#steven pinker

By: Adam Omary

Published: Feb 10, 2026

For years, public health debate has often fixated on a supposed rise in the prevalence of autism. Various culprits have been named, including the well-investigated but unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, additional risk factors have been proposed — many by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — including maternal Tylenol use, food dyes and additives, chemical manufacturing agents and other possible stressors affecting perinatal development. Concerns about autism have been spotlighted within the larger Make America Healthy Again movement, motivated by a well-founded alarm over the nation’s devastatingly high burden of chronic disease and psychiatric illness. But there is a bigger problem with the autism epidemic: It doesn’t exist.

Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, published last April, revealed a five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. But a large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, found that this dramatic rise may be entirely driven by children with mild or no significant functional impairment.Between 2000 and 2016, there was a 464 percent increase in diagnoses among children with no significant functional impairment whatsoever. In fact, during the same time period, there was a 20 percent decrease in the prevalence of moderate or severe autism,from 15 to 12 cases per 10,000 children.

There is often a lag of several years before such epidemiological datasets are released, and years more for researchers to perform statistical analyses, publish the findings and enter public policy discussions. We do not yet have data more recent than 2016 breaking down symptoms by severity level while controlling for other psychological factors such as intellectual disability. However, it is likely that the 74 percent increase in cases reported between 2016 and 2022 will reflect a continuation of the previous problem of overrepresentation of children withmild symptoms and no significant functional impairment.

Despite that, some advocates support the narrative that autism is on the rise, because an ever-expanding “spectrum” that produces more diagnoses draws more attention and research funding — even if children’s underlying psychology remains unchanged.

Some of the CDC’s data documenting the supposed rise in the characteristics ofautism, meanwhile, comes not from gold-standard in-person psychiatric assessments but from parent-reported surveys such as the Social Responsiveness Scale. The SRS includes statements such as “Would rather be alone than with others,” “Has difficulty making friends,” and “Is regarded by other children as odd or weird,” which parents rate from “Not true” to “Almost always true.” In my own doctoral research on adolescent mental health, I included the SRS to account for the extent to which other psychological outcomes were explained by social difficulties. However, I was always careful to use hedging language — these are behavioral traits known to be associated with autism, not diagnostic markers. Unfortunately, many studies use high scores on the SRS as a substitute for clinical assessment of autism — accounting, for example, for at least 12 percentof “suspected cases” in the 2022 CDC data.

We should be concerned about the rising number of quirky children “on the spectrum,” but not because they are being exposed to neurotoxins that older generations were insulated from, nor because a growing number of children face clinically-significant social impairment. Rather, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy,” the more pressing concern may be a cultural and institutional drift toward overdiagnosis across child psychiatry. Like the rise in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression diagnoses among young people, the surge in autism labels may reflect shifting norms, looser diagnostic criteria and excess therapeutic attention directed toward ordinary struggles. If autism were truly increasing because of a new environmental insult, we would expect to see increases across all levels of severity. But that is not the case.

This reality should fundamentally reshape our national conversation. Policymakers and public health officials have rallied around dramatic claims fueled more by fear than by evidence. Yes, America faces a real crisis of chronic disease — including obesity, metabolic dysfunction and autoimmune disorders — which plausibly could be impacted by environmental toxins. Yes, many children face real mental health challenges that warrant increased attention and psychiatric support. But neither of these narratives survives scientific scrutiny when applied to the rise in autism diagnoses.

When public discourse starts from an alarming headline — “Autism rates have quadrupled” — even careful scientists can be pressured into chasing explanations for a biological phenomenon that doesn’t exist. The result is a misallocation of scientific effort and a blurring of the real signals of environmental harm. In many cases, the kid labeled “on the spectrum” is the same train‑obsessed third‑grader your grandfather knew, only now he’s been assigned a diagnosis. Let’s instead direct public health toward real, ongoing health crises and insist on psychiatric criteria that are consistent, unexaggerated and clinically meaningful.

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The "autism spectrum" is no different from the "gender spectrum" and "nonbinary." Both the effect and the intent is to lower the threshold of entry, to allow anyone in and claim a minority intersectional identity. Which is why you'll find overwhelmingly white girls and women claiming it.

