You can always start a thread dealing with a subject that interests you.

You may simply be out of luck in that there's too few people engaged in leisurely analysis.

Take Pinker for example, his whole thing is that "everything is fine". His message is precisely meant for people who don't want to analyze or think too hard about anything and want to be comforted by the idea that "the real smart analysis", such as Pinker provides, concludes with laissez-faire everything is fine and dandy.

Congruent to this state of affairs, fans of Pinker don't generally engage in analysis to defend Pinker but just restate statistics that Pinker likes to state, such as "so and so amount of people out of poverty!!" Pinker is designed (whether "intelligently" by the man Pinker or then a broader media-evolutionary process) for popular consumption of people who support the status quo; things feel good for them right now and it's nice to think things are good for people generally speaking.

However, on any closer inspection by people who like rigour and analysis, Pinker's entire proposition simply falls apart.

First, whenever someone talks about progress, this simply begs the question "progress to where?" We need a moral theory in order to evaluate progress and weigh different statistics against each other.

The obvious and immediate criticism of Pinker is ecologically. If the progress he espouses is at the cost of ecosystems, necessary for long term prosperity and/or valuable in themselves, that issue must be addressed. If Pinker puts up a graph of poverty reduction and an ecologist puts up a graph of biodiversity loss, Pinker requires some moral framework to even make the claim things are going in the right direction. Which, as far as I know, Pinker never provides a moral framework in which it's even possible to compare different numbers in different graphs.

Point being, fans of Pinker don't concern themselves with defending or filling in Pinker's view of the world; the whole point is to support a laissez-faire, everything is fine attitude, and so no need to think about it further. Anyone serious about philosophy is going to immediately point out Pinker does not even have a moral framework in which "the good" can be asserted and any sort of comparative analysis with other values can be carried out.

There's ecological value (that Pinker's economic system that does all the great stuff he point to depends on, and if the system isn't sustainable then you also need a framework in which short term gains can be weighed against long term costs in the same metric) but there's also plenty of other moral and political decisions. For example, if prosperity in China leads to Chinese domination of the planet and spreading Chinese technological social control systems (great firewall, social credit, etc.) is therefore Chinese prosperity a good thing (even assuming it's ecologically sound)? If Nazi Germany had a poverty problem and then Hitler solved that poverty problem, seems to me Pinker's framework would view that as an absolutely amazing achievement of mankind right up until 1939, perhaps even 1943. Obviously China is not literally Nazi Germany, so is it's government "bad enough" or "good enough" or "benign enough" to support one conclusion over another is not easy to do, but would have to be resolved for Pinker's argument to be simply step 1 of plausible soundness.

However, even assuming "liberal democratic values" (which we can obviously question how great they are in reality, such as a genocide our liberal democracies are carrying out right now and China is not); what if, even assuming China is "bad" for liberal democratic values in China, nevertheless helps Africa and other poor nations develop in exactly the way Pinker wants, and just so happens that is and would be in a liberal democratic way outside of China? Can we weigh the "freedom" of the Chinese against the "freedom" of Africans? So even on Pinker's preferred metrics of evaluation, different scenarios can be elaborated with different pros and cons and Pinker's framework has no way of resolving them. Ultimately, all these critiques are answered with just "optimism" and the whole exercise is starting with an optimistic attitude, putting together statistics optimistically with an optimistic interpretation, and then being optimistic that potential for bad will be resolved by fellow optimistic people.

Pinker's place in the social discourse is simply serving as the counter-contrarian to everything. If someone starts analyzing an issue that really does seem governments are going to need do something about to avoid bad things happening, Pinker can be relied on to state that it's not a problem, and if it is it's not a big problem, and if it was it's not a problem anyone should really worry about, and if they should it can't be compared with all sorts of other things that are going absolutely swimmingly.

Therefore, Pinker resists "casual analysis"; either you repeat what Pinker says completely oblivious to all the moral, political, ecological, statistical collection and analysis methods, qualitative, issues Pinker never addresses, or then even the smallest analysis immediately starts to encounter questions and problems that just lead to more questions and problems, which is not a leisurely task to get through, and you just end up in those debates of those issues which Pinker ignores, and the whole point of Pinker's proposition is to encourage ignoring those issues; but if those issues aren't ignored, then in those "actual debates about stuff", Pinker's work becomes purely ornamental to the discussion.

Try the Lounge maybe?

Better still read someone like Alain de Botton? He is a pretty pleasant read and explores topics with graceful prose allowing the reader to become as involved with the text as they wish to.

'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' is another moodier book that might interest you.

Wouldn't hurt to just post about a topic that interests you and make clear what it is you are trying to get out of the thread.

Should we go on to talk about Pinker? I have never read any of his recent books, but have heard him talk about them with others.

I have a feeling it is this sort of analysis that the OP is not looking for :D I think what you say is a little harsh. When people give a sweeping analysis of the human race it is necessarily going to remain fairly large grained. I think what often riles people is that in their immediate surroundings they only see and hear terrible woes rather than see the huge leaps that have been made in different locations and across larger periods of time.

What charitable analysis could you make of Pinker's views on something? I am assuming you are talking about Angel and Demons thing he wrote?