It's because it was just published. You see the same thing with many books, or movies. It's partly deliberate marketing, and partly because there are people excited about it. For that matter, there's been plenty of noise from people who disagree as well. But it all surrounds the fact that it was just released.
I think there's more to it than that. The book proposes a return to a classical rational-modern worldview with typical liberal values ("Enlightenment"). That optimistic view of the future would be one way out of the tribalist identity politics that, fueled by fear, are ruining Western society. There are big power interests, both financial and cultural, that are interested in stability. Pushing Pinker's book is more than just marketing.
Tribalist identity politics are inevitable in all multicultural societies. You can bemoan human nature, but you can't change it.
That's not to say multicultural societies can't be successful, with discipline and genius it can be done. For example Lee Kuan Yew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew) did a great job with Singapore.
So that we understand you better - what exactly are you proposing as the mechanism of these power interests pushing this book? Are you suggesting there are specific people who are actively pushing this book, who are not directly tied to the marketing of the book? Or that are directly tied, but since they are "power interests" or some such, they are trying harder than they do marketing other books?
I mean, I think you're wrong. But more than that, I think you're not saying something well-defined. What does it mean that "cultural power interests that are interested in stability" (paraphrased) are pushing the book in a way that's more than just marketing? Who exactly is doing this? Is this coordinated? Is this more than just "some people like this book so are talking about it", which is a much more innocuous way to phrase that?
what exactly are you proposing as the mechanism of these power interests pushing this book?
> slating for reviews, inclusion on top lists, discussions on television shows, interviews with author etc.
Are you suggesting there are specific people who are actively pushing this book, who are not directly tied to the marketing of the book?
> yes
since they are "power interests" or some such
> Are you suggesting that power is not a legitimate criterion of social analysis? Just to understand the quotations
What does it mean that "cultural power interests that are interested in stability" (paraphrased) are pushing the book in a way that's more than just marketing?
> It means they are doing it because they don't care about the sales, they care about the message being spread widely.
I'm not saying it's coordinated. I'm not saying it's some sort of conspiracy. But yeah, it's clearly more than "some people like this book"
The quotes around "power interests" is because you used the term and I was quoting you directly, it's not a phrase I would personally use.
Assuming it's not coordinated or a conspiracy, how is it different than "some people like this book"? I mean this sincerely - I really don't understand why people liking this book and talking about it doesn't completely explain what we're seeing. That's what explains pretty much every other book that people talk about a lot, which is a lot of books.
Meta: This is just an FYI, but I'm pretty sure the standard way of quoting and answering a previous comment is to put the original text after the ">", and the reply or whatever else you want to write without the ">". The way you did it is the reverse of this, and kinda makes your comment hard to parse.
Judging from the incredible hype, this is a book that you will be able to grab for a dollar at the thrift shop in a year due to overprinting; kind of like Malcolm Gladwell books. I'll wait a year and read it then.
I don't generally agree with Noam Chomsky (on some things I do, but that should hopefully be irrelevant to the point I'm making here), but I don't understand why this would be controversial to say.
Our biggest problem right now is intellectual laziness and "being on the team.". We need more speech, not less. We should be reading and listening outside of our comfort zones. Let's started engaging with the strongest arguments of each side! Steelman over strawman!
Do we really want everyone to answer with a list of their favorite books every single time someone mentions a book that they like? Is that advancing the conversation in any way?
I feel like he doesn’t get the attention and criticism, review etc that he deserves. He writes a great many books, none of which were received with the acclaim eg that Pinker’s last book was.
Some people need a little Pangloss in their lives it seems. Maybe there’s more at play, but it doesn’t shock me that the “meritocracy” crowd enjoys a book that largely reinforces their worldview.
As can reason and sincerity. Humans, being humans rather than Vulcans or robots, should understand that excessive snark serves to distract from the point and draw attention to the author.
"Enlightenment Now" is an arrogant title? It sounds remarkably generic to me.
Anyways, that cuts both ways. If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
The subtitle is "the case for reason, science, humanism and progress".
