Steven Pinker (b. 1954)
Filed under the name Steven · July 16, 2026
Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and Harvard professor whose books, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" especially, make the case that violence has actually declined across human history, and he's become a widely read popularizer of that kind of big-picture, data-driven argument. I get a lot of my history knowledge from audiobooks logged over twenty-two years of long hauls, and Pinker's the sort of thinker who makes you sit with two feelings at once — the daily news cycle sure doesn't feel like violence is declining, and yet the actual long-run numbers, apparently, tell a different, more hopeful story than the headlines do. I've made a habit on this job of holding two contradictory-feeling things at the same time instead of forcing myself to pick a side just to feel settled about it, and Pinker's whole project seems built on exactly that same discomfort — trusting the slow data over the loud, immediate feeling. That's a harder discipline than it sounds.