Steven Pinker on Progress

I’ve enjoyed Our World in Data and Steven Pinker for a long time for their zoomed out perspective on progress in the world.

The talk he gave at the Progress conference that covers his overall worldview, which is a great introduction to the concept.

The news is a systematically misleading way to understand the world. Not because of any nefarious bias on the part of the media companies but because of the very nature of news. News is about stuff that happens not stuff that doesn’t happen, and news is about sudden and unexpected, not gradual changes so news by its very nature is a non-random sample that will end up being the worst things happening in the world.

- Steven Pinker

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Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!