to turn now within rich countries of course inequality has increased but that does not mean that developed countries have turned their backs on the poor in recent years quite the contrary for hundreds of years no European or developed country spent more than 1.5 percent of its GDP on readest redistribution to the poor the aged children the sick but in the course of the 20th century every developed country embarked on a massive program of redistribution so that today the median among OECD countries in social transfers is 22% thanks largely to these transfers the rate of poverty in the United States has decreased even as inequality has increased in 1960 the poverty rate when it's calculated as disposable income that is after taxes and transfers was 32 percent that has fallen to 7 percent and when poverty is measured in terms of consumption where people can afford to buy it's gone from 30 percent to less than 3 percent peace for most of human history war was the natural state of relations between countries and peace was a mere interlude between wars you can see this in this graph which plots the percentage of years that the great powers of the day the 800-pound gorillas the empires and states that could project military force beyond their borders were at war with each other in the 1500s and 1600s the great powers were pretty much always at war today they are virtually never at war the last great power war pitted the United States against China 65 years ago if we zoom in on the 20th century then of course two of the wars that did occur were horrific bloodbath but thanks to after the Second World War thanks to expanding economies denser commercial relations between countries and norms against conquest and the changing of borders by force the rate of death in wars of all kinds has skittered downwards there were peaks for the Korean War the Vietnam War the iran-iraq war and most recently the Syrian civil war but the rate has come down from 22 per hundred thousand per year in the late 40s and early 50s to about nine during the Vietnam era to about five during the iran-iraq war to one point two today freedom and rights there has been recently conspicuous backsliding in democracy in countries like Russia and Turkey and Venezuela but still the overall trend in governance has been towards democracy as this graph showing the relative democracy versus autocracy score across the world shows but even with the backsliding in democracy of recent years the world has never been more democratic than it has been in this decade and less that's strike you as an incredible keep in mind that in 200 years ago the number of democracies in the world could be counted on one hand and embraced one percent of the world's population as recently as the early 1970s the world only had 31 democracies half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain and under the control of communist totalitarian dictatorships Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships Greece was under the control of the Colonel's a military junta almost all of Latin America was under the control of military governments Taiwan South Korea Indonesia all military governments all and all of them today are democracies they were about 52 democracies sorry about 52 democracies in 1989 87 in 2009 the first year of the Obama presidency when by the time Obama left office there were a hundred and three democracies in the world comprising 56 percent of the world's population also the power of governments to brutalize their citizens is being curtailed capital punishment used to be pretty much ubiquitous across countries and it was applied to trivial misdemeanors like shoplifting and poaching often in grisly torture torture executions like disembowelment and burning at the stake but beginning with the Enlightenment and swelling to a flood in the 20th century country after country has abolished the death penalty if current trends continue the death penalty will vanish the earth by 2026 also more and more countries have decriminalized homosexuality again there has been backsliding in Russia and several African countries but overwhelmingly the trend is towards decriminalization child labour in 1850 30 percent of English children were sent to work on in farms and factories with the growth of affluence a premium that modern economies put on education and in general evaluation of the lives of children the rate of child labour has plunged in England in the United States even more dramatically in Italy and it's come down in the world as a whole an accomplishment for which kailashi trt won the Nobel Peace Prize three years ago violent crime pretty much any region of the world in a state of Anarchy suffers from high rates of interpersonal violence records for homicide go back in Europe some almost 800 years and in 1300 in Western European countries had a homicide rate of about 33 per a35 400,000 per year with the consolidation of centralized states and kingdoms across the medieval patchwork of Berenice and fiefs the rate of homicide came down in England and the Netherlands from 35 to 1 a similar reduction in Italy and pretty much any part of the world in which frontier regions come under the control of the rule of law we'll see a transition from high rates of violence to relatively low ones as the code of vendetta and a culture of Honor is replaced by a court system in the rule of law it happened in later in colonial New England it happened in the American Wild West when the when the sheriffs came to town and even countries that remain notorious for their high rates of violence such as Mexico have seen a fivefold decline of violence from what it was 70 or 80 years ago we zoom in on the last 50 years we see that the United States which has with many measures of human flourishing is something of a an outlier among Western democracies we we punched below our wealth in measures of human well-being and Indian in the United States and in other Western countries there was something of a crime boom in the 1960s but starting in 1992 the United States brought its rate of homicide down by more than half and the world as a whole has reduced its homicide rate by about 30 percent just in the last 20 years there is a plan from the University of Cambridge of how the world could reduce its homicide rate by 50 percent in the next 30 years and that's a quite a feasible goal other kinds of violent crime have also been in decline the domestic violence such as violence against wives and girlfriends rape and sexual assault are down 75 percent since the records were first kept in the 1970s children are safer they're safer from violent victimization at school including bullying and safer from physical abuse and sexual abuse by caregivers in fact we've been getting safer in just about every way thanks to advances in safety technology in cars like seatbelts and airbags thanks to the design of better highways and more consistent enforcement of traffic laws the chance of B of being killed in a car accident has fallen by 96% in the last century we are eighty eight percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk 99% less likely to die in a plane crash fifty-nine percent less likely to fall to our deaths 90 percent less likely to drown 92 percent less likely to die by fire fire departments by the way are putting themselves out of business 92% less likely to be asphyxiated however there is one category of accidental death that has gone the other way that is the category called poison by solid or liquid and here you see the the results of the American opioid epidemic at the same time we're 95% less likely to be killed on the job and what about the acts of God the droughts