Steven Pinker

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“The Number Of Possible Offenders Armed With Catastrophic Weaponry Is Likely To Increase Significantly In The Future”

December 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

anarch78

The anarchy of the Internet will be unloosed into the physical world more and more as we move forward, with 3D printers and gene-editing kits and the like. That will be mostly good, but what if just a little bit of it is catastrophically bad? Assault rifles won’t be the only untraceable weapons to fall into the wrong hands. 

In a thought-provoking IEEE Spectrum essay, Phil Torres wonders if positivists like Steven Pinker aren’t missing a small explosive truth while admiring the hopeful big-picture data. An excerpt:

If one actually looks at the statistics, the world is steadily becoming more peaceful. This is the conclusion of Steven Pinker’s monumental 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, as well as Michael Shermer’s excellent 2015 follow-up The Moral Arc (essentially a “sequel” of Pinker’s tome). The surprising, counterintuitive fact is that the global prevalence of genocides, homicides, infanticide, domestic violence, and violence against children is declining, while democratization, women’s rights, gay rights, and even animals rights are on the rise. The probability that any one of us dies at the hands of another human being rather than from natural causes is perhaps the lowest it’s ever been in human history, even before the Neolithic Revolution. If that’s not Progress with a capital ‘p’, then I don’t know what is.

The oceanic evidence that Pinker and Shermer present is robust and cogent. Yet I think there’s another story to tell — one that hints at a possible future marked by unprecedented human suffering, global catastrophes, and even our extinction. The fact is that while the enterprise of human civilization has been making significant ethical strides forward in multiple domains, a range of emerging technologies are, by nearly all accounts, poised to introduce brand new existential risks never before encountered by our species

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the most worrisome threats are not merely anthropogenic, they’re technogenic. They arise from the fact that advanced technologies are (a) dual-use in nature, meaning that they can be employed for both benevolent and nefarious purposes; (b) becoming more powerful, thereby enabling humans to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in new ways; and (c) in some cases, becoming more accessible to small groups, including, at the limit, single individuals. This is notable because just as there are many more terrorist groups than rogue nations in the world, there are far more deranged psychopaths than terrorist groups. Thus, the number of possible offenders armed with catastrophic weaponry is likely to increase significantly in the future.

It’s not clear how the trends that Pinker and Shermer identify could save us from this situation. Even if 99% of human beings in the year 02100 were peaceable, the remaining 1% could find themselves with enough technological power at their fingertips to initiate a disaster of global proportions. Or, forget 1% — what about a single individual with a death wish for humanity, or a single apocalyptic group hoping to engage in the ultimate mass suicide event? In a world cluttered with doomsday machines, exactly how long could we expect to survive?•

 

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“The Idea That Violence Is Declining In The Most Highly Developed Countries Is Questionable”

March 16, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Pushing back at Bill Gates’ favorite book of the last decade, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, philosopher John Gray argues in the Guardian that those who believe global violence to be on the wane are using accounting that’s too messy and theories too neat. We assign violence to backwardness when the cutting edge has the potential to be the sharpest of all. The essay comes from Gray’s new book, The Soul of the Marionette. An excerpt:

There is something repellently absurd in the notion that war is a vice of “backward” peoples. Destroying some of the most refined civilisations that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged south-east Asia in the second world war and the decades that followed were the work of colonial powers. One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda was the segregation of the population by German and Belgian imperialism. Unending war in the Congo has been fuelled by western demand for the country’s natural resources. If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one reason may be that they have exported it.

Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable. Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the most advanced society in the world. According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement, sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced state.

It may not be an accident that torture is often deployed in the special operations that have replaced more traditional types of warfare. The extension of counter-terrorism to include assassination by unaccountable mercenaries and remote-controlled killing by drones is part of this shift. A metamorphosis in the nature is war is under way, which is global in reach. With the state of Iraq in ruins as a result of US-led regime change, a third of the country is controlled by Isis, which is able to inflict genocidal attacks on Yazidis and wage a campaign of terror on Christians with near-impunity. In Nigeria, the Islamist militias of Boko Haram practise a type of warfare featuring mass killing of civilians, razing of towns and villages and sexual enslavement of women and children. In Europe, targeted killing of journalists, artists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen embodies a type of warfare that refuses to recognise any distinction between combatants and civilians. Whether they accept the fact or not, advanced societies have become terrains of violent conflict. Rather than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred.

