Steven Pinker

Is This An Overview?
Using rational reasoning skills, humans have been able to achieve material and scientific progress. Rationality is composed of cognitive tools that people use to understand a situation, to find potential solutions to a problem. Rationality is often found in groups, as each individual reciprocates in finding each other’s fallacies. Reason can reason about reason, which enables people to disagree and find alternative solutions. There are situations in which people can find rational reasons to behave irrationally, situations in which there is strategic value in ignorance. People use reasoning skills when they argue, persuade, evaluate, accept, or reject an argument instead of threatening and coercing each other.

Various social and institutional systems used force to shape others’ beliefs rather than use persuasion. The acceptable methods of forcing beliefs on others have changed, but even institutions that are meant to evaluate ideas, find ways to suppress divergent views. The problem of using force, is that force can leave the opposition with no alternative other than to reciprocate with force. Relative power can shift to the opposition who will reciprocate the lack of willingness to be heard on merits.

Caveats?
The book expresses rationality through various methods such as formal logic, game theory, and probability. Although the decision theory and mathematics are provided in an introductory form, a reader who has not yet learned the ideas might need to apply more effort to understand them such as by researching for more details and applications. The way some parts are written can contradict values in other parts, such as highlighting individual failures of rationality even though the group process of finding rationality is understood, and sharing causes to biases but providing various examples that enable the biases to occur.… (more)

Overview:
Each society has a theory of human nature, which is rarely referenced, but shapes beliefs and policies. Theories of human behavior range from mainly genetics to mainly social constructs. Human behavior is shaped by nature and nurture. Evolution coded in genetics has limited resources and ability to anticipate various complex situations, therefore cannot do everything. Nurture coded in social constructs have physical limitations, therefore cannot do everything. There are contexts which can be explained with mainly nurture or nature. Social constructs like language are nurture, while genetic disorders are nature. Within most contexts, nature and nurture work together. There are complex interactions between genes and their environment.

The blank slate is a reference to an extreme nurture view of the human mind. That the human mind has no inherent structure, in which society and the individual can inscribe values. Differences in behavior come about through differences in experiences. By changing the experiences, can the individual change. This implies that problematic behavior can be ameliorated. There are limitations within this perspective. Blank slates cannot do anything because they would not have the innate circuitry for learning or understanding. While culture shapes thought, thought could not come about without a biological entity capable of learning. Humans are biologically distinguishable, and are constrained in their choices.

More On Evolution, and the Blank Slate:
Genes cannot provide a complete blueprint. They have limited resources, which means can only be so big. Genes cannot anticipate the complexity of the environment and behavior of other genes. To compensate, genes have developed a program that enables learning mechanisms such as feedback, which generate information with which to adjust behavior.

There are many limitations of the blank slate perspective. The mind creates a model of the world, but the model is based on the physical world. It takes a perceiver with information to decipher patters, combine patters with priorly learned patterns, and use them to obtain new thoughts that guide behavior.

Humans have the capacity to learn, and interpret information if a myriad of ways. With finite information processing, can an infinite range of behavior be generated. Culture is a cumulative pool of information that enables coordination of expectations about each other’s behavior. Genes do not create cultures, but cultures do not impact formless minds.

Recognition of biological differences has caused many unfavorable conclusions such as prejudice, Social Darwinism, and eugenics. Biological constraints prevent complete reshaping of human behavior, and can be seen as deterministic.

Caveats?
The claims about nature and nurture are sensitive topics, which garner controversy. The author attempts to provide a more appropriate and neutral explanation for how they shape human society. The problem is that the way in which the book is written, is not favorable to neutrality.… (more)

First, decades ago, Edgar Cayce, “the Sleeping Prophet,” tells me that animals don’t have souls; Now, come to find out, or, according to Stephen Pinker that is; people don’t have them either. Meanwhile, Deepak Chopra tells me; no, we don’t HAVE souls, we ARE souls. Well, alright. We all have opinions about the noumenal world. And if I understood it right, one of the things the author is telling us is that, some of them come from the Age of Enlightenment, and some we only think did.
Mr. Pinker immerses us in the Age of Enlightenment's principles and varying philosophies, quoting from the movement's various members and arguing for (science, humanism, logic) and against (brands of metaphysics that drift into religion) those ideas and/or our assumptions about them, while citing and praising the many actual results.
For the most part, I liked what the author had to say. Fortified with numerous charts and graphs, he explains all the ways in which mankind is better off, not worse, than it ever was before, despite the prevalent fears engendered by the media and several common failures of cognitive function (such as a tendency to assume that correlation=causation, or an assumption that an anecdote is as strong, evidentially, as statistics---although he often opts for the anecdote to make a point).
I’m guessing that few will agree with every conclusion he comes to, or appreciate the criticisms that are flung left and right . . . though I’d say, most of his sympathies lay with the former, politically speaking.
With a few reservations, all in all, I’d say it’s an enlightening book. 😊
(Narrated by Arthur Morey)… (more)