🌐 The Modernity Paradox: Why the Safest Era in Human History Feels Like an Apocalypse 📉

[Insert Visual Here] (An elegant, gold-trimmed line graph showing a massive 90% decline in global violence over the centuries, juxtaposed with a tiny, stressed-out human staring at a smartphone screen that simply reads: "EVERYTHING IS FIERY DOOM.")

OR

Insert Visual Here] (Visual: A detailed diagram of human evolution. On the far left: a furious Neanderthal wielding a massive wooden club. On the far right: a modern human in an elegant designer suit, crying hysterically and running away in absolute panic because his smartphone just vibrated. In between, a giant red arrow points directly at the modern human with the caption: “Peak Civilisation”.)

Let us gather around our high-speed, fiber-optic internet connections to contemplate a profoundly rational, mathematically verified, and deeply inconvenient truth: We are currently surviving the safest, most stable, and least violent epoch our species has ever experienced.

Yes, really. Do not throw your organic oat-milk latte at the screen just yet. Let us look at the empirical, peer-reviewed data.

📊 Exhibit A: The Pre-Modern Carnage (The Myth of the "Peaceful Ancestor")

For decades, cultural nostalgia led us to believe that pre-industrial humans lived in harmonious, eco-friendly tranquility. Science, however, has ruined that beautiful fantasy with a stubborn thing called archeological evidence.

🦴 Prehistoric Mortality Rates: Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies and tribal warfare (e.g., Keeley, 1996, War Before Civilization) show that roughly 15% of prehistoric humans died at the hands of another human. To put that into perspective: if the 20th century—with two World Wars and a Cold War—had experienced that same rate of tribal violence, the death toll would have been over 2 billion people instead of the estimated 100 million.

🦠 The Biological Lottery: Before the mid-19th century, "safety" was non-existent. Infant mortality rates regularly hovered around 30% to 40% worldwide. A simple scratch from a rusty nail or a bad glass of water was a certified death sentence.

⚖️ The Rule of Might: For 95% of human history, universal human rights did not exist. Chattel slavery, institutionalized torture, and absolute monarchical whim were not anomalies; they were the legal framework of daily life.

📈 Exhibit B: The "Better Angels" Data (The Steven Pinker Framework)

As famously synthesized by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and updated through ongoing sociological metrics, the long-term historical trend of violence is a steep downward slope.

🛡️ The Pacification Process: The rise of organized states and centralized judicial systems reduced homicide rates in Europe from roughly 100 per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages to less than 1 per 100,000 in the 21st century.

🕊️ The Long Peace: Since 1945, there has been a systematic, statistical decline in direct interstate wars between major global powers. The global rate of battle deaths per capita has dropped exponentially compared to the horrific peaks of the 17th, 18th, and early 20th centuries.

🩺 The Institutional Shield: The creation of global frameworks—such as the World Health Organization, international trade agreements, and famine-relief logistics—means that humans are statistically less likely to starve or die of a preventable plague than at any other point since the Agricultural Revolution.

🎭 Enter The Irony: The Modernity Paradox

And here lies the delicious, excruciating irony of the 21st-century human mind.

Science has systematically dismantled the threats of roving bandits, smallpox, and feudal executions. We have successfully engineered an environment of unprecedented material comfort, legal protection, and physical safety. And yet, we are absolutely, unequivocally terrified. 📈🧠

Why does the safest world feel like a psychological horror film? The mechanics of the paradox are purely scientific:

📱 The Availability Heuristic & Real-Time Doom: Our brains evolved in small tribes where hearing about a tragedy meant immediate physical danger. Today, commercial algorithms monetize outrage and fear. If a bridge collapses in a country 8,000 miles away, it is pushed to your lock screen in 4K resolution within three seconds. Your ancient, evolutionary amygdala doesn't understand "geographical distance"; it just registers "Danger! Flee!"

🔍 The Declining Effect (Problem-Gifting): Sociological research shows that as a problem becomes rare, our definition of that problem expands. When actual murder is rampant, people don't worry about microaggressions. When physical violence drops to near-zero, our sensitivity to emotional, systemic, and digital harm skyrockets. We didn't eliminate anxiety; we just upgraded its targets.

☢️ The Scale of Risk has Shifted: In 1347, the Black Death killed half of Europe, but the planet survived. Today, while your local street is safer than ever, humanity has engineered existential risks—thermonuclear stockpiles, catastrophic climate shifts, and unaligned Artificial Intelligence. The local threats have shrunk, but the systemic macro-threats are now planetary.

