Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Wow, it’s amazing to see how many people still fall for Pinker’s ideas. Have you ever heard of Mark Twain’s "Lies, damned lies, and statistics”? It seems as if Pinker carefully picks statistics that support his view while disregarding mountains of evidence to the contrary. I can easily do the same for the opposite theory that says things are getting worse… 1. Depression rates are up pretty much everywhere one bothers to look: “In nations as diverse as Taiwan, Lebanon and New Zealand each successive generation is growing more vulnerable to the malady. Although rates of depression rise with age, the study found increases among young people. In some countries the likelihood that people born after 1955 will suffer a major depression -- not just sadness, but a paralyzing listlessness, dejection and self-deprecation, as well as an overwhelming sense of hopelessness -- at some point in life is more than three times greater than for their grandparents' generation.” - New York Times “Ministry of Health figures have revealed that a growing number of young New Zealanders are battling psychological distress. The percentage of 15- to 24-year-olds struggling with mental health has been steadily increasing, affecting 5 per cent five years ago, 8.8 per cent in the 2015/2016 year, and 11.8 per cent in the past year.” - Stuff “Depression is on the rise in U.S. teens, a new study finds.” - Live Science “In April a Mission Australia report found nearly one in four Australian teenagers met the criteria for having a "probable serious mental illness" — a 20 per cent increase from five years ago.” - CathNews “The rate of depression amongst South African men is at an all-time high. "It's an absolute crisis," clinical psychologist Zamo Mbele tells HuffPost SA.” - Huffington Post SA “We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death.” - Newsweek So, how exactly is life getting better if people are getting more and more unhappy? Shouldn’t happiness be a measure above all others? 2. In the real world, health is not doing too great. Sperm counts fell in Western nations by 60% in 40 years, and it’s biologically impossible that health would be getting better at the same time. Therefore we see so many diseases on the rise as well, like many types of cancer, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases etc. To top it off, life expectancy is already declining in many developed countries (like US and most of EU). I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if life expectancy continues to go down in the following years. 3. Environmental problems are spiraling out of control: “A “biological annihilation” of wildlife in recent decades means a sixth mass extinction in Earth's history is under way and is more severe than previously feared, according to research [from 2017].” - The Guardian “The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found.” - The Guardian "In just 3 decades, insect populations in German nature reserves have plummeted by more than 75%, according to a new study. The reasons for the decline aren’t clear, but the pattern is consistent over a swath of western and northern Germany, from the region around Bonn and Cologne to the countryside south of Berlin." - Science "Global fish production is approaching its sustainable limit, with around 90% of the world’s stocks now fully or overfished and a 17% increase in production forecast by 2025, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)." “Erik Solheim, executive director of the UN environment agency, describes the problem of marine pollution as “Armageddon in the making”. “We will have the same weight of plastic as fish in the sea by 2050 if this continues,” he says. “It’s all over the place, even in northern Norway, hundreds of miles from human habitation.”“ “Beijing’s pollution has made the city almost “uninhabitable for human beings”, according to a new study released by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences…” Anyone who doesn’t see humanity as something apart from nature knows that what we do to nature, we do to ourselves. And no, I'm not talking about global warming, a theme close to Pinker's heart. There are many other urgent issues to solve. 4. Even our food production is in peril: “Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.” - Scientific American Let this be enough for now. What I wanted to show with these citations is not that everything is getting worse, but that I can easily make a case that it is by citing sources, studies etc. that agree with this. However, the fact remains that many things are not that great in this “enlightenment age” and that we need to collectively work towards a better future. This book is encouraging people towards complacency, which given the issues cited above I find very harmful.