Just finished @sapinker's phenomenal new book, Enlightenment Now. The best thing about Pinker's writing is his heterodoxy and empiricism: no matter your perspectives, you'll hate at least some portion of his ideas. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:
"Changes over time may be statistical, with unpredictable fluctuations, without being cyclical, namely oscillating like a pendulum between two extremes. That is, even if a reversal is possible at any time, that does not mean it becomes more likely as time passes." @sapinker
"Another paradox of rationality is that expertise, brainpower, and conscious reasoning do not, by themselves, guarantee that thinkers will approach the truth. On the contrary, they can be weapons for ever-more-ingenious rationalization." @sapinker
"The acid test of empirical rationality is prediction. Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense—we should credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones that don’t—are rarely applied to the intelligentsia." @sapinker
"A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not." @sapinker
Enlightenment Now is to history what quant finance is to finance...