>If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
I guess you're not as big a fan of reason as Pinker is, then. It's the content of the review you need to look at if you want to figure out whether the book's any good or not.
In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia. You can easily find similarly snarky articles by Pinker himself.
>In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia.
A bit off topic, but that's terribly damning of academia! It's not often you get a concrete example of the "educated elite talking down to the proles" stereotype, but that review is it, in the flesh.
It's off-putting. Viscerally so. I've read bad restaurant reviews by professional critics that are less venomous.
That's weird. I don't get that impression from the review at all. Pinker is a Harvard Professor, and hardly a prole from anyone's point of view. You have to bear in mind that Pinker has put out a series of publications in the past 5-10 years that are extremely patronizing to scholars in the humanities. If you're going to tell entire disciplines that they're doing it all wrong, and that you know how to do it right, then you can't really expect a friendly response. One can imagine the reaction if, for example, historians wrote articles telling physicists how to conduct their research.
Technically true, but I'm kind of sick of seeing it. The more time I spend online, the more nauseated I feel when I read people writing serious documents who can't even be civil.
If either of the criticism articles that I saw links to here were actually posted as comments on HN, dang would be asking them to reword their criticisms to be less hostile and aggressive.
>my own prediction is that future historians, if they haven't all been replaced by cognitive psychologists, will regard misplaced faith in data, metrics and statistical analysis as the curse of the twenty-first century
I think that line ruined the review for me, that whole paragraph just chastises the notion of evidence
Can one have a misplaced faith in evidence? Once there is evidence for something, it is not merely faith - faith is conviction without evidence. The whole point of the scientific process is to re-evaluate conclusions when new evidence is presented. I suppose historians may look back and find that some of our scientific beliefs were held in spite of evidence to the contrary, or that evidence was not sought out to disprove those beliefs, but I do not see how a full discrediting of data and statistics would one day happen.
I disagree with that as an example of a "misplaced faith in evidence". That is coming to the wrong conclusion due to committing a false cause logical fallacy. Drawing the wrong conclusion should not be confused with a "misplaced faith in evidence". It seems that the religious really want to use the term faith in regards to science so as to imply that scientists "stoop to their level". That argument is seemingly often made that scientists have a blind faith in science. Certainly it happens that a scientist will hold onto beliefs against evidence, will doctor evidence to confirm their belief, and will cherry pick data to prove their belief that they hold despite evidence. But those are all actions that are antithetical to the scientific process. while and endemic to religion.
That's a semantic quibble which isn't really relevant to the point that Harrison is making in the rest of the quoted paragraph.
But yes, you can have misplaced faith in e.g. null hypothesis significance testing and other methods of data collection and analysis common in some of the social sciences.
My point was not that you can't have misplaced faith. But rather can you have misplaced faith in the notion of evidenced based conclusions. If your conclusions are based on evidence, then it isn't faith. It may still be wrong, but it isn't faith.
Faith doesn't mean 'belief without evidence'. That's a Richard Dawkins talking point, not anything you'll find in a dictionary. John could have excellent evidence for his own abilities, and yet his faith in those abilities could turn out to be misplaced.
Using faith and belief interchangeably seems disingenuous and ignores the religious context that is part of faith. Faith implies a lack of compromise, a concreteness, and unwillingness to change. Using that term to describe evidence based science, and the belief that evidence ought to be presented before a belief is held is an attempt to reduce science to dogma.
That's not the definition of faith, really. Faith can mean belief and it can mean trust (often the former is an expression of the latter). What you mean is blind faith, which is pejorative. When it comes to religion (Chistianity specifically), the recorded accounts of Jesus' miracles and his resurrection function as historical evidence of his divinity.
The article is under the 'religion' section so it seems reasonable that the author (A religious scholar) would have some issues with a worldview based on empirical and provable evidence.
I don't know if they mean evidence in a specific sense. I think they mean misplaced faith in data in a meta sense, giving it more power to affect decisions than it should. The idea that everything can be solved by commissioning a study, acquiring data, and analyzing it. Or that "the data" becomes an unquestioning authority that you invoke.
edit: the word "Scientism" is probably closer to the meaning here; science and rationality as a belief system in itself, as opposed to tools that help us understand physical processes. Faith in these tools to supply meaning and create a better society, often to absurd levels.
