We don't actually know what impact living in this world to be connected in this way is having on people. We have a generation who've only known the kind of social network revolution, the Facebook revolution in their lives. Might that have a more profound impact than we realize on very very different perceptions of what human experience is, what's possible? I think there's too much of that lazy blaming. Surely there are revolutionary changes that have been unleashed by social media. But for many of them, since we have not yet had enough time for society to develop countermeasures to some of the excesses of social media, the immune response, we really don't know how it's going to shake out
For the second part of our conversation between cognitive psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker and academic and podcaster David Runciman, who teaches politics and history at Cambridge University, we rejoin the discussion with the two looking at the roots of skepticism. This interview first appeared on Intelligence Squared in early 2019 at the time of the publication of Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
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