by Steven Pinker
Pinker marshals 75 graphs showing long-term gains in health, wealth, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness to argue that Enlightenment commitments to reason, science, and humanism have delivered measurable progress. He contends that cognitive biases like the availability heuristic and negativity bias make us systematically underestimate how much better the world has become.
In this collection, Enlightenment Now references 4 other books.
It draws on The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Blank Slate and Thinking, Fast and Slow.
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The books Pinker references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Enlightenment Now is explicitly a sequel to Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, extending the violence-decline data to wider metrics of progress and revisiting his arguments against cyclical and pessimist theories of history.
Pinker repeatedly cites his own Blank Slate to ground the book's argument that human nature contains cognitive tools for moral and scientific progress, not a romantic pre-civilized harmony.
Pinker draws heavily on Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, invoking System 1 biases like the availability heuristic and negativity bias to explain why news consumers perceive the world as worsening.
Pinker engages Bostrom's Superintelligence in his existential-risk chapter, rejecting what he calls the most extreme AI doom scenarios while acknowledging Bostrom's concerns merit serious analysis.
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Directly cites
Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Steven Pinker
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
Brian Christian
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
Stuart Russell
Atomic Habits
James Clear
Tools of Titans
Tim Ferriss
Hooked
Nir Eyal
Books with the highest citation overlap within the same categories.
The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
Will Storr
2 shared citationsThe Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Steven Pinker
2 shared citationsThe Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
Brian Christian
2 shared citationsHuman Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
Stuart Russell
2 shared citationsAtomic Habits
James Clear
1 shared citation
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
1 shared citationThis book and its direct connections. Hover a node to see its title, click to visit.
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