Quotes from Steven Pinker

they say that the government spends too much on "welfare" but too little on "assistance to the poor," and that it should "use military force" but not "go to war.

This may also explain societal decisions such as banning nuclear power, with its tiny risk of a disaster, rather than reducing the use of coal, with its daily drip of many more deaths.

Bayesian reasoning recommends against the common practice of using "textbook" as an insult and "scientific revolution" as a compliment.

Now, if concepts are undefinable, that means they aren't built out of more elementary concepts, which means they must themselves be elementary concepts, which means they must be innate.

The American Superfund law calls for eliminating certain pollutants from the environment completely, though removing the last 10 percent may cost more than the first 90 percent.

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A

In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn't-be-more-wrong.

The African AIDS dip is a reminder that progress is not an escalator that inexorably raises the well-being of every human everywhere all the time.

For all the violence that remains in the world, we are living in an extraordinary age. Perhaps it is a snapshot in a progression to an even greater peace. Perhaps it is a bottoming out to a new normal, with the easy reductions all plucked and additional ones harder and harder to reach. Perhaps it is a lucky confluence of good fortune that will soon unravel. But regardless of how the trends extrapolate into the future, something remarkable has brought us to the present. One

mounted hordes from the steppes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks, Magyars, Tatars, Mughals, and Manchus. For two thousand years these warriors deployed meticulously crafted composite bows (made from a glued laminate of wood, tendon, and horn) to run up immense body counts in their sackings and raids. These tribes were responsible for numbers 3, 5, 11, and 15 on the top-twenty-one list, and they take four of the top six slots in the population-adjusted ranking.

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

In 1974, it cost $1,442 (in 2011 dollars) to fly from New York to Los Angeles; today it can be done for less than $300.

The Victim's Narrative: The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpetrator's actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irreparable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should ever forget it. They

Charles Kenny's Getting Better.17

Not only has chronic undernourishment been in decline, but so have catastrophic famines

Como escribió Montesquieu: «Si los triángulos tuvieran un dios, le darían tres lados».)

While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-prevention measures from useless tough talk.

The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.

Third, don't confuse an anecdote or a personal experience with the state of the world. Just because something happened to you, or you read about it in the paper or on the Internet this morning, it doesn't mean it is a trend. In a world of seven billion people, just about anything will happen to someone somewhere, and it's the highly unusual events that will be selected for the news or passed along to friends. An

If p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true." They just wouldn't be part of the word's meaning.

Mediante el intercambio voluntario, las personas benefician a otras beneficiándose a sí mismas; como él decía: «No esperamos conseguir nuestra cena por la benevolencia del carnicero, el cervecero o el panadero, sino porque ellos velan por sus propios intereses. No apelamos a su humanidad, sino a su amor propio».

I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.

The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules.

Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain't what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.25 As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.