floods wild fires storms volcanoes landslides meteor strikes earthquakes thanks to more resilient infrastructure better early warning systems and better emergency responses were 96% less likely to be to die in an act of God because it will be not because god has become more merciful indeed think about the quintessential act of God the everyone's favorite metaphor for an unpredictable date with death the literal bolt from the blue yes we are 97% less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning knowledge we are naturally illiterate and even in early modern Europe no more than 15% of the population could read and write European countries achieve universal literacy by the mid 20th century Germany a little bit later here you see Italy the United States Chile and Mexico here you have the trajectory for the world as a whole showing that today 80 percent of the world can read or write and 90 percent of the world under the age of 25 not just boys but girls in 1750 only six girls could read or write for every ten boys and that gender parity was achieved in the late 19th century the world as a whole is very close to gender parity in literacy even the most backward parts of the world Pakistan and Afghanistan have shown dramatic increases for which we can thank the other winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 Malala yousufzai and in perhaps the most incredible example of progress of all the one that defies belief that people their jaws drop we have been getting smarter this is true in a well-documented effect known as the Flynn effect IQ scores all over the world have increased by three points per decade for a century a gift of the spread of education but also of the trickling down of abstract concepts and visual symbols from technical domains like science and technology to everyday experience well have these gains improved our quality of life in many ways they have in 1870 the typical work week in the United States and Western Europe was greater than the 62 years that has fallen by 22 ow 62 hours per week that is that's fallen by 22 hours a week and in addition most American workers get three weeks of paid vacation thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity and to the adoption of what used to be called labor saving devices like washing machines vacuum cleaners refrigerators dishwashers stoves and microwaves the amount of our life that we lose to housework has fallen from 62 hours a week to less than 15 hours a week that is from about eight hours a day to two hours a day and when I say we I really should say women because housework is highly gendered given that housework is the activity that people rate as the least favorite way to spend their time this itself is an enormous gain in quality of life thanks to shorter work weeks and less time lost to housework leisure time has increased by about eight hours a week just since 1965 the game for women started to level off around 1995 and I was puzzled by this graph and read the fine print and the tables and the reason for the leveling off is that women are spending more time with their children so a single working mother today spends more time with their children then a married stay-at-home mom did in the 1950s so forget the stereotypes from Leave It to Beaver now is the time when women are spending more time with their children we also forfeit less of our paycheck to necessities from sixty percent a century ago to less than a third today has it made us any happier it's often said that money can't buy happiness but that's not exactly true if you look at a graph of self-rated life satisfaction as a function of GDP per capita on a logarithmic scale you see there's actually a pretty strong relationship both within across countries as indicated by the scatterplot of points and within countries as indicated by the arrows impaling each point again it's a logarithmic scale which means the relationship starts to bend over when you get to higher income levels but what this graph suggests is that as countries get richer as all countries are doing their citizens are likely to get happier and indeed the world value survey has found that in 45 of the 52 countries they have tracked 86% happiness as increased over the last 40 years has it come at the expense of the environment and the answer is it surely has although that is starting to turn around according to a report card given to countries called the environmental performance index 178 out of 180 countries have shown improvements in environmental quality over the last few decades I'll just show you a snapshot of what's happened in the United States since 1970 thanks to the year of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency thanks to legislation that regulates pollution and to pollution control technology while the American population is increased by 40% GDP has increased by a factor of two and a half we've driven twice as many miles but the five major air pollutants have been reduced by 60 percent so the idea that is conventional wisdom both on the extreme libertarian right and in the extreme green left that we have to choose between economic growth and environmental protection I turns out to be false deforestation in temperate regions of the world has fallen to zero as forests are no longer cleared for farms and abandoned farms are in fact being recolonized by temperate forests the situation is not as rosy and when it comes to tropical forests where there is still alarming deforestation but the tide has turned and the peak for deforestation was more than 40 years ago and it has come down since 1970 the world has shipped twice as much oil by sea but has had 85 percent fewer oil spills and the amount of the Earth's surface that's protected against economic exploitation has doubled from 8 percent to 15 percent while the amount of the world's oceans that are protected has also doubled from 6% to 12% well I hope to have convinced you that that progress is not a matter of having a sunny disposition but is an empirical fact and how is the fact of human progress reflected in the news well I'm going to show you a graph that uses the technique of sentiment mapping that tallies the number of positive versus negative words in a sample of new stories going back to 1945 when it comes to the New York Times during this era of increasing peace prosperity and happiness the New York Times has gotten glomer and glomer and that is true of a summary of the world's broadcasts as well which has become increasingly morose so why do people deny progress part of the answer comes from cognitive psychology Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown that the human brain tends to estimate risk and probability via a shortcut they call the availability heuristic namely the more easily we can recall examples from memory the more common we think an event is for people for example think that tornados kill more people every year than asthma attacks whereas it's drastically the other way around presumably because tornados make for great television and my attacks not so much indeed if you combine the availability heuristic with the nature of news recalling that news is about stuff that happens not stuff that doesn't happen you never see a journalist saying Here I am reporting live from a country that is not at war or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists also news is about sudden events not gradual changes as The Economist track max Rosa points out the news could have report it had run the headline 138 thousand people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday every day for the last 25 years but they never ran that headline leading to the story