🎓 The Fact-Based Verdict

To demand absolute safety is to fundamentally misunderstand the cosmos. The universe is, by default, an entropic vacuum trying to freeze us, and the earth is a biological arena trying to decompose us.

The fact that you can sit in a heated room, reading this long-form critique on a pocket-sized supercomputer, without a realistic fear of being pillaged by a neighboring warlord before dinner, is a monumental, statistically miraculous achievement of human civilization.

We have successfully engineered the safest era in history. Now, if we could only convince our evolutionary brains to stop panicking about it, that would be fantastic. 🦖💻

.......

"So, yes, we as humanity could certainly try a bit harder to stop murdering one another, but unfortunately, our tribal leader called 'Nature' strongly objects to that—after all, there is us, and then there are those thoroughly suspicious, terribly strange others!

mod

# # # # # # # # # #

📚 Peer-Reviewed Frameworks for Further Reading:

Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.

Keeley, L.H. (1996) War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford University Press.

Rules for asks:

What you CAN ask:

Steven:

- pretty much anything

- you can also tell him pretty much everything

Other characters:

- pretty much same as for Steven

What characters are the least likely to get your asks:

- the other Diamonds and their Pearls

Can you ask me/the creator:

- yes, but when you do, please, say so in your ask

What you CAN'T ask/is NOT allowed:

- NSFW/inappropriate stuff

Why your ask might NOT get answered:

- it doesn't fit the AU

- it's NSFW/inappropriate

- it contains spoilers (if it does it might either get answered later or never (if I forget about it))

Who can you ask as:

- homeworld gems

- humans

- humans from OUR world

- other creatures

- anonymous

That's pretty much it!

Thank you for reading and understanding!

Have a nice day/night/midnight/life/whatever!

:3

Admittedly I think about this a lot because when I was a teenager I enjoyed some of Christopher Hitchens' writings, particularly his book reviews and his book about George Orwell. I also know a medium sized public figure with some connections in this area (though we don't keep in touch much) and when they started having connection in this area I started trying to figure out why the fuck new atheism had been so big. And I mean, this was the time of the bush administration and the tea party. There were so many valid reasons to criticize religion (obviously there are today as well), and many things these people said were either true or at least were opinions it was worth expressing. But it was also a cesspit, and I think it was more influential connected to other systemic issues in internet/broader culture than people realize.

For example, Richard Dawkins literally coined the term meme. Rebecca Watson's video casually mentioning unwanted sexual advances in an elevator at an atheist conference caused a shitstorm of harassment towards her (elevator gate) that really functioned as a precursor to Gamer Gate a few years later.

Anyways I've recently learned both that Epstein helped start /pol/ on 4chan and that huge numbers of these new atheist figures were strongly affiliated with Epstein. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State, was emailing Epstein frequently about his own sexual assault allegations, and others like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and even Daniel Dennett flew on Epstein's plane, were photographed with him, etc. Anyways I guess this indicates to me that Epstein broadly saw a path to take irreverent young men who disliked organized religion and create a culture among them that was broadly fascist and defensive of pedophilia. And he largely succeeded at doing that. New Atheism mostly died; the only person I know of who talks about it much is Alex O'Connor (also occasionally youtubers like Vaush and Contrapoints). But /pol/ succeeded in Epstein's goal. I've heard 4chan before /pol/ was a lot less horrible, broadly politically similar to New Atheism in general.

I still broadly don't know why there were so many connections to Epstein in particular, even if I better understand New Atheism as a reaction to 9/11 mostly among white men that carried with it all the Islamaphobia and misogyny you'd expect of something like that. But I've found a bunch of videos that discuss the connection to Epstein further and would welcome any more sources.

Here are a couple videos from Rebecca Watson, longtime enemy of Richard Dawkins:

and my favorite 4 hour video I've seen this year:

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker

The Harvard psychologist on unwritten rules, social contracts, shared logic – and what happens when they fall apart

Knots, RD Laing’s 1970 book, was a collection of short dialogues illustrating the tangle of projection and misreading that characterises human encounters. The radical psychiatrist made clear the influence of unacknowledged baggage, the conscious or unconscious laying of traps for the other speaker, and helped us see more clearly the pitfalls of even our most routine conversations. In an era like ours, where global relations can contain as much psychodrama as private ones, Laing’s Zen-like exchanges have more than just individual pertinence.

