Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

An old Saturday Night Live skit has Gilda Radner in a postcoital conversation with a nervous lover (played by Chevy Chase) who is worried she didn’t have an orgasm, and she consoles him by saying, “Sometimes I do and I don’t even know it.”

“Man plans and God laughs.”

If I've read, quoted from and researched stats from this book, and I find out its some religious diatribe I will be so pissed. This is what makes atheists go to extremes of loud-mouthed asshattery in public.

That makes three segments of the population that have become happier amid the American happiness stagnation: African Americans, the successive cohorts leading up to the Baby Boom, and young people today.

And no one knows why, for example, the world’s most suicidal countries are Guyana,

Worst punch line ever.

The GI and Silent generations were more reluctant to kill themselves than the Victorian cohorts that preceded them and the Boomers and Gen-Xers that followed them.

Woody Allen,

A pedophile & misogynist. Why use quotes from terrible people?

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.”

This is a true work of art by Max Brooks That movie with Brad Pitt? A travesty bearing its name.

Remember the Y2K bug?

The next year based bug is 2038.

Sure enough, at 12:00 A.M. on January 1, nothing happened (as I quickly reassured family members back home on a fully functioning telephone). The Y2K reprogrammers, like the elephant-repellent salesman, took credit for averting disaster, but many countries and small businesses had taken their chances without any Y2K preparation, and they had no problems either.

This was the first "I told you so" in my marriage. My husband wanted an apocalyptic scenario. I was the rational one. My 2nd was Jan. 1, 2013.

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.

(1) humans are so gifted that they can design an omniscient and omnipotent AI, yet so moronic that they would give it control of the universe without testing how it works,

Isn't this the Starfleet Mission Statement, though? Earth is the Florida of the galaxy.

AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding.

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Remember what species is designing this GAI.

foom,

I love this word. I am always going to use it.

“No one in civil engineering talks about ‘building bridges that don’t fall down.’

Unless it was trying to span the Narrows Gorge, in Tacoma, WA Galloping Gertie: https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/tnbhistory/connections/connections3.htm

In 2002 Martin Rees publicly offered the bet that “by 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.”

the ISIS trainer who demonstrated an explosive vest to his class of aspiring suicide terrorists and blew himself and all twenty-one of them to bits;

Obvious CIA plant has no fucks. He was a true patriot, even though we'll never see his medals or honors on a public wall.

a mind that delights in senseless mayhem for its own sake is probably not the brightest bulb in the box.

Chaotic Evil

Doomsday Clock, now set at two and a half minutes to midnight.

It's at 100 seconds as of 1/23/20

nuclear weapons turn out to be lousy deterrents (except in the extreme case of deterring existential threats, such as each other).

Mutually Assured Destruction

female genital mutilation,

Circumcision needs to stop for boys, too. Same goes for ear piercing for infants. Religion and culture are not reasonable justifications for mutilating a child. While children are protected under many nations' laws, their bodily autonomy is still violated in ways that have no medically necessary purpose. Elective surgeries and purely cosmetic mutilations should require consent.

Still, a puzzle in the rise of authoritarian populism is why a shocking proportion of the sectors of the population whose interests were most endangered by the outcome of the elections, such as younger Britons with Brexit, and African Americans, Latinos, and American millennials with Trump, stayed home on election day.

“I’d rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,” flamed a left-wing advocate of “the politics of arson.”

Wow. My personal feelings are edging a little too far to the left. I voted for Clinton. I'm stuck voting for Biden. Because even though they are both Turd Sandwiches, they are at least literate, educated people. But if it all burns before November, I'm okay with that, too.

Until the messiah comes,

Look, dude, stop waffling w/the religious references already.

it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones.

Once a conflagration passes, the path is cleared. Sometimes it's better to let it all burn clean. These riots are signal fires for change.

People are not clones in a monoculture, so what satisfies one will frustrate another, and the only way they can end up equal is if they are treated unequally.

Equality is not necessarily *equity*. Giving everyone the same portion is equality, but ensuring that everyone has *enough* is equity.

What’s going on is that these people are sharing blue lies. A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers).

We know today that political partisanship is like sports fandom: testosterone levels rise or fall on election night just as they do on Super Bowl Sunday.

Tetlock to think aloud, reported that he began by estimating the base rate: he went to Wikipedia, looked up the list of Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe for the previous five years, and divided by 5, which predicted 1.2 attacks a year. But, he reasoned, the world had changed since the Arab Spring in 2011, so he lopped off the 2010 data, which brought the base rate up to 1.5. ISIS recruitment had increased since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a reason to poke the estimate upward, but so had security measures, a reason to tug it downward. Balancing the two factors, an increase by about a fifth seemed reasonable, yielding a prediction of 1.8 attacks a year. There were 69 days left in the forecast period, so he divided 69 by 365 and multiplied the fraction by 1.8. That meant that the chance of an Islamist attack in Western Europe by the end of March was about one in three. A manner of forecasting very different from the way most people think led to a very different forecast.

Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, flamboyant fauna from tropical rain forests and deep-sea ocean vents, graceful spiral galaxies and diaphanous nebulae, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous Planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.

My generic male internal narratpr segued nicely into Sir David Aftenborough's voice.

In 1853 Arthur de Gobineau, a fiction writer and amateur historian, published his cockamamie theory that a race of virile white men, the Aryans, spilled out of an ancient homeland and spread a heroic warrior civilization across Eurasia, diverging into the Persians, Hittites, Homeric Greeks, and Vedic Hindus, and later into the Vikings, Goths, and other Germanic tribes. (The speck of reality in this story is that these tribes spoke languages that fell into a single family, Indo-European.)

Now, as long as he thinks he is eternally invulnerable, he might take that chance, but the Law of Entropy rules that out. He may tyrannize everyone for a while, but eventually the massed strength of his targets could prevail.

Don't give me hope.

Is masturbation immoral (as the prototypical deontologist, Kant, argued), because one is using oneself as a means to satisfy an animal impulse, and people must always be treated as ends, never as means?

Human rights promote human flourishing.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Thomas Jefferson is a terrible role model. He was a slave owner and a racist. It's a damned shame this is one of the best quotes about my approach to apathetic atheism.

Nothing that we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it depends entirely on neural activity.

Donald Trump won the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher proportion than of any other demographic.59 In large part he earned their votes by promising to repeal a law which prohibits tax-exempt charities (including churches) from engaging in political activism.

The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you.

Why, then, do commentators think that religion is rebounding in the United States? It’s because of yet another finding about the American Exodus: Nones don’t vote. In 2012 religiously unaffiliated Americans made up 20 percent of the populace but 12 percent of the voters. Organized religions, by definition, are organized, and they have been putting that organization to work in getting out the vote and directing it their way.

as the ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider has put it, “Religions are just ideas and don’t have rights.”

Malaysia,

One step forward, one step back & to the right.

Leyla Hussein (founder of Daughters of Eve, which opposes female genital mutilation);

Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

I don't care if his sister manipulated some of his writing to appeal to the Nazi party or not. His unaltered writings are racist enough.