Steven Pinker

Life is getting better. That's the message in a new book written by Harvard College Professor of psychology, Steven Pinker. His book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress paints a picture of human progress where people live longer, healthier, freer and happier lives.

As a long time Harvard professor who has spent almost 40 years working to prevent nuclear war and to mitigate global environmental change, it is important to point out that Steven Pinker, as many who are self-appointed as "public intellectuals," as people who can speak with authority on almost any ...

It's easy, surveying the world, to conclude that human life is dominated by poverty, disease, oppression, violence, and other ills. Such a viewpoint, according to experimental psychologist Steven Pinker, is deeply misguided. Pinker, who has become well-known far outside experimental psychology thanks to ...

Steven Pinker: There's a coherent alternative to religious, nationalist and reactionary movements, namely the ideals of the Enlightenment: that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing. The Enlightenment, moreover, worked: We live longer, healthier, safer, wealthier, freer, more peaceful and ...

Steven Pinker has become chief cheerleader for modernity. In his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he marshaled mountains of evidence to show that violence, both private and public, has significantly declined over the last 200 years. While atrocities naturally continue to draw our attention, they ...

Here to ease your general feelings of despair is renowned psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress, Steven Pinker. As Pinker tells us, our media is saturated with images of despair and dystopia, but that doesn't tell the full story of everything ...

This year, Harvard professor Steven Pinker topped Bill Gates's top book list with Enlightenment Now, a book that challenges people's questions about world progress. According to Pinker, the world is actually getting better. In his book, Pinker uses history and statistics to outline world trends which position ...

Steven Pinker has a message for all those standing at the ready, poised to raise the doomsday alarm at a moment's notice: Not so fast. In his new book, “Enlightenment Now” (which Bill Gates has declared his “favorite book of all time”), the Harvard professor of psychology uses social science data to make ...

Although democracy has spread from one country to more than 100 countries in the space of two centuries, it has also suffered setbacks along the way, and continues to face resistance to this day. Democracy, after all, is not inevitable, and yet it remains the best system of governance compared to the ...

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, author of 'Enlightenment Now,' pushes past negative headlines, examines the data, and explains how the world is moving in a better direction in almost every way -- and he's got charts. "Everything except dying by opioids, that's gone up, everything else has gone down ...

Watch the part one of UpFront's interview with Steven Pinker here. In part two of our interview with Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and cognitive scientist addresses criticism of his latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. In the book, Pinker argues that ...

Bookseller One Grand Books has asked celebrities to name the ten titles they'd take to a desert island, and they've shared the results with Vulture. Below is the list of cognitive scientist and author Steven Pinker. “One, Two, Three, Infinity,” by George Gamow. $13, One Grand Books. A delightful introduction ...

Steven Pinker: My point of view identifies four things: reason, science, humanism and progress. Reason being the ideal that we analyze our predicament using reason as opposed to dogma, authority, charisma, intuition, mysticism. Science being the ideal that we seek to understand the world by formulating ...

Steven Pinker's Radical Brand of 'Contingent Optimism'. The Harvard University psychologist argues humans have the capability to deal with the huge challenges we face. ... Just ask Steven Pinker. The Harvard University psychologist's new book, Enlightenment Now, which argues the quality of human life ...

Science author Steven Pinker discusses his latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which connects data with psychology to show that people are now safer, healthier, and freer than ever, at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. 7 p.m. at 600 I St. NW. $20–$50. Israeli indie pop ...

Is the ideal of progress obsolete? Harvard Psychology Professor and New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases, and instead, follow the data. In his new book, Pinker shows that life, health, ...

Is Steven Pinker a modern Enlightenment philosophe? In some ways, the comparison seems reasonable. Like the French philosophes, but unlike most contemporary intellectuals, Pinker writes with enthusiasm about a wide range of human knowledge, from the humanities to the social sciences to physics ...

Montreal-born Steven Pinker, 63, began his academic career as a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist, writing two technical books offering his theory of language acquisition. But if that aspect of his work brought him to a Harvard professorship, it's his more numerous books aimed at a general ...

Take, for example, the psychology professor Steven Pinker, who attracts breathless adulation. I am broadly sympathetic to his worldview. I agree with him that scientific knowledge is a moral imperative, and that we must use it to enhance human welfare. Like him, I'm enthusiastic about technologies that ...

We all can benefit from the vast erudition (and biblical proportions) of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, which preaches “organized rationalism's” doctrines (like “quantitative thinking” to counter our cognitive biases). 3. I'm using religious terms to stress Pinker's aim of moral conversion. By not maximizing ...

Psychology professor Steven A. Pinker received the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism at a ceremony administered by the Humanist Hub and the Harvard Community of Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics Sunday afternoon. Over 100 people gathered in the Science Center for ...

Elon Musk Blasts Harvard's Steven Pinker Over Comments Dismissing the Threat of Artificial Intelligence ... Elon Musk took to Twitter this week to bemoan comments, made by Harvard professor Steven Pinker, that were dismissive of Musk's many warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Wow ...

Cognitive psychologist and linguist Prof Steven Pinker of Harvard University is no stranger to intellectual controversy. Since 1994, a series of bestselling books, including The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate and The Better Angels of Our Nature, have unleashed a torrent of criticism. Pinker's ...

Yet one might argue (and Steven Pinker does) that the philosophy Voltaire satirizes here is not optimism at all. If you think this world is already as good as it gets, then you just have to accept it. A true optimist would say that, although human life will never be perfect, crucial aspects of it can improve if we ...

In Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, they have found their bible. “It grew out of an epiphany I had after writing The Better Angels of Our Nature [his 2011 bestseller],” Pinker (an atheist since 13) told me when we met at One Aldwych ...

In 2011, Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker published “The Better Angels of Our Nature,'' a massive book arguing that, over time, the world has become a less violent place for humans to inhabit. His new book, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,'' ...

Steven Pinker defends the Enlightenment – books podcast. Is the world going to rack and ruin? The psychologist Steven ... Alongside his research into cognition, the psychologist Steven Pinker has forged a career as a bestselling science writer. His latest book, Enlightenment Now tackles 21st-century ...

The big prizes go to books on war, terror, cancer and extinction, feeding our morbid curiosity about the gruesome ways in which things can go wrong. But there is an underappreciated genre of books that recount the facts of progress. These improvements are not as photogenic as the bursting bombs and ...

That's according to famed Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. He penned an op-ed in Canadian paper, The Globe and Mail, published Saturday, making the case. His op-ed preceded the release of his new book, "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress," which ...

Steven Pinker doesn't just want you to be happy; he wants you to be grateful too. His new book, “Enlightenment Now,” is a spirited and exasperated rebuke to anyone who refuses to concede that the world is becoming a better place. “None of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our ...