Deaths on the battlefield have fallen and may continue to fall. From one angle this can be seen as an advancing condition of peace. From another point of view that looks at the variety and intensity with which violence is being employed, the Long Peace can be described as a condition of perpetual conflict.

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Certainly the figures used by Pinker and others are murky, leaving a vast range of casualties of violence unaccounted for.•

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“The Curse Of Knowledge Is The Single Best Explanation Of Why Good People Write Bad Prose”

September 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Having edited many, many people over the years, I feel confident in saying that writing is a natural gift that must be developed incrementally. If you don’t have that innate flair, you’ll just be hitting your head against a wall over and over (as will your editor). It’s really no different than music or athletics: Without the inborn goods, effort can go just so far. And if you don’t work very strenuously to develop the gift should you possess it, you’ll be left with a writer’s ego minus the ability. God help you.

Steven Pinker thinks the preponderance of lousy writing stems from something else: the Curse of Knowledge, which causes people who are experts at something to fail to communicate properly with those outside their expertise. (Think of an IT person sending you inexplicable instructions.) Sure, that’s true, but I don’t think it’s the main problem. Plenty of experts can write very well. From a Pinker piece in the Wall Street Journal:

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows—that they haven’t mastered the argot of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

Anyone who wants to lift the curse of knowledge must first appreciate what a devilish curse it is. Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize that he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse because the curse prevents us from noticing it. Thirty students send me attachments named ‘psych assignment.doc.’ I go to a website for a trusted-traveler program and have to decide whether to click on GOES, Nexus, GlobalEntry, Sentri, Flux or FAST—bureaucratic terms that mean nothing to me. My apartment is cluttered with gadgets that I can never remember how to use because of inscrutable buttons which may have to be held down for one, two or four seconds, sometimes two at a time, and which often do different things depending on invisible “modes” toggled by still other buttons. I’m sure it was perfectly clear to the engineers who designed it.

Multiply these daily frustrations by a few billion, and you begin to see that the curse of knowledge is a pervasive drag on the strivings of humanity, on par with corruption, disease and entropy. Cadres of expensive professionals—lawyers, accountants, computer gurus, help-line responders—drain vast sums of money from the economy to clarify poorly drafted text.•

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“Writing Is Cognitively Unnatural”

June 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

 

 

William Faulkner.

Two brief excerpts from “Writing in the 21st Century,” a thought-provoking Edge piece about the nature of composition by Steven Pinker.

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“The first thing you should think about is the stance that you as a writer take when putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Writing is cognitively unnatural. In ordinary conversation, we’ve got another person across from us. We can monitor the other person’s facial expressions: Do they furrow their brow, or widen their eyes? We can respond when they break in and interrupt us. And unless you’re addressing a stranger you know the hearer’s background: whether they’re an adult or child, whether they’re an expert in your field or not. When you’re writing you have none of those advantages. You’re casting your bread onto the waters, hoping that this invisible and unknowable audience will catch your drift.

The first thing to do in writing well—before worrying about split infinitives—is what kind of situation you imagine yourself to be in. What are you simulating when you write, and you’re only pretending to use language in the ordinary way? That stance is the main thing that iw distinguishes clear vigorous writing from the mush we see in academese and medicalese and bureaucratese and corporatese.”