in the hypothetical story in the onion CNN holds morning meaning meeting to decide what viewers should panic about for the rest of the day you combine the availability heuristic with the nature of the news and you get the impression that the world is getting more dangerous and always has been there's another feature of our psychology that predisposes us to pessimism about the world called a negativity bias that bad is stronger than good we dread losses more than we anticipate gains we dwell more on what can go wrong than what can go right especially recent bad events bad events that in distant memory tend to lose their negative coloring explaining an observation by Franklin Pierce Adams that nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory the negativity bias also opens up a market for doomsayers and profits to remind us of hazards we may have overlooked as a result pessimism often sounds serious optimism sounds frivolous as Morgan Housel a financial writer to point out pessimist sound like they're trying to help you optimist sound like they're trying to sell you something there's also a Status competition among elites Society is divided into different professional guilds and clubs with different responsibilities for making the society run to complain about modern society is a backhanded way of putting down your professional rivals it's a way for academics to look down on business people for business people to look down on politicians for political challengers to look down on incumbents and so on this has been going on for quite some time as Thomas Hobbes said in the 17th century competition of praise inclined us to a reverence of antiquity for men contend with the living not with the dead let me end with three questions about progress and enlightenment you might think isn't it good to be pessimistic to afflict the comfortable to break the mock to speak truth to power well not exactly it's good to be accurate of course we must be aware of problems and suffering and injustice where they occur but it's also important to be aware of how they can be reduced there are dangers to thoughtless pessimism such as fatalism why throw good money after bad why throw money down a rat hole the poor will always be with you why waste time and money on a hopeless cause indeed if we are doomed as many prophets remind us then we should just enjoy life while we can since there's nothing that we can do to to forestall that do eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die it can also open the door to radicalism if every institution is in irrevocable decline if the society is degenerating fast on the verge of collapse well that opens up calls to smash the Machine drain the swamp burn the empire to the ground under the expectation that anything rising out of the ashes has got to be better than what we have today or to empower an aspiring demagogue who promises only I can fix it is progress inevitable well of course not progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time that would be magic not progress progress consists of using knowledge to solve problems and problems are inevitable solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn also the world can always be blindsided by nasty surprises and I've mentioned a number of them the world wars the 1960's crime boom AIDS in Africa the American opioid epidemic and there are severe global challenges that we have not solved for most among them being climate change and the risk of nuclear war I think it is best to see these not as apocalypses in waiting but as solvable but as yet unsolved problems we can address climate change by attempts to decarbonize our economy via carbon pricing and lo zero and negative carbon technologies and to pursue denuclearization via international stability which would make nuclear weapons unneeded obsolete anachronistic and programs of arms reduction just a couple of hints that these are not vain utopian hopes is the fact that in some ways they have already begun there's a natural arc in modern economies toward emitting less co2 per dollar of GDP here we have a graph for the UK showing that as the UK underwent the Industrial Revolution it emitted far more co2 as large amounts of coal were burned to power the Industrial Revolution but then there was a transition from coal to oil from oil to natural gas from and then to renewables and nuclear energy and hydro which has resulted in less co2 being emitted per unit of wealth the u.s. underwent the same transition China did with huge spikes from the Maoist era where people were forced to set up backyard smelters that emitted vast amounts of co2 with zero economic output and but it started to come down as it has for India and the world as a whole now I have to emphasize this does not mean that the climate will have a soft landing those figures have to go down to zero which is an extraordinary challenge but it shows that economies are not inherently tied to flaming carbon the major fact about nuclear weapons is that no nuclear weapon has been used in war since Nagasaki more than 70 years ago and there is a something like a taboo against the use of nuclear weapons even at least so far including Street tactical nuclear weapons and there's been a massive reduction in the size of the world's arsenal at least so far at 85 percent reduction since the height of the Cold War in the 1980s indeed about 10 percent of American electricity is generated from fuel nuclear fuel from spent nuclear weapons in mainly Soviet more generally progress is not a mystical force but it depends on embracing the ideals of the Enlightenment namely applying reason in science to enhance human flourishing if we continue to apply these principles then progress could continue and if we don't it may not final question does the Enlightenment go against human nature as some romantics and defenders of religion insist is humanism just too arid or tepid or flattened to satisfy human needs is the conquest of disease famine poverty violence and it's boring do people need to believe in miracles a father in the sky a strong chief to protect the tribe myths of heroic ancestors well it's not so clear secular liberal democracies turn out to be the happiest and healthiest places on earth probably in the history of our species and they are the top destination of people who vote with their feet also oh yeah I dare say that applying knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing is heroic glorious maybe even spiritual this is a heroic story that is not just a myth it is true or true to the best of our knowledge which is the only truth we can have also it is a heroic story that doesn't belong to one tribe but to all of humanity - to any sentient being with the power of reason and the drive to persist in its being because it depends only on the convictions that life is better than death health is better than sickness abundance is better than want freedom is better than coercion happiness is better than suffering and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance thank you very much thank you all right [Applause] my first note says remember to mention post-show book sales thank you out there you haven't mentioned Trump except by certain inference but essentially he is mentioned you book quite a lot and you see me saying that one of the ways to these various success curves can be reversed as to the policies of administration you want to spell that out a bit yes well I faced a challenge in writing a book on progress that came out and after 2016 shortly after 2016 it doesn't look like so much progress and I got I got conflicting advice some people said oh he's just a blip progress is gonna