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

by Steven Pinker

To my mind, Tetlock’s hardheaded appraisal of expertise by the ultimate benchmark, prediction, should revolutionize our understanding of history, politics, epistemology, and intellectual life. What does it mean that the wonkish tweaking of probabilities is a more reliable guide to the world than the pronouncements of erudite sages and narratives inspired by systems of ideas? Aside from smacking us upside the head with a reminder to be more humble and open-minded, it offers a glimpse into the workings of history on the time scale of years and decades. Events are determined by myriad small forces incrementing or decrementing their likelihoods and magnitudes rather than by sweeping laws and grand dialectics. Unfortunately for many intellectuals and for all political ideologues, this is not the way they are accustomed to thinking, but perhaps we had better get used to it. When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the nature of forecasting, he said, “When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.”