In a world of rewarded p-hacking, unrepeatable cancer research, of wild contentions being pulled from the loosest of correlations, you think faith in these things isn't a problem?
Keep in mind faith has a specific meaning as a belief in something you yourself can't prove. IE, you aren't repeating these experiments, thus you take it on faith they are correct - a critique of science originally put forth by Richard Feynman the Nobel Prize winning physicist.
Hmm...that's not a review of the book, it's a hit piece by someone with a personal axe to grind because of a previous article.
An example:
The ultimate import of his graphs is to demonstrate some kind of inexorable and progressive historical law (although he doesn't admit as much).
Where to begin with something as inane as this? The reviewer makes up a silly interpretation of what Pinker has provided, claims without any evidence that this is what Pinker really means, because he obviously knows better, and then faults Pinker for this silly interpretation. Hmm..
He goes on:
In Pinker's history, it seems as though there are no real contingencies - no prospect that the battle of Britain might had been lost, no prospect that the cold war might have turned into nuclear catastrophe, and for the future, no real sense of a potential calamity produced by climate change or a trigger-happy Kim Jong-Un (or his U.S. counterpart, for that matter). This is an almost providential view of history.
Again, the reviewer completely misses the point: we have always had potential calamities. But the real calamities have decreased dramatically, and life has improved so incredibly that it is not even funny. This really hit me when I was on a tour at the Neue Palais in Potsdam, a palace/guest house built by Frederick the Great to impress his neighbors. This palace has a bunch of apartments for royal guests. Even the poorest households in Western countries today live better. Much better.
We. Are. Living. Like. Kings.
No: better than kings of even a few centuries ago.
> How is that not an almost providential view of history?
In about every conceivable way?
"Providential" means that there is some divine guidance or care, so it is (a) about the cause of what happened and (b) that this cause is somehow divine in nature.
Saying that "real calamities have decreased dramatically" is not saying anything about causes, it is simply making an empirical observation about the world. Which could certainly be wrong, but even then it is not saying anything about divine causes.
Of course, Pinker does say something about causes, but these are about as far away from "divine intervention or guidance" as possible. In fact, it is about as secular as you can get.
Of course, you may be of an opinion that such a "lucky streak" so to say is so highly improbable that it must be divine intervention, but that is purely you, because it isn't luck and it isn't divine intervention. The entire argument is that we have found something that works really well, empirically.
Unless of course you change the definition of "almost" to be "the exact opposite of".
Yeah, I took that to be the import of the 'almost'. Harrison is noting the irony that Pinker is is much more of a panglossian than many people who actually do believe in divine providence.
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
Given how much easier it is to destroy things than to build them, that things have gotten so much better over such a long period of time would seem to indicate that there is some causal force at work and that it isn't merely a string of incredibly good luck.
How could anybody digesting Pinker's message come to that conclusion? His whole message is that we got here primarily because we embraced reason and science and that we can get to an even better place as long as we continue to embrace reason and science.
Right, that is the view that is being labeled almost providential. There's a quote from the book that I posted in another comment that pretty clearly exemplifies the 'almost' providential nature of Pinker's view of history:
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
True. What's funny is that if you ask people how their individual circumstances are, they overwhelmingly answer "good and improving". But then you ask them about the state of the world and they answer "horrible and getting worse".