continue you want your book to be relevant long after he's left the stage don't mention him your other said well you should after every measure of progress that you document you should say but this is threatened if Donald Trump gets his way so I I didn't follow either bit of advice but I did try to put the trumpism in perspective in a couple of ways one is first of all it is undoubtedly true that all of almost all of the measures that I attributed progress to are really under threat from from Trump's policies the international community of both of commercial connections through trade and strong international norms and associations like the like like the UN like the ability to impose sanctions to countries that violate the taboo against conquest are threatened the regulations that have made technology safer that have allowed environmental protection to the environment to be protected as the economy has grown a reliance on science and evidence both as a way to expand extend to human life span and to implement policies like crime reduction that are driven by evidence I mean I could go hunt they really are threatened it isn't just the standard liberals discussed with Donald Trump I pinpoint why each one of these causes of progress really really has been threatened so a question is is um the one thing does that mean that trumpism and authoritarian populist and more generally are the wave of the wave of the future so have we was progress nice while it lasted but the Enlightenment is over and the clocks gonna be turned back well I mean no one knows but there are some reasons to think not that's a little premature to declare the enlightenment dead among them are that a lot of these these processes are trends that have been in progress for four decades and it seems unlikely that they will suddenly do a u-turn for what that's worth including just the political and and sentiments toward liberalism one graph that I chose not to show tonight comes from the World Values Survey and it looks at attitudes of Tolerance women's rights Politico Craddock political participation in every region of the world they've been going up since 1960 so that's more than more than 50 years big differences across regions but with the Middle East to North Africa the world's least liberal region in Western Europe most but there has been a steady increase in every region of the world this is driven by urbanization by education by connectivity forces that are themselves not likely to stop overnight also if you look at the age distribution of support for populism I have a graph that shows the degree of support for Donald Trump in 2016 breaks it in 2016 and European populist parties over the last 15 years and they all kind of fall off a cliff as a function of age now people contrary to the old cliche that if you're not a liberal when you're 20 you have no heart if you are a liberal when you're 60 you have no head attributed to many people that that turns out to be false people basically carry their liberalism with them as they age which suggests that populism is something of a middle-aged and old man's movement and the demographics are likely to push against it a related demographic question is immigration is a big event mmm specially in Europe North America our immigrants more liberal or what it depends a lot on the immigrants in and in fact some of the rise of populism is due not to I think a retreat from enlightenment values but to the specific incident of huge waves of immigration from parts of the world that are the least liberal Middle East and North Africa often not assimilating quickly and bringing a lot of counter Enlightenment values with them such as when we just fundamentalism and oppression of women and there has been a backlash against that massive immigration that has empowered some of the right-wing populists in Europe the other the other thing I do in dealing with populism and trumpism is to note that this is actually not the first time that enlightenment values have been resisted even though it sounds like an oxymoron to talk about the intellectual roots of trumpism but and at first I thought that that that trumpism was just kind of pure it just streaks of human nature from authoritarianism tribalism demonization that you know always push back against enlightenment too and I think there is something to that I think the Enlightenment is not so cognitively natural tribalism really is a recurring motive but there actually is Trump was advised by people like Steve Madden Michael Anton Steve Miller who consider themselves intellectuals they are consider themselves well-read and they were influenced by counter Enlightenment political thinkers and philosophers by crackpot French and Italian fascists from the 1910s in the 1920s from Friedrich Nietzsche who was a rabidly counter Enlightenment figure mm-hmm and pretty soon after the Enlightenment unfolded there was a resistance movement a kind of romantic counter Enlightenment nationalist tribalist blood and soil devaluing the individual in favor of the culture the tribe the land the bloodline and it gained descendants in various times of European history especially in Central Europe around the time of World War one in World War two it was in abeyance after World War two because the world sort of saw what it leads to and but but it does tend to bubble up and that's what we've been seeing I think without with authoritarian populism a couple of questions about the research that what we just saw reflects kreygas how do you perform your research to ensure the statistics you use aren't affected by an implicit bias toward data that shows positive progress and I would add to that I can't believe you did all this research so you'll see a little bit about how you accumulated the material is behind these graphs which is you know that yeah really meat of what you have here from from various places I was assisted greatly by a couple of websites that have popped up that are kind of data aggregators max roeser's work website our world and data stupendous source of data because not only are there graphs but you can download them and link to the original source of each one off often United Nations organizations the Food and Agricultural organization of the World Health Organization the World Bank there's another one by Mari and 2p called human progress org there's Hans and Ola Rosling's website Gapminder mm-hmm so that was a kind of portal into some of the standard data sets and others I've found from various sources by often if I read a large number of books by experts in the particular domains and recorded their references and follow up on their data sets and I don't think any of the any of the sources that I cite are particularly controversial in terms of their their direction that is you could quibble about exact values but but I would be surprised if any of them were were not the consensus of the academic experts in each field so I think it's pretty well established among historical criminologists for example that there's been a massive reduction in homicide since the middle ages I think all the ex Craig's question sure how do you defeat your own confirmation bias well if by looking at curves that go in the wrong direction like the opioid epidemic like the great American crime boom in there or not just American Western crime boom in the in the 60s 70s and 80s if that graph stayed high that would be a counter example to progress in that domain if if the graph for deaths and Wars was a world war one and then World War two and then World War three I know that would be dis confirmation so anything could be just confirmed that's easy the fact is the graphs do go down like that I