Pinker’s common sense, clear intellect and lack of double-talk is refreshing. What he says about university life changing is very clearly understood. Administrations and other parties many times feed the weaknesses, the fears and bias instead of empowering students to mature, to develop a freedom from the sometime nonsense of pop culture, to have humour in their lives, to feel deeply, to study and read deeply. Student life has changed, degraded unnecessarily. The easy ‘A’ has lowered the academic standard, degraded the diploma and has called into question the value of the intellectual world, a world many students only touch, if that.
There aren’t many academics with the courage to speak out against identity politics aka woke. Pinker is a renowned expert in his field, and a courageous man. I applaud him. I don’t expect many others to do the same, as it would destroy their careers. Sadly.
A mild-mannered academic who's become an intellectual hero by taking the responsibilities of his position, and the mission of his institution, seriously. I understand academics who go along to get along. They just want to think about their topics, and be left alone. But out truth-finding norms and institutions can't survive if most intellectuals (faculty, journalists, etc.) are conformist cowards. Aggressive orthodoxies will not leave anyone alone, in the end. I hope PInker's example will give some of them the courage speak up.
The theses that enlightenment has made life better, progress isn't linear etc are based on arbitrary standards germinated from personal ideologies -not intrinsically good or bad. Quality measures depend on the chosen parameters.
Economically and technologically, things are incredibly better now than in the past. At the same time, socially and culturally, we are seeing a steep decline; things were far better 50 years ago than now. How far will we fall before our culture recovers is an open question; hopefully before our civilization completely collapses.
The one time endowment of fossil hydrocarbons, that is, concentrated, latent solar energy... It's the main reason that humanity was able to flourish to the degree that it has, with high net energy from fossil hydrocarbons facilitating unprecedented growth, an increase in aggregate living standards, and progress toward the realization of universal human rights. In the context of those factors, consider what might well occur on the down slope of the age of fossil hydrocarbons, with the much lower net energy that will be available from alternative energy sources, given the limits of current technology. How might that impending energy transition affect the growth trend? How might it affect human rights? And if the energy transition poses a threat to the progress that has been made, what can be done to prevent its reversal?
I met Steven Pinker back in 2004, in Montreal where he was visiting his parents, Rose and Harry Pinker. He is a completely different person "in person". Shocked to learn that he is an Atheist Jew with extremely scarce knowledge of things spiritual. Does he not know that "Pearly Gates is a Catholic belief". He may be a good writer and possibly a good professor, but this interview reveals a part of him that was hard for me to comprehend. I have no problem with him being a materialist, but ignorance of spirituality is hard to swallow! I learned the term "awokism" in the interview. Thank you!
Progress is due to the Evolution of the Equinoxes, see the film The Great Year. Pinker likely knows more about the tooth fairy than he does about the Precession of the Equinoxes. Evolution without a prototype to evolve to makes less sense than the tooth fairy, but it is still being pushed. It is good of Pinker to now deny the Blank Slate, having been the originator and chief proponent of it in the past. Seeing oneself starting off as a blank slate could not have been exactly helpful. Terrible things went on in The Dark Age but due to The Precession we are past that now. The remnant is still with us but we are moving away from it, there will be some backsliding, nevertheless the Precession is on track. If we can just get past the deification of matter: materialism, and begin to understand consciousness and mind and see humankind as a special creation, we will get past this worm’s eye view of reality. Youth will have something to again strive for. Materialism has just about ruined everything but we can pull back from it. People from elsewhere, Murdoch with his trash print empire etc. and their proselytizing are a problem. Americans on our own, no matter how benighted at times, at least we have some common sense. Let’s hope it holds up. Stop listening to so-called experts. There is more common sense in Medieval Philosophy and Ancient Greek philosophy about human nature than is in the gibberish propagated today by the current crop of Atheists.
For what it's worth: I was interested in watching this video but had to turn it off at the :40 second mark... just as the host began. He came out of the intro clips of Pinker calmly making a point... by SHOUTING at the camera... and me and you, as it turns out. Tone deafness is a big turnoff to me. This sort of chat based content requires a conversational host intro. Maybe just my opinion, and likely pedantic, but I'm not sticking around to watch the rest. I wish you much success and hope this comment helps the algorithm reach more viewers for your channel.