And of course politicians have also been at it for some time. See Adam Curtis's excellent The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
https://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker... He addresses a lot of of John Grey's issues in the forward of his book. I think it is interesting that people have such problems with data.. its so Post-Modern. this book is for people real people not ideals of people - I cannot read philosophy I can even read this book I have to listen to it. I love how Grey tries so hard but when I read it I did not understand what Grey was saying.. so either I am stupid or he is not answering a question that I had.. about the book. Grey goes on about the US prison system .. uhh wow.. even that is getting better - The crackpot in charge of it had to make it worse.. so its getting better because why because we eat so much food we have so much more energy no.. its because we are getting better and we need to work harder to make things better the sun is shining we can progress because well things are considerably better than when I was a kid. Its still tough on American children but we can change this and we want to change it... I mean look at Germany - Look at what happened that place was nearly a nuclear wasteland but now It is a freaking garden of eden for civilization - things are even better in Mississippi - mostly because if you are born there you have a great chance of moving out and up to Colorado.. and things are not that bad yeah there are opiates and school shootings but less and less and less compared to when I was a kid. less childhood abuse less disease.. its a reality that cannot just be denied - I mean you can and Pinker explains why that is so easy and so delicious to our brains.. but hey its for you do do man
The overall thrust seems pretty damning (given how much technology improved recently, why hasn't that turned into more income and leisure time improvements for many?), enough to seriously dampen my interest in the book itself:
> The problem with the Brooks/Pinker story is that we expect the economy/people to get richer through time. After all, technology and education improve. In the ’50s, we didn’t have the Internet, cell phones and all sorts of other goodies. In fact, at the start of the ’50s, we didn’t even have the polio vaccine.
> The question is not whether we are better off today than we were 60 years ago. It would be incredible if we were not better off. The question is by how much.
> In the ’50s, wages and incomes for ordinary families were rising at a rate of close to 2 percent annually. In the last 45 years, they have barely risen at all.
-- from a bit later:
> Should we celebrate this reduction in poverty rates over the last 33 years? Well, the [child] poverty rate had fallen from 27.3 percent in 1959 (the first year for this data series) to 14.0 percent in 1969. That’s a drop of 13.3 percentage points in just ten years. The net direction in the last 47 years has been upward.
I agree with the criticism of Pinker's use of data.
However, I think his main thesis still stands: humanism and science are winning strategies for human flourishing.
I think this his main idea (the benefits of science and humanism) is an idea worth exploring and defending, but I don't think collecting a bunch of measures of progress and saying "see, humanism + science works!" is the best way of doing it.
I'd rather see someone approach the problem by focusing on what is lacking, what are the major outstanding problems and then demonstrate that these problems persist because we have not attempted to tackle them using science to guide practice and humanism to guide our values.
This approach seems more mature and sophisticated than just saying "gee whiz! look at all the goodies we got now!"
Not meaning to offend, but you're kind of leading in to exactly why Pinker writes the book.
> (the benefits of science and humanism) is an idea worth exploring and defending
He explores and defends those pursuits.
> I don't think collecting a bunch of measures of progress and saying "see, humanism + science works!" is the best way of doing it.
It's at the very least an objective method that doesn't rely on flimsier propositions. You use the phrase "measures of progress" which are a great way to measure progress...
> I'd rather see someone approach the problem by focusing on what is lacking, what are the major outstanding problems and then demonstrate that these problems persist because we have not attempted to tackle them using science to guide practice and humanism to guide our values.
He never disputes that there are still issues, he's just saying that if you only ever focused on things that are missing, you might lose an appreciation for the progress humanity has made.
If you only watched the news (which he specifically rails against), you'd think we were going to hell in a hand basket. Of course we still have issues, but to buy into the "end is nigh" mentality espoused by the media and plenty of people (and some commenters here!) would be to ignore a wide variety of indications that humanity's scientific and social progress are improving.
I enjoyed Pinker’s last book and I enjoy Taleb’s books even more. Funny that Taleb really hates Pinker’s work - deriding his analytical skills several times in his latest book “Skin in the Game”.
I think Pinker’s conclusions are too Rosy and Taleb’s cynical views are too negative. Both provide much tasty food for thought though.
I admire Pinker's optimism but the enlightenment was 300 years ago and the fact that humans are still lagging behind their own progress by 3 centuries is proof of something awful which it's maybe time we all acknowledge.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadhttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/df4a1409-16ca-464b-ba6c-1971b...
That's not to say multicultural societies can't be successful, with discipline and genius it can be done. For example Lee Kuan Yew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew) did a great job with Singapore.
