PanLos Angeles Review of BooksJust a few sentences into the book, I am tangled in a knot of Orwellian contradictions ... this is a profoundly anti-intellectual book ... By eliminating skepticism from his rendition of the Enlightenment, Pinker has done the equivalent of removing every second word of a book: what’s left behind is not half the sense of the original, but just nonsense ... This brings up another important point: the origins of Pinker’s data. Just over a third of the charts and tables in his book come from a single source: Our World in Data, housed in an Oxford University entity called the Oxford Martin School, founded in 2005 with the largest donation in Oxford’s nearly millennium-long history by an IT consultant, best-selling author, and technology evangelist named James Martin ... Then there are the graphs that do not appear in the book: graphs showing rising sea levels, rising temperatures, the resulting natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, mass shootings, and the list could go on. Indeed, it should set off alarm bells that every single graph in the book points in the same direction: every day in every way, better and better. My point is not that things are getting worse rather than better, but that history is not a straight line up or down, and that presenting \'data\' as though it produces and speaks for itself is worse than useless: it is profoundly dishonest.
