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Steven Pinker and David Runciman on Optimism, Enlightenment and Progress PART 1
Intelligence Squared
The Optimism of Politics
The new focus on what is mistakenly called optimism comes from the fact that for the first time there's been attention to data on whether there has been progress in the past. There's no reason to think that things will automatically get better any more than they'll automatically get worse. And we just know from opinion surveys that people have systematically incorrect assumptions about recent change. The kind of argument I have made is not one of prognostication into the future. But it's just pointing out facts that people don't know, which is often mistaken for optimism.
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