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“Poets and novelists often have a better feel for the language than the self-appointed guardians and the pop grammarians because for them language is a medium. It’s a way of conveying ideas and moods with sounds. The most gifted writers—the Virginia Woolfs and H.G. Wellses and George Bernard Shaws and Herman Melvilles—routinely used words and constructions that the guardians insist are incorrect. And of course avant-garde writers such as Burroughs and Kerouac, and poets pushing the envelope or expanding the expressive possibilities of the language, will deliberately flout even the genuine rules that most people obey. But even non-avant garde writers, writers in the traditional canon, write in ways that would be condemned as grammatical errors by many of the purists, sticklers and mavens. “

 

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“The Prevalence Of Texting And Tweeting Does Not Mean That People Magically Lose The Ability To Communicate In Every Other Conceivable Way”

May 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Harvard Gazette interview conducted by Colleen Walsh, Steven Pinker mounts a defense of Twitter and other modern forms of expression that allow for limited characters. He sees it as a generational battle, though I don’t get the sense that most of those tweeting are particularly young. An excerpt:

“Question:

As an expert in language, what do you think of Twitter?

Steven Pinker: 

I was pressured into becoming a Twitterer when I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times saying that Google is not making us stupid, that electronic media are not ruining the language. And my literary agent said, “OK, you’ve gone on record saying that these are not bad things. You better start tweeting yourself.” And so I set up a Twitter feed, which turns out to suit me because it doesn’t require taking out hours of the day to write a blog. The majority of my tweets are links to interesting articles, which takes advantage of the breadth of articles that come my way — everything from controversies over correct grammar to trends in genocide. Having once been a young person myself, I remember the vilification that was hurled at us baby boomers by the older generation. This reminds me that it is a failing of human nature to detest anything that young people do just because older people are not used to it or have trouble learning it. So I am wary of the ‘young people suck’ school of social criticism. I have no patience for the idea that because texting and tweeting force one to be brief, we’re going to lose the ability to express ourselves in full sentences and paragraphs. This simply misunderstands the way that human language works. All of us command a variety of registers and speech styles, which we narrowcast to different forums. We speak differently to our loved ones than we do when we are lecturing, and still differently when we are approaching a stranger. And so, too, we have a style that is appropriate for texting and instant messaging that does not necessarily infect the way we communicate in other forums. In the heyday of telegraphy, when people paid by the word, they left out the prepositions and articles. It didn’t mean that the English language lost its prepositions and articles; it just meant that people used them in some media and not in others. And likewise, the prevalence of texting and tweeting does not mean that people magically lose the ability to communicate in every other conceivable way.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Even The Worst Terrorist Attacks Kill A Trifling Number Of People Compared To War, Genocide, And Homicide”

March 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Death is death, but many of us have way more fear of a horrible demise that’s unlikely than a comparatively “benign” one which has a greater probability of occurring, even if the physical pain involved is equal. It’s an utter lack of control that seems to haunt us most.

U.S. commercial airlines almost never crash, but MH-370 floating mysteriously into oblivion has awakened fears of death by air when we know logically that a fatal car accident is much more likely. These same anxieties will likely play a role in determining how quickly we adopt driverless autos, which will save so many lives but will ultimately fail on occasion and kill someone who had no authority over the incident. That will seem scarier to some.

These fears don’t only govern our own decisions but can influence the creation of policy as well–policy that can end up costing more lives than it saves. An excerpt from Steven Pinker’s comments which appear in an Edge feature about Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman:

“As many Edge readers know, my recent work has involved presenting copious data indicating that rates of violence have fallen over the years, decades, and centuries, including the number of annual deaths in war, terrorism, and homicide. Most people find this claim incredible on the face of it. Why the discrepancy between data and belief? The answer comes right out of Danny’s work with Amos Tversky on the Availability Heuristic. People estimate the probability of an event by the ease of recovering vivid examples from memory. As I explained, ‘Scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.’

The availability heuristic also explains a paradox in people’s perception of the risks of terrorism. The world was turned upside-down in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. But putting aside the entirely hypothetical scenario of nuclear terrorism, even the worst terrorist attacks kill a trifling number of people compared to other causes of violent death such as war, genocide, and homicide, to say nothing of other risks of death. Terrorists know this, and draw disproportionate attention to their grievances by killing a relatively small number of innocent people in the most attention-getting ways they can think of.