should think she actually if I were you I'd be welcoming anything that is sort of counter to these trends because they're so continuous wide and gross and so and then you know anything goes against it you sir in order to add some kind of plausibility true another another example for those who are kind of eagle-eyed very very quick grapha spotters may have seen a number of reversals such as the fact that the American homicide rate which fell pretty steadily from 1992 to 2014 went up in 2015 and 2016 I mean not didn't undo the decline but wiped out about nine years of progress and the Syrian civil war represents a reversal the the peak was probably the year before last let's hope but that was a way to the wrong direction in fact in the book I have four graphs for violence I put a little arrow pointing to the last year of data plotted in my previous book the better angels of our nature to address the question well did you maybe catch the world at a lucky moment and has it all fallen apart since then and in a couple of cases like the the optic in American homicide it has gone in the other direction the Syrian civil war again was a blip up from the low from 2010 so the you know the graphs could go any which way and you're right they it would be if they all just went monotonically downward mistrusting suitably creepy toy from the United Nations Innovation Lab - where does female empowerment and leadership fit into this new era of enlightenment yeah it's it's actually a theme that I explored more in the better angels of our nature than in this book just the question that people often ask about violence is as women are more empowered would you expect rates of violence to go down the answer is probably yes and in the case in the broader case of human flourishing I didn't comment on this but it does seem that there is a in the switch from say martial values tribalism national glory to humanism you could say this is a kind of feminized a of morality that a world in which it's safe to bring up children you know who grow up look at an education who don't die of disease it'll starve to death as opposed to the glory of the nation you could say that that's a shift from prototypically masculine to more feminine values and it may not be a coincidence that many of these changes have been coincident with the rising empowerment of women since since the 1970s how is that going in your world of academia which is famously slow - well it's actually hasn't been slow to feminize I mean there are some there is a students but other than the power structure well no it depends on the discipline ok say more I'm a psychologist our our discipline is doing pretty well for gender parity in fact my main area of specialization was language development in children which was majority female mm-hmm psychology is one of the more closer to closer to gender parity not exactly and it's depending on the discipline there's a enormous differences in the percentage of scientists who are female ok ah here's a live stream question from unfriend phew Howie live stream I recommend to folks I just started trying it myself and on live stream you see the slides better than you see it in the theater and questions come to the stage so Hugh Howey yes how does the balance of knowledge that things are getting better and passion required to continue the trends blend how do we manage make it easier for people to be rational pessimists and optimistic activists is people sir sit back say the things are gonna be ok I had to go golf yeah you know I don't know if that's happened in fact I'm doing planning to experiments with a student of mine Jason de Muro - to see whether narratives of decline and degeneration or narratives of conditional progress are more likely to empower people to donate effectively to charity to not to discount the future as much so we don't know for sure my my hunch is that there is an optimal amount of pessimism and that many people are more pessimistic than the optimum and I don't know if this is true it's an empirical question I just know it so you should never do this but of course we all do just for my own experience I feel I've been more of a donor to charities more of an activist more spoken out more since I've seen all of the ways in which humanity has increased its human activity can pay off in things actually getting better it's not just feeling good it's not just conspicuous virtual six signaling but trying to make the world better makes a little better and I appreciate that more have you yourself over the course of these last couple of kinds of research books shifted your own personal relationship to the world from a less pessimistic to a more optimistic absolutely and in fact there's a there's a paper trail because in 2002 I wrote a book called the blank slate on the modern denial of human nature and a belief in human nature has tended to militate toward a kind of tragic view of the human condition were we're not angels we can never have in Utopia on the other hand as a cognitive psychologist my view of human nature always accommodated a system of our brain that can creatively combine new ideas someone who studies language I know that we can share our hard-won wisdom through through words and so there is scope for human improvement even with a belief in human nature namely we come up with new ideas we try them we share them we keep the ones that work but I think since between writing the blank slate defending human nature and the better angels of our nature which was inspired by stumbling across graphs showing declines of in violence I've become more optimistic based on the data and more and I think more engaged in effective altruism and advocacy of a positive change this is an interesting measure if you looked at activists across the board and we're sort of evaluating their effectiveness as as activists in the domain that they care about and then measure their effectiveness as activists in that domain against their pessimism or optimism is anybody looking to see what makes an effective activist and there's this part of that story that I would love to do with the answer so I mean I I suspect that that effect of all activists are do have some enough at least enough optimism enough animal spirits as Keynes put it to take the risks under uncertainty to make the personal sacrifices under some reasonable expectation that they'll return benefits to human welfare okay this is speculation I think it says something that should be studied I have a question in the language here that you're this language guy you know we call it optimism and pessimism and when there's an optimist or pessimist it's so like a Communists and communist and there's this a belief structure we're talking about or what yes well if this goes back to a belief in human nature I'm virtually certain that a big chunk of differences among people in level of optimism versus pessimism is heritable I just cuz everything is it's partly heritable and and there are certain personality traits that would tend to correlate with optimism pessimism that we know are heritable such as neuroticism which is a degree of worry then correlating so who's more neurotic oh the pessimist but you know optimism that the term optimism I think it actually does go back to the era of live knits and Voltaire and an optimist was someone who believed that this is the best of all possible worlds namely this is the optimum and ironically enough of Voltaire was actually not satirizing what I never got that optimism is optimism which actually is not the way we not the way we use the word now as I mentioned if you're really an optimist you don't think that this is the optimum heaven forbid so when