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

by Steven Pinker

Indeed, in one realm after another we are seeing the conquest of dogma and instinct by the armies of reason. Newspapers are supplementing shoe leather and punditry with statisticians and fact-checking squads.93 The cloak-and-dagger world of national intelligence is seeing farther into the future by using the Bayesian reasoning of superforecasters.94 Health care is being reshaped by evidence-based medicine (which should have been a redundant expression long ago).95 Psychotherapy has progressed from the couch and notebook to Feedback-Informed Treatment.96 In New York, and increasingly in other cities, violent crime has been reduced with the real-time data-crunching system called Compstat.97 The effort to aid the developing world is being guided by the Randomistas, economists who gather data from randomized trials to distinguish fashionable boondoggles from programs that actually improve people’s lives.98 Volunteering and charitable giving are being scrutinized by the Effective Altruism movement, which distinguishes altruistic acts that enhance the lives of beneficiaries from those that enhance the warm glow in benefactors.99 Sports has seen the advent of Moneyball, in which strategies and players are evaluated by statistical analysis rather than intuition and lore, allowing smarter teams to beat richer teams and giving fans endless new material for conversations over the hot stove.100 The blogosphere has spawned the Rationality Community, who urge people to be “less wrong” i...