Postmodernism philosophy underlies the anti science, anti liberal arguments on both sides. For example, a focus on qualitative analysis over quantitative (the proven data of climate change). Subjective analysis allows for denying reality.
Postmodernism is a movement in art, not politics or philosophy. Post-structuralism is the intellectual / philosophical movement. Postcolonialism is a political bastardization of both
The climate change dilemma is simple to evaluate, if you look at the big picture, and prioritize options available. World population has nearly quadrupled in the last 70 years, and this growth has been made possible through burning fossil hydrocarbons. Each human alive today, and those alive in future, will make decisions based on their own self interest, as is our nature, and each human will alive will generate additional CO2. It is not feasible to expect to reverse the trajectory of carbon addition to the atmosphere, we can only slow it down. so the logical actions to prioritize are those that mitigate inevitable future warming as best we can. But those are not the actions we hear about. Net zero and all the other strategies focus on putting off the inevitable. When you face reality in this way, it is easy to see that the things we should put at the top of our list should be3 planning on engineering solutions for sea level rise, and planning for shifting weather patterns affecting food production. Slowing the rate of carbon emissions is important, but forcing the time frame entails many unavoidable consequences. Planning for the inevitable makes much more sense if you are a practical, logical person. Unfortunately, as a species, we are not that logical, or practical.
Or focus on accelerating technological progress to the point where we can overcome these problems. There are so many examples of us doing that historically, with crop yields, oil drilling, huge construction works to prevent flooding etc etc. The next step right now is to build climate control for this planet. It's not economical to pull CO2 out of the air right now but that doesn't mean it never will be, work over-capacity of solar and wind, and possibly fusion. We also have very simple and cheap solutions for lowering the temperature, but that are politically unpalatable for some reason. ("No, I don't want a technological fix, I want to tear down the socio economic system")
@@martindbp I was with you until you said tear down the soci0 economic system. Change, perhaps, but destroy? That seems contrary to the ability to work cooperatively across countries and on a global scale, which I doubt will happen anyway. It's always tempting to hope for new technology to solve the problem of using fossil hydrocarbon for fuel, but it's unwise to count on it. For example, CO2 has doubled in the atmosphere within the last 80 years, but it is still only 4 parts per 10,000 now, and such a dilute processing stream will be very hard to address by any future technology. No, I think we are going to have to accept that humans will continue to dump carbon into the atmosphere for the next century, and if the greenhouse effect really turns out of be true (and it's not proven, no matter what the consensus of scientist say), we will be faced with mitigation rather than prevention. I just wish this topic would be addressed, even if it is not eminent. We are barking up the wrong tree, in my opinion, and even though birth rates are slowing dramatically, there will still be 9 billion people on the planet later in this century. It would be good to address a "what if" scenario with regard to failure in switching to another fuel source. That seems the likely outcome to me
It says a lot about our society that people like Steven Pinker are now considered controversial. The only thing I find controversial about him is his belief in Universal Grammar hahaha :-) But seriously, kudos to him!
I feel bad for the people who are "too woke". As far as I can tell they're behavior and concern typically is coming from a good place. Usually it's about bigotry or "unfairness". I likely helped raise a woman in a manner that would lead her to be "too woke". I can see how the fact that she is a lesbian would give her a perspective that is hard to ignore. Not all people have treated her well when they became aware that she's not straight. Feeling "separate" due to who she is must cause many feelings that most of us cannot experience since most of us are straight. I cannot blame her for her perspective but I also see that her "wokeness" is actually part of the problem. The inability of many to look at actual data and come up with similar conclusions is definitely a problem. It is hard to explain how some people can look at the exact same outcomes and decide that it cannot be true.
@@WeThe66out of interest, how did you get hold of Steven? I plan to contact him one day regarding a project I’m working on, and I have an idea of how to reach him, but am also wondering how you made it happen. Of course, I don’t want you say anything that might jeopardise you or him! So no worries if not!
