Harvard Psychologist Reveals How You're Brainwashed to Think Negatively | Steven Pinker Ep. 593

Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard, one of the world’s leading authorities on language and the mind, and an author of several bestsellers. His latest is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

Full show notes can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/593

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What We Discuss with Steven Pinker:

00:00 - Intro
01:04 - Stop Romanticizing the Past
14:08 - Protect People, Not Jobs
24:55 - The World Isn’t As Bad As You Think
30:42 - Old/Young Gens Don’t Get Each Other
42:20 - The Positive Facts Nobody Hears
56:21 - Politics Makes You Dumber

It seems that representatives of every generation between The Flintstones‘ great-grandparents and our own will, at some point, shake their wise old heads at the folly of youth and proclaim that life was better back when they were kids. But if this were true, then the human race and the planet we call home have been on a downward trajectory ever since the beginning. In fact, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker — author of bestsellers like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and his latest, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters — argues that the opposite is true: there’s never been a better time to be alive. From me, the person writing these words, to you who’s reading them: aren’t we lucky?

On this episode, Steven joins us to discuss why old-timers who count on misremembered nostalgia to tell us how their misspent youth took place in the world’s real heyday are mistaken, options our society has for housing and feeding a workforce increasingly unemployed by automation, how criticizing the present is really just a way of criticizing your rivals, why conflict and mass suffering still exist in hotspots around the world if things are truly so peachy keen, what sentiment mapping tells us about the escalating tendency of media to negatively paint current events as if we’re perpetually experiencing the End Times, why taking the time to appreciate how far we’ve come gives us the perspective we need to build a better future, and much more. Listen, learn, and enjoy!

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