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October 16 - October 23, 2018
It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish.
Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.
Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.
Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science.
Nationalism should not be confused with civic values, public spirit, social responsibility, or cultural pride.
When a “nation” is conceived as a tacit social contract among people sharing a territory, like a condominium association, it is an essential means for advancing its members’ flourishing.
many on the left encourage identity politicians and social justice warriors who downplay individual rights in favor of equalizing the standing of races, classes, and genders, which they see as being pitted in zero-sum competition.
For almost two centuries, a diverse array of writers has proclaimed that modern civilization, far from enjoying progress, is in steady decline and on the verge of collapse.
“The skepticism regarding Western progress that was once confined to a very small number of intellectuals in the nineteenth century has grown and spread to not merely the large majority of intellectuals in this final quarter of the century, but to many millions of other people in the West.”2
News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen.
“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being.
The researchers who assembled these conservative estimates calculate that more than five billion lives have been saved
Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.
The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th
It’s important to add that the market economies which blossomed in the more fortunate parts of the developing world were not the laissez-faire anarchies of right-wing fantasies and left-wing nightmares. To varying degrees, their governments invested in education, public health, infrastructure, and agricultural and job training, together with social insurance and poverty-reduction programs.
inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty.
“From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”
the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline.
Muslim countries have seen a 40 percent decline in fertility over the past three decades, including a 70 percent drop in Iran and 60 percent drops in Bangladesh and in seven Arab countries.12
The most damaging effect of terrorism is countries’ overreaction to it, the case in point being the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.
spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing.
very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.24
By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.
The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false.
Many studies that try to show that conservatives are temperamentally more prejudiced and rigid than liberals turn out to have cherry-picked the test items.
When people are first confronted with information that contradicts a staked-out position, they become even more committed to it, as we’d expect from the theories of identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance reduction. Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the
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The lifeblood of science is the cycle of conjecture and refutation: proposing a hypothesis and then seeing whether it survives attempts to falsify it. This point escapes many critics of science,
The political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and discovered that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movements succeeded, compared with only a third of the violent ones.
the spirit of science is the spirit of the Enlightenment.
