This is The Guardian.

Bialyx Blastel

Red by Christopher Rackland

and produced by Esther O'Poco-Geni.

On a recent afternoon, Stephen Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author of

upbeat books about human progress, was sitting in his summer home on Cape Cod, thinking about

Bill Gates. Pinker was gearing up to record a radio series on critical thinking for the BBC,

and he wanted the world's fourth richest man to join him for an episode on the climate emergency.

People tend to approach challenges in one of two ways, as problem solving or as conflict.

Pinker, who appreciates the force of a tidy dichotomy, said,

you can think of it as Bill vs Greta, and I'm very much in Bill's camp.

A few weeks earlier, Gates had been photographed in Manhattan,

carrying a copy of Pinker's soon-to-be-published 12th book, Rationality, which inspired the BBC series.

We sinned it to his people, Pinker said.

Pinker is an avid promoter of his own work, and for the past 25 years, he has had a great deal

to promote. Since the 1990s, he has written a string of popular books on language, the mind,

and human behavior, but in the past decade, he has become best known for his counterintuitive

take on the state of the world. In the shadow of the financial crisis, while other authors were

writing books about how society was profoundly broken, Pinker took the opposite tag,

arguing that things were, in fact, better than ever. In the better angels of our nature,

published in 2011, he gathered copious amounts of data to show that violence had declined across

human history, in large part because of the emergence of markets and states. Understandably,

...