The contrast between Laing’s absurdist, tragicomic sensibility and Steven Pinker’s crisp reasonableness is obvious. But there is more common ground than we might at first think. Pinker illustrates his arguments with piquant little dialogues, some of them worthy of Laing (“You hang up first”. “No, you hang up first.” “Okay.” “She hung up on me!”); this book is as lively an exposition of cognitive science as you are likely to find.

The central theme is simply expressed: all acts of communication occur against a background of intricate, recursive assumptions (I know x; you know that I know x; I know that you know that I know x; you know that I know that you know … ad infinitum). What Pinker calls “common knowledge” is both what makes intelligible exchange possible and what complicates it. Communication is not a neat trading of information packages. It is the product of long histories of assumption and symbol; we need to deploy reason in order to arrive at outcomes that are good for everyone involved, and to resist the seductive but potentially suicidal narratives that promise benefit for ourselves alone.

Pinker discusses the famous “prisoner’s dilemma”, in which two criminals being interrogated separately have to decide whether or not to betray each other in order to minimise their sentences. If both refuse to help the police they get a light sentence. If one implicates the other, he or she may go free, while their partner suffers an even worse fate: an enticing possibility. But if each prisoner gambles on that strategy – betraying their friend – then it fails and they’re both jailed for a long time. What this shows is that finding the least unfavourable outcome for all may require parking individual interests.

As Pinker says, this is a pattern that applies to a very wide range of choices – and precisely because of this, it can be tempting to use it as a universal grid for choosing. It is a model in which there is always an optimal answer, where the choices can be set out diagrammatically to show plainly what is best for everyone. But this works only if both parties have some sort of knowledge of the other – or, to put it more realistically, perhaps, have some sort of trust that the other will respond in an intelligible way. When parties in a conflict stand on the precipice of destruction, this trust transforms into a dangerous gamble that each knows the other well enough to predict they’ll back down (partly, in an absurdly ironic twist, because that’s what they would do in the other’s place). It is why the so-called “madman” strategy in international relations (when a leader behaves in such an unpredictable way that no one could possibly guess how they would respond in a crisis) is so powerful a tool for intimidating others.

All this highlights the centrality of “common knowledge” in making sense of another’s acts and words (Pinker is very good on the role of our ability to read physical indicators of thought and attitude). Common knowledge is at work in a whole range of habits that may seem pretty obscure or arbitrary, but which consolidate the mutual trust intrinsic to social cooperation, from myth and ritual to social convention. And this is also why, to cite Pinker’s neat formulation, “rational argument should be really more like a dance than a war”. It is – or can be – a ritual deployment of allusion, shared expectations and cultural performance in which reasonableness is framed and animated by other factors.

Pinker directs his strongest polemic at those who deliberately seek to suppress or limit common knowledge in order to protect what is thought to be a vulnerable or fragile social consensus. He argues that the problem with “the cancelling instinct” is that it muddles fact and value, and, through defending what is “right” via legal or social silencing, reinforces the dangerous inference that claims about what is true are always veiled bids for power. But he is not a free-speech absolutist, and makes a careful case for “quarantined topics” where we might agree that unrestrained communication is disproportionately harmful – as with, for example, the manifestos of mass shooters. He does not quite spell it out, but he seems to be saying that this “quarantining” must itself be a matter of shared cultural discernment rather than inquisitorial processes (whether in the courts or online).

Overall, then, a lucid, measured discussion of what we need to understand about our communications with each other. Pinker shares with a good many other secular philosophers at the moment a tone of deeply exasperated rationality – a default conviction that there really are ultimately reasonable positions about which sane people cannot sanely disagree, and a despairing acknowledgment that this seems an increasingly unpopular idea. He struggles a bit to give weight to aspects of our moral lives that aren’t always amenable to reason (he is predictably dismissive about religion, for example), yet he does ultimately take this dimension seriously, conceding the legitimacy of social markers of solidarity, without which the mutual trust he is exploring would not survive.

This is not a book for anyone in search of metaphysical analysis of the “linguistic animal” (to use the philosopher Charles Taylor’s term). But it enlightens and provokes; to pick up his own metaphor, it is worth dancing with.