Steven Pinker: belief

Transcript context

…Let me try another angle on potential pessimism and see if you can talk me down out of that tree. I’m sure you’ve thought about the Fermi paradox. There are more and more potentially habitable planets out there, and yet no one is showing up to visit us or sending us signals or constructing glamorous advertisements up there in the stars by manipulating matter. The universe seems oddly quiet, at least our corner of it. That’s not a surprise if you think that civilizations tend to destroy themselves once energy becomes cheap enough, but otherwise if one is relatively optimistic as a default, where are they, to pose Fermi’s question to you? I don’t think there’s a natural arc toward destruction of civilizations. In fact, one could make the argument that it goes the other direction. That as you become more advanced, civilizations develop mechanisms that make conflict less likely, which I think is the trajectory we have gone on so far. Again, I’m not willing to prophecy that it will continue. But war is a pretty stupid thing to do. You blow a lot of stuff up. You kill people. You don’t end up with anything that you couldn’t have gotten from some other means. As soon as you become too belligerent, you give other people an incentive to destroy you. That may not be avoidable in Hobbesian anarchy, but if you can have some kind of system either of world government or of a functional equivalent like international norms in the United Nations and a set of expectations, then everyone could live a lot better if you aren’t all living by the sword. It’s just as plausible to me that as civilizations advance, rather than having more and more destructive wars, they could continue the trend that we’ve been on since World War II and they eventually make war obsolete. That’s another plausible trajectory. Indeed, the idea that the worst aspects of this particular primate — namely, we evolved in such a way that we are too quick to anger, too quick to defend our dominance — that that’s the only way for intelligence to evolve I think is parochial. It’s saying that what we see in Homo sapiens is the only way that intelligent beings can come into existence. I don’t think we should be constrained by that. Outside of zoos and the like, do you think the other primates will go extinct?…

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