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Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.91 Though we think we understand how a zipper works, or a cylinder lock, or a toilet, as soon as we are called upon to explain it we are dumbfounded and forced to confess we have no idea.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

For the same reason, editorialists should retire the new cliché that we are in a “post-truth era” unless they can keep up a tone of scathing irony. The term is corrosive, because it implies that we should resign ourselves to propaganda and lies and just fight back with more of our own. We are not in a post-truth era. Mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds are as old as our species, but so is the conviction that some ideas are right and others are wrong.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Intellectual and political polarization feed each other. It’s harder to be a conservative intellectual when American conservative politics has become steadily more know-nothing, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Whatever differences in policy or philosophy divide the parties, the mechanisms of democratic deliberation should be sacrosanct.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

control of Congress by a Republican Party that became synonymous with the extreme right has been pernicious, because it is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause and the evil of its rivals that it has undermined the institutions of democracy to get what it wants. The corruptions include gerrymandering, imposing voting restrictions designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters, encouraging unregulated donations from moneyed interests, blocking Supreme Court nominations until their party controls the presidency, shutting down the government when their maximal demands aren’t met, and unconditionally supporting Donald Trump over their own objections to his flagrantly antidemocratic impulses.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Quoting John Stuart Mill—“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”—they called for greater political diversity in psychology, the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

A liberal tilt is also, in moderation, desirable. Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.57 But we have seen that when a creed becomes attached to an in-group, the critical faculties of its members can be disabled, and there are reasons to think that has happened within swaths of academia.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

They calculated a Fate Score by adding up the “Agree” ratings for items like the first three and the “Disagree” ratings for items like the last three. An average American is somewhere in the middle. An undergraduate at an elite university scores a bit lower; a so-so forecaster lower still; and the superforecasters lowest of all, with the most accurate superforecasters expressing the most vehement rejection of fate and acceptance of chance.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

“When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.”

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The more famous they were, and the closer the event was to their area of expertise, the less accurate their predictions turned out to be.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

With the exception of a tiny number of movers, shakers, and deciders, a person’s opinions on climate change or evolution are astronomically unlikely to make a difference to the world at large. But they make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle. To express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The values that divide people are also defined by which demons are blamed for society’s misfortunes: greedy corporations, out-of-touch elites, meddling bureaucrats, lying politicians, ignorant rednecks, or, all too often, ethnic minorities.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The principal reason people disagree about climate change science is not that it has been communicated to them in forms they cannot understand. Rather, it is that positions on climate change convey values—communal concern versus individual self-reliance; prudent self-abnegation versus the heroic pursuit of reward; humility versus ingenuity; harmony with nature versus mastery over it—that divide them along cultural lines.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker