He still disparages those who have the audacity to question his ideas about progress. The tone of Rationality isn’t as relentlessly chipper as that of the previous book, but Pinker’s optimism seems to have weathered the Trump years and the pandemic largely intact. Some of Pinker’s observations on racial issues are similarly blinkered.
The trouble arrives when he tries to gussy up his psychologist’s hat with his more elaborate public intellectual’s attire.
When Pinker is dealing with abstract puzzles involving small-stakes situations, the book is familiar but fine. Pinker spends page after page walking us through concepts like 'base-rate neglect' (giving too little weight to the original probability of an event in the face of new information) and the 'availability heuristic' (guessing the likelihood of an event according to what comes easily to mind). For someone who so frequently and serenely proclaims that he’s right, Steven Pinker can get curiously defensive.
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