It's not just experience, it is also a conventional wisdom spread through op-eds and commentaries and television and the internet. It can't just be that we've got to wait for people's lots to improve because people's people already are better off than they think everyone else is. If people are mis- are factually mistaken about the major facts about which way the world is going, then a lot of deplorable opinions will follow. Obama was, despite hatred from some sectors, he was or the whole, a successful and popular politician.
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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