I mean, I think you're wrong. But more than that, I think you're not saying something well-defined. What does it mean that "cultural power interests that are interested in stability" (paraphrased) are pushing the book in a way that's more than just marketing? Who exactly is doing this? Is this coordinated? Is this more than just "some people like this book so are talking about it", which is a much more innocuous way to phrase that?
> slating for reviews, inclusion on top lists, discussions on television shows, interviews with author etc.
Are you suggesting there are specific people who are actively pushing this book, who are not directly tied to the marketing of the book?
> yes
since they are "power interests" or some such
> Are you suggesting that power is not a legitimate criterion of social analysis? Just to understand the quotations
What does it mean that "cultural power interests that are interested in stability" (paraphrased) are pushing the book in a way that's more than just marketing?
> It means they are doing it because they don't care about the sales, they care about the message being spread widely.
I'm not saying it's coordinated. I'm not saying it's some sort of conspiracy. But yeah, it's clearly more than "some people like this book"
Assuming it's not coordinated or a conspiracy, how is it different than "some people like this book"? I mean this sincerely - I really don't understand why people liking this book and talking about it doesn't completely explain what we're seeing. That's what explains pretty much every other book that people talk about a lot, which is a lot of books.
Meta: This is just an FYI, but I'm pretty sure the standard way of quoting and answering a previous comment is to put the original text after the ">", and the reply or whatever else you want to write without the ">". The way you did it is the reverse of this, and kinda makes your comment hard to parse.
Our biggest problem right now is intellectual laziness and "being on the team.". We need more speech, not less. We should be reading and listening outside of our comfort zones. Let's started engaging with the strongest arguments of each side! Steelman over strawman!
Do we really want everyone to answer with a list of their favorite books every single time someone mentions a book that they like? Is that advancing the conversation in any way?
Anyways, that cuts both ways. If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
>If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.
I guess you're not as big a fan of reason as Pinker is, then. It's the content of the review you need to look at if you want to figure out whether the book's any good or not.
In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia. You can easily find similarly snarky articles by Pinker himself.
True. Doesn't mean it's worth his time to read if the style is distracting. He's just hoping to find a better-written review.
A bit off topic, but that's terribly damning of academia! It's not often you get a concrete example of the "educated elite talking down to the proles" stereotype, but that review is it, in the flesh.
It's off-putting. Viscerally so. I've read bad restaurant reviews by professional critics that are less venomous.
If either of the criticism articles that I saw links to here were actually posted as comments on HN, dang would be asking them to reword their criticisms to be less hostile and aggressive.
I think that line ruined the review for me, that whole paragraph just chastises the notion of evidence
That's a semantic quibble which isn't really relevant to the point that Harrison is making in the rest of the quoted paragraph.
But yes, you can have misplaced faith in e.g. null hypothesis significance testing and other methods of data collection and analysis common in some of the social sciences.
Using faith and belief interchangeably seems disingenuous and ignores the religious context that is part of faith. Faith implies a lack of compromise, a concreteness, and unwillingness to change. Using that term to describe evidence based science, and the belief that evidence ought to be presented before a belief is held is an attempt to reduce science to dogma.
What you describe is more like fideism.
edit: the word "Scientism" is probably closer to the meaning here; science and rationality as a belief system in itself, as opposed to tools that help us understand physical processes. Faith in these tools to supply meaning and create a better society, often to absurd levels.
Keep in mind faith has a specific meaning as a belief in something you yourself can't prove. IE, you aren't repeating these experiments, thus you take it on faith they are correct - a critique of science originally put forth by Richard Feynman the Nobel Prize winning physicist.
An example:
The ultimate import of his graphs is to demonstrate some kind of inexorable and progressive historical law (although he doesn't admit as much).
Where to begin with something as inane as this? The reviewer makes up a silly interpretation of what Pinker has provided, claims without any evidence that this is what Pinker really means, because he obviously knows better, and then faults Pinker for this silly interpretation. Hmm..
He goes on:
In Pinker's history, it seems as though there are no real contingencies - no prospect that the battle of Britain might had been lost, no prospect that the cold war might have turned into nuclear catastrophe, and for the future, no real sense of a potential calamity produced by climate change or a trigger-happy Kim Jong-Un (or his U.S. counterpart, for that matter). This is an almost providential view of history.
