Steven Pinker is my main reference in psychology. He makes scientific ideas engaging and easy to remember. Like Chomsky, he equips readers to defend their beliefs with reason.
How the Mind Works is still the best account of how evolution shaped thinking. I lean on its cheesecake argument in Beauty. Rationality lays out why reason is the key driver of moral and social progress. The Sense of Style is another I admire, because communicating well, above all about science, matters so much. It has its own entry.
The Better Angels of Our Nature documents how much progress humanity has made. It is slow, incomplete, and can be undone if we let things slip. The amazing part is how many people refuse the evidence.
Enlightenment Now continues the case. Its account of what markets have done changed my mind, though I do not share his view of inequality. It also overlooks motives. Its treatment of the weapons-of-mass-destruction case for the Iraq War, and of the Y2K panic, blames bias and ignores the profit motives behind both. George Monbiot has raised environmental objections to the book. They deserve an answer.
The AI exchange shows the same habit. He calls most extinction scenarios preposterous and says assuming doom breeds fatalism, panic, and distraction from the real safety work. That answers the weakest form of the case, as Alexander catalogued, and leaves the strongest unaddressed. He dismisses when he should engage, and the bill comes due when his sober voice is most needed.
My favorite line from Enlightenment Now is this. Martin Luther King Jr. said the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. In the same spirit, the arc of history bends toward progress, toward more reason, knowledge, and well-being.