I was professor I don't know where pessimism how they'll find out but in any case Voltaire wasn't even satirizing hopes for a better future and he was an Enlightenment figure he was satirizing almost the opposite Leibniz theodicy according to which we have no choice but to accept the evil and violence and suffering and early death in the world because it's metaphysically impossible for the world to be any better than it is because if it could be better God would have made it better mm-hmm so what we have we're stuck with it's impossible for the world to be better that's what Leibniz had in mind and that's what Voltaire was satirizing speaking of that there's a question from a person named anonymous who says is there asked is there a religious component from monotheism which helped order to be considered helping modern enlightenment and science and quality of life well the certainly the Enlightenment thinkers themselves were even though they many of them were not atheists some of the more deists they believe that God kind of wild up the clock of the universe set it in motion and then let it kind of unwind by itself without any intervention none of them really appealed to judeo-christian doctrine to justify much of anything in fact often the Enlightenment is almost defined as a abandonment of justification by Scripture dogma tradition mm-hmm there there is a notion of progress in among religious thinkers that may have influenced the Enlightenment the idea that there has been progress from at least among Christian thinkers from the ancient Hebrews to the Jesus to the early church to the if your parson to the Reformation so there is that notion that at least concept of progress but it's uh well these churches were an institution are they an institution in the Enlightenment sense that you've been talking about it's a sort of a no Amelia reader of a lot of the fragment and feudal like some of them especially that the Catholic Church fought the Enlightenment tooth and nail Josef - Miska for example was a argued against the abolition of torture and and grisly torture executions because people will just run wild with licentiousness if they don't have the fear of being tortured to death he's against reading of novels because then people would start to get ideas about nonconformity so certainly the Catholic Church was dead set again and actually in many ways continues to be and then many of our much of the what you might think of as sort of strange opposition to enlightenment including some of the negative reviews of enlightenment now come from prom cap prominent intellectuals who would be the first to note that they are influenced by Catholicism such as Andrew Sullivan such as Ross Douthat and there's been a queasiness among many Catholic thinkers - Steve Bannon another Catholic thinker mmm - the idea that and again he's me makes no bones about it he's he address the Vatican and one of his most famous speeches was delivered there the idea that the individual human is the both the locus of moral value valuation that what's important is how happy each one of us is that the human reason is the source of moral doctrine as opposed to something that is bigger than any of us namely the church and the church tradition that the freedom and individual self-determination have just led to licentiousness to pornography and abortion and divorce so there has been a attention between enlightenment and at least some religious traditions others though have been influenced by the Enlightenment in many religious denominations have become more humanistic more liberal Quakerism was in some ways ahead of the curve they were both abolitionists and pacifists in an era where not all Enlightenment thinkers were and certainly most other religious denominations were not and other denominations mainstream Protestantism the more liberal branches of Judaism have I think been affected by the Enlightenment tide and have backtracked from the Iron Age morality from the theological doctrines and have become kind of institutions of humanism themselves you're among the sort of public somewhat aggressive atheists I'm clear I mean I I have the statement there's no evidence that God exists I think that I think that's a true statement I don't mean aggressive it's perceived as aggressive I think precisely because it is only by faith tribe community bloodline that you have beliefs almost by definition that are based on faith and so if you simply put those beliefs under a rational microscope it sounds like you're attacking the people who acquired those beliefs because of the community that they were born into so that's where I think the perception of aggression comes from even though it's just a hypothesis and you know why can't I say there's no evidence if there's no evidence so house atheism doing on or near church well there's they're two different trends has a by the way and I have to quote here Bertrand Russell who's when he was challenged on there by some vicar on the BBC like well what will you say if after you die you find yourself staring the Almighty in the face and he said Oh Lord why did you not give me more evidence but back to your question and the Lord says what part of the word face do you not understand there are two trends that are going in opposite directions one of them is that when people shift their religious belief it is in the direction of losing their religion the fastest-growing religion in terms of converts is no religion at all however religious people have more babies so the number of people that are in communities of faith is increasing even though the number of people who become religious is decreasing the other trend that makes us overestimate the the influence of religion why many people believe that despite enlightenment hopes people are getting that religion is playing a larger and larger role I'm an aside from just here for fecundity which itself may change in the future as because a lot of the trends that have reduced religiosity hmm like urbanization like like education like affluence as those continue they also affect fertility and so it could be that the trend toward the demographic transition to lower fertility may also involve secularization but the other I think distorter of our perception of the role of religion is that religious people vote and and a lot of second people do not why do religious people vote partly their their clergy tell them to it may also be I mean that may be one reason and so in fact in the 2016 election I think the voting rate among evangelical Christians was in the ballpark of 80 percent the voting rate among so-called nuns you know any it was more like 25% now partly this is age there's a pretty big cohort effect for religiosity the younger the group the less religious but then it may also be that whatever social cultural personality type allows you to affiliate with any institution makes you more engaged in the political process and that some of the nuns aren't so much kind of students of Bertrand Russell who figured it all out but they just kind of withdraw from all institutions from churches but also from the political process okay here's the internet question social media question Justin asks how do you feel about communication over the Internet has affected our ability to have discourses and advancement and where does it fit into this story do you think yes so that's the music nowadays everything that goes wrong is blamed on social media right right and you know maybe some of the things that have gone wrong our fault of social media then some surely our yeah and I don't really know that's I think it's to man but by that I mean who cares what I know it is not know