Well, a lot of the answer depends on if you believe in free markets or not.

Given those such people like Musk or Bill Gates making contributions to the survival of humanity through the positive externalities created by the invisible hand, then the future looks pretty good.

However, if we can't find a solution to the 'tragedy of the commons' scenario with regards to climate change, then the future looks pretty uncertain for everyone on the globe.

Ever since November 8th, the cradle of the world has been shaken but just like the children we are, we allow the shaking to lull use back to sleep.

Definitely in the wrong one. Collectivism is the worst thing that could've ever happened to our society. New silent totalitarian regime. Lack of searching for truth is what helps authorities to manipulate others and thus bringing us closer to Orwell's 1984 type of society.

As for some minor problems:

https://aeon.co/essays/is-being-super-awesome-really-helping-anybody

And I don't want to steal anyone's ideas, but as mentioned in thread called Post-truth. The fact that it's the word of the year speaks for itself well enough.

The wrong direction clearly. The biggest problems we face are that we have to come to terms with several impossibilities:

(1) The impossibility of globalisation
(2) The impossibility of a unified multicultural society
(3) The impossibility of an economic system based on and fuelled by the idea of infinite growth
(4) The impossibility of sustaining social order in a society driven by consumerism

We have to return to local, family/culture driven societies, where economics takes a minor role in people's lives, where local cultures grow, are respected and develop, and where the main function of people is something other than to consume. We need virtue back - the virtue of the olden days of Plato and Aristotle. Our problems arise out of people - post-modernists, progressives, globalists, socialists, capitalists, etc. not accepting the facticity of the above four impossibilities and instead allowing ideology to drive them.

I am a glass half full type of guy.


.

Yeah, give me a break. After the bloodiest century in all of history, we notice a reduction in violence. Yeah no doubt, if violence spiralled out of control even more than that, we may not have been around to notice anything... (and I have no doubt that sooner or later violence will be back with a vengeance - in addition to this, many people are living in the world worse than they have EVER lived before in the entire history of mankind - some folks can't even drink water because it's not potable anymore. Some folks live with the threat of bombs over their heads. And so forth. These "consume me" type of authors like Steven Pinker and so forth don't say anything great. They say something new, because the new sells. Forget what the truth is, it's more important that the truth is new than that it is the truth!

I think Pinker gives us good evidence to believe that more recent centuries were not in fact the bloodiest of all time.

These "consume me" type of authors — Agustino

Aren't all authors intended to be consumed?

I think Pinker gives us good evidence to believe that more recent centuries were not in fact the bloodiest of all time. — m-theory

Yeah sure, Hitler killing 6 million Jews! Not a big deal! Stalin murdering around 21 million! Eh, just another statistic! Nothing to fret about! Mao Zedong murdering 40 million! Not that bloody, it's just fucking 40 million no?

Aren't all authors intended to be consumed? — m-theory

No. Non-fiction authors should intend to communicate the truth to others, not to be consumed.

Well Pinker addresses that in the vid.

Yes but if no one consumes their material they will not succeed in that intention.

Well Pinker addresses that in the vid. — m-theory

Ehmm yes he commits the sophistry of looking at it in terms of percentages. Ahh only 1% of the world's population died during the World Wars! Not a big deal! It's 1% - look in the past, more than 1% died! In the tribe having 100 people as population, 10 died per year, much bigger you see? 10% - not a big deal! Just another statistic as I've said. The chance of dying violently was much greater! 10 times greater in fact! Woah, what a discovery!

Yes but if no one consumes their material they will not succeed in that intention. — m-theory

Yes but consumption isn't the essence of what an author should be doing. If he writes shit and everyone consumes it, then he's failing. If he writes truth, and no one consumes it, he's not a failure, he just didn't have the skill of communicating except to a few.

I think you are not being very reasonable.
Pinker does not imply that violence in more recent centuries is less appalling.
He points out that it is a trend that is actually in decline.
That is a good thing.

Consumption is a basic fact of the human condition, we consume.
This cannot be avoided.

I think you are not being very reasonable.
Pinker does not imply that violence in more recent centuries is less appalling.
He points out that it is a trend that is actually in decline.
That is a good thing. — m-theory

No, the trend in absolute numbers is NOT in decline. So don't give me this bullshit. Who cares that 10% died in the past, and now only 1% die? The 1% now is greater than the 10% back then.

Consumption is a basic fact of the human condition, we consume.
This cannot be avoided. — m-theory

*facepalm* Nope. We have avoided it for centuries quite successfully.

WTF?
You "Who cares that 10% died in the past"

I think we are done here.

Really I almost can't believe how easily people are fooled by sophistry. All you have to do to change perspectives is talk in percentages. Oh ain't that cute now no? The fucking Pinker is gonna come and tell us how we're all wrong, and everything we thought about is wrong. And guess what, we're going to start salivating like dogs and listening to him tell us something exciting (because it's new!). Right... That's what's wrong with the world.

This would be great if it was about something.

Ted Talk is just a cheap fast food for brains of thought consumers. In other words, it is designed for people who are not well read and will never engage in complex discussions themselves. It's a pseudo-intelectual environment for your lovely consumers.

Ted Generation is one of the problems of our age. Steven Pinker is a great example of the thought seller.

Agreed.

- Ironic how this type of question is paradoxically prompted in the modern angst-ridden world in which we live by an age-old anxiety occasioned by the turn of a year!

Well, concerning as an example of what might in practise justify our apprehension the angst-ridden prospect of nuclear war, the relevant factor regarding this prospect - in terms of a philosophical analysis of the nature of the Human Condition in the abstract that is - is only whether such an event is in principle possible, rather than the pragmatic question of how the prospect might some time in the future actually happen to be realised. Upon the answer to that question in principle profound consequences regarding the fundamental nature of what constitutes our human condition are contingent.

Iconic iterations of what is possible in our situation that occurred in the 20th century – The Battle of the Somme, The Holocaust, as examples – served in their turn to illustrate how events can reveal fundamental aspects of its’ nature previously not anticipated. In that respect the doctrine of ‘Mad’, on which the idea requisite to our psychology of the inherent impossibility of nuclear war is based, might seem, as weapons of mass destruction gradually proliferate, an evermore tenuous thread on which to hang the hope that future eventualities will not nonetheless reveal – albeit perhaps posthumously - further realities regarding the nature of this situation in which we are obliged to exist being yet more incomprehensible in terms of anything we can currently anticipate.

Agustino, I have read Pinker's work and his massive data collection and reasoning are quite solid.

I am generally an optimist.

I think he has a teds talk as well.

The data speaks for itself really:




https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths/

Fuck man not this again! The data does not speak for itself. You're deluded. 10% in a tribe of 100 people is 10 people! 1% in a world of 1 billion is 10 million. What were the populations of those tribes? Small!!! That's why you see big percentages! If I have a small business making 1 dollar a year, and then I make 2 dollars the next year, woah, 100% growth be jealous of me! This is the old sales trick of giving data in percentages to make it sound more impressive. Nothing special. It's not even about the data, it's how you interpret it. This whole ideology of "the facts", "the data" is bullshit. There is no data in a vacuum. No facts in a vacuum.

The fact remains unchanged that the world in the past century (not today) was more violent than ever before in its history. Now we're living in relatively more peaceful times, in some parts of the world that is. But there is no trend towards peace. This is bullshit.