Steven Pinker

Stephen offers and defends a hopeful notion of long-term and continuous human progress.

Violence, for example, has decreased steadily for centuries, a trend we might not notice given the media's fascination with death and destruction.

While Clay Shirky argues that we have the excess cognitive capacity for great collective work, Steven and Rebecca argue that if our future is anything like our past, we are likely to apply that capacity toward deeper appreciation of the world and our place within it.