Even the perceived probability of nuclear terrorism is almost certainly exaggerated by the imaginability of the scenario (predicted at various times to be near-certain by 1990, 2000, 2005, and 2010, and notoriously justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq). I did an Internet survey which showed that people judge it more probable that ‘a nuclear bomb would be set off in the United States or Israel by a terrorist group that obtained it from Iran’ than that ‘a nuclear bomb would be set off'” It’s an excellent example of Kahneman and Tversky’s Conjunction Fallacy…”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

July 8, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Steven Pinker might be a douchebag

Steven Pinker might be a douchebag /a-hole. Am only getting this from one experience, but if I’m right that he can be judged by looks or how he’s dressed, he’s kind of an asshole.

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“The Era In Which Video Games Exploded In Popularity Is Exactly The Era In Which Violent Crime Among Young People Plummeted”

March 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, Steven Pinker addressing the supposed link between violent video games and actual violence:

“Question:

I don’t know if this has been asked yet, Professor, but…

Do you believe in the idea that violent video games could increase violent tendencies in children?

I’ve read a lot about the subject, but to be honest, I’m extremely doubtful that something like a video game could influence someone into hurting someone else.

My belief is that you are who you are, and if you’re going to be violent then you’re bound by fate to that path unless you change yourself. There is no outside influence (besides self-defense) that could make you hurt someone else if you weren’t that type of person.

Thoughts?

Steven Pinker:

There is no good evidence that violent video games cause real-life violence. Christopher Ferguson has reviewed the literature extensively and shown that claims to the contrary are bogus (and the Supreme Court agreed). Just for starters: the era in which video games exploded in popularity is exactly the era in which violent crime among young people plummeted. It’s not true, though, that anyone is fated to be violent. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, I presented a hundred graphs showing rates of violence changing over time, mostly downward. The near-80% decline in US rape since the early 1970s, and the halving of the homicide rate since 1992, are just two examples. Rates of violence respond to certain features of an environment, such as the incentives of an effective police and criminal justice system, and the surrounding norms of legitimate retaliation. They just don’t respond to video games.”

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“Things Are A Lot Better Than They Were 200 Years Ago”

February 12, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A few exchanges follow from the new Bill Gates Ask Me Anything on Reddit.

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Question:

What’s your worst fear for the future of the world? 

Bill Gates:

Hopefully we won’t have terrorists using nuclear weapons or biological weapons. We should make sure that stays hard.

I am disappointed more isn’t being done to reduce carbon emissions. Governments need to spend more on basic energy R&D to make sure we get cheap non-CO2 emitting sources as soon as possible.

Overall I am pretty optimistic. Things are a lot better than they were 200 years ago.

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Question:

What emerging technology today do you think will cause another big stir for the average consumer in the same way that the home computer did years ago?

Bill Gates:

Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at “computers.” Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways.

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Question:

If Microsoft didn’t take off, what would you have done and be doing instead?

Bill Gates:

If the microprocessor had NOT come along I am not sure what I would have done. Maybe medicine or theoretical math but it is hard to say.

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Question:

Oh! What’s your favorite book? 

Bill Gates:

My favorite of the last decade in Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature. It is long but profound look at the reduction in violence and discrimination over time.

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“They Suggest That Evolution Has Equipped Humans To Solve Tragedies Of The Commons”

June 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Steven Pinker has an essay Edge in which he counters evolutionary scientists who support group selection theory. The opening:

“Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare of the person and his or her kin? If so, does the theory of natural selection have to be revamped to designate ‘groups’ as units of selection, analogous to the role played in the theory by genes?

Several scientists whom I greatly respect have said so in prominent places. And they have gone on to use the theory of group selection to make eye-opening claims about the human condition. They have claimed that human morailty, particularly our willingness to engage in acts of altruism, can be explained as an adaptation to group-against-group competition. As E. O. Wilson explains, “In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals.” They have proposed that group selection can explain the mystery of religion, because a shared belief in supernatural beings can foster group cohesion. They suggest that evolution has equipped humans to solve tragedies of the commons (also known as collective action dilemmas and public goods games), in which actions that benefit the individual may harm the community; familiar examples include overfishing, highway congestion, tax evasion, and carbon emissions. And they have drawn normative moral and political conclusions from these scientific beliefs, such as that we should recognize the wisdom behind conservative values, like religiosity, patriotism, and puritanism, and that we should valorize a communitarian loyalty and sacrifice for the good of the group over an every-man-for-himself individualism.

I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not.”

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“Our Ancestors Had A Capacity For Violence, But This Was Just One Capacity Among Many”

November 29, 2011 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Carl Zimmer has a really good New York Times profile of pugnacious evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who believes that the world has gotten markedly less violent. An excerpt:

“Dr. Pinker finds an explanation for the overall decline of violence in the interplay of history with our evolved minds. Our ancestors had a capacity for violence, but this was just one capacity among many. ‘Human nature is complex,’ he said. ‘Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.’

Which inclinations come to the fore depends on our social surroundings. In early society, the lack of a state spurred violence. A thirst for justice could be satisfied only with revenge. Psychological studies show that people overestimate their own grievances and underestimate those of others; this cognitive quirk fueled spiraling cycles of bloodshed.

But as the rise of civilization gradually changed the ground rules of society, violence began to ebb. The earliest states were brutal and despotic, but they did manage to take away opportunities for runaway vendettas.

More recently, the invention of movable type radically changed our social environment. When people used their powers of language to generate new ideas, those ideas could spread. ‘If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate,’ Dr. Pinker said. ‘That pulls you away from what human nature would consign you on its own.'”

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Pinker in discussion with Bill Faux’Reilly:

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“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities”

September 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought among other provocative books, provides a history of violence–and its gradual decline–at Edge. An excerpt about the mitigating effect the printing press had on violence:

“By the 18th century a majority of men in England were literate.

Why should literacy matter? A number of the causes are summed up by the term ‘Enlightenment.’ For one thing, knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance: beliefs such as that Jews poisoned wells, heretics go to hell, witches cause crop failures, children are possessed, and Africans are brutish. As Voltaire said, ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’

Also, literacy gives rise to cosmopolitanism. It is plausible that the reading of history, journalism, and fiction puts people into the habit of inhabiting other peoples’ minds, which could increase empathy and therefore make cruelty less appealing. This is a point I’ll return to later in the talk.”

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Pinker talks the same topic at TED:

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Science/Tech: No Matter What The Naysayers Will Have You Believe, The Internet Has Made Us Better And Smarter

June 15, 2010 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Internet cafes will not make you dumber. (Image by Phallus Nocturne.)

When I was growing up in my working-class neighborhood in Queens, there wasn’t a single bookstore in the community during my entire childhood. Not one. There were candy stores where you could get a paper or a magazine and a couple of small, semi-stocked libraries, but it was difficult for a kid with a curious mind to grow up in that environment. You had to take a train to Manhattan just to get a hold of something with hard covers to read. I always felt like there was information somewhere, but I didn’t know where it was.

You know what would have leveled the playing field? The Internet. It didn’t exist then, but it does now, and it has the potential to connect any reader in the world to any book they want. You can find out about any university, look up any word and read an incredible array of great writing wherever there’s a wi-fi connection. That doesn’t mean everyone will use the medium to improve themselves, but it’s pretty hard to avoid doing so. The Internet is democratizing and despite what the hand-wringers say, it’s made our knowledge deeper and stronger.

That’s why I bristle when I hear how the Internet is destroying the literary mind and damaging our memories. If it seems like our memories are failing more often than they used to, that’s because we have so much more information at our fingertips. Ultimately, that’s a good thing.

One person who agrees with me is Steven Pinker. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard who’s best known for his book, The Stuff of Thought. In an article on Edge, he addresses concerns about what the Internet is doing to our brains. An excerpt:

“New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying.”

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