Steven Pinker's new book shows how he's become a contradictory figure Steven Pinker's new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows makes a compelling case for common knowledge. Steven Pinker argues that "cancel culture" is a form of censorship Steven Pinker's new book perfectly encapsulates what a contradictory figure he has become. Much of it is a clear, fascinating explanation of a major psychological phenomenon . But then he starts telling you what he thinks about current affairs. Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard University who has written a string of popular science books. Some, like Words and Rules, are rooted in his own research and are a good read.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and prolific author, has often been described as a cheerleader for science, reason, and humanism. He is often maligned by his critics as a defender of the status quo. Much of his research focuses on slow and steady incremental improvements that have defined rapid human development, both in the United States and globally, over the past century. His 2018 book, "Enlightenment Now" was famously cited by Bill Gates as "his new favorite book," and became a focal point for global policymakers. He is a fierce defender of liberalism, democracy, and market economies, and believes a variety of forces are conspiring against them: populism of both the right and left, religious fundamentalism, and political correctness, among others. He also has emerged as a champion of reasoned, civil debate on college campuses, pushing back against cancel culture, and what he views as a'political monoculture' in academia.

Where writing is concerned, the best of today's AIs can be very, very good. A few years ago, a text generator called GPT-2 analyzed a sample of writing by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, then produced an imitation that hardly anyone could distinguish from the real thing. A more recent AI called Copilot, which has been customized for programming uses, is speeding up the work of practiced coders–it sometimes knows more than they do. A sample from a writing assistant called Jasper (formerly known as Jarvis) struck an editor as better than the work of some professional writers. The machines seem to have a particular knack for conversations. This may not be writing per se, but it's a language challenge that leaves some humans floundering.

A few years ago, at the Princeton Club in Manhattan, I chanced on a memorable chat with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. His spouse, the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, with whom he was tagging along, had been invited onto a panel to discuss the conflict between religion and science and Einstein's so-called "God letter," which was being auctioned at Christie's. Pinker had recently published Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I was eager to pepper him with questions, mainly on religion, rationality, and evolutionary psychology. I remember I wanted Pinker's take on something Harvey Whitehouse, one of the founders of the cognitive science of religion, told me in an interview--that my own little enlightenment, of becoming an atheist in college, was probably mostly a product of merely changing my social milieu. I wasn't so much moved by rational arguments against the ethics and existence of God but by being distanced from my old life and meeting new, non-religious friends. I recall Pinker almost pouncing on that argument, defending reason's power to change our minds. He noted that people especially high in "intellectance," a personality trait now more commonly called "openness to experience," tend to be more curious, intelligent, and willing to entertain new ideas. I still think that Pinker's way of seeing things made more sense of my experience in those heady days. I really was, for the first time, trying my best to think things through, and it was exhilarating. We talked until the event staff shelved the wine, and parted ways at a chilly midtown intersection.

Man is born smart, and everywhere he lacks brains. So, minus The Social Contract's gendered language, might Steven Pinker have opened Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Pinker, a senior Harvard professor, cognitive psychologist, bestselling author, and alleged victim of cancel culture, spends a lot of time these days fighting culture wars. Picking up where 2018's Enlightenment Now left off, his latest book takes as its problem the contrast Pinker sees between humankind's innate rationality and our observable taste for the irrational. Where his last book argued for "Enlightenment" as a source of values, however, Rationality introduces a specific set of logical and statistical tools, "benchmarks" of reasoned argument, as weapons in the fight against "rumor, folk wisdom, and conspiratorial thinking" that, Pinker thinks, poison our politics and endanger our world. Take up these tools, Rationality exhorts us, and champion "the reality mindset" against the forces of "mythology"!

John Brockman: On the Promise and Peril of AI • Seth Lloyd: Wrong, but More Relevant Than Ever • Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines • Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put Into the Machine • George Dyson: The Third Law • Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do? • Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into • Frank Wilczek: The Unity of Intelligence • Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete • Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages • Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas • David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment • Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings • Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation • Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent • David Kaiser: "Information" for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us • Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling • W. Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences • Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords?

The global community faces staggering challenges this century. We spent much of the 21st century learning how to get along with each another. According to data collected and analyzed by Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, we've made much progress toward that goal, judging from per capita declines in both natural and unnatural deaths worldwide. While the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation remains with us, the 21st century challenges relate to such things as space exploration and the ever-present issue of climate change and the natural disasters associated with it. At the same time, we have made giant strides in methods of addressing nearly any problem one can imagine.

Two particular events directed my attention recently to the importance to democratise information about AI into governence and popular culture. The first was a congressional hearing of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (the Cambridge Analytica story) where he at some point had to explain rather basic principles on Facebook's revenue model. The second was a recent EU parliament panel (October 2017) organized by STOA (Science and Technology Options Assessment) on AI aimed to prepare audiences for new technologies and their potential impact. I will go into more detail in the latter and show that there is still a big chasm between the expert view on the nature and potential of AI, and the view shared by non-experts such as EU parlementarians and the larger society. Thus the need for further demystification and democratisation of AI is quite apparent if it wants to earn a broad platform of trust and support by the general public.

In the book, Pinker argues that war and poverty are in decline and that humanity's progress can be attributed to reason and science, central aspects of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th century. However, critics accuse Pinker of cherry-picking data. They point out that the statistics he uses to support declining death rates begin from 1945, thus excluding the millions killed the decades before, including during World War I and II. "The claim about the Enlightenment is not that it instantaneously brought an end to war, but the Enlightenment did bring the first ideas on how to reduce war out in the open," says Pinker. "The decline in war is really a post-1945 phenomenon."

Alien invasion is a constant theme of Hollywood science fiction, from War of the Worlds to Independence Day. But Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, author of the new book Enlightenment Now, argues that highly developed civilizations tend toward peace and tolerance, and that advanced aliens are much more likely to be friendly. "I think it's not inconceivable that wars between countries will go the way of slave auctions and dueling, just be seen as too ridiculous for any reasonable country to engage in," Pinker says in Episode 296 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. But wouldn't alien brains be so different from ours that it would make mutual understanding impossible? On the contrary, since aliens would have been subject to the same evolutionary pressures as us, they would probably possess an appreciation of science--and maybe even beauty--similar to ours. "It's conceivable that other intelligences have a sense of beauty that is not wildly different from ours," Pinker says, "because they too might be expected to be attuned to counter-entropic forces and patterns in nature."