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December 9, 2023 - January 14, 2024
restate the ideals of the Enlightenment (also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism).
The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.
Patrick Sheehan liked this
Harder to find is a positive vision that sees the world’s problems against a background of progress that it seeks to build upon by solving those problems in their turn.
This book is my attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century.
So you need to make videos on social media about it.
Kant answered that it consists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity,” its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority.
(As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”)
Many writers today confuse the Enlightenment endorsement of reason with the implausible claim that humans are perfectly rational agents.
it was only by calling out the common sources of folly that we could hope to overcome them.
The deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable.
“progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.
you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.
Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.
Also, the desire to be right can collide with a second desire, to know the truth, which is uppermost in the minds of bystanders to an argument who are not invested in which side wins.
If that's true why do partisan groups who sre unwilling to change their minds form around ideas?
all ideas have to come from somewhere, and their birthplace has no bearing on their merit.
To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason. Religions also commonly clash with humanism whenever they elevate some moral good above the well-being of humans,
Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives,
As for incompatibilities with science, these are the stuff of legend and current events, from Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial to stem-cell research and climate change.
Defenders of the faith insist that religion has the exclusive franchise for questions about what matters.
Fuck that shit.
Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause.
In many colleges and universities, science is presented not as the pursuit of true explanations but as just another narrative or myth.
Which is a bullshit view.
But change the question from the people’s lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore.
Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.
Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated.
A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.
The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise.
Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.
while pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.
when fewer children die, parents have fewer children, since they no longer have to hedge their bets against losing their entire families.
As the physicist Peter Hoffman points out, “Life pits biology against physics in mortal combat.”
The sin of ingratitude may not have made the Top Seven, but according to Dante it consigns the sinners to the ninth circle of Hell, and that’s where post-1960s intellectual culture may find itself because of its amnesia for the conquerors of disease.
Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”
History is written not so much by the victors as by the affluent, the sliver of humanity with the leisure and education to write about it.
“In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”
Paul Collier, who calls war “development in reverse,” has estimated that a typical civil war costs a country $50 billion.
Progress consists of unbundling the features of a social process as much as we can to maximize the human benefits while minimizing the harms.
The fickle effects of inequality on well-being bring up another common confusion in these discussions: the conflation of inequality with unfairness.
Economic inequality, then, is not itself a dimension of human well-being, and it should not be confused with unfairness or with poverty.
(Ecomodernists point out that organic farming, which needs far more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.)
by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing
Or is the burden changing from physical use to emissions from electricity production? Is it less damaging or just same amount of damage in a different form?
Just as we must not accept the narrative that humanity inexorably despoils every part of the environment, we must not accept the narrative that every part of the environment will rebound under our current practices.
A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].”
people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.
It may be satisfying to demonize the fossil fuel corporations that sell us the energy we want, or to signal our virtue by making conspicuous sacrifices, but these indulgences won’t prevent destructive climate change.
the ratio of carbon to hydrogen in its energy source steadily fell, and so did the amount of carbon that had to be burned to release a unit of energy
This assumes all sources switch to gas. Energy is in such demand coal plants will keep operating even as more gas plants come online.
“Hydrogen is as innocent as an element can be, ending combustion as water.”
Hydrogen can still explode and water drowns
No one owns the atmosphere, so people (and companies) have no reason to stint on emissions that allow each of them to enjoy their energy while harming everyone else,
“There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. It is the only low carbon technology we have today with the demonstrated capability to generate large quantities of centrally generated electric power.”
As Ivan Selin, former commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, put it, “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.”
The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.
Keith remarks, “Is it plausible that we will not figure out how to pull, say, five gigatons of carbon per year out of the air by 2075? I don’t buy
The real question is can we fibd something productive to do with 5 gigatons of carbon. That's a lot of printer toner.