Again, the reviewer completely misses the point: we have always had potential calamities. But the real calamities have decreased dramatically, and life has improved so incredibly that it is not even funny. This really hit me when I was on a tour at the Neue Palais in Potsdam, a palace/guest house built by Frederick the Great to impress his neighbors. This palace has a bunch of apartments for royal guests. Even the poorest households in Western countries today live better. Much better.
We. Are. Living. Like. Kings.
No: better than kings of even a few centuries ago.
So yeah, Pinker is right.
How is that not an almost providential view of history? I don't see how the charge is misplaced.
In about every conceivable way?
"Providential" means that there is some divine guidance or care, so it is (a) about the cause of what happened and (b) that this cause is somehow divine in nature.
Saying that "real calamities have decreased dramatically" is not saying anything about causes, it is simply making an empirical observation about the world. Which could certainly be wrong, but even then it is not saying anything about divine causes.
Of course, Pinker does say something about causes, but these are about as far away from "divine intervention or guidance" as possible. In fact, it is about as secular as you can get.
Of course, you may be of an opinion that such a "lucky streak" so to say is so highly improbable that it must be divine intervention, but that is purely you, because it isn't luck and it isn't divine intervention. The entire argument is that we have found something that works really well, empirically.
Unless of course you change the definition of "almost" to be "the exact opposite of".
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
"Though I am skittish about any notion of historical inevitability, cosmic forces or mystical arcs of justice, some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force."
And of course politicians have also been at it for some time. See Adam Curtis's excellent The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
The overall thrust seems pretty damning (given how much technology improved recently, why hasn't that turned into more income and leisure time improvements for many?), enough to seriously dampen my interest in the book itself:
> The problem with the Brooks/Pinker story is that we expect the economy/people to get richer through time. After all, technology and education improve. In the ’50s, we didn’t have the Internet, cell phones and all sorts of other goodies. In fact, at the start of the ’50s, we didn’t even have the polio vaccine.
> The question is not whether we are better off today than we were 60 years ago. It would be incredible if we were not better off. The question is by how much.
> In the ’50s, wages and incomes for ordinary families were rising at a rate of close to 2 percent annually. In the last 45 years, they have barely risen at all.
-- from a bit later:
> Should we celebrate this reduction in poverty rates over the last 33 years? Well, the [child] poverty rate had fallen from 27.3 percent in 1959 (the first year for this data series) to 14.0 percent in 1969. That’s a drop of 13.3 percentage points in just ten years. The net direction in the last 47 years has been upward.
However, I think his main thesis still stands: humanism and science are winning strategies for human flourishing.
I think this his main idea (the benefits of science and humanism) is an idea worth exploring and defending, but I don't think collecting a bunch of measures of progress and saying "see, humanism + science works!" is the best way of doing it.
I'd rather see someone approach the problem by focusing on what is lacking, what are the major outstanding problems and then demonstrate that these problems persist because we have not attempted to tackle them using science to guide practice and humanism to guide our values.
This approach seems more mature and sophisticated than just saying "gee whiz! look at all the goodies we got now!"
> (the benefits of science and humanism) is an idea worth exploring and defending
He explores and defends those pursuits.
> I don't think collecting a bunch of measures of progress and saying "see, humanism + science works!" is the best way of doing it.
It's at the very least an objective method that doesn't rely on flimsier propositions. You use the phrase "measures of progress" which are a great way to measure progress...
> I'd rather see someone approach the problem by focusing on what is lacking, what are the major outstanding problems and then demonstrate that these problems persist because we have not attempted to tackle them using science to guide practice and humanism to guide our values.
He never disputes that there are still issues, he's just saying that if you only ever focused on things that are missing, you might lose an appreciation for the progress humanity has made.
If you only watched the news (which he specifically rails against), you'd think we were going to hell in a hand basket. Of course we still have issues, but to buy into the "end is nigh" mentality espoused by the media and plenty of people (and some commenters here!) would be to ignore a wide variety of indications that humanity's scientific and social progress are improving.