Making a case for reason and science

“Human beings, on their own, are not particularly reasonable. As a species, we generalise from anecdotes, reason from stereotypes, we seek evidence that confirms our beliefs, ignore those that don’t,’’ said Steven Pinker, Johnstone professor of psychology at the Harvard University during his session on his book ‘Enlightenment Now’.
Charting the progress made by the human race in the past 250 years, Pinker said life expectancy, from an average of 40 years in 1760 has increased to 71 years; Gross World Product has increased by a factor of 200 in the last 200 years; rates of extreme poverty have gone down across nations and for the first time in history, majority of people in the world are middle class; since World War II there has been a dramatic decline in rate of deaths in all kinds of war, including civilian, while in comparison peace was just a brief interlude between wars for most of human history when major empires fought each other; in the middle ages in Europe, over all homicide rate was 33 deaths for 1,00,000 per year and today it is 1 per 1,00,000 and worldwide homicide deaths have reduced by 35% in the last 20 years itself; IQ scores are increasing by about 3 points a decade and so we score 30 points higher on IQ test than our parents did; technology has improved quality of life, for one, the amount of time we spend on house work has decreased from 60 hours a week to 15 hours a week.“Yet, why do people deny progress?” Pinker asked.
He traced it to what cognitive psychologists call, “the availability heuristic”, that is, people estimate risk according to how easily they can recall examples from memory. That is where the role of media and market forces in fomenting “the negativity bias” comes in, he said. “Newspapers have got increasingly morose and glum in the past few decades,” said Pinker. “It’s in the nature of news, it’s about sudden events, not gradual changes.” Human beings feel and think about bad events more often than the good ones. If one compares the nature of cognitive psychology with the nature of journalism, one can see where the feeling of the world is coming to an end comes from, Pinker said, making a case for reason, science, humanism and progress.