in the sense that it's so new that I don't think there's a good body of literature on how much social media has driven the polarization that we have seen a lot of it has been driven by cable news and there we do know that it has an effect just by the natural experiment that cable companies offer different menus of stations and Fox News in particular is sometimes introduced to one town before it's introduced to another town so for social scientists yes it independent very an experiment of nature and what happens is there is absolutely an effect of Fox News on voting and political opinions when Fox News is introduced to a town the citizens move to the right and so that's not social media but man is in effect there's also a big effect and again I don't know if if we have the social science data to disentangle them but segregation by education and that more highly educated people tend to live with one another more mm-hmm there patterns across urban areas versus suburbs some here am saying this in San Francisco it's kind of bloody obvious and that the like-minded communities may be driven by physical proximity and by occupational segregation as far as you know as much as by social media filter bubbles there's a couple of where we go from here questions Alexander Rose asks what trends our data give you the most concern Emily asks where should we focus our efforts for progress in the future in your opinion yeah well you know there may be separate questions they may be related they might be relation about what should we should we focus wealthy certainly in terms of actual physical threats I'm concerned about climate change I assume you are too but maybe not as much as me or more but I'm concerned about climate change mm-hmm I am concerned about the low probability high damage scenario of a nuclear war interesting okay not because I think it's particularly likely but just because it's if it does happen it's it could be a lot of people could be killed very quickly in the world of ideas I am concerned about the rise of authoritarian populism I as I said I think there are demographic and trends that are probably will prevent it from taking over but in the meantime it certainly has gained control of a number of countries I'm concerned about impediments to economic growth if the if there are structural brakes on growth like debt like an expanding retired population supported by a shrinking working population Japan yeah exactly and one thing that surprised me as I wrote the book is how many good things come from economic growth I mentioned happiness as one but the Flynn effect of rising IQ scores is affected by how a wealthy country is liberal values richer countries in general are more tolerant more progressive more liberal at least if the source of their wealth comes from knowledge and commerce as opposed to digging stuff out of the ground because there are a number of extraction States particularly in the Middle East Arab oil States that are very rich and very reactionary but putting aside them in general wealth buys liberalism it buys intelligence it by his happiness advice peace it buys democracy on average mmm-hmm so if economic growth were to Plateau then a lot there'd be a lot of negative consequences so that's something I think about so one question you enlightenment now new enlightenment that was then this is now you're talking about the values which were established in and that are still valid to push forward what's different 200 years is a long time and a whole hell of a lot is going on and that we're still even evoking something that was basically invented over two hundred years ago is itself strange and amazing but okay go with that what is an Enlightenment now made of it is are we just seeing this is the Enlightenment playing out quietly behind the scenes making all these graphs go forward or is there something extra-special of these questions are raising there that we might be doing now so that we are the Voltaire's and deed arose and so on of our time what are we talking about now in terms of employment well now we we certainly are talking about limiting the resurgence of tribalism nationalism racialism I think that in general although I don't think that religion is necessarily incompatible with enlightenment value because widgets become more lightened but certainly fundamentalist beliefs getting your morality from Scripture getting your theory of causation from scriptures so you're using prayer or faith as a solution to problems I think is probably problematic I'll be concrete there is a belief there's a huge correlation between utter denial of human-made climate change and both right left politics much greater correlate correlation in a scientific literacy fact the correlation of scientific literacy is probably zero the correlation with where you are on the right left scale is very very high Oh point eight or something or point nine and there is a correlation with with religiosity so there was a movement in the 1990s and early and first few years of the 21st century toward sometimes called stewardship of the environment kind of confluence of the religious with the environmental movement I think it's called creation environmentalism it went by a number of names it was completely dashed when Obama became president and the Republican Party vowed a principle of absolute non-cooperation with anything the Obama administration proposed and of course evangelical Christians were locked up by the Republican Party and so the the dream edia Wilson had a whole book where he had a letter to a hypothetical Minister of how they could find common cause and protecting God's gift of the environment forget about it there was just the evangelicals became implacably opposed to any measures to address carbon emissions or or environmental protection and part of it was polls show that a large percentage of them believe God wouldn't alit let any bad thing happen God wouldn't let there be climate catastrophes so this is a case in which a counter enlightened belief Enlightenment belief could have real pernicious consequences okay so in the sense you're using concern about climate as a sort measure of enlightenment enlightenment actually in people that would be one example but it also sounds like you're telling the outliers of this political spectrum that if there were less out lawyers and more folks sort of arguing agreeably with each other rather than totally not listening that that somehow and movement in the right direction I would so hard left or both problems I would I think so yeah the just from yeah just from research that shows that when people are committed to a political ideology they are demonstrably less rational this has been shown by a number of ways by Philip tetlock who's spoken in this series has shown that if you look at how accurately people predict the future I mean you know not kind of seen into the next century but just I pull their feet to the fire make concrete predictions about what's gonna happen in the next six months to a year the political idea all I do is do much worse than the kind of the Bayesian nerds the ones who try to assess a base rate probability and tweak it up or down by the evidence and another example is the work of the Yale legal scholar Daniel kahan who's did a famous experiment it was reported in a number of newspapers as why politics makes us stupid or politics interferes with with your ability to do math that presenting data to people from a hypothetical study what the data were jiggered so that there was a kind of gut feeling as to what they implied whether a cause B that was wrong that is if you look at the raw numbers it would seem that a caused B but if you