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My new favorite book of all time

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Re: My new favorite book of all time

#231

Post by andrepd »

rpedela wrote: post #132
chippy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I don't think that view was expressed in Gray's article about Pinker. But I imagine that there could be an implication that "if the data shows the world is improving, it always will do, progress happens one way and is always going up" which Gray takes issue to. Why act if everything is getting better anyhow?

Why act like the world isn't getting better if it actually is?

It's getting better for some measures of 'better', and it's getting worse for others. It's also getting 'better' for some people, and less so for others. For example I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years, and is fabulously better for the super-rich.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#232

Post by zaksoup »

ABCLAW wrote: post #213

I've read a lot of the discussions regarding Pinker's work in both books (but particularly his position in Better Angels), and I've always found his position to be slightly disconcerting. Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time. Violence is not a first order phenomenon at a social scale - it's presence is predicated upon the existence of other key criteria, largely the exist…

I work on criminal justice reform and this is SO true. I cringe every time I hear these kinds of stats being brandished without context as evidence of our society 'working'. Ben Thompson is a particularly bad example of this, but it certainly seems like it's the folks 'winning' the conflicts that love to cite 'reduced conflict'.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#233

Post by euyyn »

pron wrote: post #109
iamcasen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I couldn't help but feel like Pinker is peddling feel-good nonsense to sell books, and give people hope to cling to. Progress or betterment is entirely subjective, and when considering the human condition, relies on too many variables to even count. Of course, the variables the Pinker focuses on have gotten better overall. The way I see it is a chaotic scatterplot that is trending slightly upwards towards…

Pinker is much more nefarious (and you can know that by going to his talks, as I have, where he's more loose-tongued than in his books). He places such emphasis on the fact that the world is getting better as a rebuttal to "complainers" and political activists . The problem is not with his premise but with his conclusion. The world has been getting better (to the extent that it has) because people complain and are di…

What problem do people in this conversation have distinguishing current state from current rate?

Complain that things are bad and fight to improve them? Sure. Complain that things are getting worse over time? It's false in a global sense, and in most specific senses too.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#234

Post by mar77i »

chippy wrote: post #47

The British philosopher John Gray is a good counterpart to Pinker's idea of progress. He focuses on the myths of progress, civilisation and freedom. This is his response to Pinker: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev... "A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray – and the idea of moral progress is wi…

None of the examples I got to read in this article are in any logical contradiction with the original enlightenment. It is shown that Locke didn't originally fully understand his own new school of thought - maybe because it's naive to think you fully understand a new idea when you're having it? It was attempted that 20th century atrocities happened as a direct result of enlightenment thinking.

I honestly grew tired of reading this very quickly. The sum of all words these philosophers said is not enlightenment. Reason means you don't frigging trust every frigging word of what people say, even if they said "don't trust every word of what people say". How is that not obvious?

What is John Gray's message here? I get he is trying to challenge Pinker's seemingly optimistic views, but I don't get what is the pattern he tries to convey by throwing all that sand into the gears of Pinker's progression thing?

Are we seriously giving up on seeing patterns here and insist in our mental image of the world as a white noise tv screen?

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#235

Post by jacquesm »

kgabis wrote: post #230
jacquesm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dresden firebombing is very well known outside of Germany. And if you've seen the 'before' and 'after' pictures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden you won't be surprised that people consider them to be on the same scale.

Bombing of Dresden is well known, of course, but it doesn't compare to a single bomb that can level cities when it comes to deterring your enemy. I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden, but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way (like Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo), so I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.

> Bombing of Dresden is well known, of course, but it doesn't compare to a single bomb that can level cities when it comes to deterring your enemy.

It does actually. The only difference is how long it took and arguably Dresden was in worse shape than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

> I'm not trying to diminish the scale of destruction in Dresden

Well, forgive me.

> but there are many cities other than it that got destroyed in similar, "conventional" way

No, there aren't. That's exactly why Dresden stands out.

> I don't see why it should be treated in a special way.

You really should go and have a look at those before and after pictures then. They are nothing short of incredible.

Warsaw, Breslau or Tokyo (and Rotterdam, for that matter) do not compare even though the destruction there was widespread.

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#236

Post by pron »

mseebach wrote: post #126
pron wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinker is much more nefarious (and you can know that by going to his talks, as I have, where he's more loose-tongued than in his books). He places such emphasis on the fact that the world is getting better as a rebuttal to "complainers" and political activists . The problem is not with his premise but with his conclusion. The world has been getting better (to the extent that it has) because people complain and are di…

There is a certain rather loud, rather fashionable kind of "activist" who are if not directly claiming that everything is awful, then strongly evoking symbolism and imagery to that effect. To fix this, they want to take broad, radical action, basically to affect revolution. This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipula…

> This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipulating their followers for personal power.

Except that, as any student of history knows, the current state of the world is what it is thanks almost entirely to people just like that (although historians generally view them in a better light than you do because of what they've achieved, despite always being presented by conservative forces in the same light as you view them).

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#237

Post by macintux »

aljones wrote: post #164
topleveldomain wrote: post #17

" War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations." I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigge…

The US and Russia avoided conflict with each other before and after the atom bomb, and also before and after the UN made it illegal. I'm not sure either were essential or even effective deterrents.

In fairness, the US did come into conflict with Russia in a sense, by supporting the White Army in the civil war.

But setting that aside, when would they have come into conflict? Prior to WWI, the US did its best to stay out of international affairs, and Russia wasn't trying to export a political philosophy. In the gap between the wars, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with internal concerns.

It's very hard to compare the potential for conflict post-1945 between the two powers with any period of time before that. Russia and the US simply weren't all that relevant to each other (Alaska aside).

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#238

Post by huskyr »

When i loaded this page i just saw a photo of Gates and a large white space with nothing beneath (screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/vBb99). I saw "Enlightenment Now" in the URL and thought maybe Gates had converted to Buddhism or something. Then i tried reloading the page with my adblocker turned off and the text finally loaded...

Re: My new favorite book of all time

#240

Post by baby »

topleveldomain wrote: post #17

" War is illegal. This idea seems obvious. But before the creation of the United Nations in 1945, no institution had the power to stop countries from going to war with each other. Although there have been some exceptions, the threat of international sanctions and intervention has proven to be an effective deterrent to wars between nations." I would argue that something else that happened in 1945 has been a much bigge…

> Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no?

Never thought about that. It's hard to tell, Everyone was in some sort of cold war with Germany before the two world wars. Nobody wanted to fight and this is what led Germany to conquer very quickly a number of countries.

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