take a second and just do the proportions then you realize it's the other way around so you know deliberately a little bit of a trick question so it required a bit of reflection if you if it's a non political issue does this skin cream successfully treat a rash then the more numerate you are the less likely you are to be seduced by the wrong answer both if you're a liberal or a conservative but as soon as the issue becomes politicized namely does a concealed carry law increase to reduce the crime rate same numbers then turns out that the more numerous liberals and conservatives did worse when the data went against their preferred hypothesis and so politics makes us stupid and that that's the basis of my expectation that less polarization would lead to more optimal policies how is that playing out in academia know you've invaded against over polarization of who can speak on campus and so on III think it has distorted certain issues in in academia that was one theme of my book the blank slate that a lot of issues in psychology I think had been distorted by the fact that certain answers were deemed politically more acceptable and there was a kind of blinkers toward data that that contradicted it that was a theme that was then taken up by Phil tetlock again and John height and was a sort of group of other Sheena's conservative public intellectual academics well conservative in the sense of the perspective of what I got insanely liberal what are we talking about it well I refer to be a hypothetical location called the left poles so when you're you know when you're at the North Pole all directions are south when you're at the left Pole all directions are right so from the left pole in academia by that standard I like to call the conservative but very peculiar conservative I'm one of the biggest donors among the Harvard faculty to the Democratic Party and I voted for Hillary I'm really by all by no stretch of the imagination a conservative except by this peculiar perspective of the left pole is that getting better on campus or worse by the way it's getting worse that many that the point of the tetlock height Duarte stern article was that the kind of diversity that really advances intellectual understanding and policy is diversity of viewpoint mm-hmm and that has been decreasing even in an era in which diversity is celebrated as the civil liberties lawyer Harvey solo great put it in modern universities the meaning of diversity is people who look different but think alike and so what the heterodox Academy which I'm affiliated with and and John Hyde and others have advocated is science will advance if we have a diversity of viewpoints simply because no one is omniscient no one is infallible science progresses when hypotheses are floated the fee incorrect ones are refuted by data and if we only try hypotheses from a narrow slice of the spectrum of possibilities we're probably going to be wrong a lot of the time okay I think I'll end with a nice general question from Neal Goldberg how do you relate contemporary China which has made huge progress following all these measures and you would not exactly describe as an Enlightenment Society so I'd say it's a yeah a question and I don't I don't know the answer but it is I think it is a profound question certainly China as repressive as it is and even more so with the announcement a few days ago of the apt removal of term limits for a Jew Jinping it's certainly more has greater degree of personal freedom than it did in the era of Mao and and some Enlightenment institutions like markets were adopted by chilena to its enormous benefit in terms of prosperity lifespan so say probably they were adopting what Lee Kuan Yew had done in Singapore that was that enlightenment to the phenomenon that we did there in one way yes and in waise No so yes in terms of markets which was a enlightenment innovation compared to royal charters and mercantilism and beggar-thy-neighbor policies so openness to trade and to private enterprise unless a certainly an Enlightenment institution but of course not democracy which another enlightenment brainchild that was not adopted so it's a it's kind of a hybrid of I lighten Minh tand authoritarian institutions how's this all look really final question going forward one hundred two hundred years since that's the frame that talking about the Enlightenment sort of raises you know here's this set of ideas set of practices set of him traditions that have been around for a couple of centuries do they own the next couple of centuries and if that's the case are we basically just looking at this trend line continuing or what what what do you see in the longer timeframe years oh what's the long now of this whole question yes well I might pop out by citing Phil tetlock who's spoken in this series who found that even his super forecasters the best of the best predictors felt a chance five years out so I I don't know I guess I guess the best I could say is that it's possible that it will continue I mean there are huge challenges climate and being one of them energy avoidance of the tail risks like like nuclear war but but on the other hand the process once set in motion does barring these potential catastrophes have the potential to improve indefinitely even though if it'll never bring us to utopia because of human nature Crooked Timber of humanity and all that stuff because solutions generate new problems which constantly have to be solved in their turn but still barring the unlikely but catastrophic events I think it's possible with the promise will continue for centuries when you leave you with a research question for I don't know if it's your next book but whatever that is this is long-term thinking actually useful or thing or anything other than amusing yeah is there you know if you look back in alignment thinkers were very long-term thinkers the founding fathers the us sir war because they were actually sort of creating a society and nation and Cillian and the Constitution reflected their ideas of what should be applicable for generations so at least that set you could probably say long-term thinking was good for them but across the board it would be interesting to tease out in the way that you abused out that how the Enlightenment values have played out and it might play out is there any goddamn value the long-term value yeah oh yes I mean I'm but long-term thinking I think we both agree this doesn't mean kind of being a seer and prognosticating what will happen but rather in game let us just take a look sensibility for rather than directly control the long term exactly I mean just as yeah I think it's actually essential to just clarify our thinking even if it isn't making confident prognostications but as a set of what-if scenarios absolutely for the same reason that I don't think you can do history without thinking of counterfactuals what would have happened if just because the notion of cause and effect is inherently tied to counterfactuals of the past and then and also of the future so I think it's tremendously valuable if it's not confused with prophecy but it isn't prophecy it's it's long-term thinking well we got Neil Ferguson who does counter fractional smoking other things is industry and speaking in the fall so I'll ask him the same question thank you for doing this [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 14,201

Rating: 4.8007116 out of 5

Keywords: Culture, History, Psychology, Education, Enlightenment, Reason, Science, Humanism, Progress, Optimism, Pessimism, Statistics, Negative Confirmation Bias, Steven Pinker

Id: CyRAn2VzpWU

Length: 92min 9sec (5529 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020